Coming back to the blog

Me as Prince Charming. With the chick from The Grudge. Halloween 2010.

Fear not gentle readers! I have not abandoned you.

Well, maybe I did a little. Most of the creative and critical juices that usually go to this blog have been going to a horror comic I'm working on with a coworker. Maybe it's gonna forever change the face of popular entertainment or maybe we'll get distracted the next time someone tosses a shiny thing into my cubicle, but I've been happily tinkering on other stuff and have turned away from the blog I call home.

Which is not to say I've taken a hiatus from horror. Lord no. I'm still watching the movies and reading the books and playing the game and listening to the songs and buying the Halloween costumes. As I type this at my desk at work (thank you, site outages) I have a copy of Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti on the desk.

When I left off, I had begun an article on The Last Exorcism, a film I greatly enjoyed. There was a lot of stuff to unpack about that movie and I sorta froze up. So, rather than try to cover the VAST swath of horror junk I've done this summer, I'll try to summarize very briefly:



The Last Exorcism: While it's a little too flip to call this the new Exorcist, I thought TLE was one of the most remarkable horror films I've seen recently. The films basically follow the same plot, but by replacing the rigid dogma of the Catholic Church with the provincial fanaticism of small town America made the movie feel oddly more contemporary. I liked the fact that the narrative follows the preacher more than the family. He's charismatic and compelling and he was one of the strongest characters in horror history. Everyone in the movie is very interesting and engaging, from the fundamentalist father to the combative camera crew. Finally, I liked the fact that, unlike The Exorcist, the movie retains the possibility that all the possession stuff could just be a figment of the girl's damaged mind. The only problem I had with the movie was the ridiculous ending, which I gather derailed the film for a lot of moviegoers, but I'll give up five terrible minutes for 85 good ones.



Teatro Grottesco: I just finished Thomas Ligotti's anthology and I've got to say that I'm clearly not smart enough to appreciate his work. It's the sort of thing that fundamentally won't click with me as Ligotti's horror style is a bit too surrealistic for my maddeningly linear sensibilities, but he's good. His style is Lovecraftian in the truest sense of the word; rather than recycling Lovecraft's gods from the beyond with unpronounceable names, he infuses his stories with a nameless dread as damaged narrators sink deeper and deeper into the terrible horrors inflicted on them.

My only real complaint with the anthology is that they almost completely lack characterization. All the stories are told in first person, all use precise speech, all the narrators so sort of psychological malady, many are artists or have artistic friends, many have stomach ailments, and so on. He's great at creating tension but there wasn't much stuff for me to grab on to. Still, I'm coming back for his other work.



Pigeons From Hell: Possibly the most ridiculously-titled story I've ever encountered, PfH is one of the most famous stories ever written by Conan creator Robert E. Howard. I read while plowing through an anthology of horror tales. While Howard was an amazing pulp writer, his stories sort of flow together and trying to plow through his entire catalog in one sitting is a bad idea. The book also included Black Canaan, which was probably the most racist thing I've ever seen put to paper. I was about to set the book aside after that, but over the years I'd heard enough positive things about PfH, including Stephen King saying it's one of the best horror stories ever written, that I wanted to give it a shot.

PfH is one of the scariest horror stories I've ever read in my life.

I realized recently that I seldom read horror the way it's meant to be read. I read horror in bathrooms and on subways. It's usually well lit and I'm usually surrounded by oppressive New York City crowds and I'm rarely in the right environment to be too affected by the stories. I read PfH in bright daylight on the subway platform and it still scared me.

It's got everything a good horror story needs. There's a decaying southern manor, a couple of walking corpses, a guy with an axe in his head, voodoo curses, the most trusting sheriff in all fiction, vigorous manly combat, and evil local legends. I can't recommend this tale highly enough.



Dracula: The Un-Dead: I'd seen this book around for some time but I didn't pick it up until recently. Written as a sequel to the original Bram Stoker novel and co-authored by a Dracula expert and Stoker's great grand nephew, the book has been drubbed for essentially rewriting the original story and making Dracula a romantic, misunderstood hero. For what is meant to be a loving tribute to the original, the book almost completely invalidates everything that's come before.

However, if you can get past all that, it's a ripping adventure story. It has the pacing and derring-do of a fun action film. There are evil monsters, swashbuckling heroes, sexy sex, and carriage chases through the streets of London.

The book is a little too concerned with retreading and reinterpreting old ground, and it's efforts to cast Dracula in a sympathetic light ultimately renders the heroic adventurers of the original novel as a bunch of embittered, violent lunatics. The lead hero, the spoiled actor son of Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray, comes off as spoiled, hard headed, and unlikable. But if you're willing to see this as more fanfic than proper follow-up then it's an entertaining action horror novel.



Soul: Soul was the last thing that really scared the crap out of me.

I found this game through Xbox 360s indie game store, where it was a featured selection for Halloween. It's a simple, beautiful little game. You guide a glowing little soul out of a dead body and lead it up into heaven. If you accidentally bump into any of the walls or the blobby demons, you have to start the area from the beginning. Simple enough.

I didn't expect the fucking girl.

You see her about three screens in, this strange little creature standing in your way. As you accidentally brush past her, the screen suddenly changes to this terrifying bitch screaming at you. When this first happened, I jumped 30 feet in the air, screaming my head off. Once I calmed down, I realized that I was playing a high-tech version of the old maze game.

So it's a scam, but it's a brilliantly done scam. The art is beautiful, the gameplay is compelling, and if you fail enough, the chick comes out and scares you again. Because the game requires a lot of concentration, she gets you when you're not ready.

And, hours later, her face kept popping up in the dark. Damn her.



Piranha 3D: I saw Piranha 3D completely drunk.

My office has a lot of celebratory liquor they leave unguarded and I decided that four shots of vodka and four beers would be a good way to start my weekend off. I was planning on going with an NYC Horror Movie meetup group, but I grossly miscalculated how much alcohol I could handle.

I had a great time.

I don't know what I would have thought about the movie sober. The stuff I remember wasn't exactly subtle, but it was a fun little exploitation flick with tons of "Oh Shit" moments. While it rankles my fake-intellectual, ultra liberal point of view, I have to admit that sometimes blood and boobs can be a lot of fun.



Predators: This was supposed to be the movie that saves the Predator franchise. It took the Predators away from their battles with aliens and brought the series back to it's roots: a bunch of tough guys out in the jungle behind hunted by an unfathomable adversary.

It doesn't quite work. Some of the characters are a little ridiculous (Yakuza? Serial killer doctor?), the dialogue displays a bit too much meta humor, and there's too much of thing I can't stand where characters talk about their motivations too directly, so they grow too obvious as the movie goes on. Ultimately, however, the filmmakers strove to emulate the first film so closely that they made essentially an inferior copy. I basically enjoyed it, but when I left the theater I couldn't help but think that it was a film that didn't need to be made.

Adrian Brody kicked ass, though.



Let Me In: I really wanted this movie to succeed even before it came out. I knew they were planning a near shot-for-shot remake of the original, but I just wanted more Americans to see this movie and realize that vampires still have some viciousness to them, that they're not all bad-boy romance novel leads.

Silly me, I should have realized that people aren't actually interested in scary vampires. Let Me In flopped, which is a shame because it's a really good remake. It jettisons a lot of the extraneous stuff around the characters (no CGI cat attack) and keeps the focus square on the kids. The vampire girl is much less alien and cold this time around, the vampire's caregiver is given greater characterization and pathos, and the boy is much more vulnerable and less special needsy.

The movie hits all the same notes in more or less the same way and I did at times wonder, like Predators, why they bothered remaking it in the first place. Still, this was an excellent horror film and I'm sorry it tanked as hard as it did.



Warlock: Warlock is one of those weird movies I have a slightly overblown sense of nostalgia for. I remember loving as a kid, especially Julian Sands' performance as the diabolical, flamboyantly evil warlock. I remembered the Warlock movies as being action-packed romps with a villain so gleefully melodramatic that he came off like a Saturday morning cartoon character with the chains off.

I recently rewatched the first film and I have to say that it still holds up very well. The warlock is still completely entertaining and I really loved the buddy-comedy duo that goes after him. I especially liked the flighty party girl who accompanies the grim crusader in his quest to capture the warlock. She comes off as a real person; mercurial and impatient, but with genuine steel in her spine. I liked how spooked the normally-unflappable crusader was when he came across his own grave. Finally, I loved the weird toe-and-thumb cuffs the crusader binds the warlock in. They're both authentic-seeming, and absolutely ridiculous. This movie, distributed by legendary genre studio Cannon, was made in the halcyon days before CGI and all the flashy effects work looks very quaint and cool.

There's really nothing wrong with this movie. Give it another look.



I Spit On Your Grave Remake: Whoa.

Many, many moons ago, I was really into martial arts and wound up assisting in a self-defense course at the community college I attended after high school. The vast majority of the students were young women and I eventually sussed out that most were there out of a very real fear that they would be attacked and sexually assaulted. As a dude, you don't really think about that sort of thing. When I walked through a dark campus after my late classes, I was worried about getting jumped and robbed, not about getting violated. Coming to that realization was very eye-opening.

I saw I Spit during a free preview screening. The vast majority of the audience were women.

Rape/revenge films are always a touchy subject and I Spit is easily the most notorious of the lot, thanks in particular to Roger Ebert's scathing review of the original. He wasn't much kinder to the remake, but I think in his extreme patronizing, that he missed something of the point. I Spit is an ugly film, and maybe we are ugly people for wanting to watch it, but I can't say I really felt titillated by the painfully long rape scene. It was horrifying and heartbreaking and the viewer is forced to see things from Jennifer's point of view. Jennifer's assailants aren't sexy or masculine. They're just cruel and she is absolutely vulnerable in the face of their cruelty.

I hear a lot about the appeal of horror is that it allows us to confront, in a small safe way, the terrible aspects of life. I refuse to believe that there weren't people in the audience who were projecting themselves onto Jennifer and seeing what her situation would feel like.

The second half of the film loses a bit of steam for me, as Jennifer's revenge becomes a bit over the top and torture porn-y, but I like the way the film focuses on the men and the way they're almost literally haunted by the spectre of what they've done. I don't know if I can say I enjoyed the film, but it was tremendously engaging.



The Walking Dead: This one is a little premature, as I've only seen the first episode. I like what I've seen so far.

I'm pretty much done with the zombie genre. It's completely overplayed, full of cliches, unoriginal, and entirely too prolific. Occasionally something clever comes along, but I have a hard time enjoying even the clever little variations to the genre.

I had believed that, in order to reinvent the genre, the next zombie film would have to radically alter the formula to the point where the old cliches simply couldn't happen. It turns out I was wrong and the real salvation for the genre is in bringing back the humanity to the genre.

Frank Darabont is really good at injecting humanity into horror. His adaption of Stephen King's The Mist stands as one of the most touching, darkest horror movies of all time. He has a gift for intelligent, mature, emotionally rich storytelling and watching his stuff makes you realize just how rare those traits are in the genre. Watching The Walking Dead reminds me that all you need to make a stale genre interesting again is to create compelling drama amid the bloodshed.

I'm not a huge fan of the comic book. I think Robert Kirkman is in desperate need of an editor and his characters spend a lot of time coldly explaining their feelings towards one another. I think The Walking Dead fits best in Darabont's hands and I defy anyone to watch the scene of the man hesitating to shoot the reanimated corpse of his wife to not be moved. Zombie movies are ultimately about what death means to us. It's an amazing start and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.



A Special Place: I don't really buy Dexter.

Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the show. I've been with it since the beginning and I will probably devote an article to my observations at some point in the future, but I have a very hard time believing a man like Dexter could ever exist. The circumstances that created the character amount to a sort of perfect storm, one that could almost never be repeated in the real world, specifically the notion that a cop father would recognize the signs of sociopathy in his son and train him to be some sort of invisible avenger. It's a cute concept for TV, but seems as unlikely as a kid getting bit by a radioactive spider and becoming a superhero.

A Special Place seems almost to be an answer to Dexter, centering around a much more likely possibility of an older serial killer recognizing the same traits in a younger family member.

Apparently A Special Place is a side-story to a longer work written by Peter Straub. Some of you may be gobsmacked by this, but for a die-hard horror fanatic, I have never read a Peter Straub book. He looms large in the genre. I never deliberately avoided him but we simply never had the opportunity to cross paths. I enjoyed the hell out of A Special Place. The lead characters come off the way you'd expect real psychopaths to behave, their poor willing victim seems almost tailor-made for annihilation, and the boy's poor mother is especially compelling as she tries to reach out to her doomed son. It's a fantastic read and I need to pick up more of Straub's work.

Anyway, I doubt this will be the last hiatus I wind up taking. Sometimes life gets in the way. But I think I'm gonna get back in the swing of regular contributing, if for no other reason than I like writing about this stuff and I think I'm pretty good at it.

Toxic Ideas in Horror Fiction

Recently a friend of mine loaned me a horror novel. The author was a big name who I've been meaning to check out for some time and a previous winner of the Bram Stoker Award. I was looking forward to the book, but somewhere between the unpleasantness of the lead characters, the overly-caustic tough guy dialogue, and the trite Stephen-King-Did-It-Better menace, I found myself feeling the same despair I feel every time I pick up an issue of Fangoria and seeing nothing but direct-to-video zombie movies. Are there any new ideas? Is there anything really innovative in our genre or are we doomed to keep retreading the same ground like Michael Myers on a slow-moving treadmill.

One of the things that really didn't sit too well with me while reading the book was how painfully familiar it all felt. The story revolved around a mysterious supernatural threat that befalls a small suburban town. The residence succumb to madness and violence as the thin veneer of civilization is stripped away and people blah de blah de fucking blah.

I get that horror isn't exactly an optimistic genre, but I've seen this theme done to death. Plus, I don't think it's a really accurate portrayal of humanity. Constantly harping on the evil inherent in humanity completely misses out on our higher aspects. Even if an idea is old there's still some value in exploring it, but it needs to lie fallow for a time.

With that, I want to look at a few themes that really need to be put on the backburner. I'll probably expand this list as times goes on, but these are the subjects that bug me the most.

1) There were some things Man was not meant to know.



This one really drives me nuts.

I get where this one comes from. You used to see this theme a lot in the creature features of the 50s, when atomic warfare seemed destined to wipe the human race off the planet. Hell, this theme goes all the way back to the roots of the horror genre, when the mad doctor Frankenstein spits in the eye of God and loses control of his blasphemous creation. While I understand people's phobias about atomic destruction, it seems like every time some new piece of technology emerges some jackass makes a ham-handed cautionary tale of how it could go wrong.

Me, I like technology. Lord knows I don't get it, but I like it.

I'm with Spider Jerusalem on this one: the future is inherently a good thing. The future represents an opportunity to crawl further away from the mean roots of our humanity and embrace something better. Change doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. We want change. We want new things. We want to know that there's a newer, brighter land on the other side of the mountain. What we don't want is some dire monastic killjoy nervously whispering to us that everything could fall apart and we're better off staying where we are. If humanity believed that, we'd still be flopping in the muck instead of swaggering around Williamsburg with ironic moustaches.

2) Sexual promiscuity is a moral failing and punishable by death.



I've covered this one before at great length but it still keeps coming up and it still keeps pissing me me off.

One of my heroes, author and sex advice columnist Dan Savage, once wrote that slutting around is like travel; it broadens the mind. Now, while I do believe it depends on the mind in question, I subscribe to the idea that sex and sexuality isn't intrinsically bad and that it's part of life. But then I'm a godless liberal educated city-dweller type, born in San Francisco and living in New York. In summation of my previous arguments, uptight virginal characters are boring and it's a bit puritanical to bump off characters who have the audacity to have sex on-camera. It's like we want to see them do it, then we want to see them punished. What the fuck is that about?

I've recently been revisiting slasher classics and one thing I couldn't help but notice is that I can't think of many final girls who are clearly labeled as virgins. Many of them have boyfriends, some of them are actually quite forward (Ginny from Friday the 13th part 2 and Megan from Friday the 13th part 6), and they seem more bothered by their friend's boneheadedness than their promiscuity. Sure, they're often outsiders in their groups but that's because they're brainier and more mature than their friends. On the other hand, abstinence is usually a big part of their survival, if only because they're paying attention to their environments rather than their bacchanalian excesses.

One of the things I really liked about Wrong Turn 2 is that the final girl clearly isn't a virgin. She's damaged goods, we get the sense that she's lived an interesting life, and we know that the shit she's been through gives her the tools she needs to survive.

As I've said before, let the sluts and the stoners live. They're usually more likable, more interesting, and probably better equipped to survive because their brains haven't been turned into anxiety-flavored taffy by a lifetime of conservative dogma.

3) Humanity falls apart once the light goes out.



I object to a lot of these themes on moral or intellectual grounds. I'm just plain sick of this one.

You've seen this one as far back as The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street. A community is isolated from the world, some weird shit happens, and everyone turns against each other. There's lynching and looting and chest thumping and oh-my-god-civilization-is-a-thin-veneer-over-primitive-madness. The idea of going all Lord of the Flies on your neighbors holds some gruesome appeal, but at this point it's become tiresome.

I really don't think horror gives humanity enough credit. Sure, when disasters happen, there's looting and civil unrest, but there's also tons of people donating blood and digging through wreckage and doing their best to keep their fellow humans warm and sheltered and safe. I don't know about you, but I find that side of humanity inspiring. The fact that horror never seems to acknowledge that side of our character puts me in mind of an angsty teenager who only chooses to see the worst in everything because it fits with his bleak and hormone-soaked world view. In other words, it reminds me of myself at fourteen.

4) Pacifism is a useless, high-minded ideal.



This one comes up a lot in stories that involve fierce survival situations, like The Hills Have Eyes or Joe R. Lansdale's The Nightrunners, where innocent, good-natured city types are beset by territorial cannibals or sadistic ghouls or vicious hoodlums. Most of the time there's one guy in the group who is singled out as the wimpy but good-hearted pacifist who ever imagine harming another human being but is eventually forced to reconnect with his bloody, savage natural instincts in order to survive. Sometimes this is framed as part of the horror, as the poor man (and it's ALWAYS a man) becomes just as savage as the monsters he fights, but most of the time we're clearly meant to be impatient with the wimp and to celebrate the time he embraces his manhood and clubs the mewling, wounded monster to death with a big hunk of wood.

Of course, the gimmick of having a character put in a situation that forces him to work against his limitations is straight out of Dramatic Conflict 101 and it's so familiar at this point that it's simply exhausting. What bothers me most in this theme is the narrow-minded definition of masculinity at the center of it. Sure, when you're put in a situation where it's kill or be killed against a bunch of snarling monsters the choice is a no-brainer. But there's something vaguely simplistic and mean-spirited about the whole idea.

I myself am some sort of a pacifist, partially because I'd never win a fight and partially because I believe it's a losing game to measure your masculinity based on whose ass you can kick, but in horror that attitude is framed as a character weakness. The pacifist is always the most cowardly, the most snotty, the most unwilling to adapt, and, bluntly, the most stupid character in the group. All pacifist characters come off as red-state stereotypes about educated people. What we need is a good solid push so we can start kicking righteous ass. It touches on some ugly, outdated ideas of what a man is supposed to be.

Conclusion

I have no doubt I'm going to add to this list. I pay a lot of attention to subtext and horror is full of dodgy ideas and puritanical subtext. At some point I want to do an article on the age old misogyny question, but for right now I'll leave it at these. Readers, if you've got any other good ones, send 'em my way.

Creature got into a car accident.

In keeping with my general real world horror/fake horror thing, I got into a big-ass auto accident this week.







The guy was drunk, he smashed into the rear of my car, and he collided with several other vehicles while attempting to flee the scene. I asked the cop that as a peaceful, forgiving, yoga-practicing dude, was it wrong for me to wish death by herpes on the guy. He laughed and said "no comment."

I got off real easy on that one, sustaining a mild concussion, some whiplash, and back spasms. I try to exercise regularly and I don't want to become one of those guys who is always in pain and can't do anything fun.

Lesson: Please please please don't drink and drive. I have an awesome post in-bound about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, but it may take some time to get to. Right now all I'm capable of doing is watching 60s caper movies starring Michael Caine and going page by painful page through Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted, which I'm not particularly enjoying.

Fangoria Weekend of Horrors 2009

(Sorry for the picture quality. Junky camera.)



Biggest lesson learned at the convention: if you're going to go to a seminar by an artist who has worked in a variety of media, don't do it in LA. The bulk of the questions from the audience will be about breaking into the industry. That's totally fine, everyone has hoop dreams, but the seminar was titled writing horror.

I keep alluding to this for I am the lord of allusions, but Clive Barker is one of my heroes. I love his versatility, I love the beauty of his prose, and I love how friendly and accessible he is to his fans. When I heard he was hosting a panel for aspiring horror writers, I booked my seminar ticket and flight immediately. It wasn't the urbane, tea-sipping conversation on the finer points of literature. It was still worth every cent I spent.



The seminar took place in a small, cheerless gray room. The Fangoria movie prop auction was going on next door, and we kept hearing amplified auctioneers and the cheering of crowds through the wall. Clive's voice was strained and raspy, even through the microphone, so he invited us to gather around him. It made for a really nice intimate conversation.

At one point in the seminar, the topic of working in television came up, specifically the limitations a creative person suffers when he's surrounded by 20 people telling him he's wrong. The conversation swung to the shows Heroes and Lost. I mentioned that the problem with the shows is that they mistake poor story control for deliberate enigma. He smiled and asked me to repeat it into his microphone, and continued on the topic using my humble contribution. It was definitely a high point. I got to ask my two questions, I got a bunch of memorable quotes, and I left feeling inspired and energized. It was an incredible experience.

It's a good thing that I had that, because there honestly wasn't a whole lot to do.

I've been to dozens of conventions in my life. I go to four or five a year. They're always a blast, but the ones I tend to go to are either pop culture shows with large crowds and tons of events (Wondercon, San Diego Comic Con) or gaming conventions (Kublacon) where there's always a pick-up game going on somewhere. Here, the panels I cared about were few and far between, I didn't necessarily feel like spending the con in the movie room, and one can only wander through the dealer room so many times. It probably didn't help that the show was held at the LA Convention Center. The sheer size of the place dwarfed the convention, so you always felt like it was a tiny show.

I did get to meet a ton of awesome people. Most of you are reading this now, so give me a shout out. I tried tracking down fellow horror blogger Dragonmanes but no one in the booths I haunted knew who he was. Sorry, brother.

Anyway, there was a big push by Anchor Bay for their upcoming slasher flick Laid To Rest, the 20th anniversary box set release of Hellraiser, and an upcoming movie by director Paul Solet called Grace. The idea, on first pass, could wander into the blighted land of the distasteful, but the stuff I've seen was remarkably well-shot and engaging. I'm cautiously optimistic this one.





The dealer room was nice enough, but I didn't get nearly the amount of schwag I planned on coming home with. There were tons of generic goth-y type spooky merch and endless variations on the witty-zombie tee-shirt thing, both items I'm kinda sick of. The one piece of memorabilia I desperately wanted to pick up was a Lament Configuration. I figured this wouldn't be a challenge, considering the Hellraiser 20th Anniversary panel was going on, but none of the vendors had one. Come on, guys. This was a no-brainer.

The dealer room's stuff also tended to emphasize the more extreme end of the horror spectrum, where suspense and subtlety takes a backseat to vomit and ropes of intestines uncurling from a wound. I see stuff like that and sometimes I wonder just how well I actually fit in with the horror community. When it comes to my friends and the people I work with, I come off like the Marquis De Sade, but I read stuff like this and I feel positively genteel and dainty. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a good mischievous cackle, but ugly for ugly's sake quickly becomes unpleasant. If I want to raise my falutin' high, I'd say I'm keen on the macabre and not the grotesque.



Anyway, burnout aside, I got a chance to meet writers, bloggers, editors, actors, directors, documentarians, and other people I promised to keep in contact with. For those of you reading this and wondering why I haven't written to you, I apologize. I work for Major Video Game Publisher and their Big New Game is running up to an important deadline. I have to do all my blogging in times that aren't as readily available these days. Give me a weekend and I'll get back to all of y'alls.



One of the highlights of the convention was the horror website panel, where representatives from Dread Central, Arrow in the Head, FearNet, Fangoria, and other sites all sat down for a round table discussions on the ins and outs of internet horror journalism. Aside from being a hilariously inspiring, martini-soaked chat about horror fandom, the panel taught me a lesson worth a grand to learn: don't get too close to your subject matter.

The nice thing about being a geek is that you have access to your idols, and that's doubly true in the horror world. If you like an author or an actor or a director you will likely have an opportunity to meet them face-to-face at a convention. On one hand it's tremendously inspirational, but it can also be a burden when you're trying to evaluate the merit of a new genre work. The line between creator and audience is very thin in horror and a lot of the people on the panel spoke of how difficult it was to write fair reviews against people they came to regard as friends.

I'm not a big fan of internet forum negativity. Even when I don't like a work, I recognize the effort and enthusiasm it took to produce it. I feel artists should be encouraged and, with a few exceptions, I do my best not to bully or trash a person's work. However, I need to be honest about my opinions and perceptions and I can't do that if I have any kind of relationship with the creators of the work. I met a bunch of people at the con who had projects coming out. I got to hang out with them and absorb their enthusiasm by osmosis. Do you think I want to then go and write a bad review?

People go to the major blogs for scoops on upcoming projects, and publicists don't like giving exclusives to people who trash their work. I'm not bloody-disgusting. I don't have access to publicists and studio marketing reps. Alls I have is my love, my fished-from-the-internet, and my little typey-typey words. I'll whip those ingredients into a tasty stew if you're willing to give my cooking a try.



Anyway, it was a damn fun con. I got some other neat stories, like paying for Doug Bradley and Ashley Lawrence's breakfast, the surreal experience of arriving in the middle of a Britney Spears show, standing in the entry line behind deceased serial killer Ed Gein, winning a Masters of Horror director chair, seeing TCM's Marilyn Burns and TCM2's Caroline Williams having a private moment long after the show ended, watching Clive Barker and Ashley Williams pretend to fall asleep at the Hellraiser panel as Doug Bradley talked at length about his upcoming projects. Lotta good stuff there, but this has already run waaaaaay too long. As for me, I've got some other good stuff in the works coming up. Thank you for reading my humble efforts. You guys remind me my life ain't just about going to work.



Oh, also, if you decide you're going to the convention and you're planning on getting the fancy schmancy gold pass in order to get into the Vampire Ball, don't bother. The stars were only there for a few minutes, I was one of four people in costume, and they closed the private room early and everyone migrated to the adjacent bar that anyone could get into. If it wasn't for the pleasantly strong whiskey sours and the lovely company, I'd have had half a mind to complain.

Horror and the real world.

"At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them." -Clive Barker

There's horror and then there's HORROR.

A few days ago, while driving to the showing of Alien Trespass, I found myself stuck in traffic. This wasn't particularly surprising, as it was rush hour and San Francisco traffic can be brutal. But we were parked on that off-ramp for a long time and highway patrol cruisers kept whizzing by with clear urgency. Eventually we got detoured to an exit that brought us an elevated view of the blockage. There were smashed vehicles all over the place. A tanker truck had blown its rear compartment. A medical helicopter had landed on the freeway and was preparing to take off with victims. Bodies were being loaded onto an ambulance while officers were busy interviewing crying witnesses.

It was, to put it mildly, surreal. The irony that I was going off to see simulated versions of this sort of thing wasn't lost on me.

Perhaps I shouldn't spend too much time contemplating why I like horror movies. Perhaps its one of those touchy points of my psychology that would only wig me out if I looked at it too closely. I know I've covered this subject before, but if you really want to see pure, hopeless, despair-ridden horror, all you really have to do is live your life and pay attention.

I think the Clive Barker quote is pretty good. We all know that at some point in our lives the curtain is gonna fall, the stage lights will be shut off, and we're all gonna wind up in the dark. I think horror fiction, be it movies/music/stories/whatevs is a way for us to dip our toes in that water, to twist the notion around like a Rubik's cube and eventually set it down. That's all fine and good for the people who dip into that well from time to time, the mobs of teenagers who descend on the multiplexes when Topless Chicks Get Slaughtered pt. 8 comes out. But what about those of us who keep coming back to those foetid pools over and over again?



I have always had a fascination with the quote-dark-unquote side of life. I likes my stories grim and creepy. But when I go to horror conventions and see a bunch of serial killer memorabilia or overhear a couple of kids talk about how they would have done Columbine better, I understand that there's a line.

I started this blog because I wanted to create a venue I can comfortably communicate in. When I started going to the horror community sites I encountered a lot of misogyny, a lot of homophobia, and a lot of people confusing reality with fantasy. Sure, I probably shouldn't take the dumb stuff kids say online too seriously, but I sometimes think the anonymity of the Internet makes it easier to stir the sediment at the bottom of the soul.

Without getting too deep into the back story of the Creature, I got an opportunity, during the course of my strange journeys, to see the real thing firsthand. I think, on some level, that my lifetime of watching Tom Savini's make up effects would prepare me for the real world. It didn't. The two have very little to do with one another. The one thing that was really ground into me from the whole experience was plain old human empathy. To whit: we're all stuck on this rock. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. There's one rule, goddamnit, and that's to be kind.

It's easy for the weak and the wounded among my tribe, when given a choice to be an awkward angel or a powerful monster, to choose the latter. I've wandered down that dark path a time or two myself. But horror fiction involves characters. Really real life capital-H Horror involves people.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. -Stephen King

Ultimately, horror fiction is safe. It's not going to hurt you, it's not going to follow you home and murder you in your sleep, and it's not going to make you into a killer, unless you bring serious damage with you in the first place. Real horror is the excrement of existence. It's the unexplained lump, the phone call late at night, the unexpected fire, and all the other agonies of life. No artist, no matter how twisted, can inoculate their audience against that kind of misery. It's the tidal wave waiting to wash away our sand castles, but we take what we can from it, wrap it up in artistry, and call it horror.

Make of that what you will.