Dark, But Shining -- Horror, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Christ Knows What Else.

Three Cheers For April, Sweet April

2006-04-01T19:26:00.000-05:00

Okay, okay. So we aren't converting Dark, But Shining into a "goth haiku web zine." Sorry to disappoint you all.

This is what I was referring to as our "big thing for April." You can read a little further explanation of it here.

Keep in mind that it isn't running at 100% yet -- we're still working out a few more minor technical issues here and there (Well, okay. Sam is and I'm just pestering him constantly about it.) But for all intensive purposes, please redirect your bookmarks to the new domain from here on out.

Unless you want to pretend that we just aren't updating any more, which really wouldn't be a huge stretch from the way things were headed.

But it's a new month, a new year, a new model, and a new way of doing things. Not here, but over there.

This Year's Model

2006-04-01T00:05:00.000-05:00

I warned you a couple weeks back that we here at DBS were "gathering our collective chi" for something big and spectacular and, well, I wasn't lying.

As you may have noticed in recent months, our regular posting has been way down from what it should be. Part of this is real world concerns infringing upon our Internet fun, but mostly it's due to a lack of anything to say. We've found that we're spent. We were in desperate, desperate need of a jump start to get things going back on track.

This is what we came up with. We figured we would leave the genre news and feature writing to those who do it so much better than we do and, in turn, we'd try something a little new. We considered doing a dark fiction web zine, but that's been done and done very well.

So we thought we'd try poetry, only with a darker edge. And while we're interested in haikus (a much maligned art form in recent years), we aren't as strict about the formatting as some purists. We're just of the belief that through constriction comes creativity.

To give you a brief preview of what we have coming when we launch our first official issue this month, below I've posted some of the haikus that will be appearing in it. Some are serious, some have a more humorous side. You know that we can't keep a straight face all the time.

THE PERSECUTION OF THE GOTH IN THESE DARK NIGHTS
Or, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS

Five Dark Haikus, Told in 17 Syllables

by Zorn Hillside

The club betrays me
Why did nobody tell me
Tonight was Punk Night?

Top 40 ails me
Forlorn, I ask Robert Smith
Where now is your cure?

Life is cold, dark, cruel
Did I mention I wear black?
It's symbolism.

Leather, velvet, lace
Some of my favorite things
Look great on grandmas

Peter Steele, Type O,
posed for Playgirl magazine.
I own ten copies.

MUSINGS ON A WORLD TOO LIGHT FOR MORTAL EYES

by Denny McGovern

Those Satanic monks
Are chanting to Cthulhu.
Time to end the world.

People think I’m odd
When I talk of Wolfman, but
He is my hero.

I like Zombie girls
They make me feel special inside
When they eat my brains.

"I will wait for more,"
She said, while smoking a clove.
Black lipstick is hot.

Anyway, that's just a very brief glimpse into what we've got lined up. I assure you that it isn't even a tenth of the haikus we will be bringing you in the first issue. So, I hope you'll stick around and see where the new year for DBS brings all of us. Because I know I will.

No mobs, please.

2006-03-27T18:02:00.000-05:00

No, it isn't April yet. Quit asking or, I swear to God, I'll turn this blog right around and no one -- NO ONE -- is getting ice cream when we get home.

Well, okay. We can still have ice cream.

Until then -- more things to distract your mind with! Go read some stories from the first three issues of Stranger Box, a fantastic little literary web zine, and float about happily in the depths of good prose.

After that you should probably have someone hose you off.

Horror in Unlikely Places: "Selling Yourself Short"

2006-03-20T13:27:00.000-05:00

So, I'm a big fan of horror-inspired music videos. "Thriller" obviously set the bar. But the last, and most recent, band I recall doing them very well was Phantom Planet -- they even had one with zombies. I dig zombies. Without effort, that quickly became my favorite video.

Until today.

The Austin, Texas based indie punk band, What Made Milwaukee Famous, has made a coup. Go to their site, go into the Video section, and watch the video for "Selling Yourself Short." It's a good tune.

And the whole video is an homage to Evil Dead. How can you not love such a thing?

So, go.

[Big thanks to Patrick Caldwell for sending me the link!]

State of the Union

2006-03-16T12:07:00.000-05:00

Let me assure you that our current lack of posting has, for once, nothing to do with laziness, real world troubles, or polar bears. We have something big coming in April and we're currently gathering our collective chi for it. Please be patient.

It'll be worth it, trust me.

Nightwatch, or Not to be negative, but

2006-03-05T16:41:00.000-05:00

this movie sucked.

Saw it last night, spurred on against myself by all the hype and good reviews. Well, bad decision:

It made no sense.
It was pretty, but empty.
The characters were hardly defined at all.
The world they lived in made next to no sense.
It was a mishmash of a bunch of other things, and not well-synthesized.
It was surprisingly slow in some places.
It did hardly anything new.
I missed all the alleged social commentary (though that may be a result of bad English subtitles).
It's the first part of a trilogy; it's learned the wrong lessons from The Matrix trilogy.

It was so pedestrian that I can't even write a full review of it. I just don't care enough. That's not good.

I realized, after leaving the thing and debriefing it with my friend Lee who I saw it with, I haven't seen a movie that I really loved in about two years (probably not since The Grudge almost made me cry with glee). I mean I movie that I was head-over-heels, embarrassingly passionate about. Or if I did, I can't remember it.

Strange thing is: I've felt that way about more than one TV show in that same period.

Which has led me to this slightly heretical opinion which may make me look like a jackass, but hey it's what I currently believe: the best current TV series are better than almost every current movie.

More Free Poe Audiobooks

2006-03-01T18:43:00.000-05:00

If the free audiobook of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart from the other day whetted your appetite for more audio Poe, you're in luck.

The Poe Podcast Project, which is part of the Sci-Fi Podcast Network, a site that provides, well, a bunch of podcasts on science fiction, is offering free downloadable podcasts of Poe stories. There are six MP3s to download so far and you can even syndicate the podcasts via XML when new stories are released.

The podcasts available already include "A Cask of Amontillado," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar."

Visit the download/syndication page for the podcasts, and enjoy.

Octavia Butler Dead at 58

2006-02-27T20:06:00.000-05:00

Pioneering SF author Octavia Butler died over the weekend from injuries sustained when she fell near her home and hit her head on a walkway. She was 58.

Butler was known not only for her work but also for being a female and African-American voice in a genre - science fiction - dominated largely by the white and the male. She was also the first ever science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur "Genius" grant, which is pioneering in an entirely different way.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Butler lived near Seattle) has a rememberance of her.

More on and by Butler:
An Amazon.com listing of her works
Biography at Oxford University Press
An NPR interview on racism
Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Two short stories by Butler:
The Book of Martha
Amnesty

One Day Only: Free E.A. Poe Audiobook MP3

2006-02-27T13:40:00.000-05:00

The folks over at Telltale Weekly, a purveyor of (according to them) "low cost, DRM-free audiobook downloads in MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and AAC formats" are making their audiobook of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart available for free download today only to celebrate their second anniversary.

If you know horror lit. - or really American lit. - at all, then you know the story and know that it's totally, totally awesome.

And when you combine an awesome story with a free audiobook, there's no way you can lose. Unless you wait. Remember, it's only free today. You want it tomorrow? Cough up $0.75, chump!

So, what are you waiting for?

Shamelessly found first at Boing Boing.

Things That Scare Me

2006-02-25T12:38:00.000-05:00

Queenie Chan, writer/artist of the very, very good The Dreaming (mentioned here at DBS in December), is running an interesting discussion of what people find frightening at her blog.

Some of the greatest fears mentioned by those who have contributed include serial killers, being abandoned, annihilation of the self, and being buried alive.

It's interesting to me to hear what really scares people, as it's a question I think about a lot in the context of horror art. There was certainly a time when the vampire, or werewolf, or whatever other classic horror archetype was legitimately and deeply scary to many people. But now, whether it's a result of our maturing, cynical culture or just overexposure, it seems almost inconceivable to me that anyone could find those figures scary. And yet, so many "horror" movies or comics rely on just trotting out a vampire to prove to us that they're scary.

To me, the most frightening things are almost never physical things, never figures, or objects. They're ideas.

To answer Queenie's question, the thing that scares me is other people. Not other people as actual people, but what it is that lives in other people, that we can't really ever know who another person is inside, can't be sure that we share values, are interacting on the same terms, or are even speaking to each other in the same way. That essentially unknowability, that mysteriousness, is truly terrifying to me.

So, what do you find scary? Go tell Queenie, and then come back and tell us.

Well well well...

2006-02-22T22:27:00.000-05:00

I know you're getting tired of me mentioning The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller. Some of you may even wonder if I've read other books.

This is the most important mention of it, I promise you.

Not only did the paperback edition come out yesterday (with new material -- including an essay from the Man Himself), but I found something else that was neat while ordering my copy.

Did you take a look? The hardcover edition at bargain price. Nine dollars. Nine stinking dollars. As far as I'm concerned, you have no reason to not pick up a copy of this now.

I don't know how long this deal is going to last, but I can assure you of two things: 1) No, I'm not getting a commission of any sort, so lay off, and 2) You won't regret spending this nine bucks. I promise.

Sympathetic Monsters, an interview with Eric Powell, part 2

2006-02-22T06:32:00.000-05:00

Are you interested in doing further work for the big two? Do you have favorite characters you'd like to tell stories about?

I don't have any objection to it. I just don't see myself having enough time any time soon. I tried to get DC to let me do a Demon miniseries a while back but they wanted to go another direction. And like I said, I really wanted to do Spiderman or the Hulk.

What was your Demon series going to be like? What was the story?

It never got that far. I just told them I was interested in that character. It would have been more like the Kirby series I think. Big Monsters.

Many publishers have been very focused in recent years on structuring their comics in story arcs readymade for trade paperback collections. The Goon has been an unusual book in its dedication to standalone, single-issue stories. You’ve recently announced that you’re going to do arcs. Why?

I'm going to do arcs in combination with stand-alone issues. Trying to cram some of my ideas into a single issue was making the quality of the book suffer. I just decided not to constrain myself.

What attracts you to the ‘30s/’40s era that plays such a big role in The Goon?

I think it's just a personality thing. I hate modern. Don't like to draw modern things. Modern buildings. That era seems to have so much more character and personality. Everything isn't slick and perfect.

You self-published The Goon before taking it to Dark Horse (and after it started at Avatar). What did you learn from self-publishing?

Self-promotion is key.

It seems like we’re in a horror comics renaissance right now. Do you see it that way?

I guess. It could be that we're just getting more variety.

What do you think accounts for that?

Hellboy.

The movie or the comic?

The comic. I think it's the most influential book to other comic artists right now. Before Hellboy, what was passing for a horror comic were T&A books. It actually has atmosphere. I think that's essential for horror.

What do you like about horror as a genre?

I don't really think of it that way. It's just the stuff I like.

Besides the Frankenstein movies, what horror (comics, books?) did you like growing up?

I read a lot of Steven King. Pretty much the only horror comic I ever saw as a kid was Swamp Thing.

Then how'd you get from there (not seeing a lot of horror comics, or even being a big comics fan) to being a successful indie creator?

I loved horror/sci-fi movies and I loved to draw. I do the kinds of comics I'd like to see. Not what I've seen.

What comics, besides Hellboy, are you reading these days?

Not a lot. I don't get a chance to make it out to the comic shop much anymore. Bone is gone. Hellboy doesn't come out much. I pick up Liberty Meadows when I see it.

Do you watch horror movies? Any recent favorites?

A lot of horror movies. I have to say the Japanese are kicking Hollywood's ass when it comes to interesting horror movies these days. I guess that's why they're remaking so many of them. I did enjoy the Dawn of the Dead remake. Even though the characters did pretty stupid stuff (one of my pet peeves). Wasn't as good as the original but great zombies and lots of intensity.

What do you see in the future for horror comics?

I hope lots of interesting original material. I hope it continues to grow.

What do we need more of in comics? What do we need less of?

More originality. More fun in comics that are supposed to be fun. More artists who look outside of the Wizard top ten as their artistic influences. More comics about ducks. More comics about monkeys and ducks. More mutated half monkey half duck comics. And we need less autobiographical civil war comics. Those damn things are everywhere.

Sympathetic Monsters, an interview with Eric Powell, part 1

2006-02-21T13:42:00.000-05:00

Eric Powell, by his own measure, is a quiet guy. But you wouldn’t know it reading his comics, especially his horror/comedy series The Goon.

The Goon is a monster comic in which a muscled thug – the Goon – and his absurdly violent sidekick, Franky, tackle crime, monsters, zombies, and generally try to keep their illegal rackets going, all while doing some high quality violence against the undead and other creatures.

In another creator’s hands, The Goon might be grim, joyless, and bloody. Instead, Eric Powell’s vision is all primary colors and strong lines, sly references (the series’ main villain and his army of zombies live “down at the end of Lonely St.”), amusing bombast and a funny, exciting romp through a criminal underworld populated by flesh eaters, evil Christmas elves, and Lovecraftian bugaboos.

Just as Powell’s stories are rich in tone, his characters - even the monsters - are nuanced. From the constantly thwarted Zombie Priest to the misunderstood (and misunderstanding) mad scientist Dr. Alloy to the cuckolded Cthulhu Fishy Pete, the cast of characters populating The Goon are all, to one degree or another, sympathetic monsters.

The Goon has seen many incarnations in its short life: the book was first published by Avatar, then self-published, and has now found a home at Dark Horse Comics. Dark Horse publishes the periodical series and has brought out four trade paperbacks of the series so far. The series’ fifth trade paperback, “Virtue and the Grim Consequences Thereof”, is out now.

In this interview Powell talks about The Goon, himself, what he likes and doesn’t like, and comics about monkeys and ducks (you’ll see).

SC: Even though we’re well past the grim and gritty comics of the early 1990s, it still seems like a lot of comics these days are deadly serious and self-important, that they have no sense of humor, no irony, no self-awareness. The Goon is so different than that, so light, straight-forwardly concerned with having fun. Was that intentional?

EP: I've had a few serious stories in the Goon but even those are intended to be fun. Mostly I'm concerned that I'm having fun doing the comic. I do the types of stories that I want to do. For some reason a lot of the publishers aren't doing comics anymore that are unabashedly fun.

Why go in that direction?

Again, because I wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted to do. I didn't want any limitations.

You’ve said in other interviews that you liked monster movies a lot as a kid. Are there any that stand out as having been particularly influential on you?

The Frankenstein movies.

What was it that you liked about those movies?

The weird atmosphere and I prefer sympathetic monsters.

Is that what draws you to The Hulk, too?

Yeah, and I just like big monsters.

What were you like as a kid? Were you more like The Goon or Franky? Or neither?

I think we create characters that are more like we would like to be, or a side of ourselves that has been repressed. People are always saying when they meet me that they can't believe I do the Goon. They expect me to be a crazy person like Franky. I'm actually a pretty quiet introverted person. I'm more like the Goon than Franky. Goon just quietly sits at the bar and has his drink. He's not a talker. But there's a little bit of me in all my characters.

It seems like some people can be funny in real life, while others can be funny on the page. Obviously, you're very funny on the page. Are you also funny in real life? Would people describe you that way?

It depends on who I'm with. I'm more comfortable around people I know. I'm definitely not the class clown. I'm more of a quiet dry wit kind of person.

You live in Tennessee. Is Tennessee a funny place or a scary place?

Both. The countryside is beautiful. The people, while being the nicest, most polite, considerate people you'll find anywhere, can also be narrow minded, hypocritical, racist, and stupid. Depending on the situation, that can be either funny or scary.

Many people, fans and comics creators alike, seem to view (whether conscious or not) getting to work on one of Marvel or DC’s big, iconic characters as the only real goal for comics creators. You’ve done some work for both companies. What do you think about this?

That was my goal to begin with. I wanted to draw Spiderman or the Hulk. As more time goes by the more I realize that's not for me. The kind of comics I want to do aren't being done by those companies anymore. I also realized you have no job security working on those titles. At this point I've got a book of my own that's becoming successful and I can never be replaced by another artist on it. I don't see any reason to change direction now.

Check back tomorrow for the conclusion.

Recovery Cinema: Tormented (1960)

2006-02-20T14:26:00.000-05:00

Directed by: Bert I. Gordon

Starring: Richard Carlson, Lugene Sanders, Juli Reding

After my most recent experience with Richard Carlson, I thought I would go and check out some of the other work he's done. Tormented was the first film I came across that starred him. Some of you may be familiar with it already, via Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Honestly, though, it's not a half bad movie. While it's relatively routine overall, where Tormented excels is in the details. Carlson plays jazz pianist Tom Stewart, who lives on a quaint little island paradise. He's preparing to marry the love of his life, a rich debutant girl played by Lugene Sanders, but there's a problem.

His other wife, a jazz singer named Vi, has shown up to claim him for her own. Something is mentioned about a mysterious "letter" and the possibilities for blackmail that it holds, but all of this is solved when Vi tragically falls to her death from the top of an old lighthouse.

The first points Tormented scores are here. Vi literally does fall to her death in an accident, instead of Tom murdering her. His only problem is that he doesn't help her when he has a chance, instead letting her fall. Soon enough, Vi is back in a new form and haunting her dear Tom in order to keep him all for herself.

While there are some unintentionally humorous sequences, for the most part the film manages to create a good, creepy atmosphere. I'll admit that I was actually a bit weirded out while lying on the couch watching it -- as well as when I went to bed that night. There aren't any major scares, but when it throws one our way it makes the most of it. The psychological ones work the best, when we aren't sure if they are the work of Vi's ghost or if they are due to Tom slowly losing his mind.

What really put me on edge is that on the beach scenes, the sound of the waves crashing against the shore and the rocks often comes close to drowning everything else out. Whether intentional or not, these waves always sound like the growling of a tiger. And the constant repetition of that is creepier than one would expect.

Carlson's performance is, again, the stand-out piece of the film for me. He does a fantastic job of being able to switch between Charismatic Leading Man and Guilty Man Going Insane. His interactions with Susan Gordon, who plays the little girl, are the best of the film.

The character of Tom Stewart also never quite bridges into evil territory. While he is responsible for a few less-than-savory events, he understandably acts out of necessity and desperation. This is, of course, until the very end, where he finally may or may not have gone off the deep end. But to discuss that more would be to ruin the fun!

Tormented ends up being a rather solid film and one of my favorite ghost story films (A sub-genre I'm not usually real big on.) It's worth giving a look, for the performances and the pretty good creep-outs, if nothing else.

And, of course, the neat jazz score -- some of which actually comes from House on Haunted Hill!

Coming Soon: Interview with Eric Powell

2006-02-19T14:31:00.000-05:00

About 18 months ago, I had the opportunity to interview the very talented and very funny Eric Powell, the creator of the hilarious Dark Horse series The Goon. I did the interview for a horror comics zine and, for whatever reason, the issue that was supposed to have the interview in it never came out. I tried emailing the editor and he never got back to me, so, rather than let the interview collect pixelly mold on my hard drive, I've decided to share it with you.

I need to do a little preparation of it, but visit us again on Tuesday for the first part of "Sympathetic Monsters, an interview with Eric Powell."

In the meantime, here's a review of the first The Goon TPB from a while back:

The Goon, Vol. 1: Nothin' but Misery

Recovery Cinema: It Came From Outer Space (1953)

2006-02-17T16:37:00.000-05:00

Directed by: Jack Arnold

Starring: Richard Carlson, Barbara Rush, Charles Drake

I have a confession to make. I have owned this film on VHS for close to two years, if not a little longer. I never got around to watching it until today.

Man, I'm an idiot sometimes.

Though it requires some patience at times, It Came From Outer Space is a rather fantastic film. Like many of its counterparts, the movie uses the building paranoia of the McCarthy era to its advantage...though in a different way than, say, Invasion of the Body Snatchers would three years later.

The other thing this film has going for it is that it was “based on” a story by Ray Bradbury. I use quotes because Bradbury essentially wrote the screenplay. While the studio didn’t trust him enough to hire him for the final script, using Harry Essex for that instead, Bradbury spent six weeks at Universal, eventually settling on a 111-page outline. Ray said on the subject: “Harry just retyped my treatment. He added things, of course, because it wasn’t complete, but he was very open. He told people this. He said, ‘Ray Bradbury wrote a screenplay and called it a treatment.’” (Information and quotes courtesy of The Bradbury Chronicles, by Sam Weller.)

You don’t have to look very hard to see the Bradbury in this film. It shines through the most when the characters, specifically Carlson’s John Putnam, consider the ramifications of their actions, as well as the world around them they once thought they knew so well.

While the performances are good, none stand above that of Richard Carlson. He brings his own brand of charisma to the screen, causing the audience to further question the disbelief of those around him. And while his role is that of your typical “outcast believer,” he manages to go above it and wrestle his lines away from the land of campiness.

The aliens themselves, when we do see their true forms, also stray from the campy side. The creatures are indeed horrid looking things – they basically appear to be blocks of meat with a single eye in the middle. This movement away from the usual “horrifying, yet cool looking” monster aids in the message of the film; that humans just aren’t ready to accept such things without responding with violence.

My only real complaint with the film is a technical one. I’m not sure if it had something to do with the film supposedly being in 3-D, but it’s filled with some of the worst “day for night” filming I’ve ever seen. While it wasn’t distracting enough to ruin the film in any way, it was still distracting. Suddenly someone would make a comment about it being the middle of the night and I’d have to stop and ask myself why it looked like they were traipsing about in the afternoon sun all this time. I’m willing to forgive some of the awful backgrounds – where the film appears to obviously be taking place on a set – but this “day for night” issue is going to continue pestering my nit-picky side. Perhaps they should have spent less time questioning the existence of alien creatures and more time questioning the rampant appearance of shadows at night. In the middle of a desert.

Outside of that, the story itself makes up for any other shortcomings. The pace is slower than I expected – becoming more of a science-fiction drama than a thriller, but it’s well worth the wait once you start to get into the meat of it. It Came From Outer Space turns the sci-fi standards of its day on end, instead choosing a closer route to The Day the Earth Stood Still than of the infinite “malevolent space invader” movies that were being pumped out.

And what a good choice it was.

Recovery Cinema -- The Corpse Vanishes (1942)

2006-02-15T10:50:00.000-05:00

Directed by: Wallace Fox

Starring: Bela Lugosi, Luana Walters, Tristram Coffin

Now, I didn't expect an awful lot when I went into this film. I didn't really know what to expect. I recalled hearing bits and pieces about it -- some good, some bad.

I was very pleasantly surprised.

I was not so pleasantly surprised when, after viewing the film, I went hunting around for how others felt. A lot of them seem to hate it. Some vehemently so. They called it ridiculous and bashed the incredibly slow pacing.

Incredibly slow pacing? The film is sixty-five minutes long! And, if anything, it's one of the better paced B-movies for its time. Things start right in with the action -- brides are falling down dead at the altar and their corpses are being stolen afterwards.

Frankly, I'm sold right there.

In a shocking turn of events, the entire story and plot isn't dropped in our laps. Instead, we figure it out as our fearless female reporter protagonist and her chums do. It seems that the evil (though not quite mad -- I'll get to that in a minute) Doctor Lorenz and his motley crew are drugging and kidnapping these virgin brides so that he can extract something from their glands and inject it into his archaic wife, keeping her young and firm. We never really discover a lot more about this, which seems to be another big complaint from people.

And, again, it's another thing I loved about the film. I hate, hate, story dumps. I loathe everything being explained by the end and everything being tied up in a neat little package for the audience. This doesn't do that. I therefore approve of such a decision.

Lugosi does his usual great job as Lorenz. I'm constantly fascinated by his ability to appear as Kindly Old Grandfather one minute and then Evil Psychopath the next. I would not, however, lump this film into the "mad scientist" category of films. Lorenz, if anything, comes across as completely sane. Just a little...bizarre. He lives in your standard Big Creepy House with Secret Corridors, surrounds himself with his wife, a crazy old hag, the crazy old hag's two sons (One is a midget, one is a beast of a man!), and a relatively normal thug named Mike. Oh, and Lorenz and his wife sleep in coffins. Y'know, just because. They're more comfortable, you know.

Countess Lorenz is by far the most insane character of the film and provides the creepiest moment when she appears in the reporter's room out of nowhere. When she isn't crying and moaning about the agony she's going through and blaming her husband for everything, she's being extremely curt to her guests and slapping them. Some people shake hands, other people slap the spit out of your mouth.

While The Corpse Vanishes may not be the best horror movie I've seen, I still enjoyed it very much. I would definitely watch it a few more times. And I will definitely have to continue to defend it against the world.

Such is life.

Coffin

2006-02-14T17:05:00.000-05:00

Days later, when asked why he had brought the knife, Jeffrey Dean would claim that it had been for love.

Comics writer Neil Kleid is serializing his new novel, Coffin, on his LiveJournal. The novel looks to be a survival horror piece, telling the story of a group of people trapped underground in a New York City subway car after a terrorist bombing of the train.

The set up is similar to TokyoPop's recently released series Dragon Head, but the execution surely promises to be very different.

The first section of the book just went online yesterday. It's a well-written, tight piece so far and looks like it will be a lot of fun.

Go, Read.

Peter Benchley dead at 65

2006-02-12T21:33:00.000-05:00

Author and conservationist Peter Benchly is dead at age 65. He died Saturday night at his house in Princeton, NJ, from a condition that causes scarring of the lungs.

Benchley, of course, is well-known to horror fans and every kid in the last 30 years who was every afraid of what was below them while they swam in the ocean as the author of Jaws. I haven't read the book, but the first film is terrific and certainly made me pretty nervous whenever something would brush my foot or leg in the ocean (even in lakes sometimes).

There's something about the visceral, irrational fear of the yawning depths below you in the ocean and the mysteries and terrors that might be contained there that makes the fear captured in Jaws really effective.

CNN.com has a longer story on Benchley, his work, his life, and his death.

Recovery Cinema: Lady in the Lake (1947)

2006-02-08T12:57:00.000-05:00

Directed by: Robert Montgomery

Starring: Robert Montgomery, Audrey Totter, Leon Ames

Lady in the Lake, like a flood of other films in the late- to mid-1940s, is based on a novel by Raymond Chandler. But after having other actors, including the likes of Humphrey Bogart, take their turn as the infamous Philip Marlowe, how was Robert Montgomery (in his feature directing debut) to set this film apart from the crowd?

Easy. He filmed it true to the novel. He shot the entire film in first person, hence the tagline of, "M*G*M presents a Revolutionary motion picture; the most amazing since Talkies began! YOU and ROBERT MONTGOMERY solve a murder mystery together!" The only time you actually see Montgomery is through reflections.

It's an incredibly fascinating film, though mostly through a technical and historical standpoint. While I love the ingenuity of Montgomery's experimentation (Especially for 1947!) I think it ultimately hurts the overall film. I'm sure it was neat at the time to have sat in a crowded theater and actually lived through the film as the main character, but looking back on the piece today it doesn't hold up as well.

My main gripe with the film is that because it's in first person everything is slowed down just enough to be a little frustrating. Every time Montgomery turns a door knob or moves something or picks up an object, the camera has to pan down and focus on the target item long enough for everyone in the audience to process it four times over. Do people really stare at doorbells for three seconds when they press them?

Ultimately, I don't think I was even a quarter of the way in before I was getting bored out of my mind. I still recommend giving it a look just to see something done radically different from its peer films, but know going in that it may take some patience.

A good amount of patience.

Recovery Cinema

2006-02-08T12:48:00.000-05:00

So, how many of you were starting to think that Costello had my incident arranged so that he could take over all my glory? I can vouch that he had nothing to do with it. He prefers to use "unfortunate anvil accidents" to accomplish his bidding.

Regardless, I've devised a new semi-regular feature to break up the Costello streak we've been having around here. While I've been recovering from my injuries, I've spent a lot of time stranded on the couch watching movies. Not so bad, you say.

Try sitting in one place watching movies all day for at least one week straight and then let's see how much you enjoy it.

So I thought I would take the time to cover some of the films I viewed, ranging from the great to the dreadful. The first one should be up shortly.

Unless I have an unfortunate anvil accident before then.

Cthulegos

2006-02-06T13:49:00.000-05:00

Man, people just never get tired of inventing new ways for Cthulhu and the Old Gods to menace the world, do they?

And it seems I never get tired of pointing them out to you.

Here's a cute little tableau of the Old Gods rising from the deep blue sea to menace a seaside town made entirely of Legos. Not that scary, really, but cute and cool and funny, and that gets you somewhere with me.

Oh, and there are zombies, too!

First seen at Boing Boing

"An Excuse to Draw a Naked Girl with a Tail" - Charles Burns Talks Black Hole

2006-02-05T11:14:00.000-05:00

You've all read Charles Burns' horror masterwork Black Hole, right? If you haven't, get the hell out to a comic shop, or good bookstore, this very afternoon and pick up a copy of the extremely pretty Pantheon hardcover edition. The story, concerning a group of teenagers in Seattle in the '70s and sexually transmitted "plague" that transforms the infected in monstrous ways, is worth every cent - and then some.

It's a great, sprawling, sexy, sad, layered work, truly befitting the term "graphic novel."

For those that have read it, or want to get excited for it, there's an excellent, in-depth interview with Burns that's just been posted. An excerpt:

That woman at the signing thought it was a romance story and if you regard it as a horror story than that's legitimate as well. But I wasn’t specifically trying to make a horror story. I was going to do the story the best way I could. I could have told a similar story without any of the obvious horrific physical transformations. I could have just had adolescent kids struggling and running away from home and all these things. But I wanted to push it into even stronger, more extreme situations. That was the reason I chose to do the mutations and the transformations. Or maybe it was just an excuse to draw a naked girl with a tail, I don’t know.

Go, read.

Not Just for Evil Dead Anymore

2006-02-02T20:28:00.000-05:00

Remember Evil Dead and its sequels? Remember that one of the key factors in all hell breaking loose and trees coming to horny life was a human-skin-bound book called, alternatively, the Necronomicon and the Book of the Dead?

Well, binding books in human skin isn't, it turns out, just for Hollywood. It's for Harvard, too. An article in today's issue of the school newspaper, The Crimson, reveals the following:

A few individuals give new meaning to the idea of spending forever in the library—their skin binds three of the books in Harvard’s 15-million-volume collection.

Without extensive genetic testing, Harvard librarians still do not have the “foggiest notion” of how many volumes wrapped in human hide exist throughout the system, says Director of University Libraries Sidney Verba ’53. But they have identified three such volumes in the Langdell Law Library, Countway Library of Medicine, and the Houghton Collection. The three books range in content from medieval law to Roman poetry to French philosophy.

I'm torn between thinking that this is pretty cool and pretty, well, weird.

Luckily, all this human-skin-wrapping-paper isn't just for the Ivy League (though Brown University's John Hay Library has some, too. They also have some of H.P. Lovecraft's original manuscripts. Good library, apparently. I just saw the Lovecraft stuff a few weeks ago. Keep an eye on Rue Morgue later this year for my article). Apparently, libraries all over the country have these kind of books.

A Boston Globe online article from earlier in January reveals these thrilling details:

The Cleveland Public Library has a Quran that may have been bound in the skin of its previous owner, an Arab tribal leader ... The College of Physicians of Philadelphia [home to the Mutter Museum] has four bound by Dr. John Stockton Hough, known for diagnosing the city's first case of trichinosis. He used that patient's skin to bind three of the volumes.

The Globe article keeps referring to "human leather." Makes me think of fruit leather. Mmmm, chewy.

Sleepless in Seattle as a horror movie

2006-01-31T13:05:00.000-05:00

Here's a hilarious recutting of Sleepless in Seattle to make it appear to be a horror film instead of a romance.

Very funny, even to someone like me who hasn't seen the original, and very well done.

It's amazing what a little taking-out-of-context will do for you!

Enjoy!

I saw this link first on Boing Boing.

Real Life Horror?

2006-01-22T16:39:00.000-05:00

So, hi there. You want to hear a neat story?

I was released from the hospital this afternoon. I ended up there Thursday night after I was mugged and shot three times in the leg.

Seriously.

I'm doing good. The first two bullets went straight through my leg below the knee, but the third shattered my thigh bone. They put in a titanium nail (or something alone those lines) and hooked the three pieces of the bone to it, so I'll be all good in a little while. I'm on crutches at the moment, but I can assure you that I have people scouring eBay for a sweet cane.

I just thought I'd let you all know what happened. Don't get freaked out -- I've been making jokes about this since Thursday night.

Besides, now I've got some street cred.

Gotta be meme

2006-01-19T09:26:00.000-05:00

"I just had had the strangest dream. I just dreamt that I was married to a beautiful blonde and we owned an inn that was going to be turned into a golf club."

Hm. This place looks vaguely familiar ...

I've been distracted by comics projects and free-lance work. Plus, for some strange reason, I haven't been in a very horror-ish mood. That, too, will pass, I'm sure.

Maybe responding to this meme will get me back in the groove. I typically hate these things, because I doubt too many people care about my preferred tie knot, or my food allergies. But this one is kind of interesting.

ONE (1) earliest film-related memory:
This may be my earliest film memory, period, largely because my family weren't big movie-goers: seeing Star Wars at the Jungle Drive-In a good year after it was released in theaters, and well after all my cousins had watched it and told me all about it. My sister, age 1 or so, screamed and covered my eyes when the Jawas hit R2-D2 with that electric bolt-thing.

TWO (2) favourite lines from movies:
I'm really bad at remembering lines from movies.

THREE (3) jobs you’d do if you could not work in the “biz”:
Is the "biz" comics, or something else? Let's pretend it's comics. Well, my "real" job is graphic design, so I guess (1.) is graphic designer; (2.) I could fall back into being a journalist/copy editor; or (3.) if I really had to, I could go back to being an advertising account executive, but that bored me senseless the first time.

FOUR (4) jobs you actually have held outside of the industry:
Let's see, I've been a (1.) nightclub DJ; (2.) a nightclub/party promoter; (3.) a newspaper editor/designer; and (4.) a beer jockey at a civic center.

THREE (3) book authors you like:
A.S. Byatt, Emma Bull and Donna Tartt

TWO (2) movies you’d like to remake or properties you’d like to adapt:
None, really. I don't think a lot about movie remakes and, generally, if I enjoy a novel or a comic book, I appreciate it in that form. Off the top of my head, I can't recall a time that I thought, "Man, someone has to make this into a movie." Maybe I have, but just don't remember.

ONE (1) screenwriter you think is underrated:
Guy Ritchie, maybe? I'm absolutely stupid for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.

THREE (3) people I’m tagging to answer this meme next:
Oh, I don't want to inflict a meme on anyone else.

Partially Back From the Dead!

2006-01-18T14:46:00.000-05:00

So, I've spent most of the day thus far digging through boxes of old horror comics in an attempt to flood this place with new and exciting content. I'm not quite there yet. In the meantime, however, we've been memed (Is that a word now?) by Sean Collins (Who also has a comic up over at Top Shelf's site that you should go and read after this.)

The first non-meme question posed was "What made you get into horror?"

I was strapped to a chair at a young age and forced to watch episodes of Tales From the Crypt until my eyes and ears bled, only then to be beaten with a broom handle between episodes.

Okay. So, my excuse isn't nearly that dramatic. As a kid I was raised on action and horror movies by my father. We spent many weekends sitting around and watching whatever dreck (Though there were often good finds, too) was showing on television. My dad and older sister also read a lot of horror books -- King, Koontz, Saul, etc -- so those were always laying around for me to get my grubby little meathooks on. That and comic books (My first comic book was one I found laying around the house from some mysterious era before my time -- an issue of House of Secrets) were what I spent most of my time reading. My family also has a sick, twisted sense of humor that I'm sure didn't help matters much.

Onto the memeememememe!

ONE (1) earliest film-related memory:
The most specific one I can think of is going to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II in the theater, only to have the film burn out ten or fifteen minutes in. This was back in the day when these things seemed to happen quite regularly, at least to me...which is probably why I have a slight aversion to going to the movie theater.

TWO (2) favourite lines from movies:
I love these questions because they always make my mind go completely blank. Probably "That's okay, time doesn't exist." from Slacker and "I'm testing the air. I like it but it doesn't like me." from The Philadelphia Story. Didn't expect those, did you?

THREE (3) jobs you’d do if you could not work in the “biz”:
I'll take this to mean the stripp-...writing "biz." I'd like to be a park ranger, an anthropologist, or a film producer. Seriously.

FOUR (4) jobs you actually have held outside of the industry:
What? Like all of my jobs? I worked for an airline at O'Hare Airport escorting unaccompanied kids from one plane to another; worked in a comic book store; worked in the gift shop for a filmmaking exhibit at a museum; worked selling tickets in the same museum.

THREE (3) book authors you like:
Dashiell Hammett, Nelson Algren, and Joseph Heller.

TWO (2) movies you’d like to remake or properties you’d like to adapt:
I'd like to adapt a more accurate version of Hammett's Red Harvest (Not that there's anything wrong with Yojimbo, Fistful of Dollars, or Last Man Standing) and Good Omens by Gaiman and Pratchett.

ONE (1) screenwriter you think is underrated:
George Romero. Seriously. Listen to the dialogue in Land of the Dead.

THREE (3) people I’m tagging to answer this meme next:
I'll cheat and try to get Sam and Kevin to actually post something around here, along with the Retropolitan, who I know has been pacing back and forth during our absence.

Self-Promotion to Start the New Year

2006-01-07T17:56:00.000-05:00

It just seems like the right thing to do.

So, I'll start here: My short comic, "Dark Matter", appears in Variants #2, the new issue of the Variance Anthology from Variance Press. It's the first comic I haven't self-published and would be awesome just because of that, but the art by Jeff Palmer is pretty slick, too. You'll get two other comics in the package and you'll only have to spend $3.50 (plus, maybe, some shipping) to get it.

How good a deal is that? Really good, that's how good a deal.

So go, buy. Start my career in comics.

Please.

A Couple of Small Resolutions for the New Year

2006-01-05T20:59:00.000-05:00

This is what happens when you leave me alone with some exquisite rum for too long. I start making a list and I get a little carried away.

A little?

Regardless -- hop over to my other residence and absorb my New Year's Resolutions into your being.

That Time of Year

2005-12-30T11:49:00.000-05:00

You say it's my birthday?

Well, happy birthday to me.

I'll be back after the New Year with some new stuff, if I manage to survive that long. Have a good one, everybody.

And They Wonder How We Ended Up This Way

2005-12-29T22:19:00.000-05:00

Now that I come fully equipped with a scanner (we couldn't afford Kung-Fu Death Grip this year), I've been wandering around my apartment almost non-stop peering in every corner to see what I can scan. Tonight I finally remembered what I had originally been looking for.

I know both we here at DBS and our comrade-in-arms, Sean Collins, have discussed the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series of children's books. I dug up my copies of the first two volumes and flipped through them for a while. I realized that while I vaguely remembered some of the stories after browsing over them, I still hadn't forgotten Stephen Gammell's illustrations. They're something that simply can't be described to those unfamiliar with them.

So, I thought I'd share a few of my favorites with you. No descriptions or comments or anything, just the illustrations. They say more by themselves than my half-wits and cheesy jokes could ever hope to accomplish.

That horse still freaks me out. A lot.

Playing Santa For Yourself

2005-12-28T15:35:00.000-05:00

So, I spent a good portion of this morning agonizing over what I was going to spend these gift cards I got for Christmas on. I had one that I was decidedly going to spend on books (since the store in question has an entire clothing department that is out of stock on their website) and, finally, managed to make a decision on the first two volumes of Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim series.

Now, I know you're all a lot like me. You get gift cards from people over the holidays and you tell yourself that you aren't going to run out and spend them this year. You're going to sit on them for a little while and see what comes up.

We all know that's a blatant lie.

I thought I would come along and give your indecision a little assist with some book reccomendations. If you have gift cards for, say, Victoria's Secret...then I'm sorry. This won't be much help. You're on your own there.

I came up with seven books to reccomend, a bit offhand, and there may be more coming along in the future as I think of them. So, in no particular order:

The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, by Sam Weller

Okay, it's a mildly cheap plug for Sam's book...but not really. It's an amazing book that covers the life of one of the (if not the) most inspiring and influential people of the twentieth century.

I know I tend to lapse into Bradbury fanaticism on ocassion (read: every other day), and that its all you get for large periods of time around here, but trust me on this one. It's worth picking up. Even if you don't have a Borders or Barnes and Noble or Jimmy Chicken's Book Hut gift card -- go get the book.

If you don't, I'll know. And I'll be sorely disappointed in you.

The Complete Novels, by Dashiell Hammett

This is what I've been spending most of my time with lately. I'd like to read other books, I really would, but I just can't put this damn thing down long enough to read anything else. It's that good. Hammett is a master of the suspense novel, leaving me sitting in stunned, gaping silence a number of times, asking myself, "Now what the hell is going to happen?"

I'll probably give these novels a little more air time later on. So far I've completed Red Harvest and I'm about halfway through The Dain Curse. Then I still have three more to go after that, including The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man.

Five grandly amazing novels. Fancy Library of America binding. Do yourself a favor, will you?

Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs

And now, as they say, for something completely different.

I'm not even entirely sure how to go about describing this book. It's non-fiction. It's a memoir. And it's one of the most bizarre, grossly interesting things I've read in some time.

I think the best comparison I can make is to call it the non-fiction equivalent of Chuck Palahniuk's Choke. But not really. That does Running With Scissors an injustice, with no offense to Palahniuk.

If you're a fan of strange, messed-up stories -- like me -- then you'll be right at home here. If you aren't then...well, I guess this is your chance to learn.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds, by Cherie Priest

Okay, okay. I know this is another mildly cheap plug. But, come on. I can't help it. It's a great book. It's southern gothic horror that's good in the way that Anne Rice isn't. (Oh, the complaints I'll get over that...)

Now, you may already know dear Cherie and you may have already picked up a copy of her book. But I know some of you haven't. You're the ones slinking down in your chair, trying to hide behind your computer desk.

I'm not forcing you into buying anything, but I am saying that if you have some gift cards for a merchant that deals in books and you like horror, even the slightest bit, then...well, this isn't exactly the quadradic equation. Get this book.

Because if I see you in line with some Dean Koontz book instead, I'll bludgeon you.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I picked up Volume One of this a number of years ago, when it was still a two-volume set. After reading Honour Among Punks, twice, I went back to the source material.

I'm still amazed at how good it is.

This is also one of those books that a lot of people seem to forget about picking up. Everyone I know loves Sherlock Holmes, but very few, if any of them, actually own this essential tome. I tend to give them dirty looks and refuse to speak to them until they hop over to the bookstore to remedy said situation.

And, come on. It'll cost you fourteen bucks, tops. Fourteen dollars. Think of all you're getting for that, cancel your pizza order, and get this instead. You and your gut will thank me.

Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

This, like The Complete Sherlock Holmes, is a book that too few people actually own or have read since they were kids. I reread it a couple months back and, as I mentioned briefly at that other place, I've been going back through some Burroughs for inspiration on a story I'm working on.

Tarzan is possibly one of the most anthropologically incorrect books around, but damn if it isn't one of the most entertaining and adverturous ones.

And, hell, if you already own this, then let this be your chance to go pick up some other Burroughs goodness. There are more to this series and his whole John Carter of Mars series to be mined (I still have the first three volumes of the latter that need to be read, ASAP.)

The Stories of Ray Bradbury, by Ray Bradbury

Okay, so I thought it would be fitting to begin and end this list with Ray Bradbury. I just can't push the work by this man enough.

Most of you probably own a number of his books, but if you don't, or if they're too ratty to chance reading any more, then this is your ticket. It contains a hundred of his short stories, nine hundred and twelve pages. If nothing else, it'll be good for when you get the flu and are relegated to your bed for a week.

Fast, easy reading with more depth than you can imagine. A good starting point for the non-Bradbury reader and still a great possession for the seasoned veteran. While it does leave out a lot of his stories, and a number of my favorite ones, I'll still vouch for the quality of those that are included.

Besides, I'm just going to keep hammering on this until all of you have read a good cross-section of Bradbury.

The Dreaming and Why TokyoPop May Have Trouble with OEL

2005-12-26T21:17:00.000-05:00

Last week I read the first volume of The Dreaming, one of TokyoPop's new OEL (Original English Language) manga titles, so called because they're created by English-language creators in English, rather than being licensed and translated from works that originated in Japan.

The Dreaming was very good indeed and much better than I'd expected. I was a little hesitant to pre-order it since it seemed to be targeted at teens and I prefer more adult-leaning manga. Still, I thought I'd give it a shot. And I'm glad I did. It's atmospheric, tense (a comic! a comic that's actually tense - wow), good looking, and mysterious. And - bonus - it's a horror mystery, rather than a gorefest. If you like Picnic at Hanging Rock or other atmospheric horror movies or books, you should really check it out.

The problem came, though, when I was done with the book, psyched about it, and wanting to find out when I could buy the next volume.

I went to the website of the book's creator, Queenie Chan, to see what I could learn there. And what I learned bummed me out quite a bit: the next volume of The Dreaming isn't due until 2006 (no specific month given), with the third and final volume not due until 2007.

And this is where the problem comes in. Other manga series have new volumes much more often - at least a couple of times a year, if not more - and that works to their advantage. They can come out at that clip because the biggest part of the work on them - the writing and the drawing - has been completed; it's touch ups and translations and rewrites that have to be done before publishing here. Asia-native manga can also come out faster because TokyoPop is working from a backlog of material, possibly years' worth, when they start publishing a series.

This seems not to be the case with the OEL. It looks like they're being created roughly in synch with the publication schedule. I know there's a lot of work that goes into these books, and I want the creators to take the time they need to make the books great, but potentially having to wait 2 years to finish the story is going to be kind of a bummer, and might kill some of the momentum, both storywise and saleswise, that these books generate.

I know people are willing to wait years and years for masterworks like Charles Burns' Black Hole, and that's certainly an argument against my worries (hell, I ws happy to wait for Black Hole, among others. I love that book). But this is a new line TokyoPop is trying to launch, with largely unknown creators, and in that situation you want as much working for you as you can.

I hope the OEL line works. It seems very promising (I can't wait to see Becky Cloonan's East Coast Rising, for instance) and could be a huge development for the industry in North America. Maybe TokyoPop should stockpile more of these books before they start releasing them so a title like The Dreaming, which is so good and leaves the audience hungry for an immediate follow up, can have three volumes released in a year or 18 months, instead of 3 years.

-----

Don't let my concerns keep you from a really good comic. Check out The Dreaming if you like psychological or understated horror. It's really, really good.

Have An Off-Kilter Christmas

2005-12-21T14:35:00.000-05:00

You didn't seriously think we were going to let Sam run the show for the entire month, did you?

Anyway, this is the time of year when I like to veg out on the couch and partake in some holiday movie goodness. School is done for the time being, so most of the stress of life has been lifted from my shoulders (there's always work and that pesky girl to keep me on edge, of course) and all I have on my schedule is to get prepared for Christmas. Being the generous gentleman that I am, I thought I would share with you twelve of my favorite movies for this segment of the year.

And don't tell me you expected these to be normal.

12. Silent Night Deadly Night (1984)

This is a terrible, terrible movie. It truly is. That's not saying that it doesn't have anything going for it. A lunatic dressed as Santa Claus who kills people with an axe is usually reason enough for me to watch something. Angry parents picketing the movie's release (at the height of the Christmas season in 1984) is an even better reason.

The story follows...come on. Do you really care? Some kid's parents are raped and murdered on Christmas, then he survives a horrific childhood only to grow up and be forced into dressing up as Santa Claus. Then he massacres the locals, in costume.

It's an amusing experience if you know what you're going into. Silent Night Deadly Night barely makes it onto the scale of So Bad It's Fantastic. Barely. But if you're feeling that your holiday celebration is missing an axe-wielding maniac dressed as St. Nick, then, well...here you go. Just, for the Love of God, stay far away from the sequels. I warned you.

11. Ernest Saves Christmas (1988)

This list isn't exactly increasing in quality, is it?

Okay. I have a confession to make. When I was a little kid, I loved watching the Ernest movies. I knew they were awful, even back then, yet they had some sort of evil drawing power that I couldn't resist. This is probably my third favorite of the series, behind Ernest Goes to Jail and Ernest Scared Stupid ("Fresh, cold miak!") I'll also admit that I haven't seen this in years, so I may very well throw-up and pass out while trying to survive it.

What else is there to say? If you've ever seen an Ernest movie, then you know what to expect. I will, however, vouch for it by saying that it in no way sinks to the level of Ernest Goes to Africa, or whatever that abomination was called.

I mean, Africa? Really?

10. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)

The sad thing is that I used to watch this movie before I knew it was on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

When I was little, I used to spend my Christmas break down in my basement playing with my Legos. I had thousands of those little things and I would spread them across the floor, turn on a Christmas movie to play in the background, and piddle around for hours. This was my favorite Christmas background movie. It's the perfect movie to only pay half-attention to. If not less.

It's still not a very good movie, no. But it involves Santa Claus and Martians. If you can't find some sort of amusement in that premise, then I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave.

Seriously. Get out.

9. Jack Frost (1998)

In 1998, a little Christmas movie called Jack Frost came out. It was a heart-warming tale involving Michael Keaton as a father who dies and comes back as a snowman or some such malarkey. I think Henry Rollins was in it, too.

But that same year another movie came out, also titled Jack Frost. That's the one I'd like to talk about. It has a similar premise, in which someone dies and comes back to life as a snowman.

Only this time around he's a serial killer.

If you weren't sure that a mass-murdering Santa could be topped, I present to you the mass-murdering Snowman. Snowman. It's a man made out of frozen water and it's killing people.

I love high-concept holiday films. Don't you?

8. Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (2001)

In a year when our country is torn in half by the mythical War on Christmas, I thought I should include a film that represents the true spirit of the season. A film that has no green or red decorations, no presents, no glowing trees. I don't think it even takes place in December. But it does have something in common with this time of year.

It has Jesus Christ kicking the crap out of vampires.

It also has musical numbers. And a Mexican wrestler named Santos. And some Canadian lesbians. And eight hundred other little things that I can't think of off the top of my head.

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is a wonderful film in a horrible, horrible way. Essentially, if you have a similar sense of humor to me, you'll enjoy it. If you're ever serious about anything, especially religion, then you should probably go find something else to watch. I hear there's a new Left Behind movie coming out.

But I guarantee you Kirk Cameron doesn't know martial arts.

7. Black Christmas (1974)

Finally, we get to a movie with some actual quality behind it.

Black Christmas is one of those horror movies from the '70s that lives in relative obscurity for no good reason. It's a fantastic movie. And I mean it. It's actually a really good horror film. It's also the best example of straight horror set during the holiday season.

It also involves a killer wiping out people in a soriority house for absolutely no reason. He just kills because, apparently, that's what he does. I can get behind that and, in fact, I have in the past.

Instead of my saying more on the subject, I suggest you just go out and track down a copy of the film and watch it yourself. I'm sure you can squeeze it in somewhere between viewing #132 of It's a Wonderful Life and your seventeenth time through A Christmas Story.

They'll go well together. Really.

6. Scrooged (1988)

This is my second favorite take on the Dickens classic (We'll get to my first in a few minutes.) It's also one of my favorite Bill Murray films of the '80s. How the hell many did he make in that decade? 300? 400?

Scrooged also constantly surprises me with how...dark it is. Danny Elfman's music is, obviously, a perfect fit.

The film is by far the best modernization of A Christmas Carol. I can't honestly see how anyone else could attempt updating the novel after this movie was released.

Oh, hell. Now I just want to go track down a copy and watch it. Twice.

5. Die Hard (1988)

Yeah. That's right. Die Hard. It's a Christmas film. It's also the best (if not the only) Christmas action movie.

I don't know. Is there anything else to say about it? Bruce Willis tapes a pistol to his back using present wrapping supplies. I'm not entirely sure that it gets much better than that.

4. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

My favorite take on Dickens' novel, bar none. It's also my second favorite Muppets movie, behind the original Muppet Movie.

If the film wasn't good enough with Michael Caine as Scrooge and Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit, you get Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat telling the entire story.

Better yet, you get Gonzo as Charles Dickens himself telling the story.

Take a moment, relax, and let that sink in. Gonzo as Charles Dickens.

So, when do we get A Muppet Tale of Two Cities? Because, really, they're about the only people who can get me interested in these things.

3. Gremlins (1984)

Not all of you forgot that Die Hard was a Christmas movie. Fine. But did you remember Gremlins? Eh? Eh? Yeah. That's a Christmas film, too. So, there.

I could go on about Gremlins for hours and hours and hours. It's one of my favorite horror films and, possibly, my favorite film that combines horror and humor. Christmas is just an extra added bonus. It's like finding a quarter in your can of honey roasted peanuts.

This is also my favorite of the films made by Joe Dante (Roger Corman alumn! Roger Corman alumn!) And would you believe that it's written by Chris Columbus? Chris Columbus who directed the first two Home Alone movies and Christmas with the Kranks and produced Jingle All the Way? That Chris Columbus?

Oh, dear Mr. Columbus, where hast thou magic touch gone?

2. Bad Santa (2003)

The off-kilter Christmas movie to end all off-kilter Christmas movies. They don't get any darker than this. Any more irreverant. Any more vulgar. And the best part of the movie?

It doesn't crap out and turn into a warm little Hallmark film. It stays dark and irreverant and vulgar and horrible throughout the entire thing.

It's also scored completely with classical music, which was neat.

If you don't like Christmas or people who go insane over the holidays or malls or Santa Claus or, really, anything pertaining to the holiday season...this is the film for you. I know it's been hyped beyond all belief, but it's for a good reason.

There's finally a Christmas movie for the rest of us.

1. A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

This should really come as no surprise. But instead of my usual slobbering, I'm instead going to simply countdown my twelve reasons for this being my favorite off-kilter Christmas movie. Ready?

12. I can't stand musicals most of the time, but I can't stop singing the songs from this film.
11. Tim Burton may give us films like Planet of the Apes, but he's also capable of writing works of pure genius.
10. It manages to combine my two favorite holidays - Christmas and Halloween.
9. Horror in a Christmas movie? Yes. I do believe so.
8. Jack Skellington is just plain nifty.
7. It's responsible for a whole new generation of Hot Topic products, which means that it's responsible for a whole new generation of people for me to mock without remorse.
6. Chris Sarandon has long been misused for bad films, so it's always nice to see him take part in a good one.
5. Probably the only good play on the traditional phrase "The Night Before Christmas."
4. Stop-motion animation.
3. I can watch it seven times in a row and not grow the least bit tired.
2. Stop-motion animation. There are fewer things in life I love more.
1. It's the absolute best Ray Bradbury story to never be involved in any way with Ray Bradbury.

...And with that, I bid you all a Merry Whateverthehellyou'rechoosingtocelebratethismonth. I'm sure we'll see each other again sooner than you probably assume.

Another Excuse to Get a Video iPod

2005-12-20T13:09:00.000-05:00

Like you needed one.

Well, in case you do, or need to justify it to yourself or Santa, here it is:

There are a bunch of public-domain horror movies available for it.

Some good folk, or folks (it's not clear from that site), are encoding public domain horror movies for the video iPod and posting BitTorrents of them for you to download.

Titles include Carnival of Souls (!!) and, hopefully soon, Night of the Living Dead. There are a bunch of others that I haven't heard of, but hey, they're free. Why not give 'em a watch?

The movies can be had here.
BitTorrent can be downloaded here.

Merry Christmas, kids. Who loves ya?

Starting to Repeat Myself about Marvel Zombies

2005-12-15T13:40:00.000-05:00

I want to stop, I really do, but I can't! How good is this cover? I mean, really. This is hilarious.

A zombified riff on X-Men #1. How funny? The Beast's arms coming off, Cyclops holding his head to shoot his optic beams. Darn funny.

MARVEL ZOMBIES #4 (of 5)
Written by ROBERT KIRKMAN
Penciled by SEAN PHILLIPS
Cover by ARTHUR SUYDAM
The zombies' battle with the Silver Surfer was just a schoolyard brawl compared to the threat he heralded. Will our flesh-eating undead heroes remain undead, or will this threat from space make them even deader? No Marvel Zombie should miss it!
32 PGS./T+ SUGGESTED FOR TEENS AND UP ...$2.99

I'm starting to break down on this one, I think. It's possible, possible, that I'll check out the trade for this.

Marvels' new comics solicits are at CBR, where I found the image and text.

Artistic Interpretations of Literary Figures

2005-12-14T07:38:00.000-05:00

If you like literature, portraiture, and comic art, I highly commend unto you Artistic Interpretations of Literary Figures, a gallery of drawings (which I am immensely jealous of) of famous writers and characters by some great comic artists.

The gallery, which is all part of a personal collection acccumulated by Steven Gettis, is terrific and makes me wish pretty hard that some of these drawings were available for purchase. I'd buy 'em.

Lots of sci fi, horror, and fantasy authors and characters are depicted, including Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, John Carter of Mars, Paul Atreides, and many more.

Arists who have contributed to the archive include Mike (Hellboy) Mignola, John (Marvel in the 60s/70s) Bucsema, Peter (Hate) Bagge, Neil Gaiman (drawing!), Stephen (Swamp Thing, Taboo) Bisette, Eddie (From Hell) Campbell, Gene (Tomb of Dracula) Colan, Duncan (Enigma) Fegredo, James (everything awesome) Jean, and Dave (Sandman) McKean.

Pictured here is H.P. Lovecraft, as rendered by Saverio Tenuta.

Scary Music: "I Have a Devil In Me," by The Meat Purveyors

2005-12-12T07:37:00.000-05:00

(This series was originally started during All Hallow's Month. I didn't get too far with it, though, so I decided to revive it and run the pieces that I had planned to during October over the next few months. Here's the first.)

I find country music to be the scariest kind of music. And that’s not some joke at country’s expense. I love country music. Not the bullshit-Nashville-spit-shined variety. Not that Faith Hill, middle of the road pablum-laced, easy piety kind. The alt.country, the old-timey ballads, the outlaws from the 70s. That’s great music and no one can argue out of that.

What makes country so powerfully primed for frightening music is its sincere belief, as a foundation of the genre, in the existence of the weird and frightening (coming into the music from its balladic roots - think songs like Barbara Allen, Fatal Flower Garden, or Henry Lee to get a sense of this), evil and the devil (coming in from gospel and the religious upbringings of many of its songwriters), its simple (not simplistic) lyrics, its ethereal notes, and its deep reverb.

The Meat Purveyor's "I Have a Devil in Me" puts all of these elements into play to create a song that only becomes more chilling as you listen more closely to the lyrics and fill in some of the gaps created by the narrator's skewed perspective.

"I Have a Devil in Me" is a song about someone who believes that they are possessed and that this devil makes them act in the self-destructive, dangerous, erratic way that they do. The narrator blames on her devil actions like crashing her car, cutting off hair, breaking down crying for no reason, and more.

The song is clearly about a schizophenic, but conveys this information in countrified/biblical way – after all, don’t we now read the biblical stories of possession as being about mental illness?

But that's an interpretation for the observer, and this is a first-person narration. Imagine the stark terror of doing these things, fodiscerniblenable reason, if you're the person doing them. The simple, unadorned narration of the things the "devil" compels the narrator to do become chilling when contrasting the interior monologue to what observers would be seeing in the same instances:

He makes me cut off my hair
He makes me total my car
He makes me break down and cry

The song also taps into a feeling of a greater, pervading sense of doom or evil that swirls around the narrator:

I have a devil in me
The way the wind blows the trees
The way it rustles the leaves
The voices talking to me
He makes me put down the phone
He makes me pick up the gun
I have a devil in me

Add the disconcerting lyrics to the flat, repetitious twanging of guitars and banjos and you have an affecting, affectless song about the real fears brought on by mental illness.

From: All Relationship Are Doomed To Fail (Bloodshot Records)

Back from the Future: NYC2123

2005-12-10T15:57:00.000-05:00

I'm sure you've all noticed our absences here recently. Rick and Kevin have both noted them. What's up, though? Well, you could look at it as a really long, really bad hangover from one really intense month (we posted about 70 articles in October).

Or you could accept this, my preferred, explanation: We've been in the future, looking for good stuff for you guys.

And now I've come back from the future with a webcomic for you guys to check out: NYC2123.

The comic, which is formatted to be read on a PSP, but is also available on the web, is a sci-fi story about a future Manhattan, in which a tsunami has hit New York and Manhattan has been totally disconnected from the rest of New York. Barge cities have sprung up, the social order has changed, body modifications are common, open source is outlawed and people have Wi-Fi network connections implanted in their brains.

There are three issues of the comics up right now, about 150 pages, which makes up the first half of the story. In it, we find a pair of people, operating on the criminal fringes of the new Manhattan, sent on a mission to steal one of the last remaining North American Gray Squirrels for a collector. Squirrels, you see, are extinct in 2123. (There's also an interesting secondary plot about some kind of drug. One gets the feeling that these two plot threads are likely to be knitted together, William Gibson-style, towards the end of the story.)

NYC2123, written by Paco Allen and drawn by Chad Allen (in a heavily Photoshopped style that's appealing and reminiscent of a lot of other webcomics and small indies), is worth checking out. Though it's a little slow getting started, it's interesting and fun and well put together. I'm looking forward to Issue 4, certainly. The whole thing gives me fond memories of Shadowrun.

Another interesting aspect of the comic is its license. The comic is posted under a Creative Commons license, meaning that the Allens are asserting much less strict copyright on it than other works are protected by (they're clearly big open source fans, as the script makes clear). To this end, they even make the original EPS and Illustrator files for the comic available for anyone to download. This has led to the comic - one that's not even complete yet, remember - being translated into a Dutch and Magyar already. It's an interesting viral marketing technique and might point a way forward for some creators.

Webcomics? Cool.
PSP Comics? Cooler.
Open-source PSP/Web Comics? Very cool indeed.

And worth checking out.

(The illustration is, of course, from the comic and copyright Paco Allen)

Farewell, You Horrible Month!

2005-12-01T15:21:00.000-05:00

We really didn't like November, did we?

Well, now it's a new month and a second chance to make up for our recent slacking. At least I will be.

I'll be (finally) bringing back my Mommy's Little Monsters feature. You may remember that from way back in October. You know, when we actually posted more often.

I'll also be taking a look at some examples of Christmas crossing over with the horror genre. While you can probably think of some of the items I'll cover, you know I always like to throw in a surprise or seven.

In the very near future, I'll be spotlighting some gifts for the horror fan in your life. Or, you know, if you wanted to buy me some presents...

I've also been doing some posting over at my other blog, Stacks, Not Shelves. As soon as I'm done with this post, I'll be switching back over there to start the countdown of my ten favorite albums of 2005. I've already covered a few that didn't quite make the list. Before that I looked at some books and pontificated about love. I know six of you have been checking it our regularly. Maybe I can knock that number up to, say, nine.

And, come on, you didn't expect me to go through all this and not give myself a cheap plug, did you? That's what happens when none of my compatriots feel like posting...

Giving thanks, catching up, making excuses

2005-11-22T12:01:00.000-05:00

illustration by Sam Weber

I'm a filthy liar. I'd really planned to write something on Sunday, honest and for true!

But between Thanksgiving preparations and attempts to get ahead on a free-lance project and a comics script before this weekend's Mid-Ohio Con (where I'll be sharing table space with Final Girl's Stacie Ponder, among others), everything else is taking a back seat.

Because I feel a little guilty, I'll point you to the website of artist Sam Weber, whose work I knew from The New York Times and The New Yorker. However, I had no idea he also created such chilling illustrations as the one above, the Witch Jadis from The Magician's Nephew, or Ahab from Moby Dick. There's a terrific wild-eyed, even monstrous, element to those paintings. (Link shamelessly swiped from Drawn!, which you should be visiting regularly.)

I hope to get back to regular blogging after this weekend, finally writing some essays I've been sitting on for several weeks now. I'm not making any promises, though.

My Alibi Is Airtight

2005-11-21T15:44:00.000-05:00

If you've been wondering what the hell I've been doing lately instead of posting here, I have a minor confession to make.

I've been cheating on you.

Don't jump to conclusions, though. It's not what you think. You haven't gotten rid of me that easily. Stacks, Not Shelves is just a new, more personal blog where I can write about the things I can't write about here. Like puppies and ribbons.

There isn't much to see at the moment, but there will be some real posts shortly. Hopefully you'll head on over there if you don't get enough of me here.

Or you'll head over there anyway. Please? I still love you, baby. I do.

Default Options For This Holiday Season

2005-11-21T13:36:00.000-05:00

I can hear everyone saying, Holy mother of crap, Christmas is only a month away! This is immediately followed by What the hell am I going to buy all of these people? and What should I spike my eggnog with first?

Well, I think I can help you with those questions. The latter -- rum. The former? Easy peasy.

Out tomorrow on DVD is the brand new 2-disc version of the original King Kong. You may know how we feel about this movie around these parts.

This new DVD features what I understand to be a nearly immaculate restored version of the film; commentary by Ray Harryhausen and Ken Ralston, with Merian C. Cooper and Fay Wray; the 2005 documentary I'm Kong: The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper; the seven part documentary RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, Eighth Wonder of the World; and a few other little goodies. In my opinion, it makes the perfect gift for anyone -- little kid, grandparent, estranged husband, bus driver, etc.

If you want to step it up a bit, though, there's a second choice hitting the New Releases shelves tomorrow. The King Kong Collection features the 2-disc set of the original film, along with the original Mighty Joe Young and Son of Kong. For the extra seven or so dollars, it may be worth upgrading.

If you're like me and have an unhealthy man-crush on Ray Harryhausen, well, then this is a no brainer. The man is responsible for some of the best special effects ever seen in film (ILM be damned!) and Mighty Joe Young was the first feature film he did work on.

For those of you who are horribly indecisive and need yet another choice -- fear not! Also coming out tomorrow is the King Kong Collector's Edition. This gets you everything the 2-disc set has to offer, plus a collectible tin packaging (Uh, yay?), 20-page reproduction of original 1933 souvenir program, King Kong postcards, and a vintage King Kong poster mail-in offer. While this is perfect for the person or small woodland animal in your life who desperately needs everything related to King Kong, it's near the verge of overkill. Also, it's going for the same price as the three movie boxed set...so I would reccomend going for Option Two.

All in all, you should have some good choices for presents as of tomorrow. Personally, I'm holding out for the King Kong underwear and coaster set. I can see it on the horizon now...

'The American Tolkien'

2005-11-19T10:56:00.000-05:00

Jaime Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire, painted by Michael Komarck

We've been asleep at the wheel this week, haven't we? Blame the post-Halloween blues, or pre-Thanksgiving anxiety. Whatever works. I'll return tomorrow with something that passes for original content.

For now, I'll pause on fantasy author George R.R. Martin, whose A Feast for Crows -- the fourth volume in his A Song of Ice and Fire series -- dropped earlier this month. In its Nov. 13 issue, Time magazine dubs Martin "the American Tolkien," above LeGuin, above Jordan and, most certainly, above Paolini:

What really distinguishes Martin, and what marks him as a major force for evolution in fantasy, is his refusal to embrace a vision of the world as a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil. Tolkien's work has enormous imaginative force, but you have to go elsewhere for moral complexity. Martin's wars are multifaceted and ambiguous, as are the men and women who wage them and the gods who watch them and chortle, and somehow that makes them mean more. A Feast for Crows isn't pretty elves against gnarly orcs. It's men and women slugging it out in the muck, for money and power and lust and love.

Coincidentally, my copy of The Art of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire arrived this week (yes, I'm that geeky sometimes). Most of the art is top-caliber, but some of it seems awfully fan-arty, like something you'd find on a GeoCities shrine to Westeros.

Still, it's a lovely collection, even if it does remind me why I don't usually buy those "Art of ..." books: Many of the artists' renditions aren't how I envision the characters. I find myself thinking, "That's not Jon Snow!" (I told you I'm that geeky sometimes.)

Now if only the mailman would fork over A Feast for Crows. It should be here any day now.

Marvel Zombies Redux

2005-11-16T19:50:00.000-05:00

I continue not to care one whit about these comics and I also continue to be in geeky love with their covers - this is the cover to Marvel Zombies #3, hitting stores in February.

This, of course, is a nod to the famous Todd McFarlane cover to The Incredible Hulk (#347? Could I remember that right, even all these years later?)

I love Wolverine's eye and the Hulk's teeth in this one.

Here are the details:

MARVEL ZOMBIES #3 (of 5)
Written by ROBERT KIRKMAN
Penciled by SEAN PHILLIPS
Cover by ARTHUR SUYDAM
The star rider of the spaceways-the Silver Surfer--at war with an entire world of Marvel heroes-who happen to be zombies! How do you defeat an army of the super-powered Undead, even with the Power Cosmic? There's only one way to find out. Don't miss it!
32 PGS./T+ SUGGESTED FOR TEENS AND UP ...$2.99

The cover and solicit were first seen by me (as well as a much-enlarged version of the cover) at Newsarama.

Sunday Monday reading

2005-11-14T08:50:00.000-05:00

Between intermittent Internet problems and a free-lance project, I'm not sure which is worse. Oh, sure I do: the damnable Internet problems. If not for them, I'd have posted a thing or three this weekend.

But now all the lights on my cable modem seem to be blinking correctly, so I'll quickly post this before things go all pear-shaped again.

'Jesus in a Bert Lahr suit'
I've made no secret that I think C.S. Lewis' Narnia books are a heavy-handed, sermonizing, derivative mishmash, so it fills my heart with something vaguely resembling glee when I read articles like Charles McGrath's piece in Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

McGrath touches upon Disney's partnership with Philip Anschutz's conservative Walden Media to produce the Lewis-based films, and promote them to secular and Christian audiences. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

But the article moves quickly from there to catalog some of the myriad problems with Lewis' seven books.

The Narnia tales are often called "allegories," but I hestitate to label them as that; an allegory implies abstract ideas and a little sophistication. Narnia displays neither of those. (To be fair, I suppose depicting Jesus as Aslan the lion instead of, say, Aslan the lamb is a little abstract; but sheep don't inspire much shock and awe.)

There's very little in way of subtext -- it's all text. And the text isn't all that good. It reads as if Lewis took disparate elements from a child's bookshelf and beat them into submission with dumbed-down religious doctrine. Okay, that's pretty much what he did:

[J.R.R.] Tolkien, a devout Catholic, thought that religious writing ought to be left to the professionals -- to the clergy. He also hated that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was such a hodgepodge. Tolkien in his own work was what he called a "subcreator," the maker of an imaginary world as intricate, as detailed and as self-sufficient as the real one. For The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he created not just a story but also an entire world, Middle Earth, a geography, a mythology and several languages. Lewis, by contrast, was a magpie. He took whatever came to hand and dumped it all in. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a pastiche not only of Christian theology but also of Wagner and of classical Greek and Latin mythology, of Arthurian romance, Grimm's fairy tales and Scandinavian folklore, of Kenneth Grahame, Beatrix Potter and Edmund Spenser. Near the end of the book, even Santa Claus (as Father Christmas) makes a cameo appearance, much as he does at the end of the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.

I love that last bit about Santa Claus.

Perhaps more bothersome, though, than pedestrian writing that depicts talking beavers alongside Greek monsters and Christ-like lions are Lewis' thinly disguised Muslim caricatures and his treatment of the books' female characters. Poor Susan, the only one of the Pevensie children denied Aslan's salvation -- simply because she became too interested in "nylons and lipstick and invitations."

Even Edmund, the bratty Judas of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe whose loyalties are bought for a little Turkish Delight, receives better treatment.

Hellboy: from page to screen
I know you're probably tired of my recent Hellboy-related posts. Well, tough. I'm excited about the recently announced animated movies. Late last week, Tad Stones of Film Roman Studios launched a Hellboy Animated production blog, chronicling the project's progress. It's fascinating reading.

Particularly interesting is the Nov. 12 post, which dissects some of Hellboy creator Mike Mignola's staging and composition techniques. Heavy shadows, insert panels, unusual framing -- they're what make Mignola's work on the books unique.

Halloween producer Akkad killed in Jordanian terrorism

2005-11-11T12:07:00.000-05:00

According to many sources, including this San Jose Mercury News article, Moustapha Akkad, the producer of the Halloween movies died today as a result of injuries sustained in the three terrorist bombings in Jordan earlier in the week.

I don't know much about the guy, but I love those first two Halloween movies and thought it bore mentioning.

Akkad is seen here in a family photo, made available through the AP, with his daughter, Rima, who was also killed in the attacks.

Gone fishin'

2005-11-10T17:17:00.000-05:00

illustration by John Schwegel

I'd planned to write something of substance today, but I'm a curious mix of busy and lazy. So to commemorate last night's new episode of Lost, I'll instead post this great illustration of Charlie (with heroin-filled icon, naturally) and Hurley, by the talented John Schwegel.

Hooks, bugs & blood: the curse of Supernatural

2005-11-09T06:37:00.000-05:00

Back in September, I wrote that WB's Supernatural "has its moments" -- specifically, the horrific scenes are handled pretty well.

I clung to that opinion, even while watching recent episodes in which the brothers Winchester (Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki) investigated the most unavoidable of urban legends, Bloody Mary and, regrettably, the hook-handed killer. The show's writers didn't bring anything new to those modern folk tales, not even a healthy dose of humor. But at least they got them out of the way, clearing the field for more interesting, original stories.

At least that's what I'd hoped.

Last night's episode, the obviously titled "Bugs," dashed those hopes, desecrated the corpse, and buried it in a shallow grave.

After a construction worker is killed by an insect burrowing into his brain, Sam and Dean arrive at a new housing development where the insects are behaving oddly (and poorly, for that matter). That's because ... wait for it ... the housing development is being built on sacred Indian land.

Yes, the writers moved from Bloody Mary to the hook-handed killer to a Native American curse. Next week, the Winchesters return to their childhood home to discover that it's haunted. Seriously.

The only thing that could make that any better is if they lived at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville.

Hellboy ... the animated movies?

2005-11-07T19:09:00.000-05:00

Hellboy art by Sean Galloway

Am I overdoing it with Hellboy this week? Just give me this one more thing ...

Comics Continuum kindly points us to this little tidbit on comic book artist Sean Galloway's deviantart.com gallery: He's the lead character designer for two animated movies based on Mike Mignola's Hellboy. According to Galloway, they're planned as direct-to-DVD releases that also will air on Cartoon Network. The first apparently is set to air in October.

"Sorry to say, but it won't be based on Mignola's style," Galloway wrote on Nov. 4. "He wanted something other than his style."

Update: It looks as if the Hellboy-related posts have been deleted from Galloway's gallery.

Trapped Between Four Walls -- We Have a Freakin' Winner!

2005-11-07T17:31:00.000-05:00

First off, I promise that we'll make the next contest easier to enter. All we'll need is a blood sample and proof of birth.

But who cares about the next contest when we have a winner for the last one? I don't!

All the entries I got for this one were excellent, and I'm not just saying that to be a nice guy. We know I'm not really a nice guy. I kicked a puppy this morning.

But, as it goes, I had to narrow things down to one entry. After much consideration, I did.

Des! You win! (I know you're off auditioning for Jeopardy! as we speak, you bastard.)

Special mentions go out to our fine friends Novice and Kevin Okon. I'll keep you guys in mind the next time we have free swag to pawn off. It may be sooner than you think.

That's that, I guess. Now I actually have to get back to posting real content...

Sunday reading

2005-11-06T12:34:00.000-05:00

I haven't done one of these "Sunday reading" things in a while, have I? I'm plotting a comics series, starting a free-lance project, and working on a couple of longer blog pieces. So in lieu of original content, "Sunday reading" is what you get from me today.

Modern horror, B.K. and A.K.
At PopMatters, Bill Gibron makes a case for Stephen King as literature -- "Fume over other facets, but King's plots are worthy of artistic consideration" -- and considers his undeniable impact on horror:

King's effect was both as fan and formulator. He was an aficionado of the genre, and indulged in its depraved joys from a young age. Like a literary Tarantino, he absorbed all he read and saw, and channeled it through his own wounded worldview to create a kind of geek-heavy version of the heebie jeebies. King re-imagined the standards, rediscovering what made the Haunting of Hill House (an obvious nod for The Shining) and childhood horrors (It) so scary to begin with. But he wasn't afraid to modernize, to find contemporary ideals in classic creep outs. It's still the same today. A book like Insomnia can work the religious right and abortion into its mortality demon details, while hot button topics like spousal abuse (Dolores Claiborne) and the death penalty (The Green Mile) find their way into his words. Impact is an important part of merit, and it's hard to argue over King's connection to the genre. You can almost label modern horror B.K. and A.K. -- Before King and After King.

But the genre, Gibron contends, coupled with some horrible film adaptations of the author's work -- "it is hard to see the successes for all the shit" -- may ruin King's chances for literary greatness: "Horror is laughed at by lots of artistic types, dismissed as drivel and looked down upon as drek. In the hierarchy of hatred, it rests beneath romance novels and science fiction as subcategories of creative cravenness."

Of course, I doubt that matters much to King, who has referred to his work as "the Big Mac and fries" of fiction.

Speaking of genre giants ...
John Carpenter has updated his website for the first time since the release of Ghosts of Mars some four years ago. The new addition comes in the form of a section devoted to his upcoming Masters of Horror segment, Cigarette Burns.

In the short film, Norman Reedus plays Jimmy Sweetman, who's hired to find a rare print of Le Fin du Monde, "a film allegedly shown only once and rumored to have driven its audience into a murderous frenzy before the theater mysteriously erupted in flames." Showtime describes Cigarette Burns as a "supernatural Chinatown."

If the section on Carpenter's website is any indication, Cigarette Burns could be downright terrifying.

The macabre, interactive feature draws the viewer into a shadowy house, where each click of a light or opening of a door reveals another grisly scene. Think of it as a blood-spattered Choose Your Own Adventure.

Flogging a dead hearse (or something)

2005-11-05T21:48:00.000-05:00

Forgive me a moment of self-promotion: Silver Bullet Comic Books has a preview of Digital Webbing Presents #27, which includes one of my short stories, "Sack-'em-Up Gentlemen." I've already shown some of the art here, but the SBC preview includes lettered pages -- so you get to see me try to mimic Regency era speech. There are additional pages of art at the DWP website.

The art for "Sack-'em-Up Gentlemen" is by Brian Churilla, with colors by Eric Erbes.

Digital Webbing Presents #27 will be released in December.

Hellboy: Makoma, or the world's longest title

2005-11-05T12:27:00.000-05:00

I really should pay more attention to the newly redesigned and relaunched Hellboy.com. If I'd visited there earlier, I wouldn't have been surprised by Dark Horse's solicitations for February 2006, which includes a listing for Hellboy creator Mike Mignola's collaboration with legendary comics artist Richard Corben, titled (deep breath), Hellboy: Makoma, or, A Tale Told by a Mummy in the New York City Explorers' Club on August 16, 1993:

... Set long before the life-changing events of this year's The Island, this two-parter reveals Hellboy's earlier encounter with the powerful mythology of Africa. Mignola writes and provides the cover, as well as drawing part of the story, with the lion's share drawn by Corben, in the collaboration which promises to be the horror-comics event of the year.

That makes me unspeakably happy.

Horror in Unlikely Places: The Hinted TV ad

2005-11-04T09:43:00.000-05:00

When Arla Foods, the U.K.'s leading dairy company, wanted to market its new line of Cravendale Hint Of ... flavored milk, it turned to DDB London and director Garth Davis. And they then turned to ... horror. Well, at least to some of the trappings of the genre.

In a TV ad introduced last month called The Hinted, a young mother drives her child home from the supermarket, oblivious to the eerily vacant parking lot, the empty streets, the overturned refrigerator in the alleyway -- and the ethereal, strawberry-colored dairy cattle that appear on rooftops, on overpasses and in the rearview mirror.

But her little son notices. He sees it all.

As they near home, the music swells. A crow squawks. Then the voice of Anthony Stewart Head (Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) intones, "There's a new kind of Cravendale, called Hint Of ..."

In the kitchen, the mother begins to unpack groceries as the boy is drawn to the back door, almost as if answering a call. He steps gingerly into the fog-enshrouded lawn.

Head continues: "Fresh milk with a hint of something so good --"

"They're here," the boy whispers, his eyes wide with something between horror and wonder as he's confronted by a herd of ghostly bovines.

"-- the strawberry cows want it back."

A cow bellows, and the mother looks up, suddenly aware that things aren't quite ... right.

The commercial isn't scary, really; it's just a little creepy, and clever.

Also worth watching on the Cravendale website: Pursuit, a TV spot with dairy cows as stalkers, following a man as he trudges home from a parking garage after his car won't start.

Other recent installments of "Horror in Unlikely Places":
Tom Ford/Karshner triplets photo spread in W magazine
Roger Ballen photo shoot for New York Times Magazine

Still Trapped...

2005-11-04T08:05:00.000-05:00

Just a reminder that today is the LAST day to enter my super-magical contest extravaganza! It's really easy, so there's no reason to not enter. I'll be mulling over the entries this weekend and then announcing the winners first thing next week. Or possibly sooner, if I get tired of waiting.

In the time it took you to read this, you could have written half your entry! So, get motoring and enter the contest!

All Hallow's Month: index of original content

2005-11-03T08:30:00.000-05:00

What follows is an index of links to our original content for All Hallow's Month 2005. Chronological order doesn't do anyone much good at this point, so I've tried to organize them by subject matter. We'll also tuck this away in the archives section in the sidebar to your right.

All Hallow's Month 2005
The post mortem

Mommy's Little Monsters
The Introduction
Day One: Mr. Dark
Day Two: Giant Ants!
Day Three: Abe Sapien
Day Five: Roger (and boulders!)
Day Six: King Kong
Day Seven: Animal!
Day Eight: Scylla and Charybdis
Day Nine: Gargoyles
Day Ten: Ben Cortman
Day Eleven: GWAR!
Day Twelve: Flying monkeys
Day Thirteen: Count Dracula
Day Fourteen: Creatures in 'The Mist'
Day Fifteen: a man named Frank
Day Sixteen: The Thing
Day Seventeen: Godzilla
Day Eighteen: The Joker
(Interrupted by illness and mid-terms.)
The Top Five!

Television
Surface dwellers (a review of the NBC series)
Horror television: Angel
Horror television: Millennium
Horror television: The Twilight Zone
Horror television: The Outer Limits
Horror television: "Be Still My Heart," ER, Season 6
TV's 10 scariest characters
Guest commentary: Why the video for Michael Jackson's Thriller belongs in the horror canon, by Sean T. Collins

Movies
Werewolves in the fold (Part 1 of the Top 10 werewolf films)
Werewolves in the fold (Part 2 of the Top 10 werewolf films)
Guest commentary: Gray areas, by Matt Maxwell
Guest commentary: Why Jason is better, by Aaron Weisbrod
Guest commentary: Welcome to Fright Night, by Steve Ruthenbeck
Guest commentary: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Steve Ruthenbeck
Guest commentary: The favorite(s) game, by Sam Weller
Guest commentary: I am Jack's creeping dread, by Matt Maxwell
Guest commentary: Horror film: Craft before art, by John Pavlus

Literature
Pig's head on a stick: the silence of the hams (Lord of the Flies)
Bradbury and the Incredible Beast, Part 1
Bradbury and the Incredible Beast, Part 2
Bradbury and the Incredible Beast, Part 3
Bradbury and the Incredible Beast, Part 4
Guest commentary: The absurdity of horror, by Aaron Weisbrod

Comics
Guest commentary: All you zombies, by Aaron Weisbrod
Contest review: Uzumaki
Contest review: Priest
Guest commentary: Sleeper hold, by Aaron Weisbrod
Horror comic review: Strangeways #1
Horror comic review: Weird Sister

Real life
Guest commentary: Black velvet and 1st corsets, by Cherie Priest
Guest commentary: Peering into darkness, by Chris Kirby

Fashion
Horror in unlikely places: Tom Ford/Karshner triplets photo spread in W magazine
Horror in unlikely places: Roger Ballen photo shoot for New York Times Magazine

Music
Scary Music: Good Clean Fun, by Cat Power

Other
Guest commentary: The Conan method of interacting with girls, by Steve Ruthenbeck

Contests
The first contest: horror manga (contest details)
The first contest: We have some winners!
Contest No. 2: 'We are Seven' (contest details)
Contest No. 3: Trapped Between Four Walls
'We are Seven': The winners!
'We are Seven' runner-up: Remember, by Jason Kimble
'We are Seven' runner-up: Galley-west, by Livia Llewellyn
'We are Seven' winner: We are Seven, by The Retropolitan

Trapped Between Four Walls

2005-11-03T07:35:00.000-05:00

You know what would be neat? If I was having a contest where you could win free books.

Funny how those things work out, huh?

It's super easy, too. Just follow the link, follow the directions, and you're set. Just remember -- your LAST chance to enter is tomorrow, Friday, November 4th. After that, you're on your own!

On horror and 'run, kill, run, kill, run, kill'

2005-11-02T18:52:00.000-05:00

Comic Foundry chats with writer Steve Niles (30 Days of Night, et al) about craft, art and what makes a comic scary. It's obviously an email interview, because there's nothing by way of follow-up, and some of the questions are farily pedestrian.

Still, Niles has a few interesting things to say about writing horror:

What are some of the typical horror genre clichés, and how can writers steer clear of them?

Some clichés work, some don't in horror and really, it's all a matter of taste. For me personally, I'm not into the ’80s style of horror where characters, usually teenagers, mostly female, are lined up as fodder for a killer of some sort. Whether it's the Tool Box Murders or Friday the 13th part 95, I get pretty bored with run, kill, run, kill, run, kill.

But that's just me. Horror is a genre loaded with clichés. Some work very well, but I think horror works best when you try a new angle on that cliché like instead of a haunted mansion, you create a haunted apartment building. Try to turn clichés on their head and you can have some fun with horror.

What about for someone established a bit - what are some of the nuances of writing horror that can only be picked up in a career like yours?

I suppose the same thing that anyone builds up doing something over and over for a long time. I like to add bits of real life to characters and make them more than just fodder. That's always been something I strive for giving even the smallest character something, a trait, to remember. I also like to play with the established clichés and/or legends. Do werewolves have to be killed by silver bullets? Not in my mind. Play with stuff, mix it up.

So go, read.

Potter's field of terror

2005-11-02T10:30:00.000-05:00

I haven't read any of the Harry Potter books, and I've only watched about 1 1/2 of the movies -- though I'd be hard-pressed to say which ones -- so when the taglines for the fourth film ominously suggested that "Dark And Difficult Times Lie Ahead" and "Everything Is About To Change," I took the studio's word for it.

Then I saw this preview from The Goblet of Fire and thought, "This is a children's movie?" It's dark, intense and, well, downright scary.

The first of the Potter movies to earn a PG-13 rating in the United States, The Goblet of Fire finds Harry and the Hogwarts gang involved in some sort of TriWizard Tournament. That doesn't really interest me, though. What does intrigue me, at least from a horror perspective, is the Death Eaters, the followers of Harry's archnemesis, Lord Voldemort.

In the above clip, the tent city is in chaos as it comes under attack; flames flicker as canvas ignites, and people scream as they run for their lives. Then they appear: the Death Eaters. Wearing white skull masks and black hoods and robes, they create a terrifying image as they march, calm but determined, into the mayhem. They're like torch-wielding grim reapers, the stuff of memento mori meditations and children's nightmares, in a cinematic La Dance Macabre.

If I were a kid watching that scene, I'd be under my seat.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire opens in theaters on Nov. 18.

Mommy's Little Monsters -- The Top Five!

2005-11-01T23:06:00.000-05:00

[Note: I had this all written last night -- honest -- and then, when all I had to do was insert one more quote...my computer crashed. I lost the whole post. That's the closest I've ever come to literally throwing my computer out the window.]

You didn't think I forgot about you, eh?

Outside concerns and a nasty cold may have put a slight damper on my end of the October celebration this year, but that doesn't mean it's the end as we know it. All those monsters you missed out on while I was out of action?

Don't worry. You may see this feature popping up more regularly. They may yet make an appearance in the near future.

But in the meantime, I promised you a top five. It's nothing too in depth (as I also plan to re-spotlight these creatures in future editions -- I just have too much to say about the bastards!), but it'll give you a nice look into what's to come from me around these parts. Let's count them down, shall we?

#5. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

Favorite Appearance: Ghostbusters

If there's one monster that stands out above them all from my childhood, it's Stay Puft.

He's a big marshmallow, sure, but that's the idea. Stay Puft is the epitome of 'least likely monsters.' Plucked from the mind of Ray Stantz and formed before the very eyes of our beloved Ghostbusters, Stay Puft storms onto the scene and threatens to destroy a good portion of Manhattan.

Godzilla is fine and well, but this is something entirely different. One is science gone too far, the other is imagination taken across the line.

I was watching Ghostbusters II this weekend and I was reminded of just how much horror there really is in these films. They're comedies -- some of the best from that era -- but they also stand firmly as scary movies. Take for instance the statue/dog/things in the first film (the memory of which still weirds me out -- they almost took this spot instead) and the scene in the sequel where the woman's fur coat comes to life.

Though we're always safe so long as Ernie Hudson is around to kick some ass.

#4. The Body Snatchers

Favorite Appearance: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1979)

For the longest time I considered the 1956 version of Invasion to be my favorite movie. It still ranks pretty high on the list. But while that film wears you down with its creeping paranoia, the remake does things a little differently.

To be honest, this version scares the shit out of me.

The monsters are basically the same, except for one tiny little aspect. Their screams.

Jesus, those screams.

I can still hear them as I write this. I wake up hearing them every so often. I can perfectly picture one of those bastards standing with an accusatory finger pointed out, mouth a gaping black hole, letting out that God awful scream.

And that psychotic half-man/half-dog creature doesn't make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, either.

#3. Karen Cooper

Favorite Appearance: Night of the Living Dead

Karen Cooper. The name doesn't ring a single bell with you, does it?

The little girl in Night of the Living Dead.

Now you know what I'm getting at.

You see, little kids are inherently innocent which, with only a slight turn of events, gives them an infinite possiblity to be extremely creepy.

The scene where Karen stabs her mother to death with a gardening trowel can be played forwards and backwards in my head on command. It probably didn't help that I wrote a paper on the movie freshman year of college for a forensic science class and had to watch that scene repeatedly in order to count how many times she stabs her. Impales her, almost.

Zombies are slow, sure. But zombie kids freak me out to no end.

For me, that's the scene that makes it one of my favorite horror movies, period. Well, that and when the two teenage lovers blow themselves up. Is it wrong that I laugh every time I watch that scene?

Horror karma gets me back when Karen finally comes around, though.

#2. Doctor Destiny

Favorite Appearance: Sandman #6

When most people have to offer up examples of horror in comic books, they point to EC Comics. Others point to Arkham Asylum. Others still point to the work of Steve Niles or the Marvel/DC horror anthology boom of the '70s or Tomb of Dracula or even Maus.

Me? I just had them my worn copy of Sandman #6.

Now, I've never really gotten into the Sandman series all that much. I love Neil Gaiman as much as the next guy, but there's just something about Sandman that never really sucked me in.

Except for this issue.

Doctor Destiny, an under-used B-level villain of the DC universe, is literally wasting away in a mental institution. One day, he manages to get his hands on a certain amulet owned by the long since kidnapped Sandman. Using it, he breaks out of the joint and shoots out into the real world. First stop? An all night diner. Once there, he has some coffee.

And then he traps all the occupants inside for the next twenty-four hours and subjects them to the most unimaginable horrors and tortures that the mind can conjure.

I still wake up having flashbacks to this comic. Even if you aren't a big fan of Sandman it's worth picking up or digging out the first trade of the series just for this issue. You won't be sorry.

Well, you may be when you try to go to sleep tonight.

#1. The creature from "The Fog Horn"

Favorite Appearance: "The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury

Picture this -- You're a dinosaur. A gigantic sea monster. It takes you years and years to swim from the deepest parts of the ocean in order to get to a depth where you can find a mate. You finally come up and you can hear the mating call of the female of your species.

Then it turns out that the sound you hear is actually just a fog horn in a lighthouse and you're the absolute last of your species.

"The Fog Horn," an obvious favorite of mine, stands as one of the stories concerning the topic of unrequited love ("The Swan" by Bradbury is another of them.) It's an incredibly sad and beautiful tale that...okay, I'll admit it. The tears well up in my eyes when I read it.

I could go on and on with the praise. Or you could just go pick up a copy of Golden Apples of the Sun and read it for yourself.

As a parting gift, my favorite quote from the piece (and possibly my favorite quote from any short story):

"That's life for you. Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than the thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more."

'All Hallow's Month': the post mortem

2005-11-01T09:58:00.000-05:00

I can't say for sure, but I think somebody sneaked a few more days into October. Or maybe we just packed a lot of material into "All Hallow's Month."

Whichever's the case, it was fun. Tiring, but fun. We hope you enjoyed it, too.

The month saw a few casualties: Rick was waylaid by illness and mid-terms, and had to interrupt his "Mommy's Little Monsters" countdown (but he'll be back tonight to give you his Top Five). I didn't get around to planned essays on horror in folklore and a few other things (but, hey, they're evergreen and needn't be confined to October). And Sam ... well, there was talk of these photos (but I think we're all better off not seeing those).

But all in all, things went pretty well. We touched upon horror in film, television, music, prose fiction, fashion, mythology, and real life. We also had some nifty contests (the third one's still going on). That makes for a pretty well-rounded month, I think. Yeah.

If you missed any or -- shame on you -- all of "All Hallow's Month," just click here, scroll down and start reading. In the next few days, we'll index all the links and archive them in one convenient place.

We'd like to thank our guest contributors for helping us to celebrate "All Hallow's Month": Sean Collins, Chris Kirby, Matt Maxwell, John Pavlus, Cherie Priest, Steve Ruthenbeck, Aaron Weisbrod and Sam Weller.

We'd also like to thank everyone who entered the contests.

But most of all, we want to thank our readers for visiting and joining in the discussions.

Guest Commentary: Horror Film: Craft Before Art

2005-10-31T16:25:00.000-05:00

by John Pavlus

The thing I like about genre filmmakers is that they often cringe at the words "art", "auteur", or any of those other limp-wristed terms that Sundance attendees fellate themselves with. Genre filmmakers are what I like to term "smiths"--craftspeople, working experts, men and women who know how to assemble something that works and lasts and is worth the money charged for it. They do their job, do it well, and get the hell out. And while a great deal of filmmakers working in the horror genre turn out poop faster than a colicky infant fed White Castle, the best horrorsmiths are true masters. And not just of horror film. Of film, period.

The trouble with craft is that it becomes invisible when mastered, and therefore so does the craftsman. Master horror directors like John Carpenter and Wes Craven built their careers on taut, muscular, 2%-body-fat frightfests that became classics, but you won't see their names laureled in the "feelm" journals. Peter Jackson and David Cronenberg's names are, but only because they started taking sojourns out of their horror homesteads. Dead Alive, Scanners: horror. Heavenly Creatures, Dead Ringers: art.

Two recent films exemplify this odd prejudice: Wes Craven's "Red Eye" and Cronenberg's "A History Of Violence." Craven brought the same angular efficiency to "Red Eye" that he did to "Scream"--so much so that one reviewer admiringly compared the finished product to a piece of architecture--and received some of the best notices of his career for it. "Scream" and its surprisingly effective sequels (the scene in "Scream 2" where Sidney has to crawl over an unconscious Ghostface to escape a car wreck is suspense at its teeth-gnashing best), however, garnered no such plaudits for Craven. (From what I remember, the good reviews mostly praised the writer, Kevin Williamson.) Why?

Maybe it has something to do with auteurist genre history--the thriller has Saint Hitchcock as an antecedent and benchmark for any claims toward "art", whereas the horror genre has no such totems. (At least not in this country. Some Italian horror directors of the 60's and 70's, like Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci, seem to have acquired a patina of critical respectability.)

Cronenberg's Oscar shoo-in, "A History of Violence," has the same double standard working in its favor. It's a propulsive, pulpy, thoroughly thrillerish film whose modest virtues lie mostly in how it courses forward with no arty longeurs or ostentatious formal flourishes getting in the way. Usually the author of his own screenplays, Cronenberg took on this project as a gun for hire and it bears almost none of the usual outre hallmarks of his "body horror" oeuvre. But lo and behold, it's been hailed as a auteur's masterpiece. Had Cronenberg made a similarly stripped-down horror film, where all the same hallmarks of quality--lean storytelling, archetypal characters, confident-yet-transparent filmmaking--apply, one hardly imagines Oscar panting as heavily in return.

In short, the peerless craft that horror filmmaking, at its best, prizes and hones, is the very same stuff that gets film critics' dicks hard--but only when it's applied outside of the horror genre itself. At the end of the day, they can take or leave art--but they require and desire craft. Same for audiences. Same for me.

Which brings me to John Carpenter, one of my favorite filmmakers, and the subject of an entertaining and illuminating interview in this week's Onion A.V. Club. The introduction describes him as "a veritable anomaly in modern Hollywood: a veteran craftsman who eschews auteurism", and I can't love him enough for it. His complete lack of pretension and self-deprecating disdain for cult-of-personality-style film criticism (when the exasperated interviewer name-checks Carpenter's Oscar-winning student film, his response is, "So what?") speak volumes about why his early output was so classic--and why he found a happy home in the horror genre. Hell, it's right there in his very name: carpenter, a builder, a sui generis smith. His movies weren't made to "say" things, they were made to work--and, not coincidentally, made to last.

John Pavlus produces science segments for network news and [REDACTED IN THE INTEREST OF JOHN GETTING PAID FOR SOME WRITING, SORRY - SAM]. He also writes for magazines about filmmaking, the interwebs, and other generally geekish topics. He lives in Brooklyn and hopes to clear his credit card debt purely by publishing in women's magazines.

Guest commentary: I am Jack's creeping dread

2005-10-31T11:32:00.000-05:00

Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, in Fight Club

By Matt Maxwell

“People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.”

If this is a horror blog, then why the hell am I talking about Fight Club, you ask. It’s not a horror movie. It’s a mixed-up jumble of nihilism and pop culture and pop fascism, stylishly directed and pretentious, right?

Oh, the hell it isn’t. Fight Club is perhaps the quintessential contemporary American horror movie. Where else can Starbucks and home-grown terror share the same psychic landscape? Where else do Ikea and cancer survivor groups inspire the same kind of creeping dread? Brand name fetishization and brainwashed space monkeys both reveal a sort of sleepwalking dream state, one shared by our insomniac protagonist, who’s also our supremely competent megalomaniac antagonist.

The horror from Fight Club stems not from the creeping realization that the sexiest man on the planet is a monster, not that the emptiness of the rat race spawns the sort of psychic vacuums that only the creatures that the Id can fill, not that the rage of the spurned white male will blossom into the destruction of everything that consumer society holds dear?

No.

The horror in Fight Club is that we (by dint of identification with the nameless protagonist) are the monster, that we ourselves are not in control of our own actions, that our unconscious minds are working to undermine the very things that our waking minds strive for. You can call it insanity if you want. But it’s more than that. Tyler Durden is no drooling psychopath. He’s confident, desirable, unreasonably handsome, stylish beyond compare. And he’s planning to revert modern America into some kind of delusional, savage nobility. Every thing you have, all of your beloved stuff, is his enemy.

And hey, maybe he has a point. Maybe we’re all too stuff-oriented. Maybe we’re all a little too driven by billboards and emergency crash landing safety cards and fear of our immediate superiors at work. Maybe we just need to let off a little steam. What’s a bit of harmless vandalism right? They’re all insured. Couple days and it’ll be back to normal and some folks might get a kick in the brain. No permanent harm done.

So what if a couple of guys want to get in a fight by mutual consent? Hey, if they want to beat each other up, that’s their own thing. Not hurting anyone else who didn’t ask for it, don’t ask don’t tell and all that. It’s their own business.

Okay, so sure, you take it another step and you get yourself a like-minded prankster army. You’re just poking fun at people’s perceptions of the everyday, trying to wake them out of their daily sleepwalking. And hey, if it takes making a burning smiley face out of an office building, then that’s what it takes. Nobody got hurt, all in good fun.

Oh, and then there’s the police chief. Yeah, you had to threaten him with castration, reminding him that all the slobs he pisses on are the ones who take out his garbage and keep the Bad People away. All the white trash that you laugh at, they’re the guys who are going to shatter your illusion of safety and remind you that all your favorite stuff is just stuff.

But you can’t stop there. You soldier on, cracking skulls along the way, doing your best to take down the corporate monoliths that block out the sunshine. Sure, you can’t do it alone, so you do a little brainwashing along the way. Independent thought is good, but it can’t be too independent. And soldiers are going to fall along the way, but that’s what happens in a war.

The question is, when do we stop cheering for Tyler Durden, when do we stop being swayed by his model-perfect looks and boyish charm, and when do we start being scared of the monster that he really is. This isn’t a moment we’re afforded with other film psychopaths. Hannibal Lechter starts a monster and never strays from that path. Tyler Durden starts as the man all the other men want to be like or be with and turns into the dark antithesis of life in modern America. But he does it by shades and gradations, by little baby steps all working towards a grander plan. He doesn’t start by making grand pronouncements about destroying society; he works his way up to it, after seducing us with his wit and cheekbones.

Or do we stop cheering for him at all?

Even when he shaves his head and files his teeth, even when he straps on the wifebeater T and starts going all medieval on our nameless protagonist, are we still rooting for him to take away all of our credit debt and blow up our bosses?

Maybe. Which places him firmly in the tradition of the greatest movie monsters. If there isn’t empathy, then there’s no tragedy in the fall. But where monsters like Frankenstein and King Kong find empathy in pathos, Tyler Durden gets it through envy. I guess that makes him more like Dracula in that regard, suave, sexy and ultimately parasitic, feeding upon others for his strength. One Tyler Durden isn’t much more than a beautiful Ted Kaczynski, toiling away with his nitroglycerin and lobbing spitballs at the establishment. Tyler Durden with an army swearing fealty to him, that’s quite another thing entirely.

He’s the perfect boogeyman for America today. He’s the guy splicing porn into kiddy flicks. He’s the guy pissing in the bisque. He’s the guy plastering subversive slogans up on the wall. He’s the rat nibbling at the edges of your personal security bubble. He’s the Unabomber. He’s the shadowy terrorist that we all fear more than anything else, because he blends in (or worse is an Adonis and not likely to fit into anyone’s racial profiling software.)

And he’s inside us. He’s the last person we’d suspect, because we’re not looking for him in the mirror.

I could go on and on about Fight Club, flawed as it is. It’s beautifully filmed, filled with texture and tactility that most films can’t even hope to achieve. The lighting is flawless, revealing in its shadows and glisten of sweat and dull fluorescent. Moreso than The Matrix, it used all the available special effects to do more than just be eye candy; these shots were integral to the story, altering our perceptions and twisting perspective in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before. Six years out, it still has yet to be surpassed in this respect (though the director, David Fincher, would try some of these same tricks in Panic Room to much lesser effect).

Like any great horror film, Fight Club knows when to leaven the moment with humor, whether it’s black or slapstick. That humor is never just a simple gag, either. It’s always knowing, revealing, unsettling. Dildoes as bombs works on more than one or two levels, though it might take a moment to sink in. Chloe the talking skeleton is simultaneously comical and terrifying. Martha Stewart polishing the brass on the fucking Titanic is laugh out loud hilarious for a second or two, then you get to thinking.

Just like Tyler Durden.

Matt Maxwell is the writer of Strangeways, a Western-horror series from Speakeasy Comics. The first issue debuts in November.

Psssst.

2005-10-31T10:48:00.000-05:00

Hey. Hey, you.

Did I tell you that I'm giving away some books? For free?

Because I am. Or at least that's the word on the street.

What do you have to do to get them? Not a whole lot. Just go here, follow the rules, and send me some writing. It's only a maximum of 500 words, so this is something you can pop out between your coffee break and your coffee refill break. I know you all write longer emails than that.

Everyone loves books. Especially free ones. And these are three that'll change your life.

Read them already? I don't care. Enter, win them, and loan them out to your friends.

Don't have any friends? Well, come on. I can't give you everything.

You only have until November 4th, so get hopping.

'We Are Seven': The winning entries (Part 3)

2005-10-31T08:02:00.000-05:00

Here's the winning entry from our "We Are Seven" contest:

We Are Seven
By The Retropolitan

The old stage coach was rumbling along the dusty road that runs from Maplewood to Riverboro. The day was as warm as midsummer, though it was only the middle of May, and Mr. Jeremiah Cobb was favoring the horses as much as possible, yet never losing sight of the fact that he carried the mail. The hills were many, and the reins lay loosely in his hands as he lolled back in his seat and extended one foot and leg luxuriously over the dashboard. His brimmed hat of worn felt was well pulled over his eyes, and he revolved a quid of tobacco in his left cheek.

There was one passenger in the coach -- a small dark-haired person in a glossy buff calico dress. She was so slender and so stiffly starched that she slid from space to space on the leather cushions, though she braced herself against the middle seat with her feet and extended her cotton-gloved hands on each side, in order to maintain some sort of balance. Whenever the wheels sank farther than usual into a rut, or jolted suddenly over a stone, she bounded involuntarily into the air, came down again, pushed back her funny little straw hat, and picked up or settled more firmly a small pink sun shade, which seemed to be her chief responsibility -- unless we except a bead purse, into which she looked whenever the condition of the roads would permit, finding great apparent satisfaction in that its precious contents neither disappeared nor grew less. Mr. Cobb guessed nothing of these harassing details of travel, his business being to carry people to their destinations, not, necessarily, to make them comfortable on the way. Indeed he had forgotten the very existence of this one unnoteworthy little passenger.

So forgotten the passenger was that Mr. Jeremiah Cobb wasn't paying the slightest attention when she lifted her bead purse back up to her face and peered in for the hundredth time that trip. She dashed off a quick glance towards her driver to make sure that he wasn't watching, and was pleased to notice that Mr. Cobb was more concerned about the tobacco in his cheek than he was about his charge. The introduction of a large stone to the undercarriage bounced the coach upward, tipping the little purse slightly to the side; the woman's hands moved at a quite unladylike-speed to cradle the contents again in their beaded bag. Mr. Cobb, himself alarmed at his own minor jump skyward, remembered that he wasn't alone, and after steadying himself looked inside with his best apology stretched happily across his teeth.

The noise of the wheels and the hooves against a particularly rocky stretch of country road suggested that their entire conversation, should they have one, would be filled with shouting tongues and strained ears. Luckily for Mr. Cobb, the lady passenger merely smiled sunnily back, seemingly content with his shrug and its implied assurance that he'd try to keep the trip smooth. On his upswing to his proper perch, his smile was startled away by a darkly-clad figure standing motionless near a cluster of trees not thirty yards away. Standing still, perhaps; she certainly didn't look like she was moving, but Mr. Cobb had the idea that she might be turning her head to follow their coach's path down the road. Another small knock of the wheel against a rock jolted him back to his road-watching vigil, just in time to catch the turn-off into a denser bit of trees. In place of leaning back down and smiling while they were in a twistier part of the roads, he tapped his knuckles lightly against the door below him, giving a thumb's-up sign he was certain his passenger would see.

Mr. Cobb -- despite the strongly scented breath of tobacco just below his nose -- enjoyed the sweet, summery smell of the trees that whisked by him. The road straightened again; the rocks flattened to a hard dirt surface, and the coach's ride became entirely more suited to his preferred position of leaning back comfortably with his leg over the dash. The lady passenger, too, found the ride more comfortable, and with a shining gleam in her yellowish eyes she reopened her little purse, tipped it over, and let the small trinket fall lightly onto the pads of her hand.

The trees, now, were growing closer and closer, and Mr. Cobb enjoyed the shade from the diminishing sunlight, humming mild, half-remembered tunes over the rushing sounds from the wind and the wheels. He became so lost in his own childhood songs that he took almost no notice of the lady darting through the distant trees, dismissing the shape as though it were just another half-solid figment of his memories; perhaps it was the lady from the lyrics, he loosely imagined. The idea of the woman in the woods disappeared completely as he noticed a faint scratching noise coming from the car; the smallest sound of the slowest splintering: screeeeeee-click. Screeeeeeerrrrrrrrrsh-pop. Surely a branch caught on the axle, Mr. Cobb imagined. Taking aim with his mouth, he aligned his face with his shoulder, and spit. The brown puddle slipped professionally off his lip, flew through the wind in what Mr. Jeremiah Cobb would likely consider to be a noble and majestic arc, and landed with a thick splash on a droopy green leaf. The leaf hung heavy with Mr. Cobb's favorite pastime, and the hunched-over woman kneeling in the shadows behind the plant took note of the scent.

The coach continued to roar down the stretch of road, long into the approaching dusk. The skies were turning purple, and the horses approached each oncoming bend with an increasingly cautious gallop. The darkness crept over the horizon that the coach and its two riders were moving away from; it presented an unpleasant alternative to the road ahead. Mr. Jeremiah Cobb had moved from his leisurely position and was now leaning forward, attempting to ward off the pleasant drowsiness that was overcoming him. He hadn't bothered to communicate with his rider since he noticed the coach's curtains drawn an hour ago; he wondered whether he should at least attempt to warn the girl that they'd been lost for a little while now. Mr. Cobb chose to let her sleep -- he assumed that the noises he'd heard were her adjusting the seat with a loud yawn or two thrown in, and he liked to be left alone to his naps. Perhaps this young girl was a woman after his own heart. Besides, Mr. Cobb entertained, who'd want to wake up with this putrid smell in the air? He thought of his old dog running into the cabin after a day in the rain.

The horses rumbled along, picking up a strenuous pace that battered against Mr. Cobb's carefree attitude. Ah, they're just spooked by the darkness. And who isn't from time to time? Encroaching darkness makes the little things of the day turn into the scariest phantoms one can possibly imagine; not unlike that shadow on the road, Mr. Cobb pointed out with a murmur to the two steeds. Were it fully daytime, we'd be able to see that it was only a tree or a branch or a fox, he explained with a small amount of trepidation to whoever might be listening to his thoughts. And that, up ahead, right in the middle --

The horses lunged to the side of the road, and Mr. Jeremiah Cobb flew in what he recognized was a noble and majestic arc far ahead of the toppled coach. Time slowed down, and to his delight he realized that he rather enjoyed this time in the air, flying like a bird over the land. He wished he could spend more time like this. His senses were so slow that as his body twisted and arched over his horses, he was able to see more clearly what was happening: there was some kind of animal in the road that spooked them. My, Mr. Cobb thought, it certainly was a large animal. He hoped in his heart that the horses would be okay, but just before he hit the tree, he saw several more large dogs leap out of the tree banks. At least he thought they were dogs.

Mr. Cobb awoke sometime later, in the pretty gloom of the moonlight. His first thought was not of the pains in his body, nor the blood that seemed to be all over his clothes; it was that he could see very well in the bright, full moonlight. Oh, dear, he suddenly thought; he certainly hoped that the young lady was all right. It was a terrible way to be awoken from a long nap.

He sat for minutes before he realized that he could turn his head a little without much pain. He turned a little to the left, just enough to see the coach on its side, the roof completely broken through and destroyed. His horses were nowhere to be seen. He would have so much explaining to do! The coach broken beyond the best repair, his young passenger likely hurt, the mail undelivered, and now the horses. And that smell! What was it? Like dogs, only worse, and the smell was getting so thick. Mr. Cobb's back started to itch, although the pains in his arms and legs seemed to be dulling as he became more alert.

It wasn't a moment later when he heard the dogs, and before he was even able to blink, they appeared in front of his eyes. Mr. Cobb froze; he didn't know if he was so still because he couldn't move or it was because he wouldn't move, all he knew was that he wasn't moving at all. The dogs, a whole pack of them, trotted over to the ends of his legs. One of them in particular, a small, sleek-looking dark-haired one walked right up and sniffed the tips of Mr. Cobb's fingertips; for an instant Mr. Cobb wondered whether someone could possibly be too afraid to feel fear. The pains in his legs -- the sharp daggers that had been stabbing into his thighs -- had disappeared, and so too had the knives in his arms and chest. The itches that were taking over his skin and his nose he could deal with, as long as he thought he was strong enough to make a run into the night; he had always hoped to find a good reason to climb a tree like he was a child again. The dark dog -- or was it something else? -- dropped something shiny from its muzzle into the palm of Mr. Cobb's upturned palm. Curling his head forward, he saw it was a strange token of some kind; a small, metallic moon.

Mr. Jeremiah Cobb barely noticed that the dark animal had moved from a crouch to a kneel. He was too busy trying to count the number of creatures around him, in case he had to keep track of them as he ran. There was one over by his left leg, and a second grey one with its ears perked up behind that one. Mr. Cobb could feel his body begin to warm up -- he felt like he needed to stretch, so very, very badly; he clenched onto the moon charm that the dark one brought him. The beast probably took it from that poor girl.

There was a third beast, brown, off a dozen yards to his left. Dear, Mr. Cobb's teeth began to throb; perhaps he was going into shock. He twisted his whole body, his torso collapsing onto his knees, falling into a tight fetal position. He had to keep conscious; he had to make it to safety. A tree would be wonderful, but perhaps the wreckage to the coach would do if he could still shut it. Oh, he wished he could be back on a leisurely drive again.

The fourth animal was sniffing the ground over by where the front dash of the car laid. It looked up, interested in Mr. Cobb briefly, and then wagged its tail and returned to the scents. A fifth he could hear traipsing through the brush behind his head, fifty feet; it was a guess, but he could hear it. Oh, his head began to throb, and he felt pangs of something in his gut. Right away he clenched, because he assumed it was pain, but he felt nothing hurting; it felt like a deep stretch. Oh, it felt good, but what Mr. Cobb really desired was to be back home again, sitting on his porch and having a very, very large meal. He really did have to get away from these --

There, finally, was the expected pain. All over his body; Mr. Jeremiah Cobb felt nothing else. It was a spurt, flowing through him, hot and cold and wet, all the kinds of pain he could imagine. He could barely think, and felt his instincts begin to take over his body. He had to get away, now, before he passed out and was eaten. He tightened his grip on the moon trinket so hard that he could feel himself start bleeding; he could even smell it. How many were there, he must know! Two by his feet, third behind him, fourth by the coach, fifth over there, and the dark one -- hair falling away, on her knees, eyes gleaming in the moonlight.

"We were six," she said, leaning in close to his hairy face. "Now we are seven."

Mr. Jeremiah Cobb growled in joyful response.

Guest Commentary -- The Favorite(s) Game

2005-10-31T00:45:00.000-05:00

By Sam Weller

As I write this guest blog entry for Dark but Shining, the candle inside the Jack-o-Lantern on our front porch flickers away. Squirrels have been buck-toothing our porch pumpkins for the last few weeks. But we saved our special autumnal gord, the one plucked from a patch in Southwestern Michigan, the one carved into a gnarled and twisted vestige of facial fright, until this very weekend.

It is All Hallows Eve, 2005 and this little rumination is long overdue. Webmaster, blog superstar, all around nice guy Rick asked me to write it up many moons ago. He asked me to ponder my favorite monster. I love playing the favorite game. But the problem is, there are always too many favorites to choose from off of any good favorite list. Favorite album? Favorite Movie? Favorite author? Well, for very obvious reasons, this last one’s easy—the gatekeeper to October Country of course, Mr. Ray Douglas Bradbury.

But favorite monster? I might answer by saying anything created out of the mind, hands and heart of Ray Harryhausen, the single greatest special effects man ever. Period. His Medusa. His sword wielding skeletons. His Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. But again, I simply can’t pick one. And so I played with the idea of breaking the rules and writing an essay about the late, lamented television program, The Night Stalker. I loved that show as a young boy. It scared the shit out of me. And I still remember the thrill when I was growing up in Malibu, California of playing in a friend’s yard and actually seeing Darren McGavin who lived next door!

But, I digress. I really should play the favorite monster game. Take a stance, right? Have some cajones. But the more I think about it, the more I realize there are really two types of monsters. First, there are the really cool ones. And if I am forced to choose from this genre of creature, I am inclined to select King Ghidora (alternately known as Monster Zero), Godzilla’s three headed, fire breathing repitilian arch-enemy. This thing is just out and out friggin’ cool. It flies Mach three for Chrissakes.

But the real monsters are the ones who have a complexity. The Wicked Witch of the West. Darth Vader. Frankenstein. Lon Chaney’s Phantom. We both fear them and feel for them. In this sub-category, it is all but impossible not to select the king of all monsters, perhaps the greatest cinematic monster of them all. . . .

Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong.

Whose heart doesn’t ache when lovesick Kong takes to the top of the Empire State Building? This, in my humble opinion, is one of the greatest moments in cinema history. It is also the greatest sympathetic villain ever captured on celluloid.

So there. I committed to just one monster. And with that, I bid you all a deliciously macabre Halloween.

Sam Weller
Chicago, All Hallows Eve

Sam Weller is the authorized biographer of Ray Bradbury and the author of The Bradbury Chronicles, as well as a full-time faculty member in the Fiction Writing department at Columbia College Chicago. He also writes for far more outlets than any human can keep track of, including the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Punk Planet. He's also the former midwest correspondant for Publishers Weekly, as well as...oh, hell, we could keep this up all night. The man does everything, okay?

Horror in Unlikely Places: NYT Magazine

2005-10-30T13:10:00.000-05:00

Selma Blair, photographed by Roger Ballen for The New York Times

It's nothing new for photographers to utilize horror aesthetics for fashion shoots; artists such as David LaChapelle have been blending couture and creepiness for years. But is it just me, or has the practice become more prominent lately? Eh, maybe it's just that time of year.

The most recent intersection of scary and style comes in this week's New York Times Magazine (registration required; try BugMeNot), with a photo spread by Roger Ballen, whose work here and elsewhere isn't obviously frightening. It's subtle and unnerving.

As in his new book, Shadow Chamber, Ballen chooses as a backdrop stark, cell-like rooms decorated only with cryptic drawings -- childlike scribbles, really. It's a setting strangely reminiscent of the final scene of The Blair Witch Project.

For his subject, Ballen uses actress Selma Blair (The Fog, Hellboy), dressed in Givency and Dior and Dolce & Gabbana.

But the focus is hardly the clothing. Instead, the camera concentrates on the unusual, and the disconcerting: Blair in an oddly emotionless cat mask, mirroring the pose of the feline crouching across from her; in a feathered jacket and dress, clutching a dove (top); or standing, petrified, on a box as snakes slither at her feet (right).

How much more goth can you get? Well, apparently this much:

"Fashion creates the illusion of beauty, of the world being perfect," Ballen tells the Times. "But we know that even when you dress in these clothes, the world is not that way. You can't ever rid yourself of the shadow."

Be sure to check out similar portraits in the Shadow Chamber gallery of Ballen's website.

Previous installments of "Horror in Unlikely Places":
Tom Ford photo spread (with the Karshner triplets) in W magazine
Gotham Central #32: "Nature"
U.K. Department of Transport commercial: Slow Down
Play With Me art installation
This American Life: Catherine Chalmers and Brent Runyon
Covad VoIP commercial: The Ringing
French safe-sex ads

'We Are Seven': The winning entries (Part 2)

2005-10-30T06:32:00.000-05:00

As promised, we're running the winners of our "We Are Seven" contest. Here is the second of our two runners-up:

Galley-west
by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Livia Llewellyn

The old stage coach was rumbling along the dusty road that runs from Maplewood to Riverboro. The day was as warm as midsummer, though it was only the middle of May, and Mr. Jeremiah Cobb was favoring the horses as much as possible, yet never losing sight of the fact that he carried the mail. The hills were many, and the reins lay loosely in his hands as he lolled back in his seat and extended one foot and leg luxuriously over the dashboard. His brimmed hat of worn felt was well pulled over his eyes, and he revolved a quid of tobacco in his left cheek.

There was one passenger in the coach -- a small dark-haired person in a glossy buff calico dress. She was so slender and so stiffly starched that she slid from space to space on the leather cushions, though she braced herself against the middle seat with her feet and extended her cotton-gloved hands on each side, in order to maintain some sort of balance. Whenever the wheels sank farther than usual into a rut, or jolted suddenly over a stone, she bounded involuntarily into the air, came down again, pushed back her funny little straw hat, and picked up or settled more firmly a small pink sun shade, which seemed to be her chief responsibility -- unless we except a bead purse, into which she looked whenever the condition of the roads would permit, finding great apparent satisfaction in that its precious contents neither disappeared nor grew less.

Mr. Cobb guessed nothing of these harassing details of travel, his business being to carry people to their destinations, not, necessarily, to make them comfortable on the way. Indeed he had forgotten the very existence of this one unnoteworthy little passenger -- that is, until coach wheels hit a particularly large dip in the road, sending Mr. Cobb up and down on the dashboard in a hard bounce that left his joints aching, and causing a particularly distressful shriek to shoot from the slightly open window just behind him.

"Are you alright in there, missy? Road's a bit rough, I'm afraid." Mr. Cobb turned his head back only slightly as he kept his eyes on the horses, guiding them toward the low grass edging the dirt road. His prim and proper passenger didn't answer, and he called out again as he carefully brought the horses to a stop, letting them rest under the branches of a sprawling elm tree. The little girl might like a moment of peace, specially being that she'd never been any further from her town than this before -- or so he'd been told.

"We're just stopping a spell, while I check the wheels." The coach shifted slightly as he stepped down from the dashboard, and the horses snorted as they began nuzzling the grass. Mr. Cobb expected the girl to burst out of the coach -- she'd been so full of life back in Maplewood, chatting incessantly as she'd continually smoothed down the crisp pressed folds of her dress -- but nothing moved behind the dusty glass. He peered through the window of the coach, but failed to see the calico-clad slip of a girl in the dark interior. "Beautiful day," he said as he pulled the coach door open. "Bit of fresh air might be good -- well, I swan."

An empty seat greeted him -- empty, that is, except for sight of the girl's beaded purse lying in a puddle on the seat, its black corded ties hanging over the edge and swaying slightly from the motion of the horses as they tugged against their reins. Mr. Jeremiah Cobb scratched his head, taken aback at the empty coach -- and a sudden vision filled his mind of his dark-haired charge sailing through the air from the impact of the last bounce, her stiff skirt catching the wind as she sailed like dark dandelion fluff across the quiet hills. He looked back up at the cloudless sky, chuckling to himself, then walked around the back of the coach to the other side, having noticed the slightly open door letting a sliver of light onto the smooth floorboards. She must have already slipped outside, too quick and silent, even in that starched calico dress, for him to have noticed.

"Missy," Mr. Cobb said as he stopped at the open door, and looked out around the quiet road, and the wooded pasture that sprawled lazily beside it. "We've a ways to go before we get to Riverboro, and there's people waiting for you." He reached for the purse, and the slick beads embroidered on the satin fabric made a soft whispering sound as it pooled into his hand.

"It popped out and rolled out the door, but I found it in the grass. I thought they'd stay put, because we all wanted to see so much, but the window was too little and high and I got all black and blue just trying to stay on the seat, and that last hole we rode through was quite a thumper."

Mr. Cobb turned around -- the girl stood before him, pink parasol opened and shading her head from the bits of sun streaming through the leaves. As she raised her face, at this moment the thought permeated Mr. Jeremiah Cobb's slow-moving mind that the bird perched before him was a bird of very different feather from those to which he was accustomed in his daily drives. Under the long brim of her white vizored leghorn cap, six eyes peered out at him, six dark stars in the pale morning sky. Their glance was eager and full of interest, yet never satisfied; their steadfast gaze was brilliant and mysterious, and had the effect of looking directly through the obvious to something beyond, in the object, in the landscape, in you. They had never been accounted for, Rebecca's eyes.

At the top of her forehead, a pearly pink slit of skin gaped open slightly, as surprised by its own emptiness as Mr. Jeremiah Cobb was by the presence of its six sisters. He looked down at the purse in his hands, the purse she held the eye out to, and he tugged at the ruffles of fabric, opening the black mouth wide.

"Best put them all in, missy," he said as her pale thin fingers carefully placed the eye into the velvety lining of the purse. Other things lay glistening inside the bag, but she had a right to her privacy, Mr. Cobb reckoned, and he'd never been much of a prying kind of man. "We've a ways to go, and the road ain't much better going forward than it has behind. I've got to get you to Riverboro in one piece, and we can't be stopping every time you loose something."

"I just wanted to see so much, and they all wanted to see too. These two are me, Rebecca Rowena Randall." She pointed to each eye above her own as she spoke. "This is Hannah Lucy Randall, John Halifax Randall, Jenny Lind Randall; and Marquis Randall, Fanny Ellsler Randall, and Miranda Randall are in the bag. We all couldn't go, so I've been swappin'. Didn't work out so well." She looked down, so forlorn and quiet, that Mr. Cobb couldn't help but feel a wave of pity for the poor girl, and all her brothers and sisters who'd never seen the world.

"Haven't seen much in that dark coach, now, have you? Don't know how we could change that. Your momma paid good money for your seat -- wouldn't seem right to make you walk behind the coach." She gasped and stared up at him, but his smile gave the joke away.

"Oh, but wait!" The girl almost dropped her parasol as she gave a quick jump in the air. "I have an idea! You don't think I could sit up front with you, so we could all see? It don't cost more, does it?"

"No," said Mr. Cobb, "there ain't no extry charge to sit by me. I reckon you could see up there just fine. Plenty o' room for one more." The girl smiled as she plucked her eye back out of the purse and worked it back into the top slot with all the delicate ease of coaxing a silken thread through the eye of a sewing needle.

"Ain't just one today," she proudly said, her eyes shining bright. "Today, we are seven."

"Then seven it is to Riverboro, missy." Mr. Cobb grinned as he helped his tiny charge up onto the dashboard, before grabbing the reins and coaxing the horses away from the grass and back down the dusty road. Rebecca clutched her beaded purse and gazed in rapt joy at the road before them, every now and then staring up at Jeremiah Cobb as questions streamed endlessly from her pretty mouth. Mr. Cobb answered them all, being a polite kind of man -- and the girl was charming and easy to talk to, and full of all manner of sass and life. And, he had to admit, her face held him -- a small, plain face illuminated by eyes carrying such messages, such suggestions, such hints of sleeping power and insight, that one never tired of looking into their shining depths, nor of fancying that what one saw there was the reflection of one's own thought.

But Mr. Cobb made none of these generalizations out loud; his remark to his wife that night was simply to the effect that whenever the child looked at him, she knocked him galley-west.

The top horror movies, by the numbers

2005-10-29T20:43:00.000-05:00

Jaws

It's October, so everybody and their brother trots out their top horror this-and-that lists. Heck, we at Dark, But Shining have been known to make a list or two as Halloween looms. But those are all so subjective.

Leave it to Hollywood.com to reduce its horror list to cold hard cash. Never mind the scariest; they're looking at the highest-grossing domestic horror films of all time (adjusted to current-day ticket prices). It should surprise no one that Jaws comes in at No. 1, far ahead of the second-place film, The Exorcist.

What may come as a surprise is that Hollywood.com considers the Brendon Fraser vehicles The Mummy and The Mummy Returns to be horror movies. Eh, go figure.

The movie site goes all the way to 25, but we'll just knock out the Top 10:

1. Jaws (1975) -- $795,369,426
2. The Exorcist (1973) -- $686,631,452
3. The Sixth Sense (1999) -- $357,566,366
4. The Mummy Returns (2001) -- $221,650,716
5. Jaws 2 (1978) -- $215,603,340
6. The Amityville Horror (1979) -- $213,841,738
7. Alien (1979) -- $200,233,659
8. The Mummy (1999) -- $189,949,583
9. What Lies Beneath (2000) -- $179,115,699
10. The Omen (1976) -- $177,620,519

Entertainment Halloween Weekly

2005-10-29T13:13:00.000-05:00

Actress Sarah Michelle Gellar, in a portfolio by James White, at EW.com

Entertainment Weekly gets in the Halloween spirit in its Nov. 4 issue and on its website, devoting coverage to the "spookiest creep shows" on television, 10 similarly titled zombie movies, and Stephen King's tips for getting in the appropriately creepy mood. And that's just for starters.

There's also a rundown of the 20 scariest movies movies of all time -- nothing surprising, really, with nods given to The Shining, Psycho, Seven, Lost Highway and the like -- and a more interesting list, of the six creepiest forgotten films. Here, EW focuses on The Exorcist III, The Innocents, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Session 9, Tell Me Something, and The Vanishing.

The "spookiest creep shows" feature, which appears both in the magazine and on the website, spotlights four of the shows unleashed on network television this fall in response to the success of ABC's Lost: Ghost Whisperer (CBS); Invasion (ABC); Threshold (ABC); and Surface (NBC). Curiously, ABC's Nightstalker and WB's Supernatural aren't covered.

I've seen all of those shows except for Ghost Whisperer because: a.) the title is wretched; b.) the premise wasn't any better when it was called Medium; and c.) Jennifer Love Hewitt is unwatchable. However, Hewitt provides the best exchange of the Q&A's:

Who'd win a see-the-most-dead-people competition — you or Haley Joel Osment? ''Me. He was really good, but I'm thinking I could take him.''

Because you've got mad whispering skillz? ''And I wear heels. And I've got boobs.''

Some of the website features may be subscriber-exclusive, so you might not be able to read all of them. However, the Nov. 4 issue also includes an article that doesn't appear to be online: an interview with Anne Rice about her new novel about the childhood of Jesus, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In a sidebar to the interview, Rice picks her three favorites from among her 26 novels: The Vampire Lestat, Memnoch the Devil and Violin.

For Rice fans, it might be worth the trip to the newsstand.

'We Are Seven': The winning entries (Part 1)

2005-10-29T11:16:00.000-05:00

As promised, this weekend we'll be posting the winning entries from our "We Are Seven" contest. First, one of the runners-up:

Remember
by Jason Kimble (additional text and apologies to Kate Douglas Wiggin)

The old stage coach was rumbling along the dusty road that runs from Maplewood to Riverboro. The day was as warm as midsummer, though it was only the middle of May, and Mr. Jeremiah Cobb was favoring the horses as much as possible, yet never losing sight of the fact that he carried the mail. The hills were many, and the reins lay loosely in his hands as he lolled back in his seat and extended one foot and leg luxuriously over the dashboard. His brimmed hat of worn felt was well pulled over his eyes, and he revolved a quid of tobacco in his left cheek.

There was one passenger in the coach -- a small dark-haired person in a glossy buff calico dress. She was so slender and so stiffly starched that she slid from space to space on the leather cushions, though she braced herself against the middle seat with her feet and extended her cotton-gloved hands on each side, in order to maintain some sort of balance. Whenever the wheels sank farther than usual into a rut, or jolted suddenly over a stone, she bounded involuntarily into the air, came down again, pushed back her funny little straw hat, and picked up or settled more firmly a small pink sun shade, which seemed to be her chief responsibility -- unless we except a bead purse, into which she looked whenever the condition of the roads would permit, finding great apparent satisfaction in that its precious contents neither disappeared nor grew less. Mr. Cobb guessed nothing of these harassing details of travel, his business being to carry people to their destinations, not, necessarily, to make them comfortable on the way. Indeed he had forgotten the very existence of this one unnoteworthy little passenger.

The girl looked out to see that they were entering a deep valley between two of the larger hills. This would do. She adjusted her hat again, pondering who she should be this time. She thought she'd been a girl off to boarding school when she'd taken the ride. Yes, but that was several hours ago, and now school no longer held the proper air. Not air: heir. She was an heiress, visiting well-off family at their country estate. She lofted the memory to the driver with her voice.

"Might we stop for a moment?"

Mr. Cobb turned around and caught sight of the girl, and not for a moment did it seem odd to him that he only just now remembered he was escorting the Churchills' niece out to them this afternoon. He smiled easily, she returned the favor, and the carriage pulled to a halt. Cobb, smitten with the importance of his task, hopped down and rushed to open the door. He took her cotton gloved hand and carefully helped the girl to the ground. She smiled again, and he flushed.

"Ride's not too rough, is it, Miss?" he asked, remembering the ruts and divots without quite hitting upon the fact that the girl was entirely absent in those memories.

"Not at all, Mr. Cobb," she returned. "But I think perhaps I've gone far enough for the day." Here she tapped his shoulder, and Jeremiah Cobb was amazed to see himself standing, as he clearly recalled losing the use of his legs when his horse threw him last year. Then he fell, as his legs seemed at that moment to also remember they weren't meant to be working. He lost his breath and cried out as he smacked his tailbone on a hard patch of ground. Jeremiah propped himself up on his hands as the girl sat cross-legged before him. She situated her dress just so, seated her bead purse in her cross-legged lap. Like she was ready for a picnic.

She took off her gloves, her hands pale and delicate as a girl of privilege's should be. Then she reached forward and pinched the air in front of her, pulling back like she had a string of taffy to play with. Jeremiah's chest hurt, and the taffy turned out to come from him: a white, stringy something the girl pulled right from his breastbone. He leaned forward, meaning to grab it and pull it back in, but the girl frowned, and Jeremiah remembered he'd lost his arms in a fire. He wobbled to keep himself up; so sure he was that what felt like arms was a phantom pain, he never did look down to see his arms hanging there.

Jeremiah had pulled a loose string on a sock once, and the more he pulled, the tighter what was left dug into his calf. The white taffy did the same to his chest. Each bit the girl teased out made it harder to breathe in the next time he needed to. She was spinning it between her hands now, studying each little section of him as it came to her on the string. He sucked for air, and she tilted her head to the side, fascinated by a particular blob of Cobb Taffy. She snagged it between her middle and ring fingers, and with one quick twist, she'd pulled it free.

Jeremiah tried to breathe, and this time, it worked. The girl's eyes shining as she looked at her prize, she let the rest of the stringy collection in her hands go. One long, glorious intake of breath, and it all snapped into him. Knocked him on his back, but he laughed at the smell of the air he could draw in again.

When he sat back up, Jeremiah had forgotten the fire and the horse accident. And, of course, the girl. He hopped back on the carriage, thinking he'd stopped to relieve himself, then set back to the trail.

The girl listened to him go, though she only had eyes for the piece of him she'd pulled away. She watched the glisten of wet newborn skin, held to her ear the tiny squall of a baby first using her lungs. She breathed in the odd collection of smells, and smiled. Mr. Jeremiah Cobb would from that day forward swear he hadn't been present at his daughter's birth, would hang his head and regret having missed such a wonderful day. Even at her wedding, much as it would bring tears to his daughter's eyes to have her father telling tales, he'd apologize for having missed her moment entering the world and losing that precious time to learn to love her all the more.

Opening her bead purse, the girl dropped her find in among her collection, then turned to walk down the valley under the warm sun.

Guest Commentary: The Conan Method for Interacting With Girls

2005-10-29T08:23:00.000-05:00

By Steve Ruthenbeck

"I admit it," Bob said. "Women used to frighten me. They have strange powers, like the ability to color coordinate, accessorize and smell nice at all times. This can be disconcerting.

"I once had a conversation with a girl that went like this:

"'Hi,' I said.

"'Hi,' she said.

"'So I weighed 205 pounds in bare feet today!'"

It's official. Bob was a dork in his past life. Then he discovered a role model who helped him solve the mystery that is woman. Yes, that's right, Conan, you know, the barbarian, invented by Robert E. Howard and played on film by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Bob read a lot of Conan books in his formative years, and one day it occurred to him: Conan never had trouble interacting with women. Oh sure, he might have one turn into some sort of lizard creature and try to eat him, but that’s small potatoes compared to a girl saying, "No, I can't go out with you tonight. I just put a bag of Ramen Noodles in the microwave."

From that day forward, Bob tried a new method with women. Whenever he found himself in the presence of a girl he liked and had no idea how to proceed, he thought, what would Conan do?

Observe the theory in action!

Bob is at a wedding and sees a girl he would like to engage in conversation. He has no clue how to instigate such an encounter — unless he tells her that he weighs 205 pounds in bare feet.

Ah, but what would Conan do?

Well, first of all Conan would eat some meat and drink some wine, so Bob fortified himself with ham and beer and wondered, what should I talk to this girl about?

Again, what would Conan do?

Conan says, "Crom!" a lot.

Bob didn't see how that would help, though. Then Bob remembered the movie. When Arnold was romancing that Viking Chick, he barely said three words to her. Less is more!

So armed with a plan, Bob approached the comely lass who caught his eye
and didn't say a word.

"Hi," she says as Bob stand chest-to-chest with her.

"..."

She looks confused by Bob's silence. "How are you?"

"..."

"Yeah, this place is kind of boring, isn't it?"

"..."

"I just want a man who loves me for who I am!"

Then she gave Bob her number.

See, how that worked? Following the Conan Method was much more effective than Bob telling her his weight without shoes.

Now then, fast-forward a few days.

Previously, Bob dialed the first six digits of a girl's phone number, hung up and started over roughly 50 times before dialing the whole number. When the girl finally answered, he panicked. This led to such great conversational tidbits as:

"So, I'm thinking about learning guitar"

"I hope I never get a bat in my house"

"What do you think about potatoes?"

But what would Conan do?

Find a partner thief, climb into her window and kidnap her?

Bob decided to stick with the phone call. Now then, Conan would probably curse the phone as deviltry and then smash it.

Again, not applicable.

What else did Bob know about Conan? He’s proactive. He would "just do it" before Nike made the phrase cool. For instance, if Conan was faced with an invincible Badger God, he wouldn't worry about proper etiquette, he'd just wade in and start chopping.

So, hey-yah! Bob dialed the girl's number and let the phone ring.

"Hello," she answered.

"..."

"Is this Bob?"

"..."

"How are you?"

"..."

"Yeah, I never know what to say during these talks either."

"..."

"I just want a man to take me for a walk under the stars!"

Fast-forward to Bob and the girl walking under the stars.

As the walking ends, Bob begins to realize that dates finish up with a goodnight — sometimes a kiss goodnight. To be honest, Bob never had to worry about that. Whenever Bob dropped a girl off, she was literally out of the car before it stopped rolling. Sometimes she would even dive out as Bob slowed down for an intersection.

But not this girl because Bob is using the Conan Method!

So, Bob drives her home, and they’re sitting there, and Bob is thinking, okay, what would Conan do? So Bob went in with maximum chauvinistic pig assertiveness. And that is how he nearly chipped a tooth and got a face full of mace.

Since then, Bob has reevaluated his Conan Method. He realized women aren't frightening, nor are they Badger Gods. They’re people who deserve a bit of courtesy and respect and a man who won’t show up wearing a loincloth — unless he's paid to. Conan showed Bob how to interact with girls by showing Bob that it's best to be one's self rather than putting on an act.

Thank you, Conan, for showing Bob the way. Truly your brain is the most oily muscle upon your person.

Steve Ruthenbeck, 31, lives in small-town Minnesota. His first novel, Dogs of War, was published by Harbor House October 2005. It has Nazi werewolves driving a Panzer tank. Ruthenbeck enjoys books, movies, bike riding, softball, basketball and volleyball. Naps are also good. Family isn’t that bad either.

'We Are Seven': The winners!

2005-10-28T19:34:00.000-05:00

At long last, we've settled on the winners of our second contest, "We Are Seven."

For those joining us a little late in the month, we asked entrants to craft a short horror story -- some 250 to 500 words or so -- using as a springboard the first two paragraphs of Kate Douglas Wiggin's classic children's novel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

And, boy, did they. There were some wonderfully twisted stories. Unfortunately, not all of them could win. (Well, I guess they could, but I'm a lad of meager means, and there's no way in hell I'm buying prizes for everybody.)

So, without further delay, the winners are:

Top prize: The Retropolitan

He'll receive Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow DVD; Black Seas of Infinity: The Best of H.P. Lovecraft, collecting 19 short stories; the Vertigo: First Taste trade paperback, featuring Alan Moore's first issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing, and the debut issues of Y: The Last Man, 100 Bullets, Transmetropolitan, Books of Magick: Life During Wartime and Death: The High Cost of Living; the Sword of Dracula trade paperback, by Jason Henderson, Greg Scott, Tony Harris, et al; the Freak Show hardcover, by Bernie Wrightson and Bruce Jones; and Issues 11 and 17 of the Digital Webbing Presents anthology, which contain the first installments of my "magical realism"/crime series, Bad Elements.

Runners-up: Jason Kimble and Livia Llewellyn

They'll each receive a copy of the first Nightmare World trade paperback and a "Cthulhu is My Homeboy" T-shirt, courtesy of Aaron Weisbrod. I'll throw in a couple of surprises, too.

We'll post the winning entries throughout the weekend. You'll love them.

Thanks to everyone who entered. Oh, and don't forget Contest No. 3: "Trapped Between Four Walls."

Masters of Horror, on TV and in comics

2005-10-28T15:58:00.000-05:00

Showtime kicks off its 13-episode Masters of Horror series tonight with Incident on and off a Mountain Road, directed by Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-tep) and based on the short story by Joe R. Lansdale.

Here's how the network's website describes it:

This episode pits Ellen (Bree Turner), a seemingly defenseless young woman, against Moonface, a deformed and demented serial killer. As the story cuts back and forth in time, we slowly discover that our heroine is not as helpless, nor as innocent as she initially seems. Trained by her abusive husband Bruce (Ethan Embry) to be a survivalist, instructed to use any and every available object as a weapon in a time of need, Ellen gets to test the real life application of these lessons. Ultimately, chained to the floor of Moonface's horrific cabin with a most unsavory roommate (Angus Scrimm), she races against the clock to free herself before she meets a grisly fate. This gritty episode pits a strong female protagonist against evil incarnate.

Let's hear it for Ethan (Empire Records) Embry!

TV Squad reviews the series premiere, and likes the story, if not the special effects. Incident on and off a Mountain Road airs tonight at 10 and 11 Eastern, then again Saturday at the same times.

In related and timely news, IDW Publishing announced today that it will publish a 12-part series of "limited edition" comic books based on Masters of Horror.

Incident on and off a Mountain Road will be adapted over two issues by writer Chris Ryall and artist Jeremy Haun. Issues 3 and 4 will adapt H.P. Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch House. The comics will be written by Ivan Brandon (NYC Mech) and illustrated by Dennis Calero, based on the teleplay by Dennis Paoli and Stuart Gordon. Ben Templesmith will provide covers for those two issues.

Masters of Horror #1 is scheduled for December release.

Hail to the King

2005-10-28T12:16:00.000-05:00

So, Stephen King is going to be writing comics for Marvel. With Jae Lee illustrating. It's a prequel to the Dark Tower series.

That's pretty big news, really. Major, actually. King is pretty much the biggest name in the world in literature (though, of course, Rowling's giving him a run for his amazingly large piles of money these days) and having him writing comics can only be good for the medium, the industry, visibility, readers, etc. Maybe even a tipping point for the industry.

Right?

Well, probably. Except that Marvel's press release is worded vaguely enough that it's not clear whether King is actually going write the book or just oversee it/contribute to it in some way.

And it's going to be released in monthly, periodical comic form. In case anyone was wondering, I think this makes clear that the current Marvel regime is never going to release an original graphic novel (except for that weird war Iraq propaganda book they were doing a while back. Did that ever come out?). If they won't do it for King, are they gonna do it for Bendis (or whoever else)?

What makes the decision to use a floppy first frustrating is that when the average book or King reader hears about this, they're going to want the book right away. And just like any other Stephen King novel, they're going to expect to be able to buy it in a hardcover, at the bookstore. Instead, they're going to have to wait months for the serialization of the thing to finish, and then more months for the trade to come out.

Does Marvel not think that they could sell 50,000 copies of an OGN at $30 each, in just the first few months? Because I bet they could. Probably more. Probably a lot more.

By pursuing this path, I fear that Marvel might be squandering a major opportunity. But, hey, they've never done that before, right?

Six feet under, but rising again

2005-10-28T12:15:00.000-05:00

Variety reports that Alan Ball, creator of Six Feet Under and writer of American Beauty, will develop another series for HBO -- this time based on Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire series of novels.

Project is set in a world where vampires and humans co-exist after the development of synthetic blood. First book, Dead Until Dark, revolves around a waitress in rural Louisiana who meets the man of her dreams only to find out he's a vampire with a bad reputation.
"It's not a high-concept pitch," Ball said. "Charlaine has created such a rich environment that's very funny and at the same time very scary. I bought the book on impulse and I just couldn't put it down."

On an unrelated note: Winners of our "We Are Seven" contest will be announced later today.

Contest No. 3: Trapped Between Four Walls

2005-10-27T15:13:00.000-05:00

You know what I hate? I hate sinus infections that turn into colds that hang around for days on end like obnoxious friends that can't take a hint. Needless to say, I haven't gotten much done in a while.

That's obvious to you at this point.

My spotlight on monsters isn't dead. Yet. I'm just going to skip ahead to my top five and call it a day. Sometimes the real world takes precedent, you know?

Oh, but I have good news. Did I mention that? I think I forgot to mention that.

FREE SHIT!

I like free things. You like free things. Together we shall form a giggling, bubbling society appreciative of free things.

What have I got for you? I've got three books for you.

"Only three books?" you ask.

As far as I'm concerned, these are the only three fucking books you're ever going to need. Drumroll, if you must:

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury!
Last Exit to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby, Jr!
The Man With the Golden Arm, by Nelson Algren!

You may see a running theme here. You may not. That's okay, I'll give you a little explanation anyway. It may give you insight into the issues that currently plague me and my work ethic, if you look close enough.

You see, I hate being trapped. I fear being trapped. I'm not really afraid of snakes or spiders or polar bears or pointy sticks or anything physical like that. I am, however, deathly afraid of being trapped in the same place or the same routine or the same life for the rest of my existence. All three of these books have that in common. Some of them get out, some of them don't. Some of them die trying.

This is where we get to the part where you have to dance for your presents.

I know you just all got done writing your long-winded entries for Kevin's contest. So? I have to write something new everyday. I have no remorse for you and your quest for free swag. Besides, let's be honest. You half-assed that entry anyway. None of us really like Kevin, we just patronize him as it fits our needs.

Now it's time to really write something good. You have a 500 word maximum. That's roughly two manuscript pages. You want to go over 500 words? That's nice. Send it to the New Yorker. Otherwise, cut out a few modifiers and send it my way.

What you have to write about it simple: Tell me about a time where you were trapped, in any sense of the word, and how you either got out or didn't get out. The deadline is next Friday, November 4th. Best piece wins the three books and will be announced the following Monday. Second-best piece gets a respectful nod from across the dance floor.

Got it? I didn't think so. Let me recap the highlights:

- 500 word maximum
- English language, preferably
- Tell me a story about a time you were 'trapped' and how you did, or did not, get out
- Email it to betweenfourwalls [at] gmail.com by 11:59 P.M. [CST] on Friday, November 4th
- Pray

Are we kosher now? If you have any questions, my email address is (as always) up at the top of our sidebar. Feel free to ask.

Also, if you don't enter this contest, I will kidnap your first-born child and use them as ottomans. You don't want that, do you?

Channel surfing

2005-10-27T13:24:00.000-05:00

I'm addicted to TV Squad, the group blog that provides pithy, off-the-cuff coverage of everything from Lost to The Amazing Race, and even offers pointers on how to dress like Magnum PI for Halloween.

Lately, though, the best thing about the site has been "The Five," its regular feature devoted to the best and worst (underrated shows, teen sex moments, guilty pleasures). This month, TV Squad has been on a bit of a roll, with "The Five Worst Sci-fi Series of All Time," "The Best Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Segments," "Best Episodes of Buffy" and "Top Five Fanesia Moments" ("fanesia" is a word coined by Squad member Bob Sassone "to describe a moment on a TV show that causes TV fans to get amnesia that the moment even happened").

Guest commentary: The absurdity of horror

2005-10-27T08:57:00.000-05:00

Jeremy Irons as Franz Kafka in Steven Soderbergh's 1991 film Kafka

By Aaron Weisbrod

When’s the last time a horror movie or, better yet, a horror book, truly scared you?

As far as horror movies go, the last movie that really rattled my cage was the first Friday the 13th. I think I was around twelve at the time, and it was the first time my parents had agreed to let me watch a flat-out slasher flick. The deal was that my dad would watch it with my younger brother and me (and fast-forward “nudie scenes”) while she did housework and kept my youngest brother – who was about seven – out of the room.

You all know where this is going, right?

It was at the end of the movie and Jason’s momma was just killed. The sole survivor was floating out in the water and the nice music was playing as the cops arrived. None of us knowing any better, my dad called my youngest brother into the room, assuring him it was all over.

Then it happened.

Me, my dad, and my brother screamed – no, shrieked. To this day I still can’t figure out how my dad lifted himself off the couch like that without using his hands or feet. My youngest brother panicked and tore into the kitchen like a bat out of Hades.

It was grand.

But it was also eighteen years ago.

Sure, there have been a few movies here and there that have creeped me out a bit since then – Alien, Jaws, The Omen II, the first Hellraiser, Poltergeist, and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre being a few prime examples – but scared? No, not really.

Heck, I finally broke down and watched The Exorcist last year only to be sorely disappointed.

Different strokes for different folks. Point being, I think a lot of movies get more wrapped up in being action movies with monsters than being actually scary. But I’ve already said my piece on this issue in “Movin’ On” at Nightmare World.

I’ve always had a more intimate connection with books than film, anyway. Jaws, the movie? Good, very good. Jaws, the book? Excellent ... even if the ending is a bit weak.

Furthermore, I’ve always found the stories that mirrored real life, and the absurdities of society, are the scariest of them all.

The hands-down scariest book I ever read was actually a novella: The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. The story starts with Gregor – poor Gregor! – waking up as a beetle. Anyone who has read the story can attest to the fact that it’s not nearly as absurd as it seems, as the story is actually tragic and horrifying.

Kafka, for those of you not in the know, is an author who makes Poe look like a ball of sunshine. I was introduced to his work in college, and one of my literature professors summed up the central theme of his writings pretty well: “The nakedness of man when faced with the absurd.”

For example, in The Metamorphosis little time is spent with Gregor navel-gazing (or freaking out, for that matter) about the fact that he is now a giant sentient bug. Rather, Gregor is more worried about not being able to go to work to support his family.

In the case of The Trial – arguably Kafka’s greatest work – a man spends his whole life waiting to discover the verdict of a trial in which he is given no insight. He knows he’s on trial, but he doesn’t know why.

A similar theme can be found in Albert Camus’ The Stranger, in which a man is put on trial for not crying at his mother’s funeral. Society becomes convinced that this fairly restrained man is an extreme danger to society. After all, what kind of man (monster?) wouldn’t cry at his own mother’s funeral, right?

Some people find these books to be absurdist literature. Me? I find them horrifying.

As I’ve said before, monsters don’t scare me. As much as I enjoy them, I know they’re not real. They can’t happen. A werewolf is not going to jump me from the side of the road and rip me asunder – or cause me to get a dose of “full moon fever.” Vampires? Nope, not real. (Note: If you think you’re a really a vampire, please do me – and the rest of the world – a favor by putting a stake through your heart to determine if it’s really true, OK? Wanker.) Cthulhu. OK, maybe he’s real … but that’s where I draw the line.

Point being, whether you’re a horror creator or merely a horror fan, ask yourself: What’s REALLY scary? REALLY horrifying? REALLY unsettling?

Got it? Good. But if you think Night of the Living Dead is scarier than 1984 … well, Heaven help you.

Sure, I loved Dog Soldiers as much as the next guy. But that wasn’t horror -- that was fun.

An Enemy of the People? The Crucible? The Lord of the Flies? That’s the real scary stuff, people … with an emphasis on the “real.”

Aaron Weisbrod thinks real life – and the allegories that can by made to it in classical literature – is plenty scary … yet he writes NightmareWorld.com week after week just the same.

My, Grandma, what big spikes you have ...

2005-10-26T19:44:00.000-05:00

I don't live even remotely close to Universal Studios Orlando, which probably explains why I haven't seen this delightfully twisted TV commercial for the theme park's Halloween Horror Nights: Tales of Terror. I loathe amusement parks, but I love this dark, funny and well-produced ad. Go, watch.

Guest Commentary: "I'm not like other guys": Why the Video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller" Belongs in the Horror Canon

2005-10-26T11:37:00.000-05:00

By Sean T. Collins

The most popular zombie movie of all time is not Night of the Living Dead. The most popular werewolf movie of all time is not The Wolf Man. The most popular blurring of the line between fictional and real-life horror is not The Blair Witch Project.

No, my friends--"Thriller" tops them all.

Directed by John Landis, the video for the title track of Michael Jackson's magnum opus is horror's elephant in the room. Perhaps because it's just a music video--or, to be fair, just a short film--"Thriller" is almost never seriously considered when the pantheon is discussed. This, I would argue, needs to be rectified, and pronto. Fans and students of horror are doing the genre a grave (no pun intended) disservice if they overlook a work this influential, and this excellent.

Consider the clout Jackson had when the video was released. Between late 1982 and 1984, the album from which it came spent 37 weeks at number one on the Billboard charts (out of a total 122-week stay) and spawned seven Top Ten singles, including "Thriller" itself, which went to No. 1 (as did "Billie Jean," "Beat It," and "The Girl Is Mine," its immediate predecessors). The album's first single, "Billie Jean," was the first video by a black artist to be played on the then-ruthlessly segregated MTV (a fact for which the network now lauds itself endlessly, as though overcoming their own racist policy is some sort of major blow for civil rights), and essentially transformed the network into a cultural phenomenon. Jackson won a record eight Grammys in 1984, seven of which were for Thriller, a record he holds to this day (he shares it with Carlos Santana); he also won eight American Music Awards that year, another record he holds to this day (sharing it with Whitney Houston). And of course, Thriller is the best-selling album of all time, with a staggering 51,000,000 copies and counting sold worldwide. In America, its 27,000,000 copies make it the best-selling album of all-new material in the country's history. And (most importantly for our purposes) when the video for "Thriller" debuted in February of 1984, it was the first long-form music video in MTV's history and rapidly became acknowledged as the greatest music video of all time, a position it continues to hold on countdowns and on critics' lists and is unlikely ever to relinquish; its companion home video, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, became the best-selling music video of all time (eventually being displaced by another Michael Jackson home video, Moonwalker).

The centerpiece for all of this is a 14-minute horror movie, folks. That matters.

The story behind the creation of "Thriller" is well-known: Jackson caught a glimpse of John Landis's seminal werewolf movie An American Werewolf in London and, despite a thoroughgoing unfamiliarity with contemporary horror, decided Landis would be ideal to direct the short film he'd envisioned for "Thriller," his campy salute to Vincent Price and the creature-features he loved when he was a boy. With the help of Werewolf make-up effects genius Rick Baker, Landis concocted a two-part adaptation of the song.

In the first part, Jackson and his female co-star Ola Ray are walking through the woods in '50s-style clothes on a moonlit night, when Jackson transforms (graphically and grotesquely) into a slavering were-cat creature, who stalks and presumably kills his girlfriend. This is then revealed to be a movie that the "real" Michael and Ola are watching; disturbed, she insists that they leave. On their walk home, Jackson teasingly sings the verses of the song in order to spook her, presumably into his arms; but as the Vincent Price-narrated "rap" begins, zombies begin emerging from graves and sewers to surround the young lovers. Suddenly Jackson himself transforms into a zombie and leads the undead in a dance the choreography of which is pretty much imprinted directly into the memory of anyone who's ever watched MTV. He then bursts into the song's chorus, and then the zombies chase Ola into an abandoned house, where, again led by Michael, they prepare to devour her. Screaming, she's awoken from this nightmare by the "REAL" "real" Michael, who reassures her that it's just a bad dream and offers to take her home--only to take one last grinning glance back at the camera, revealing he has the yellow eyes and slit pupils of the cat-monster from the beginning of the video.

Does it work as a music video? Oh hell yes. The fact that MTV, which obsesses on the new to the point of psychosis, can't bring itself to dislodge the video from the top of its All Time Greatest lists even today is testament to that. When not being monstrous or victimized respectively, Jackson and Ray are a really likable pair of performers--they actually have quite a chemistry, and Jackson's charm reminds us why he was the hugest star in popular music this side of the Beatles or Elvis (and quite possibly the other side as well). The song itself, produced by Quincy Jones, is a killer slice of the pop-funk that Jackson all but singlehandedly converted traditional R&B into in the late '70s and early '80s, with goofily scary lyrics and that unforgettable "darkness falls across the land" monologue by Price at the end.

And Jesus Christ, could Michael Jackson dance or what? He'd debuted the moonwalk on May 16th, 1983, on Motowns 25th Anniversary TV special--probably the single most memorable dance step in the history of rock and roll--but the guy was so stupid with talent that he didn't even need to use it here. Instead he put together a choreograpy combining the spastic movements of breakdancing with the shambolic stalkings of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Living Dead, creating a dance routine that's seared directly into the brains of anyone who's ever watched MTV. The limp shoulder-shimmy of the zombies, and most particularly the part where they make their hands into claws and swing from one side to the other with them, are still instantly recognizable as being from this video. Can you think of choreography that's better known than this? (No fair using the knife fight in "Beat It" and the precarious leaning in "Smooth Criminal.") I think you've got to go with "Singin' in the Rain" or nothing. (Britneys tune-in-Tokyo move from "Toxic" only counts if you're a Best Week Ever junkie.)

But does it work as horror? Again, hell yes. Jackson may not have known horror aside from whatever black-and-white classics he managed to watch during his sad non-childhood childhood, but he knew what he liked, and what he liked was the work of Baker, who in The Howling and American Werewolf helped create some of the most convincing and disturbing transformation scenes in film history. Baker was a long-time collaborator of Landis's, and while the director's tasted in horror ran more along the lines of schlock (literally), don't forget that Baker also worked on the likes of David Cronenberg's Videodrome. He was no stranger to serious, transgressive horror, and he brought this sensibility to his more mainstream work as well.

The end result, surely seen by many more people than had seen any of the many movies referenced by the video itself, took its two genres--werewolves and zombies--and knocked them the hell out of the park. Jackson's transformation into the furry, claw-wielding beast at the beginning of the video is tensely built up to and shockingly directed--the way yellow-eyed, sharp-toothed, but still-human Jackson bellows "GO AWAY" at his girlfriend in a last-ditch effort to save her from himself is genuinely chilling and unexpected. We're then treated to a series of straight-on, unblinking shots of Jackson's face and hands as they bulge and swell, sprouting fur and claws and whiskers in what is a quite obviously painful process. The sequence culminates with Ola lying on the ground, helpless as the monster slowly approaches, reaching down to snuff her out. Even as a kid, I found that incredibly scary--there's no doubt that she knows she's about to die, and that's maybe the scariest thing imaginable. And don't let's gloss over that final, smirking shot, with Vincent Price's triumphant and evil cackle echoing in the background; that's a face of horror, and an unforgettable one.

Then there are the zombies. Horror aficionados had seen their decrepit, decaying, blood-vomiting ilk in Italian movies like Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2, but mainstream American audiences were being exposed to these really gross undead for the first time. Keep in mind that the revenants in Romero's zombie movies looked more or less like living people with bad make-up; Romero's grossest (and least popular) zombie movie in his initial cycle, Day of the Dead, came out two years after "Thriller." These zombies, flesh rotting off their faces, limbs and heads dropping off their frames, black blood spilling out of their open mouths, were, as far as most people watching were concerned, sui generis. And those horrible noises they made when the song cut out--As a five-year-old who was super-excited that his parents allowed him to watch the video for this awesome song, I was so terrified that I began screaming and bawling, and spent days afraid to go near the television again for fear I'd hear those noises again. I've managed to hold myself together a little better when I've seen the video since then, but that zombie work still compares favorably to anything the feature-length folks have produced.

Finally, of course, there are the video's unintentional and disturbing resonances with the Michael Jackson we'd come to know, or at least allegedly know, over the ensuing years. "I'm not like other guys," says a suddenly serious Jackson to his bobby-sox'd girl during the film within a film. She reassures him, and he rejects the reassurance: "I mean I'm different." That's certainly one way to put it. Jackson undoubtedly came across as weird even in the behind-the-scenes Making of video: think of his childlike giggle as director Landis tickles him, or his high-pitched squeals as he's coached to display pain during the transformation scene. But each time we saw the video as it was shown and reshown every year--around Halloween; at the top of MTV's annual "Top 100 Videos of All Time" countdown (now abandoned, as are pretty much all videos on that network, and shunted over to occasional revisits on VH1), the film-Jackson's claims took on more and more believability. The plastic surgery and skin lightening, the strange relationships with everyone from Brooke Shields to Uri Geller to Liz Taylor to Bubbles the chimp, the hostile takeover of the Beatles catalog from his former friend Paul McCartney, the regression into a perpetual childhood (the ranch is called Neverland, for pete's sake), the hyperbaric chamber, the Elephant Man...the barrage of the bizarre never let up. By the time a simultaneously enraged and aroused Jackson destroyed a car with a crowbar while repeatedly fondling his own genitals in his video for "Black or White" in 1991, Jackson had gone from a superstar playing at a transformation into figures of horror into something of a figure of horror himself. And when allegations of child molestation surfaced in 1993 and sprung up again a decade later, this time leading to a trial and acquittal, the real-life transformation was all but complete. Watching the were-cat and zombie Jacksons stalk their respective girlfriends in sequences rife with subsumed sexualized violence is now infused with the belief, however unproven, that the real Jackson is a sexual predator too. (That Jackson himself was a victim of child abuse at the hands of his odious stage father Joe gets factored into the sinister equation as well.) Moreover, by the time of that trial, as we watched repulsed while Jackson's face seemed to disintegrate before our eyes, "Thriller"'s repeated use of disfiguring prosthetics--and especially the behind-the-scenes footage of their creation and application in the Making of video--seemed all too prescient itself. In the end (as with Robert Blake in In Cold Blood and Lost Highway), Jackson's performance in "Thriller," frightening then, is all the more frightening now.

So that's "Thriller": A musician and entertainer at the peak of his popularity and powers, employing a grade-A horror crew, tackling and nailing two key horror subgenres in the most public way imaginable, achieving an impossible-to-replicate level of pop-culture impact and unwittingly displaying traits that will be hauntingly eerie in later years. To me it's a recipe for a horror classic. When you whip up that kind of dark magic, it is indeed an evil no mere mortal can resist.

-----

Sean T. Collins has written about popular culture for a variety of publications, including Wizard, Giant, Stuff, The Comics Journal, Complex, A&F Quarterly, The Yale Herald, and Comic Book Galaxy. He maintains two weblogs: Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat, a pop-culture blog focusing mainly on horror these days (with music, movies, and sometimes comics thrown in); and The Outbreak, an "autobiographical horror blog" chronicling his life during a zombie epidemic. He also runs Where the Monsters Go, the Internet's most comprehensive listing of horror-related blogs. He's spending the month of October writing Blog of Blood, a marathon analysis of Clive Barker's Complete Books of Blood short-story collection. He's not like other guys.

Images courtesy of Neverland Valley.

Guest commentary: Peering into darkness

2005-10-26T06:22:00.000-05:00

By Chris Kirby

When the last time you were really scared?

I mean really fucking scared.

Not the quick adrenaline shock that comes when you slam on the brakes and narrowly avoid rear-ending the car in front of you, but that sick-to-your stomach, creeping feeling where you are absolutely certain that something awful and vile is going to happen.

True story --

In the summer after my senior year of college I worked for an apartment management company renting units and dealing with tenants. An older woman, the mother of one of the tenants, came in late one dreary September day and needed to get into her son’s apartment. We hadn’t received a rent payment in almost two months and we were fairly certain the guy had just disappeared and abandoned his apartment. The mother was there to pay the balance, remove some of his belongings, and sublet the apartment.

My boss, Steve, wanted me to go over and unlock the door and stay onsite until the woman had finished and lock up behind her.

“Go now, man. You gotta see this guy’s apartment,” Steve said. The mother had to fill out some paperwork and I would have a good ten or fifteen minutes at the guy’s apartment by myself.

The guy – I’ll call him “Max,” as I’ve long since forgotten his real name – lived in a basement studio apartment right across from the laundry room of a small, older building with nine units.

Max was a LARGE guy. By large I mean HUGE – easily 6’6” or 6’7” and a flabby 250 lbs. Max was also a very odd guy. He liked to pace between the parked cars in the small lot behind the building for hours, and had taken to sticking his head out his door and glaring at each tenant as they tried to do their laundry. One tenant was certain Max was holding a hammer as he watched her sort her whites from her colors. Most tenants in the building began frequenting Laundromats.

Max’s studio apartment was the only one in the building located below ground, and it had no windows. None. No source of natural light. So, when I pushed open the door to Apartment A, the room was completely dark except for the light spilling in from the hall. The switch by the door failed to produce light of any kind, but I could make out a standing lamp next to a mattress resting on the floor. I stepped over some scattered magazines or newspapers and turned on the light.

And there I was, standing in a room covered from floor to ceiling in images of bondage, S&M and gruesome torture.

Neat stacks of cheap leather-fetish porn mags were against one wall, each about two and a half feet high. More magazines were scattered across the floor along with hundreds of pages torn from other issues and tossed casually around the room, and in piles so deep you couldn’t tell the color of the carpet.

Scotch-taped to every inch of wall was Max’s original artwork, his twisted creativity on display, where he could really amp up the action from the magazine photos and manipulate and control his sadistic fantasies.

A pencil-and-charcoal drawing of a blindfolded woman lashed across a bed of nails.

A woman nailed to a cross and hung upside down, done in marker.

He’d saved the most graphic of the images for the wall and ceiling above his bed. These were the last images Max would see when he went to sleep and the first thing he’d gaze upon when he woke up.

A crayon drawing of a woman with hundreds of small cuts across her back tied to a rack and suspended above a pit of fire.

Women with spikes through their breasts and with flesh pierced by dozens of hooks.

This isn’t what freaked me out. The explicit stuff didn’t really get to me. It was two other things, really.

One was the hammer lying next to the door, sitting there, waiting for Max to take it in hand to defend against perceived threats outside in the hallway.

The other was the small, child-like handwriting underneath the most prominently displayed and most violent series of pictures.

The writing on each picture read, simply: “SARAH.”

That really fucking got to me.

Sarah was someone’s daughter. Maybe someone’s sister or girlfriend. Someone’s mother, perhaps.

Max had decided that she suited his taste.

He knew exactly with whom he wanted to dance. These weren’t random, sick thoughts on paper. The pictures were simply a blueprint for what he really wanted to do to Sarah. She probably had no idea that Max was watching and plotting. I knew damn well that she had no idea her naked image was plastered on Max’s wall, or she would have run to the cops as fast as she could.

At that point, I could feel Max there in the room with me. His presence filled the small space. A door closed loudly somewhere upstairs and I got the fuck out of there, barely remembering to lock up behind me.

I ran into Max’s mother coming down the stairs and had to descend to the basement once again to open the door for her. Before going inside she turned, smiled, and said, “I’ll be just a minute. I only need to get some clothes. I don’t like to be in there.” She knew about her son. She understood when I told her I’d wait out in the hall.

As it turned out, Max had been committed to an institution and she was taking him some of his things. I hope he’s still there rotting, frankly, and that Sarah is far away.

The aparment was soon cleaned of the filth and closed up never to be rented again.

As for Sarah, I never did find out who she was exactly. I checked the tenant list for the building and didn’t find a Sarah listed. She’ll never know how close she came to, what I believe, was a monster.

When it comes to movies that really creep me out, it’s not the flicks with demons or monsters or undead stalkers in hockey masks that get to me. It’s always the film where the human mind is the real villain that scares me. Give me a well-done and cliché-free serial killer movie, like The Silence of the Lambs or Seven. I think it’s because of my short time in Max’s apartment, where I peeked into the window of a really dark and twisted psyche. I found that, for myself, the scariest of monsters lives inside the disturbed mind.

Chris Kirby is the writer of Freakshow and Bride of Freakshow. His latest comic-book series, The Lost Squad, debuts today from Devil's Due Publishing. You can read more about the weird war tale at his work blog, and preview the first nine pages from the premiere issue.

How are these for the scariest TV characters?

2005-10-25T15:49:00.000-05:00

Last night, I wrote about MSNBC.com's list of "TV's top 10 scariest characters," and poo-pooed some of the website's selections.

Arvin Sloane of Alias (yes, I'm repeating myself), the supporting cast of Desperate Housewives, even Mr. Burns from The Simpsons -- none of them seems particularly scary to me. In fairness, I haven't actually watched Desperate Housewives, so maybe I'm missing out on some of the most terrifying characters in the history of television. I doubt it, though.

Of course if I'm going to criticize, I should be willing to put my own choices out there for scrutiny. So, that's what I'm doing.

I think I've followed the spirit of the MSNBC.com criteria, if not the letter: My selections are fictional characters from shows currently producing new episodes (that last bit is key). Well, more or less. In one case, the episodes are new to most viewers in the United States, even though the series has wrapped up in Japan. And not all of my choices are recurring characters; however, MSNBC didn't specify whether they had to be.

So here they are, my Top 10 scariest characters on TV:

10. Admiral Cain (Battlestar Galactica)
Just when it looked as if the producers of Battlestar Galactica were hitting the reset button, returning the Colonial fleet to what passes for the status quo, along comes the Battlestar Pegasus and Admiral Helena Cain. While Commander Adama's decisions have been shaped by civilian concerns, the sometimes-shaky presidency of Laura Roslin and his insistence that the Galactica is a family, Cain's choices are purely militaristic.

She's cold, driven and fully in command. Anyone who questions that may just find themselves executed -- by Cain's own hand. Hell, she makes the Cylons seem downright cuddly. But there's more to fear from Cain than her iron fist and itchy trigger finger; something about her explanation of how the Pegasus survived the initial Cylon assault doesn't add up.

9. The monkey in Chris Griffin's closet (Family Guy)
Here's the first of two instances in which I agree with the MSNBC.com list. Monkeys, whether evil and winged or evil and accusing, are frightening little things. The finger-pointing primate who lives in Chris Griffin's closet is no exception.

There are a lot of elements in Family Guy that get on my nerves -- Meg, the endless '70s sitcom parodies and the insistence that pausing too long on a "painful" moment is funny, among them -- but the monkey is pure devilish gold. Who can't feel for Chris when no one will believe his desperate claim that, "There's an evil monkey in my closet"?

8. Jor-El (Smallville)
If we cast our eyes to the WB's Smallville, Lex Luthor might seem the obvious choice. After all, we know he's destined to become Superman's arch-nemesis; there's no way around it. However, his rapid slide from somewhat complex friend who tries to be good to over-the-top, mustache-twirling villain is pretty laughable -- and not in the good, Gene Hackman kind of way.

The really scary character is Clark's Kryptonian father, Jor-El. Maybe it's because his voice is provided by Terence Stamp, who played the delightfully wicked General Zod in the first two Superman movies. Or maybe it's because the disembodied daddy gives new meaning to the word "manipulative," inching his son toward world domination (Lex could take a few lessons from Mr. El). The only thing that could make Jor-El scarier is if Internet speculation turns out to be true, and he's really General Zod, lashing out at his foe through Clark.

7. The Homunculi (Fullmetal Alchemist)
Watching early episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist, it's difficult to figure out what The Homunculi are. While the series' other characters are governed, nominally, by the "scientific" laws of alchemy, Lust (left), Gluttony (right) and their ilk seem to play by different rules

Lust, as her name suggests, callously uses people's desires to get what she wants. Gluttony, on the other hand, is a monster both in shape and act, eating humans in a futile attempt to satisfy his appetite.

However, it's not until later in the series that we discover the true nature of the Homunculi, and the horror of their existence really sets in. (Because new episodes are being aired in the United States, I won't give away the secrets. They're pretty startling, though.)

6. Sideshow Bob (The Simpsons)
MSNBC.com gave its top spot to C. Montgomery Burns, the wraith-like millionaire power-plant owner from The Simpsons. Mr. Burns is greedy, self-serving and cadaverous, but I wouldn't call him scary. No, that honor goes to one Bob Terwilliger, better known as Sideshow Bob.

After years of playing second fiddle to Krusty the Clown, Bob snapped, and tried to frame his mentor-tormentor for murder. He's attempted to kill Bart numerous times, and married Selma Bouvier in an effort to mend his wicked ways -- then sought to blow her up. And while we're on the subject, Bob also tried to blow up Springfield.

If you still have doubts about Bob's scariness, watch the wonderful Season 5 episode, Cape Feare, a direct parody of Martin Scorsese's 1991 version of Cape Fear.

5. Jessica Trent (CSI)
I'm grateful to Novice for reminding me of one of the most disturbing episodes of CSI: "Cats in the Cradle," from Season 2. I may be bending the rules a bit looking back three years to a character who only appeared in one episode, but that's what MSNBC gets for not being specific. Besides, adorable little Jessica Trent is terrifying.

For those who haven't seen "Cats in the Cradle," 80-year-old Ruth Elliot, the neighborhood "cat lady," is found stabbed to death, surrounded by 20 of her pets. The investigation leads to 8 1/2-year-old Jessica Trent, who points a finger at another neighbor -- a cat-hater at that. This being CSI, nothing is that easy, and the meandering trail of clues leads back to our precocious third-grader, who tries to deflect blame on her mother and then her sister. "Tattletales burn in hell," she says when it's obvious her sister is about to break during interrogation.

"The old lady should have just given me the cat," Jessica finally admits. "I lied before. She wasn't nice. She was mean."

Yeah, that's right. Little Jessica Trent killed Mrs. Elliot over a cat.

4. Vic Mackey (The Shield)
While most of the other choices on the list are obvious "villains," Detective Vic Mackey is a little tougher to pin down. Oh, he's scary -- would you want him coming after you? -- but he's incredibly complicated. He doesn't have a problem with framing a criminal of a crime he didn't commit -- after all, the guy's guilty, just not of this crime. He also doesn't see anything wrong with ripping off the Armenian mob; the guys on the Strike Force could use the money.

Vic has a definite code of ethics; it's just ... malleable. And that's what makes him so unsettling. He's confident that everything he does is for the right reasons: reducing crime, supporting family, covering for a fellow police officer. No matter what, he's convinced his cause is just.

And few things are scarier than a zealot with a badge and gun.

3. T-Bag (Prison Break)
Here's the second, and last, instance in which I agree with MSNBC.com: the case of one Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell, from FOX's Prison Break. His Southern drawl and genteel affectations provide a thin veil for what lurks beneath: a multiple murderer-rapist, and a charismatic, manipulative white supremacist.

T-Bag may very well be evil to the core, taking a correctional officer hostage during a prison riot that he himself instigated, then tormenting the guard by threatening to rape him then find and assault his teen-age daughter. Despite being ordered not to kill the guard, T-Bag stabs him several times, then hurls him off the walkway, leaving him to die on the concrete floor below.

Wait, there's more: Fearing he'll be fingered for the guard's murder, he plants evidence in the cell of one-time ally Trokey, then sends his punk -- the perfectly named Cherry -- to rat him out.

Scary and classy ...

2. Cy Tolliver (Deadwood)
When Deadwood debuted, it looked as if Al Swearengen was going to be the villain of this little Western morality tale. However, as the first season progressed, it became obvious that, much like Vic Mackey, Swearengen thinks he's doing what's best for Deadwood, even if his methods are sometimes a bit ruthless. And, hey, if he benefits financially in the process, so be it.

But his business rival, Cy Tolliver, is just wicked -- and maybe a little crazy. If Swearengen is occasionally brutal, it's because he lives in brutal times. Cy Tolliver is brutal because he enjoys it.

In the first two seasons of Deadwood, Tolliver has ordered his smallpox-infected business partner dragged into the woods and left for dead, executed two children who tried to steal from him, incited racial tensions in the camp, helped to bilk miners out of their claims and, perhaps worst of all, covered up for a serial killer.

That's all in just 22 episodes. He's a busy man.

1. Ethan Rom (Lost)
I like the idea of The Others, the mysterious adversaries on Lost. As vague, faceless representatives of the unkown, they're the perfect bogeymen. But the more we learn about them, the more tangible they become, the less frightening I find them.

So maybe it's odd that the scariest moments of Season 1 come courtesy of Ethan Rom, who gives form to the pregnant Claire's worst fears: that somebody wants to take her baby. What's worse, the savage, almost supernatural, Ethan makes the survivors realize that the most immediate danger doesn't come from the jungle -- but from within their group. The revelation is chilling: "He wasn't on the plane," Hurley says. "Ethan, that Canadian guy, he wasn't on the passenger manifest."

Ethan abducts Claire and tortures Charlie, leaving him for dead. When an amnesiac Claire stumbles back into camp, Ethan reappears, demanding her return and pledging to kill one of the passengers every day until he has her again. And he delivers, at least in part, murdering one of the castaways before being executed by a deranged Charlie.

Was Ethan one of The Others, as Locke suspected? Or was he evil incarnate, some twisted manifestation of all the survivors' fears? We may never know for sure. Thanks a lot, Charlie.

TV's scariest characters? Eh, maybe

2005-10-24T21:36:00.000-05:00

I'm a sucker for lists, even when I don't really understand the thinking behind them. Take the latest from MSNBC.com, TV's top 10 scariest characters, for instance.

The criteria were pretty straightforward: They had to be fictional characters from a show currently producing new episodes. Simple, right?

So, how did they end up with Arvin Sloane from Alias (No. 3) and the supporting cast of Desperate Housewives (No. 10)?

I get Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell (No. 5), the murderer-rapist with the syrupy Southern drawl from Prison Break -- he's creepy as all get-out. (That's him, on the right.) And the freaky monkey (No. 7) who lives in Chris Griffin's closet on Family Guy certainly has earned his spot on the list; few things are more terrifying than an evil monkey pointing an accusing finger.

But Arvin Sloane? Really? Maybe if I could get past all that silly Rambaldi mumbo-jumbo I might upgrade his status to "grating." But scary? Never. Now J.J. Abrams' myriad parent issues -- those are scary.

For those interested, here's the full list:

1. Charles Montgomery Burns (The Simpsons)
2. Eric Cartman (South Park)
3. Arvin Sloane (Alias)
4. John Locke (Lost)
5. T-Bag (Prison Break)
6. Emily Gilmore (Gilmore Girls)
7. The monkey in Chris Griffin's closet (Family Guy)
8. Silvio Dante (The Sopranos)
9. Mandy (24)
10. Supporting cast (Desperate Housewives)

This, of course, is where I should offer my list of TV's scariest characters. Unfortunately, I'm drawing a blank. Anyone have any ideas? I'll put my thinking cap on and revisit this tomorrow.

Update: If anyone cares, I think I've settled on the 10 (or so) scary characters for my list. I'm putting it together for later this afternoon. Arvin Sloane? Yeah, right ...

Horror comic review: Weird Sister

2005-10-24T18:09:00.000-05:00

Weird Sister
Streetfables
Writer: Elizabeth Genco
Artists: Adam Boorman, Dash Shaw and Jeff Zornow

I'm fascinated by black dog folklore, so the premise of Weird Sister held an undeniable appeal for me: A young witch named Daleth comes to Brooklyn after the mysterious murder of her teacher, and quickly meets up with a spectral mastiff she names Shock -- a nod to the legendary bogey-beasts of Suffolk, England.

Writer Elizabeth Genco weaves just enough such references into the minicomic's three stories to lend a richness to Daleth and her world without sending casual readers clamoring for a copy of Briggs or Bulfinch. In Daleth's Brooklyn, European folklore, ancient mythology and modern witchcraft beliefs all casually intersect.

In the anthology's opening story, the dark and brutal "Shock," we're introduced to Daleth -- although not by name -- as she strolls through a stygian Prospect Park, happy to discover "something green and living." However, what she finds is three young toughs out to kill a guard dog that hasn't earned its keep.

Here, artist Adam Boorman exploits the shadows from trees and streetlamps, obscuring the teen-agers' faces and casting them as savage Everymen. Under Boorman's heavy inks, Daleth, too, is transformed into something faceless and primal when she invokes the goddess Artemis to protect the defenseless animal. Her depiction during the prayer -- glowing eyes peering from an inky form -- is repeated later in the appearance of the spectral dog. It's a striking and effective representation of the supernatural.

With "Just Like That," the art, by Dash Shaw (Love Eats Brains!), is lighter and more cartoonish, but the subject matter is no less grim. But instead of trying to rescue a dog, Daleth is confronted with a girl about to be murdered for being a witch. "Welcome to the Middle Ages," Daleth says as she comes upon the accused and the accuser at the end of a pier.

While Daleth's narration is sparse in the first story, here Genco loosens the reins, giving us more insight into her character and revealing her name for the first time (her real name, we're told, but not her only name).

Shaw's storytelling isn't always clear -- the girl's accuser appears unarmed in one panel but wields a gun in the next, the girl is bound by rope one moment, then free the next -- but his almost primitive depiction of the would-be executioner is fitting. His seemingly tattooed facial features perfectly convey his slipping grasp on reality as he desperately explains to Daleth why he's going to kill the girl: "S-she tells me things -- says she can see things. -- about me. T-terrible things. And-and then they come true. ... Sshe told me how I'm ggoing to dd-ie."

It's interesting that Shaw reserves his most exaggerated strokes for the madman and for Shock, who looks almost like a woodcut print. In a particularly manic moment, their facial features mimic one another. Again, it's the supernatural, or perhaps the unnatural, manifesting itself through the eyes.

The final story, "I Love Watching You Die," finds Daleth in an undeniably goth setting, Green-Wood Cemetery after dark, where a girl named Phylis has come to pay respects to her dead junkie boyfriend. Despite their obviously dysfunctional relationship, Phylis pines for the newly departed John. "You said you'd never leave," she yells. Right on cue, John appears as a revenant -- a vampire, probably, although it's not clear -- determined to bring his enabler into the afterlife.

Here, the spotlight is on the unhappy couple, with Daleth initially only serving as a sounding board before, in the end, becoming Phylis' rescuer. Still, Genco reveals Daleth's feelings of loneliness and sadness over never having been kissed. It's a touching contrast to Phylis' bitter graveside rant.

Artist Jeff Zornow's characters are expressive, with John oozing a twisted charisma even from beyond the grave, while Daleth appears, at turns, fragile, forlorn and determined.

"I Love Watching You Die" is reminiscent of Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's acclaimed Demo series, if not for the characterizations and dysfunctional relationship then for Zornow's art, which occasionally resembles Cloonan's. Neither is a bad thing, though.

Weird Sister is a solid anthology that gives us a glimpse into Daleth's complicated, frightening world. We see just enough of her personality to make us like her, and learn just enough about her past to leave us wanting more. In short, it's what an introduction to a new character should be.

Weird Sister can be ordered via PayPal at the Streetfables website.

One October spawned a monster *

2005-10-24T10:05:00.000-05:00

I knew I was forgetting something this weekend: the roundup of Week 3 of "All Hallow's Month." A day late and a dollar short, that's me.

As we head into the home stretch -- there's just seven more days 'til Halloween (Silver Shamrock!) -- we've covered everything from scary music to scary comics to the influence of Ray Bradbury on modern horror.

So, for those of you just joining us for "All Hallow's Month," here are some quick-and-easy links to the third week of original content:

Mommy's Little Monsters -- Day Sixteen: The Thing
Horror Television: The Twilight Zone
Mommy's Little Monsters -- Day Seventeen: Godzilla
Horror Television: The Outer Limits
Bradbury and the Incredible Beast, Part 1
Mommy's Little Monsters -- Day Eighteen: The Joker
Guest Commentary: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Steve Ruthenbeck
Bradbury and the Incredible Beast, Part 2
Guest Commentary: Sleeper hold, by Aaron Weisbrod
Horror Television: "Be Still My Heart," ER, Season 6
Bradbury and the Incredible Beast, Part 3
Horror comic review: Strangeways #1
Scary Music: Good Clean Fun, by Cat Power
Bradbury and the Incredible Beast, Part 4

A final reminder: Deadline for our second contest is tonight at 9 Eastern.

* With apologies to Morrissey.

Contest reminder: 'We Are Seven'

2005-10-23T14:26:00.000-05:00

Deadline for entries for our second "All Hallow's Month Contest" is tomorrow at 9 p.m. Eastern.

As detailed last week, we're challenging you to craft a scary short story based on the first two paragraphs of Kate Douglas Wiggin's classic children's novel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Just 250 to 500 words, in addition to those opening paragraphs. Send entries to seven@badelements.net.

The winner will receive: Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow DVD, starring Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci; Black Seas of Infinity: The Best of H.P. Lovecraft, collecting 19 short stories, including "The Call of Cthulhu," "Dagon" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"; the Vertigo: First Taste trade paperback, featuring Alan Moore's first issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing, and the debut issues of Y: The Last Man, 100 Bullets, Transmetropolitan, Books of Magick: Life During Wartime and Death: The High Cost of Living; the Sword of Dracula trade paperback, by Jason Henderson, Greg Scott, Tony Harris, et al; and the Freak Show hardcover, by Bernie Wrightson and Bruce Jones. Because I'm feeling exceedingly self-promotional, I'll also throw in issues 11 and 17 of the Digital Webbing Presents anthology, which contain the first installments of my "magical realism"/crime series, Bad Elements.

Thanks to Aaron Weisbrod, runners-up will receive a copy of his first Nightmare World trade paperback, Knee Deep in the Dead and Other Tales of Terror, and a "Cthulhu is My Homeboy" T-shirt.

For full contest details, including the two opening paragraphs, follow the link.

Bradbury and the Incredible Beast, Part Four

2005-10-23T09:23:00.000-05:00

[Part One, Part Two, Part Three]

Neil Gaiman

In Neil Gaiman’s short story “October In The Chair” a more direct connection to Ray Bradbury can be seen. Here we see nearly all of the aspects of a Bradbury horror story as shown in “The Emissary”; October, an incredibly strong focus on the seasons, archetypal character names, youth, and the ending. It’s fitting that after the story ends, Gaiman puts in the line “For Ray Bradbury.” It is, indeed, very much a Bradbury story, yet still told in the voice of Gaiman. The story begins;

“October was in the chair, so it was chilly that evening, and the leaves were red and orange and tumbled from the trees that circled the grove. The twelve of them sat around a campfire roasting huge sausages on sticks, which spat and crackled as the fat dripped onto the burning apple wood, and drinking fresh apple-cider, tangy and tart in their mouths.”

As the story goes on, it’s revealed that the twelve months are meeting for their regular storytelling sessions. This time around it’s October’s turn to tell the story. The mood begins with the description of October himself;

“His beard was all colours, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looks like a friend; like someone you had known all your life.”

The night goes on and finally it comes to October’s turn to begin his story. Though the overall story begins in a Bradbury fashion, it is the story within the story that really hits the mark;

“There was a boy, October said, who was miserable at home, although they did not beat him. He did not fit well, not his family, his town, nor even his life. He had two older brothers, who were twins, older than he was, and who hurt him or ignored him, and were popular. They played football: some games one twin would score more and be the hero, and some games the other would. Their little brother did not play football. They had a name for their brother. They called him the Runt.”

Here begins a story about a curious youth who doesn’t fit into his surroundings and therefore has to find his own world in order to thrive. It’s very familiar to readers of Bradbury and, again, “The Emissary.”

The story progresses and the Runt decides to run away. The story explains that, “The Runt could not have told you when he first decided to run away, nor when his daydreams crossed the border and became plans.” The overactive imagination of children, something prominent in the works of Bradbury, sets in motion the actions of this story within a story. A little further along the Runt’s naivety and innocent awareness of the world is shown;

“He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad thing to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.”

Indeed, the Runt does end up meeting a kind person in the form of a little boy’s ghost. The Runt is not scared by the spectral boy’s appearance, but rather befriends him. The two spend the night traversing the countryside and having fun together. Heralding directly back to “The Emissary,” the ghost boy tells the Runt of why he lacks a playmate;

“But there must be lots of people up in that meadow,” said the Runt. “Don’t they ever play with you?”

“Nope,” said Dearly. “Mostly, they sleep. And even when they walk, they can’t be bothered with me...”

By the end of the story, the ghost boy has to return back to his world at dawn. He explains to the Runt that there’s a way he can stay there with him forever; it involves the Runt having to go inside a ramshackle old farmhouse where “other things” are. They can put him in the same world as his new ghostly friend. The story then ends;

“He pushed his way through the weed-choked yard. The door to the f farmhouse was mostly crumbled away. He stopped at the doorway, hesitating, wondering if this was wise. He could smell damp, and rot, and something else underneath. He thought he heard something move, deep in the house, in the cellar, perhaps, or the attic. A shuffle, maybe. Or a hop. It was hard to tell.

Eventually, he went inside.”

This ending again gains the same reaction as “The Emissary.” A sense of impending danger, yet also a sense of hope. The reaction is played out among the rest of the seasons as October sits in his chair; the other eleven sit in stunned silence, making small remarks, and not wanting to try and tell a story after his. Their night therefore finishes.

Scary Music: "Good Clean Fun," by Cat Power

2005-10-23T08:52:00.000-05:00

Music intended to be scary, using the trappings of horror, rarely is. The Misfits are perhaps more associated with horror music than any other, and yet for all of their excellent music, none of it is very scary. The same is true for legions of other punk and metal bands, trying so hard to be scary or edgy or disturbing that they end up as charicatures.

Some music, though, really is scary. Not much - especially because familiarity with a song tends to blunt its ability to scare - but some. This is the first in a short series of articles about songs that I find truly scary.

--------

“after this, there will be heads …. on different bodies”

"Good, Clean Fun" comes on like standard Cat Power, slow, lilting. The voice comes in just how you’d expect – half whispered, half mumbled, all pained. And it goes on like that.

The song can be heard as being in the mainstream of Cat Power’s songs about the relationship between men and women and the fraught nature of sexuality and its fallout. It seems like a song about a woman being used up and discarded by a man after he gets what he wants. Like a song about a woman trying to hold on but knowing she’ll give in. But that line nags. Heads on different bodies.

That line echoes throughout the song, wrapped in a lazy gauze of lyrics and picked-out guitar notes. It lends an air of desperation, an instability to the narrator. Suddenly, the narrator doesn’t seem so desperate or lovelorn – she seems tilting on the edge of a mental breakdown.

And then there’s that image – heads on different bodies. Chilling, to imagine, I think. A non-sensical, irrational image that lives at the heart of a nightmare.

An interior landscape is often scarier to me than anything acted out on the exterior. The essential unknowability of other people is the most frightening thing in the world to me. And here, it’s played out in just one line.

One act, one thing passing between the man and the woman in this song will lead to a radically shifted interior landscape, one in which actual physiologies will change. That's scary.

Appears on: What Would the Community Think? (Matador Records)

Horror comic review: Strangeways #1

2005-10-22T10:41:00.000-05:00

Strangeways #1
Speakeasy Comics
Writer: Matt Maxwell
Artist: Luis Gurana

There's a sense of dread and isolation that pervades the first issue of Strangeways, the new Western-horror series from Matt Maxwell and Luis Gurana.

(Note: Maxwell is an occasional contributor to this blog.)

Perhaps it's Gurana's scratchy lines and heavy inks -- reminiscent of Rob G's work (Teenagers From Mars, Dead West) -- which lend an air of claustrophobia to the panels, despite the vastness of the Wild West setting. Or maybe it's Maxwell's terse dialogue and slow, deliberate pacing.

Whatever it is, it works, creating a tense mood that suits the story well.

Like so many others, ex-Union soldier Seth Collins has headed West after the Civil War, and agrees to ride shotgun for his old friend Web on the stagecoach route to Silver Branch. This being a horror comic, it's not just any stagecoach route. "There's -- stories about happenings out here after dark," a jittery Web tells Seth. "Enough to make me watch my tail out here."

Of course, one of those "happenings" soon finds the coach, forcing Seth to defend himself and his passengers against the supernatural. It's not terribly complicated, but it doesn't need to be; it's all about establishing mood, and setting the stage for what follows.

At first glance, it's easy to mistake Seth Collins for simply another nod to Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name (as with the aforementioned Dead West). The wide-brim hat, the grizzled hair, the cold stare. But it's obvious that Maxwell has plans for Seth beyond the role of "mysterious stranger." He's a soldier -- a killer -- to be certain, but he shows genuine concern for his friend Web and for his passengers, and displays equally genuine fear when confronted by the werewolf. Sure, he initially tries to rationalize what he saw -- "a wolf or a big cat maybe" -- but even the soldier in him is shaken, and even uncertain of his decisions.

My only quibble is with the placement of some of the word balloons. On a few pages, the reader is forced to work too hard to determine the sequence of dialogue.

But that's a minor complaint in an issue that manages to live up to expectations, and lays the groundwork for what's almost certain to be an eerie, and entertaining, series.

Strangeways #1 will be released in November.

Not Halloween: Will not let you go -- let me go!

2005-10-21T19:30:00.000-05:00

How to describe this ... Season 1 of Lost, summarized to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody? Oh, just click the link already.

Bradbury and the Incredible Beast, Part Three

2005-10-21T06:04:00.000-05:00

[Part One, Part Two]

Stephen King

Stephen King, the next author in the horror evolution, owes a sizeable portion of his career to the works of Richard Matheson. However, he owes an even bigger portion to Ray Bradbury.

Much like the previous two authors, King also worked in different mediums. However, it is primarily in his short stories that Bradbury’s influence fittingly appears. In his story “The Mist,” appearing in the Skeleton Crew collection, many of the aspects of a Bradbury story still shine through. Though the beginning of the story does not involve fall, but again summer, it still focuses heavily upon what is typical for a certain season;

“This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke – the night of July 19 – the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.

We lived on Long Lake, and we saw the first of the storms beating its way across the water toward us just before dark. For an hour before, the air had been utterly still. The American flag that my father put up on our boathouse in 1936 lay limp against its pole. Not even its hem fluttered. The heat was like a solid thing, and it seemed as deep as sullen quarry-water. That afternoon the three of us had gone swimming, but the water was no relief unless you went out deep. Neither Steffy nor I wanted to go deep because Billy couldn’t. Billy is five.”

Here we have a return to the more descriptive language of Bradbury. Whereas Matheson’s sentences were short and to the point, King finds a halfway point between the two influences. The season and weather already begin to play a major part in the story – as they will throughout.

Also, the appearance of youth is first introduced at the end of the second paragraph. Billy, though younger than most of Bradbury’s youth, exhibits many of the same qualities; innocence and naivety, yet intelligent and aware. For example, later on in the story, after the massive storm has hit and the main characters are out exploring the damage, Billy’s reaction is funneled into this exchange with his father;

“Daddy, will we fix the boathouse roof and get a new flagpole?” For the first time he looked anxious. He’d maybe had enough destruction for a while.

I clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re damn tooting.”

“Can I go over to the Bibbers’ and see what happened there?”

“Just for a couple of minutes. They’ll be cleaning up, too, and sometimes that makes people feel a little ugly.” The way I presently felt about Norton.

“Okay. Bye!” He was off.”

Though the storm has wreaked havoc upon the neighborhood, Billy still sees the experience as something exciting and curious. Later on in the story when everything begins turning into chaos, there is a confrontation between a number of different people and Billy’s father. Billy’s one contribution to the exchange is, “I want to go home! I want my MOTHER!” This is a standard reaction from a child who doesn’t fully grasp the nature of what’s going on around him, yet who still has enough wit about him to inherently realize that it’s not good. He’d rather be at home with his mother, somewhere he knows for sure to be a safe haven.

King’s story again ends in the same Bradbury fashion. Quick action, short sentences, and wide open;

“...I am going to leave these pages on the counter and perhaps someday someone will find them and read them.

One word.

If I only really heard it. If only.

I’m going to bed now. But first I’m going to kiss my son and whisper two words in his ear. Against the dreams that may come, you know.

Two words that sound a bit alike.

One of them is Hartford.

The other is hope.”

Where Have The Monsters Gone?

2005-10-20T21:12:00.000-05:00

Okay, okay. Bear with me here. I have bad news and good news.

Bad news first.

I need to catch up on a lot of stuff and sort out a lot of other stuff at the moment. Long, boring story short -- I will not be posting any more parts of my Mommy's Little Monsters feature until Monday. I just need a couple days here.

The good news?

Next week just became Double-Feature Week. Two monsters a day.

And, I don't know. Maybe a hug or two if you're nice.

I still have three parts to my Bradbury essay left, so you'll be seeing those this weekend. Kevin is also going to pop a lot of stimulants and stay up for seventy-two hours straight to work on things.

So, I'll be back in full force come Monday. In the meantime, come back and check out what the other people around here have to say about things. I know you don't just come here for my wit and dashing good looks.

Also, if you're out and about this weekend and near a music-type store, pick up Shooter Jennings' album that came out a little while back. No, that isn't related to horror at all, but I saw him play a show last night and it kicked my ass.

Frankly, you could all use a good ass-kicking while I'm gone.

Horror TV: Be Still My Heart, ER, Season 6

2005-10-20T12:50:00.000-05:00

Not the show you’d expect to see on a list of great horror TV, I know. And yes, this cheats a bit because it’s a single episode, not a series. But if you’ve seen this episode, I think you’ll agree with me that it’s worth bending the rules for.

This is the single most frightening episode of TV I’ve ever seen. Not best, not the saddest, not anything else. The scariest.

The most interesting part of this episode, and the part that gets to the real terror, centers on med student Lucy Knight and Dr. John Carter.

Knight, played by Kellie Martin, had been covering her own incompetence for a long time before its revelation nearly torpedoed her career. Carter, played by Noah Wyle, discovered her secret but gave her a second chance (this was years before his latter-day turn as a very icy dude). Oh, and he was getting kind of sweet on her, too. It was the Valentine’s Day episode, too.

Leading up to this episode, Knight had been doing a psych rotation and had encountered some disturbing, and disturbed, patients, someone of them violent. We’d been getting short glimpses into their ways of thinking and almost got the feeling that there was something building, though it was too subtle to notice except in retrospect.

That episode vacillated, as I recall, between a lightness and humor (Carter noticing, and excited when he realizes Lucy is wearing a thong under her scrubs) and a pervasive, unlocatable air of doom and tension. The sweetness of the pair seeming to finally overcome the gap between them and being on the cusp of progressing to a romance.

When a disturbed man in his 20s is checked into the hospital and is treated by Lucy, he seems like just another patient, just another one of the many colorful characters who parade through the show. But he turns out to be much more.

The final scene of the episode, when Carter is stabbed by an unseen assailant (it’s not close to clear until the next episode who has committed the act), is frightening. The surprise, the sound effects, the look on his face sell the scene as scary.

It gets worse, though, when Carter falls to the floor and comes face to face with Lucy, stabbed and bleeding, amazingly pale and gasping for air like a fish on land. The seeming randomness, the sound of her gasping and her mouth trying to gulp down life, the heft and grisly crunch of the scene make it a rare, starkly terrifying moment on a mainstream, non-genre TV show.

And then the episode faded to black, leaving two key characters dying on the floor of their hospital.

To this day, it’s the scariest thing I’ve seen on TV as an adult. And I love it.

Guest commentary: Sleeper hold

2005-10-20T07:46:00.000-05:00

By Aaron Weisbrod

“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

I don’t remember where I first heard (or, more likely, read) that saying, but it’s one that’s never far from my mind in regard to horror.

(Something deep down keeps telling me that it was somewhere in my parents' attempt to raise me Catholic via sending me to a Catholic elementary school, but that can’t be right … can it?)

Regardless, that statement, to me, is what true horror is all about.

And that’s why I consider Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' comic series Sleeper one of the best horror comics I’ve ever read -- even if it’s more of a noir thriller with superhero underpinnings.

That’s right, folks, nary a monster in sight, and it has some spandex elements to it, to boot.

Actually, let me backpedal a moment: There are nary any monsters in this series of the traditional sense.

As Dark, But Shining mainstay Rick Geerling has been discussing and showcasing in his “Mommy’s Little Monsters” series, monsters don’t always have to be fanged beasties or radioactive creatures. Sometimes they can just be really, really screwed-up, scary, and/or damaged people.

Or people with nothing to lose.

Now, mind you, the whole “people with nothing to lose” cliché is one that usually grates on me pretty badly because it’s oftentimes so poorly used.

“His wife and family are dead and he now has nothing to lose.”

“He’s being hunted by both sides of the law and he now has nothing to lose.”

“Society has now decayed and he now has nothing left to lose.”

Is it really that the character has nothing to lose, or is it that the writer is just a lazy hack who would rather not involve the characters with even the most basic elements of societal norms and sociology?

Anyway, point being, the “nothing left to lose” bit is more often than not a crutch used by writers freeing them to write sophomoric action/revenge fantasies in which uber-tough characters can grind their teeth while contributing to the cycle of blasé action/horror fiction.

But then there are those few writers who get it right and craft a great story in the process.

And that’s what brings me back to Sleeper.

Sleeper is the story of Holden Carver, an undercover government black-ops agent so deeply embedded in a deadly terrorist organization (led by a secretive mastermind known only as Tao) that only one person knows he’s not really a murderer and a traitor -- and that man is in a coma.

D’oh!

The setup is a simple one, but Brubaker (with artist Sean Phillips) paints a dismal picture of a man who once considered himself one of the “good guys” now hopelessly adrift among some of the wickedest people on Earth.

I mean wicked-wicked. As in topple-third-world-governments-for-fun wicked.

Now either unable or willing to break cover Carver is forced to do more and more horrific things in order to stay alive and appear as a valuable member of the organization. But hey, at least he’s one of the good guys, right?

Right?

Heh.

As the story progresses -- four slim graphic novels comprise the whole Sleeper series, although a prequel book titled Point Blank sheds some additional light -- Carver comes to a horrifying epiphany: He remains a “good guy” in intentions only.

Heck, he murders former teammates in order to maintain his cover, he works for a sadistic global terrorist, his best friends are meta-human terrorists, and his girlfriend is a twisted deviant named “Miss Misery” who has to commit genuine horrific atrocities on a daily (if not hourly) basis to stay alive. (You know, like, say, pushing people in front of traffic or assaulting homeless people with 2x4s, for example.)

As Carver sinks deeper and deeper into the organization (and Tao’s favor), he continues to realize he can tell himself he’s a good guy all he wants -- but at what point do actions speak louder than intentions?

In a complicated world in which the basis of “good” and “evil” gets murkier every day, Sleeper is a chilling and horrific reflection of our times.

Sometimes the real monsters are not the creatures of legend; sometimes they’re men in suits seeking to shape the world in their own image.

Sometimes they’re good men and women willing to ignore any sense of morality (and mortality) for what they deem the greater good.

Sometimes they’re us as we go throughout our daily lives telling ourselves we’re making the right decisions just so we sleep better at night.

Aaron Weisbrod is the writer/creator of NightmareWorld.com. He has a wide scope of what he considers horror, and he hopes that, while ordering the Sleeper collections at Amazon, you’ll consider ordering his two graphic novels as well.

No Monster For You

2005-10-19T18:18:00.000-05:00

Due to events outside the control of this blog, you will not be recieving a monster of the day today.

Frankly, I'm beat, worn down, and in severe need of a nap, a beer, or a lengthy walk into Lake Michigan.

So, you'll get two monsters at some point tomorrow. And the next part of my essay. It'll be a Super Rick Thursday.

Unless I move to Guatemala overnight. Then, well, you just get bananas.

Mommy's Little Monsters -- Day Nineteen: Midterms

2005-10-19T08:01:00.000-05:00

Favorite Appearance(s): None. Ever.

...Okay. So, this isn't really my monster of the day. I will be plagued by them for much of the morning and part of the afternoon, so I won't be posting today's monster or my next essay installment until late this afternoon when I get home.

Unless I kick so much ass on this test that they make me Emperor of the World and I'm able to amass an army of robot giraffes. Then, well, you'll have to wait until tomorrow.

Contest reminder: 'We Are Seven'

2005-10-19T07:15:00.000-05:00

Some actress (left), Violet Wilkey and the legendary Mary Pickford in the 1917 adaptation of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

Five days remain in our second "All Hallow's Month" contest, "We Are Seven."

As detailed last week, we're challenging you to craft a scary short story based on the first two paragraphs of Kate Douglas Wiggin's classic children's novel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Just 250 to 500 words, in addition to those opening paragraphs. Deadline is 9 p.m. Eastern on Monday, Oct. 24. Send entries to seven@badelements.net.

The winner will receive: Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow DVD, starring Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci; Black Seas of Infinity: The Best of H.P. Lovecraft, collecting 19 short stories, including "The Call of Cthulhu," "Dagon" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"; the Vertigo: First Taste trade paperback, featuring Alan Moore's first issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing, and the debut issues of Y: The Last Man, 100 Bullets, Transmetropolitan, Books of Magick: Life During Wartime and Death: The High Cost of Living; the Sword of Dracula trade paperback, by Jason Henderson, Greg Scott, Tony Harris, et al; and the Freak Show hardcover, by Bernie Wrightson and Bruce Jones. Because I'm feeling exceedingly self-promotional, I'll also throw in issues 11 and 17 of the Digital Webbing Presents anthology, which contain the first installments of my "magical realism"/crime series, Bad Elements.

Thanks to Aaron Weisbrod, runners-up will receive a copy of his first Nightmare World trade paperback, Knee Deep in the Dead and Other Tales of Terror, and a "Cthulhu is My Homeboy" T-shirt.

For full contest details, including the two opening paragraphs, follow the link.