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Horror is Where You Find It

March 20, 2023
cinema, thoughts, we'll send him cheesy movies
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The other night, we watched The Sea Hawk (1940) for the first time. We watched this for several reasons, among them because Grace loves the old swashbuckling novels like the one this picture was adapted from. Books by folks like Rafael Sabatini (who wrote this one), Alexandre Dumas, Frank Yerby, and a variety of others, especially Samuel Shellabarger, who wrote one of Grace’s favorite books of all time, Prince of Foxes, itself adapted into a movie in 1949 starring Tyrone Power, Orson Welles, et al.

While I also like these old Hollywood movies, I was excited about this one for a particular reason. Like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), another all-timer that we watched for the first time last year, this was directed by Michael Curtiz. While Curtiz is probably best known for Casablanca, and perhaps only slightly less well-known for swashbuckling fare like this, when I think of him, the first two movies that spring to mind are two of his only horror pictures – and two of my favorite horror films of all time: Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).

I’ve written about those two films at some length various other places, but for those who are just hearing about them for the first time, know that I recommend them, especially Doctor X, as heartily as I possibly can. Not only are they two of the only surviving films shot in what’s known as “two-strip Technicolor,” lending them a lurid and unmistakable palette, they are also just dynamite examples of the horror films of Hollywood’s golden age – and horror films in general.

On those two films, and several others, Curtiz worked with Polish art director and production designer Anton Grot, who, for my money, may have been one of the best who ever plied that trade. The incredible look of both Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum owes at least as much to Grot’s work behind the scenes as to Curtiz’s work behind the camera.

Grot and Curtiz are working together again on The Sea Hawk, and while the sets here are not as filled with expressionistic horror or pulpish shadows and angles as those of Doctor X, they are no less impressive, or integral to the mood and function of the piece. From possibly the most impressive ship-to-ship battle I have ever seen, which opens the film in dramatic fashion and for which Warner Bros. had to build a larger sound stage to accommodate the full-scale ships, to minor touches in quiet scenes, the production design and art direction here is always top of the line.

In fact, there’s very little in The Sea Hawk that isn’t a shining example of Golden Age Hollywood operating at the peak of its powers. The actors, including Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, Brenda Marshall, Alan Hale, Una O’Connor, and many others, all acquit themselves nicely, while Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth is an absolute force of nature. But the human elements may be the film’s weakest links. Everything from the score (by swashbuckler stalwart Erich Wolfgang Korngold) to the costumes (by the prolific Orry-Kelly) to the scope and scale of the film itself is absolutely top-drawer Hollywood, as they only did back in those days.

Earlier on, though, I was talking about horror, and I want to address the horror bonafides in The Sea Hawk, which absolutely has them, even if we discount the involvement of Curtiz and Grot. One of the things that really sets The Sea Hawk apart from a number of the other cutlass-and-tights flicks of the era is the way in which it deftly handles a variety of disparate moods, from swashbuckling adventure to throne-room intrigue to romance to tragedy to tension and, yes, horror.

Each of these transitions is handled at once dramatically and dynamically, with touches that are often both small and ingenious. Take, for instance, the sequence of the film which takes place in the New World, where the standard “silver screen” black-and-white of the rest of the picture is replaced with a sepia tone that captures perfectly the changed feel of the setting.

This extends to the film’s few moments of genuine horror. The galleys of the Spanish ships, where slaves are whipped into pulling heavy oars, are rendered in an expressionistic scale that calls to mind the great German silent films, while an attempt at escape late in the movie is suffused with more genuine tension than most entire thrillers can ever manage. The desperation of a slog through the swamps of the New World is rendered suitably oppressive, but the real star of the horror show comes when the escaped crew of the Albatross attempt to return to their ship after an ambush.

Worn down and desperate, they row toward what should be their salvation, but even before they reach the ship, it is clear that something is very wrong. As they climb aboard a ship that should be bustling with the rest of their crew, all is silence and the grim creaking of the rigging, a setting as haunting as any ghost ship ever put on film. The real bravura touch, however, comes as they move to explore the deck, and the camera suddenly switches to a top-down shot from high in the rigging, one that expertly conveys the isolation and the unknown danger of the situation in which they find themselves.

These are only a few brief moments of horror in a film that otherwise moves effortlessly across a variety of other tones and moods, but they are no less deftly deployed for all that and for me, at least, they served to heighten what was already a most enjoyable experience with a classic film of yesteryear.

Stranger Than Fiction

February 9, 2023
cinema, freelancing, thoughts
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How much do you know about the chupacabra? Did you know that it might actually just be the alien from the 1995 movie Species? It seems that Madelyne Tolentino, the first eye witness to describe the chupacabra, had recently seen the film and may have just been describing the alien that she saw on the screen.*

It’s not even the first time something like that has happened, either. In 1972, two teenage boys in Victoria, British Columbia claimed to have seen a monster come up out of nearby Thetis Lake. The story was reported in newspapers, though the two teens eventually admitted to making it up, basing their monster description on the creature from The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965), which had recently shown on TV.

As a freelance writer, I write a lot of stuff. From corporate marketing and social media updates to true crime reporting to movie reviews and beyond. In that capacity, I often get hired to write about oddities of various kinds, from UFO sightings to cryptids to creepypastas and so on. In so doing, I learn frequently weird stuff, some of it true and some of it not. Some of it pretending to be true when it isn’t, some of it pretending not to be true when it is.

Some of what I stumble across makes it into whatever work I’m doing that day. Some of it is quickly forgotten. Some gets stored in the back of my brain and trotted out for something later, or repurposed into something like this blog post. Frankly, the world is filled with fascinating factoids and perhaps even more filled still with things that we believe even though they aren’t true.

Then again, many things are mixture of true and false. Take Project Sanguine, for instance. A real (and obviously extremely practical) government project originating during the Cold War, Project Sanguine would have turned literally 40% of Wisconsin into a giant radio antenna by embedding cables into the bedrock. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was never carried out. But I learned about Project Sanguine while researching Doveland, Wisconsin, an urban legend or creepypasta about a town that supposedly disappeared – and whose disappearance some people blamed on Project Sanguine.

Of course, for every Project Sanguine that turns out to be legit, there’s something that has been accepted as legit even though it’s just emphatically made-up. Take, for example, the story of the Brazilian village of Hoer Verde, which allegedly disappeared back in the 1920s. The story caught on enough to make its way into the 2019 video game Control – but its origin was almost certainly the 1983 Dean Koontz novel Phantoms.

(The Russian newspaper article that originally spread the Hoer Verde story also, and I am getting this secondhand via translation, so grain of salt, blames the Roanoke disappearance on “protoplasm coming from deep in the ocean and eating people,” which it does every thousand years. So maybe we should have been skeptical from the start, is all I’m saying.)

None of this is intended to make fun of the credulity of anyone, though. While we should all be careful about believing what we read on the internet, this is far from a phenomenon that is unique to our modern age. Take H. L. Mencken’s notorious fake history of the bathtub from 1917, which was circulated as true for decades.

Rather, I’m just posting this here because my work occasionally fills my head with lots of weird information, and I don’t always have the luxury of sharing it. (Such as the phenomenon of invisible fire and the low-tech solution NASA worked out to deal with it, or Taku-He, a South Dakota cryptid who is basically Bigfoot but wearing a fancy coat and top hat.) Today, things like Project Sanguine and that information about the chupacabra were buzzing around in my brain, and I thought my readers might also enjoy them. That’s all.

* Of course, reports of similar phenomena go back as far as 1975, where they were simply attributed to Satanic cults or to “the vampire of Moca,” named for the place they were first reported. But both the name and the general description of the chupacabra as we know it today date from 1995, the latter from Tolentino’s eye witness testimony, the former coined by comedian and radio DJ Silverio Perez.

“I dedicate this accursed prose to the damned.” – Junji Ito: Maniac on Netflix

January 22, 2023
cinema, we'll send him cheesy movies
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I have, as of this writing, seen the vast majority of the live action properties that have been adapted from the works of Junji Ito, but precious few of the animated ones. When it comes to live action films, virtually the only gaps in my viewing record are Scarecrow from 2001 and 2011’s Tomio, directed by Ito himself, whilst Junji Ito: Maniac is the first of the various anime adaptations I’ve seen, skipping over Gyo and the previous Junji Ito Collection, the latter because I have heard… not good things.

Was I excited about Junji Ito: Maniac, which actually has an incredibly unwieldy title that adds a whole extra clause that I won’t bother reproducing here? Cautiously. At least the key art that they had trotted out for the show seemed good and, honestly, if the series had ever lived up to any of that key art, we might have had something special on our hands here.

Unfortunately, some of the same people behind the Junji Ito Collection are responsible for this one, and Junji Ito: Maniac certainly gets off to a rocky start, beginning with one of the most inappropriate opening songs I’ve heard in a while. For one thing, the show makes the decision to adapt several of Ito’s more comic stories, including two featuring the morbid Soichi, as well as the first episode, “The Strange Hikizuri Siblings.” We can debate the effectiveness of Ito’s humorous tales, but for me they number among his weakest even while, in the context of his overall oeuvre, they serve a similar function to the “hot and cold showers” of the Grand Guignol. More to the point, “Hikizuri Siblings,” as it is presented in the anime, is handily the worst episode of the bunch.

In fact, it takes until episode 3, a faithful adaptation of “Hanging Balloons,” one of Ito’s most classically Ito stories, before the series really tackles anything that feels more that slight. Even here, however, we see one of the key difficulties of adapting Ito to the screen. The style of animation used for Junji Ito: Maniac is generic to the point of feeling almost sterile – an approach that could potentially work, if the style took a sharp turn during each episode’s reveals of horrific scenes, in order to deliver some extra punch. However, that’s mostly not the case here, and even Ito’s most disturbing panels are rendered inert as a result.

It isn’t until “Intruder,” in episode 5, that the series rises above “literal but uninspiring adaptation.” The original story behind “Intruder” was part of a series of linked pieces, and here it feels like it ends prematurely, but the music and production decisions here at least make “Intruder” feel like its own thing in ways that help to distinguish it from the manga while also working on their own merits. It’s something the show will pull off all-too-seldom, with one other notable example being “Unendurable Labyrinth” in episode 10.

More than perhaps anything else, Maniac is a case study in why adaptation is about more than merely reproducing things as directly as possible. The stories follow Ito’s manga almost exactly and, as such, many of them are spooky enough on their own merits, especially if you’ve never read the original story. (“Tomb Town” was a new one for me, for instance, and kept me involved the whole time as a result.) But they all still feel like pale reproductions of something much better, even when they’re at their best.

Indeed, this has generally been the case with adaptations of Ito’s work, which struggle to find ways to bring to a new medium what makes his pieces so effective and affecting in their original format. Pretty much the only Ito adaptations I have seen that really justify their own existence are the live-action Long Dream and Uzumaki from 2000, both of which were helmed by the same director, who managed to bring their own sense of indelible weirdness to the proceedings, capturing the feel of an Ito manga, rather than merely the text of one.

This is the End

December 30, 2022
appearances, cinema, freelancing, how to see ghosts, lists, privateer press, reading materials, secret identity, tabletop, year in review
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As I write this, we are less than two days away from the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. I’m not going to pretend that 2022 has been an especially good or easy year for… well, anyone, really. Or that 2023 looks inclined to change that trajectory overmuch. But some big things happened for me this year, most of them in the last couple of months.

Earlier in the year, the third set of books for the Iron Kingdoms: Requiem 5e RPG setting hit Kickstarter. As was the case in the previous two installments, I wrote a huge amount for these books, including some very fun stuff that I’m really looking forward to people getting to see. And, as I write this, I’m working on some future stuff in the IK setting, as well.

As usual, I wrote a lot of movie reviews (mostly for older movies getting released onto Blu-ray) and attended Panic Fest back in April, covering it for The Pitch. I also became the movies editor for Exploits, an Unwinnable publication, and acquired some fun essays on movies like The Monster Club, Night of the Devils, Anna and the Apocalypse, The Ghosts of Hanley House, and more. In fact, I kicked off my tenure by immediately making them regret putting me on staff, acquiring an essay from Perry Ruhland on Mermaid in a Manhole. And I “helped” (by not actually contributing much, ultimately) with the movie programming for the NecronomiCon in Providence, even though I then wasn’t actually able to attend due to various circumstances beyond my control.

I also continued to write three regular columns (two monthlies and one quarterly) and added another monthly, while I was at it. So, currently, I write about board games at Unwinnable, folk horror and old anthology TV shows at Signal Horizon, and whatever tickles my fancy, pretty much, at Weird Horror. (You can read my latest, on Man-Thing and Swamp Thing and the weird history of muck monsters, here.)

I continued to co-host the Horror Pod Class with Tyler Unsell of Signal Horizon and, more to the point, we switched over from just doing a standard talking heads podcast to actually hosting the movies we discuss and then recording live at the Stray Cat Film Center. We kicked that off back in March with 976-Evil, and since then we’ve shown Someone’s Watching Me!, Doctor Mordrid, The Mask (not the Jim Carrey one), Night of the Creeps, Uzumaki, Ghostwatch, Yellowbrickroad, and we sadly had to cancel Bloody New Year due to inclement weather. We’ll be kicking off the first part of our 2023 season with The Undying Monster on January 26, so if you’re local, come join us at the Stray Cat for one of my favorite werewolf (?) movies from the ’40s!

Over the course of 2022, I read 42 books, the lion’s share of which were graphic novels. That’s… far from ideal, but here we are. Of those, some notable titles include Jonathan Raab’s The Haunting of Camp Winter Falcon, Victoria Dalpe’s collection Les Femmes Grotesques, Abby Howard’s 2020 graphic novel The Crossroads at Midnight, all of the Orochi volumes that Viz has put out so far, and John Dickson Carr’s 1932 novel The Corpse in the Waxworks.

I also watched an impressive 345 movies so far in the year, though that number may increase by, like, one or two before the year is out. That’s also perilously close to an average of a movie a day, a feat only accomplished by a few days in which I watched several movies in 24 hours, such as during Panic Fest and my annual attendance of Nerdoween. At a glance, that appears to be the most I’ve watched in a single year since I started keeping a journal, which I guess is an accomplishment.

Of those, more than 265 were first-time watches for me, easily demolishing my goal of keeping to at least half “new-to-me” movies each year. Of those, some of my favorites that didn’t come out this year were The Medusa Touch (1978), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Glass Key (1942), The Psychic (1977), Jigsaw (1962), War of the Gargantuas (1966), The Flying Phantom Ship (1969), and Mute Witness (1995). You can see the rest of the list over here. By far the best new-to-me movie that I saw in 2022, however, was The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964), one of my favorite new discoveries in a long, long time.

As for movies that came out in 2022, I saw a surprising number of those, as well. Around 35, in fact. We’ll be discussing our favorites on the Horror Pod Class in January, so I won’t do a top 5 or anything, but despite a lot of perfectly good movies this year, very few of the year’s new releases (that I saw) were anything that I fell in love with. There was no Malignant this year, is what I’m saying.

So, that’s all the (substantial, as it turns out) bookkeeping stuff taken care of. With all that going on, it is perhaps unsurprising that I didn’t publish a lot of new fiction in 2022, and of the five or so stories I did put out, two are original to my newest collection. And maybe that’s the biggest news, at least from a professional standpoint: How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, my third collection from Word Horde and my fourth overall, came out in October, though at the time I was a little distracted.

You see, in October we also bought a new house! And I’ve been a little distracted ever since then because, to be frank, a lot has gone wrong since we moved in. We still love the house, though! It just seems that the people who sold it to us don’t particularly love us. (And we’re not terribly fond of them, at this point.)

Those have been the two biggest changes in a year filled with personal milestones – my twentieth wedding anniversary was also earlier this year, for example. As I said, 2023 promises to be filled with new challenges along with a bunch of the same old challenges and honestly, the world is probably just going to be on fire for the foreseeable future. But I’m hopeful that I can achieve some more milestones, too. My goals for 2023 include more reading, publishing more stories, and hopefully some exciting surprises for my readers. Plus, of course, more of the same, too.

“Lifeless images rendered in colorful goop.” – Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022)

October 29, 2022
cinema, thoughts
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I feel like I probably don’t need to explain why I was excited about Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (it’s always weird to me that his name is part of the title). Del Toro is one of my favorite contemporary directors and, more to the point, one whose sensibilities very often line up with my own. I love ambitious anthology horror series. This was a big deal for me.

And like any horror anthology series, it was hit and miss. I’d say the eight episodes that dropped on Netflix across four days were about 50/50 for me, but the good half were quite good, and even the ones I didn’t like as much were generally interesting. Of the eight episodes, I was most excited about “Graveyard Rats” going in, just because I love the story and think it would translate really well to film in the short form. And maybe it would, done another way, but this wasn’t it… at least for me. (I’m told there’s a black-and-white version available, and I’m very curious to check that out.)

A lot of other people seem to have loved it, so maybe my high hopes contributed to my disappointment. It’s certainly got a lot of critters in it, anyway. And that’s part of the thing with Cabinet of Curiosities; with the exception of Jennifer Kent’s “The Murmuring,” every episode has at least one or two monsters of some sort. And they’re usually quite good. “The Viewing” is another one I didn’t care for (not a Panos Cosmatos fan), but the monster in it was great.

So, which ones did I like? Well, I liked the first episode, “Lot 36,” and thought it started the series off on a strong footing, even if its lore was a little muddled and its monster relied perhaps too much on CGI. And I loved “Pickman’s Model” (that ghoul!), even though it doesn’t seem like most other folks dug it as much as me. Chalk that up to me liking the story, I guess, and also thinking it adapts well. But also, I mean, there are a lot of monsters and grotesques and such in this take on “Pickman’s Model,” and for striking imagery, it wins the show hands down, IMO. And I could listen to Crispin Glover’s Boston-ish accent all day long.

This is also reflective of something about this show, as a whole. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of Masters of Horror. For some obvious reasons: both were pure anthology shows with each segment roughly an hour long and helmed by a different, generally well-established horror director. But there’s more to it than that. Like Masters of Horror, Cabinet of Curiosities has a certain amount of shared aesthetic from one episode to the next, even as the stories (and the directors) pull them in different directions.

In Cabinet of Curiosities you can lay that at least partly at the feet of showrunner Del Toro, most likely, but it also highlights some of the stars of the show, which are the people working behind the scenes. Guy Davis was a concept artist for pretty much the whole series, as I understand it, while Kevin McTurk puppeteered many of the monsters. And those are just two of the ones whose work I was already familiar with. For “Pickman’s Model,” for instance, you need examples of Pickman’s paintings, and in this case many of those were provided by Vincent Proce.

Besides the Masters of Horror of it all, there are some interesting decisions made in Cabinet of Curiosities. Of course, I am thrilled that GDT decided to go full Rod Serling and host the series himself. There’s also the fact that literally every episode is a period piece. Not all of them are the turn-of-the-century Victoriana of “Graveyard Rats” or “Pickman’s Model.” The first episode is set Stateside during the Gulf War. Panos Cosmatos’ segment is set in the ’70s. “The Murmuring” in the ’50s. And so on. But not one is set in the present, with the weird, indefinite period of Ana Lily Amirpour’s “The Outside” coming closest.

There are probably lots of reasons for this – I’ve already seen at least one person online trot out the “no cellphones” cliche – but what I find interesting about it is that it taps (perhaps accidentally) into the antiquarian bent that informs so many classic ghost stories but also the cabinets of curiosities for which the show is named. These episodes, then, become artifacts from another time; capturing, in at least some cases, perhaps an older style of horror.

I haven’t yet mentioned “The Autopsy,” which was, for a lot of viewers, their favorite episode. It was my second-favorite. But if I’m being entirely honest, the first half of “The Autopsy” is my favorite episode of the entire series. It’s only in its second half that it falters. And that’s not really a condemnation of the episode itself. I’m just less interested in where the story goes than in the journey it takes to get there. That was true of the original short story by Michael Shea, as well, if memory serves. That journey, though? So good.

So, all in all, was Cabinet of Curiosities a triumph? Yes and no. It was not a perfect series. Few series are. It had episodes that landed with resounding thuds for me, but I almost always found them interesting, even then. But it was an absolute triumph in at least one sense. We need more well-funded anthology horror in the world, especially when it brings in the talents of some of the best in the business, both in front of and behind the scenes.

And if anyone wants my opinions, I’ve got some suggestions for stories to adapt for season two…

The Old Ways

October 18, 2022
appearances, cinema, countdown to halloween, halloween, how to see ghosts
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“It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands, and we’d be waiting in our houses of wattles and clay. The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal, and the dead might be looking in to sit by our fires of turf.”
– Halloween 3 (1982)

However you feel about them, traditions are one of the ways we anchor ourselves – to the past, to our families and friends, to the world we know. From traditions that are part of cultural norms (presents at Christmas, fireworks at the 4th of July, the basic structures of weddings and funerals) to personal rituals that are bespoke for each individual, we all have them.

For me, one tradition that has settled in over the past decade is Nerdoween. It happens every October, hosted by the gents from the Nightmare Junkhead podcast. A themed triple-feature of horror movies, with the titles a mystery until the picture begins to roll. I went to the very first one, eight years ago now, and saw both Demons and Night of the Demons for the first time. (The third film on the docket was Demon Knight, but by then it was early morning and I had just watched Demon Knight the week before, as it happened.)

My adopted brother, Jay, came with me to that first Nerdoween, and he’s been with me at every one since. Over the course of the intervening years, I’ve seen twenty more movies courtesy of Nerdoween, skipping out on only one, for similar reasons to why I missed Demon Knight that first time around. Of those movies, 22 in total, counting that first year, nine were first-time watches. Which, given how many horror movies I’ve consumed, is a pretty good average. Every year but two I saw at least one movie for the first time.

This year’s theme was eating, and the movie I saw for the first time was Gnaw: The Food of the Gods 2 (1989), which was an experience. I did that over this previous weekend, when I also partook of a somewhat less long-lived but equally vital Halloween tradition: an Analog Sunday double feature, this time watching Dead Inn (1997) and Witches Sabbath (2005).

For those who have been following along for a while, you’ll know that Analog Sunday has become an important part of my life over the last few years. Through it, I’ve seen all sorts of movies I would probably otherwise never have experienced and, even more importantly, made some of my closest friends. Recently, it has moved into the Rewind bar in the basement of the Screenland Armour, which has been accompanied by some growing pains, but this double-feature was back upstairs and felt like a return to old times.

After watching five movies at the Screenland in two days, I drove back just two days later and hosted a screening of House on Haunted Hill (1999), a movie that has been a favorite since I first saw it in its Halloween theatrical run. Back then, I had never seen the original 1959 version, which has since become my literal favorite movie of all time.

The screening was fun. Haunted Hill ’99 makes for good seasonal programming. Spooky and campy and occasionally genuinely deranged. We had a good crowd, including one person who was seeing her first horror movie in a theatre. I think she picked a good one to start.

Eli, who hosts Analog Sunday, loaned me his tombstone props, and so I was able to decorate the place for some ambiance – harkening back to when I first saw the much worse haunted house movie of 1999, Jan de Bont’s frankly terrible remake of The Haunting, on opening night in a Wichita theatre whose lobby was decked out in fog machines and fake headstones.

That’s almost it for me this Halloween season, when it comes to appearances and theatrical endeavors. There’s just one left – another thing that has become a monthly staple, hosting a movie followed by a live podcast at the Stray Cat Film Center. It’s something that we’ve only been doing for a short while now, but it’s going strong. Last month, we did Uzumaki, which had our best turn-out to date. For Halloween, on October 27, we’re showing the movie that I’m probably most excited about of anything we’ve done yet: the 1992 faux newscast Ghostwatch.

It’s going to be a special night. And, in a lot of ways, the culmination of what has felt like a special Halloween season, despite some behind-the-scenes things that have kept me busier and less engaged than I might otherwise be. And the season isn’t over yet. There should be some news about my next collection, How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, coming very soon now…

“You wanna play games you will lose.” – Hellraiser (2022)

October 8, 2022
cinema, we'll send him cheesy movies
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Let me be clear, David Bruckner’s new Hellraiser does a lot of things well. The expansion of the Lament Configuration’s design, while unnecessary, is fun. The puzzle-box effects as the Cenobites arrive are great (there’s a sequence in a van that, as Trevor Henderson points out, is worth the price of admission) and the Cenobites themselves are well-designed and nicely performed throughout, even if they also all look like they’re already NECA action figures.

But, underneath all that, the film is so sterile and not even remotely horny, which are such weird things for a Hellraiser movie to be. As I said on social media, “I don’t know how to explain it but, despite having several sex scenes, this new Hellraiser emphatically does not fuck.” There is no passion underneath this machinery.

Ironically enough, David Bruckner’s last film, The Night House, which was, itself, rumored to be a repurposed Hellraiser spec script, is actually probably a better Hellraiser movie. Sure, it still doesn’t fuck either, but at least it kind of understands what fucking is. It’s not as grand as this film turned out to be, and if it had been released under the standalone title Hellraiser, as a reboot of the first film, as this one was, the fanbase would have been rabid. But it had a better handle on obsession, which is what you really have to get, even more than passion, to get Hellraiser.

Days and Nights

September 29, 2022
appearances, cinema, countdown to halloween, halloween, how to see ghosts, lists, secret identity
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October is an important month to me. I’ve talked a lot about this before. As a horror writer and person who predominantly consumes horror media, it’s a big time of year for me. Most years for the past decade or so, I’ve had a new book coming out in October, and this year will (hopefully) be no different, assuming supply chain issues don’t kick How to See Ghosts & Other Figments a little later into the season.

None of that is really why I love October so much, though. I love Halloween. It’s my favorite time of year. I love the grinning pumpkins, the autumn leaves, the fake cobwebs, and all that jazz. I love the fun of it, the carnival curtain covering the morbid reminder of our own mortality. I love autumn, the time of year that feels most right to me.

Every October, in various ways and for various reasons, I try to make the month feel special. For myself, for my friends and family, and for those who follow me online. This year, some things have come up. Nothing bad. In fact, some possibly quite good. But they’re going to change the dynamic of how I spend my time over the coming weeks.

Most years, I try to do a #31NightsofHalloween countdown on Twitter, running through what I’m watching, reading, and otherwise imbibing to celebrate the season. I’ll still be doing that, but there’s a real chance that I won’t be consuming quite as much as I otherwise would.

There are still some really exciting events happening in October. Nerdoween on the 15th, Analog Sunday on the 16th, and Tyler Unsell and I hosting Ghostwatch on the 27th at the Stray Cat Film Center. Not to mention my book which, hopefully, I’ll have more news about soon. And I’ll probably fit more other stuff in around that than even I am expecting. But if October is a little quiet this year, it’s not for any bad reason, and not for lack of enthusiasm.

The spirit, as they say, is willing.

In the meantime, I’ve seen a lot of folks asking for recommendations for movies to watch during the spooky season, and over on Twitter I’ve compiled a thread (two of them, actually) of some of the best ones I’ve ever seen that most folks never talk about. These are not just some oddities (that I love) that I have encountered over the years. These are, at least for my money, dyed-in-the-wool classics, every bit the match of their more famous counterparts, in various ways, and any one of them should be a guaranteed homerun for your Halloween viewing.

The Xenomorph Under the Table

September 16, 2022
appearances, cinema, tabletop, thoughts
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Starting last night, I began playing a game of the Alien RPG from Free League with Stu Horvath and the folks at Team Unwinnable. The game, a pre-gen “cinematic” scenario called “Destroyer of Worlds,” is a subscriber reward unlocked during the mag’s last subscription drive – and, incidentally, the next one is coming up soon.

We’ll be playing every Thursday night for at least the next couple of weeks and live-streaming the results, so feel free to tune in to Unwinnable’s Twitch channel, if you’re into that kind of thing. You can also watch not-live recordings of the previous game sessions, such as last night’s.

This is my first experience with live-streaming a roleplaying game – or anything else, really, although we did some live-streamed episodes of the Horror Pod Class for a while. It’s also my first experience with the Alien RPG, which is more what I’m here to talk about.

Longtime readers will know that the Alien franchise – and Aliens, in particular – holds a special place in my heart, so playing a game based around it, and specifically one in which we play marines, feeds back into a lot of things from my early life.

The Alien RPG is one of those roleplaying games that presents a much narrower field of possibilities than something like D&D. You would think this limitation, combined with an extensive knowledge of the source material, might make for games that felt stagnant or free from tension. Last night, at least, we found the opposite to be true.

There’s a very famous quote, from an interview with Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut, in which Hitchcock explains the difference between suspense and surprise. “Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us,” Hitchcock begins. If the audience doesn’t know it’s there, everyone is surprised when it goes off. However, if the audience does know that it’s there, but the characters do not, that creates suspense.

(That’s a very shortened version. The full conversation is in Hitchcock/Truffaut.)

Something that is easy to forget in a roleplaying game is that you are both the audience and the protagonists. If you’re playing it right, there will be things that you, the players, know that your characters do not.

In some ways, narrative-focused games like Alien are better at exposing and exploiting this tension between character and player than a game like D&D could ever be – and there are other games, more narrative-driven yet, that are better at it still, and that even make it their central mechanism.

In the case of last night’s Alien game, our previous familiarity with the subject matter acted as the audience’s knowledge of the bomb beneath the table, forcing us, as players, to push our characters into situations that we knew (or thought we knew) were going to be disastrous, because they had no way of knowing what we knew. It also allowed us (the players) to be taken in by red herrings – misdirects for the audience that are largely meaningless to the characters.

It’s a reminder that RPGs are capable of more than we often remember to give them credit for, and a very sharp demonstration of Hitchcock’s bomb-under-the-table theory of suspense, and I’m looking forward to more surprises, more tension, more comedy, and more carnage in future installments of this Alien RPG live-stream!

Monster Season

September 5, 2022
appearances, cinema, halloween, how to see ghosts
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“It’s a perfect night for mystery and horror. The air itself is filled with monsters.”
– Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

No sooner had the calendar flipped than the skirmishes began. September 1 is either still summer, or it’s the first day of Halloween. At least by observing the battle lines drawn up on Twitter and elsewhere across social media, you must choose a side.

Naturally, and to the surprise of no one, I am on the side of the Autumn People, described so evocatively by Ray Bradbury in Something Wicked This Way Comes: “For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond.”

There is a story in Ian Rogers’ Every House is Haunted which argues that autumn is a uniquely magical season because it is the only one that doesn’t exist in perpetuity somewhere on Earth. There are places where it is, for all intents and purposes, always winter, always summer, or even, arguably, always spring. But there is no place where it is always autumn.

There is, in other words, no October Country (described again by Bradbury): “That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay.”

Perhaps the only country where it can be autumn all year round is the one in our hearts.

On September 1, I put up my Halloween decorations this year. As the rough beast that is Christmas slouches ever earlier in the year, decorative gourd season is squeezed shorter and shorter each anum, so what harm if it bleeds a little into the summer?

Little enough else of my behavior changes with the changing of the season. I am one of those Autumn People, and I watch monster movies all year long. If anything, only the tenor of the movies I seek out changes with the leaves. As the season turns, I want movies that evoke that small-town, autumnal beauty that represents Halloween as much as grinning pumpkins or sheeted ghosts.

I reach back, even more than I do the rest of the time, to black-and-white horrors that feel delightfully stagebound. To films that crunch with dry autumn leaves underfoot. October proper has its own traditions. There’s Nerd-o-ween, which I will be attending once again this year at the Screenland Armour, making my eighth year in a row, never having missed an occurrence, even the year that I was dying. There’s Analog Sunday, which will be rolling out a double-feature, and the Horror Pod Class, where we’ll be hosting Ghostwatch at the Stray Cat Film Center. And then, of course, there’s the fact that my own new collection should be out in time for Halloween – or thereabouts.

While September is the first month of Halloween, though, it hasn’t quite reached the same saturation point for me. Monster movies are still the order of the day, wherever possible, or creaky thrillers replete with cobwebs. But the seasonal quality of them hasn’t yet solidified. Alien invaders and city-crushing kaiju are still fair game in September, as much as they are the rest of the year.

As I said, I keep the October Country in my heart year round, but I also watch a lot of other kinds of movies. In September and October, it’s monster weather. Ghost stories will come, as October ramps up and the winter gradually shakes the leaves from the trees. For the moment, though, give me rubber creatures or old dark houses, and I’ll be happy – a sentiment that I could honestly aver any time of year, without hesitation.