One last kick at the can before those roundtable hooligans take over.

Final Girl and co. have opened up shop on the decidedly non-horror Genre Girls.

Blogs-a-poppin’! The proprieter of the always excellent Kung Fu Fridays has birthed Popcorn and Sticky Floors, a little slice of exploitation heaven.

It looks like the Young Frankenstein stage production may have acquired an experienced monster.

Wait, the Day of the Dead remake has a screenwriter? Ain’t It Cool News provides the interview.

Fangoria has the goods on the Plane Dead poster.

I Spit On Your Movie interviews Mike Mendez, director of Gravedancers, a selection from the upcoming 8 Films To Die For and one of my favourite screenings from this year’s Fantasia.

Night of the Living Dead 3-D fares no better over at 150 Days of Sodom.

Dr. John Carpenter?

Wilmer Valderrama has made a zombie movie? Not “is making”, but “made”, as in already finished shooting.

Max Brooks offers up a primer on the history of zombies.

Admit it, the news about Faulkner’s vampires has you pumped for even more terror from the pens of history’s most esteemed authors. Who wouldn’t want to see William Shakespeare’s Invaders from Mars or John Milton’s Chucky? Well, you’re in luck, as Carlos Maycotte of the Cornell Daily Sun has made the astonishing discovery of a plethora of horror titles by those authors and more, including Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Jason Vorhees.

Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. Jason himself was especially full of mirth. As he put Becky and Jim on a raft, they asked him whether they would be playing the part of the pirates or the commodores. With a grunt, Jason pushed the raft out on the river and set it on fire. And smiled a smile nobody could see.

It’s a natural progression from the current trend of “torture porn” to vivid interpretations of modern movie monsters by the world’s greatest writers. You’re looking at the next big thing in the genre, kids.

People who manage the estates of deceased literary figures always seem to be dredging up some long-lost manuscript or other piece of ephemera, the better to keep the money flowing. I hope that no one decides to go through my reject pile after I’m gone, though I’m guessing my best work wouldn’t compare to a Pulitzer and Nobel-prize winning author’s worst. That’s right, the estate of William Faulkner has dug up an unproduced script for a movie. The kicker? One of the most esteemed authors of the 20th-century was hiding a vampire movie in the attic.

In the midst of all this, Faulkner apparently spun out a vampire saga set in an anonymous Eastern European location. Caplin plans to relocate the story to the Deep South and has a high-end computer-graphics firm on the hook to dress it up with modern effects.

I can understand the desire to take discarded or forgotten works and squeeze the last bit of life out of the estate, and in some ways I appreciate the look at an author’s rough drafts and neglected tales. But to take a critically-acclaimed author’s rediscovered work and spin it into another Venom is just beyond belief.

Guro is an abbreviated term for Erotic Gruesome Nonsense, an idea that has found it’s way into almost all forms of art in Japan, particuarly manga. The concept is as straight-forward as it’s name, wherein the artists take sex and horror and push them to absurd and grotesque extremes. To illustrate how brutal these comics are, I had to wade through about a dozen pages from various guro before I could find even one image that I could use in this post, and that’s after cropping it.

Guro is rarely translated in North America, presumably because of an insufficient market, but also possibly because some of this material may in fact be considered obscene in various parts of the continent. Due to this, guro seems to have a very healthy presence in the scanlation community, thereby allowing you to sample the sub-genre for free. GuroFan has a number of stories available, from Guillotine Masturbation to Schoolgirl in Concrete, and even provides sample pages so you can pick and shoose which to download. Same Hat! Same Hat!!, from whom I found GuroFan, also has a few stories available if you like what you see and are looking for more.

Thanks to Journalista! for the tip!

The Blade television series may have burned out after just one season, but from the ashes emerges yet another supernatural-tinged Marvel property; Moon Knight. Referenced in a few episodes of Blade, rumour has it that Moon Knight was set to make his screen debut in a guest spot until that series was cancelled. Despite their lack of success with that franchise, it appears that Marvel is set to take another swing. But who is Moon Knight, and will he fare better than Blade? This week we turn to resident Moon Knight expert Sloan for the answers.

Download the mp3 here. If you dare…

Every once in awhile something comes along that seems so perfect, so obvious, that you wonder why you didn’t think of it first. Writer Rick Remender will be joining forces with former Walking Dead artist Tony Moore and Remains artist Kieron Dwyer to bring us XXXombies, the tale of a zombie outbreak set against the backdrop of the burgeoning porno industry in 1976. The first story, entitled “Crotch Rot” will centre on a porno producer’s efforts to round up famous, recently deceased movie stars to appear in his films. Especially interesting are the cover designs, as Tony Moore explains.

Kieron and I are both doing send-ups to the striking graphic design of ‘70s porno posters. Seems like the design sense of even the most base crap back then had a pretty impressive amount of skill and panache. Looking at these posters, I was astounded at the amazing quality and visual sense these things had. So, yeah, basically my covers will all be patterned straight off some of my favorite porno poster designs from the ‘70s.

I never would have believed that I would use the “zombie”, “comics” and “porno” tags together in one post. Two of them, maybe. Despite a glut of zombie comics in the marketplace, the names involved and the attention to detail have certainly sold me on XXXombies.

What an upset! If you’ve been following the Horror Blog Monster Rally at all, you know that it hit a snag with the selection of the wild card. Every one of the discarded contestants were eligible to be repositioned in the Monster Rally during its final days. While the poll was only supposed to run over the weekend, a three-way tie between Leatherface, Samara and Sammi Curr prompted me to let it continue until a clear winner was possible. I fully expected one of the three top contenders to take it, but the Ghoulies came up from out of nowhere and swept the race. This was no doubt influenced by the grassroots campaigning of David Z. to see the Ghoulies given a second chance.

Due to the extended Wild Card competition, the regular Monster Rally will resume next week, in what is surely the most dragged-out contest the internet has ever witnessed.

I’ve always been attracted to good backyard filmmaking, be it Criterion’s recent release of Equinox, M. Night Shyamalan’s home movie clips or even Plaga Zombie. One DVD that I would like to own but I haven’t had a chance to track down yet is Monster Kid Home Movies, which is a collection of creature-filled shorts directed by kids and teens on 8mm from back in the day. The trailer above is for that release, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun all on its own.

One of my favourite movie theatre experiences was in 3-D. J. and I attended a screening of Friday the 13th 3-D in Montreal a few years back that was being held as part of a comedy festival. The tickets were a little expensive, but if I had known just how much fun I was going to have I would have happily paid twice as much. Say what you will about the gimmick or the quality of the film, but there was no denying that Steve Miner was well aware of how to stage a shot for maximum 3-D effect.

I bring you this preamble to show that, though I’m by no means a 3-D expert, I do have some fairly recent 3-D experience. With that out of the way, please take my advice and stay the fuck away from the recent release Night of the Living Dead 3-D. This is by far the worst movie I’ve seen all year, with a meandering storyline, complete lack of suspense, and downright pitiful acting. In fact, it’s the second worst zombie movie I have ever had to sit through, and considering the dozens of shoddy undead flicks I’ve exposed myself to, that’s saying something. It’s one of those movies you want to like so much that when something even slightly cool happens you feel like cheering, even if that scene would have only been a mediocre shot in any other film. The only bright spot in the film is Sid Haig’s performance as the mortician, and even that only comes after over thirty dreary minutes of characters feebly debating whether they should use the phone or not. When Haig spoke I almost believed that someone else had written his lines for him. Either his performance is a testament to his acting abilities in deciphering the script, or he improvised. Either way, as great as he is it still doesn’t come anywhere near saving this mess.

You’re probably asking yourself why I’m even bothering talking about the plot and characterization when all that you really expect from a movie like this is some cool 3-D effects. Unfortunately, if there was anything worse than the above criticism it would be the shoddy use of 3-D. I don’t know if it was the glasses, the projection or the film itself, but the movie was barely in 3-D. You could still see blue and red lines throughout, lessening the impact of the gimmick. Reading a few other reviews and comments on the film, I noticed that it wasn’t just my screening that was affected by this. Not that it matters, because with the exception of one or two moments almost nothing was staged in a way that showed off the 3-D. Some shots moved too quickly to register, while others were composed in such a way that they ended up in the bottom corner of the screen, lessening the effectiveness. Even worse were the missed opportunities. If you’re expecting disembodied limbs, decapatations, bared breasts and other assorted body parts leaping off the screen at you, prepare to be very disappointed.

I could have forgiven Night of the Living Dead 3-D if it were just bad, and I could have even given it a pass if the 3-D wasn’t up to par, but when it fails on every single possible level it’s just disheartening.

You may be wondering what happened to the Wild Card poll, and when we can expect to see the conclusion of the Monster Rally. Unfortunately, we’ve hit a bit of a hitch. The Wild Card poll is currently sitting at a three-way tie. I’m not saying who the three contenders are, but until one of them pulls ahead of the rest, I’m leaving it up there.

And while you’re in a voting kind of mood, you may want to check out the Rue Morgue poll for Best Feature Film for 2006, which I mentioned once before. Happily, Hostel made the list, though the two current frontrunners are Slither and The Descent by a wide margin. You must be a member of the board to vote, and they’re only taking votes for a very limited time. Vote now!

Halloween brings with it so many wonderful treats that it’s going to be months after that date before I exhaust all the wonders I’ve collected. This year was especially great for aural delights, and one of my favourite mp3 blogs stepped it up with a trio of garage band goodness. Office Naps presents a trio of truly whacked out and rare novelty 45s for a cold Autumn night. All three selections are fascinating, but if you choose only one make sure you check out Strangler in the Night for it’s pure psychotronic giddiness. How could they allow these deviants the freedom to roam the streets with normal, God-fearin’ folk?

The Horror Blog’s New York correspondent, JA of My New Plaid Pants, has braved The Splatter Zone and returned to take apart the off-broadway production of Evil Dead - The Musical. I rip off more links from My New Plaid Pants than you can imagine, so if you get a chance I encourage you to take a peek.

Evil Dead - The Musical

I’ve been to Universal Studios three or four times in my life - what can I say, I’m a big Jurassic Park fan - but I’ve never gone to see Beetlejuice’s Rockin’ Graveyard Revue, a live show in which the “ghost with the most” rounds up all the classic Universal Monsters (a la this very site’s Monster Rally - only instead of of a brutal fight to the death, it involves song-and-dance routines set to what I expect to be some approximation of “rockin’” tunes) where they, I assume, entertain the kiddies in a spectacularly cheesy fashion, fangs not included.

But now, yes, the characters may’ve changed, the curse-quotient amplified up to 11, the sexual innuendo distinctly somewhere between a PG and a mild PG-13 (no boobies!), and something tells me the front rows at the Beetlejuice show, filled with toddlers and their weary parents, are never spritzed with red-dye-infused corn syrup, but all these distractions aside, I’m guessing that witnessing Evil Dead: The Musical is somewhere on par with what happenin’ at that Rockin’ Graveyard scene.

Now, I know the Evil Dead films are hardly Tennessee Williams we’re talking about here. The source material - the first and second films thrown into a blender, a light dusting of Army of Darkness sprinkled over the top – is a cult classic because of the deep, deep silliness with which director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell approach the ridiculous story. But Raimi’s exaggerated tracking shots, Campbell’s Stooge-mimicry and genius at delivering a line, thrown together with an, at times, genuine creepiness, not to mention gallons upon galloons of every-color-of-the-rainbow gore, somehow added up to the perfect concoction – a sort of post-modern splatter comedy, where everything is making fun of itself while at the same time going straight for, yes, the jugular. They wanted to pick their teeth with your funny bone, if you will.

That sense of irreverence is taken to the Nth degree with the stage show, but sadly, because of the limitations of having to, you know, stand in front of a live audience and not actually be chopping the actors to bits but rather rely on rather shoddy improvisations of the violence – a beheading in shadow behind a screen, for instance – the gore, which nicely leveled out the silliness in the films, and made them something you knew you couldn’t watch with dear old Mum (Mum was an intestine-spewing demon in the basement, actually), is overtaken by the campiness and what’s left is, well, a demon in a sequined jacket doing dance moves ripped off from “Thriller”.

There was one genuinely creepy moment on stage – the infamous rape-by-tree-branches scene, of course – that I thought worked, but this show exists primarily for laughs, and it does get them, but it somewhat swallows the soul of the material in the process. Again, yes, not the Bible they’re reenacting here, but with the balance slipping way into camp-territory, the film’s charms dissipated into endless clouds of dry-ice smoke and bad puns. You got the feeling, with the films, that Raimi wanted distinctly to accost you, to make you want to barf mid-laugh; the only thing that felt accosted after the stage show were my eardrums.

But with all that said, there were laughs to be had. At first, actor Ryan Ward as Ash seemed too slight in frame to be playing our Bruce Campbell stand-in, but as the show went on and he began spouting the familiar lines (”Gimme some sugar, baby” gleefully included) and coating himself in fake blood he became far more convincing. By the time he’d slipped the chainsaw on his stump and spoke of his “boom stick” he’d won me over.

The women were, perhaps appropriately, completely indistinguishable from each other, except for actress Jenna Coker as Ash’s sister, Cheryl, who was the chief bearer of the bad puns and cheerleader-happy dance moves, which she did with an unfortunate relish that led to much of the ratcheting up of the camp-factor to a level somewhere in the vicinity of beyond bearable. Yes, the badness of the puns was commented upon and done on purpose, but she delivered them with such lick-her-lips glee that it slid rght back from aren’t-we-clever? into just plain badness again. And Brandon Wardell as Ash’s friend Scott did his best Stifler impersonation.

The music was fun - with such titles as “Do the Necronomicon” and “You Blew That B**** Away”, how could it not be? – but the surprising stand-out was Daryl Winslow as Jake (the hillbilly character from Evil Dead 2) singing “Good Old Reliable Jake” as some sort of Meatloaf-inspired power ballad. By the time he’d gotten to his next number, “Ode to an Accidental Stabbing”, he’d become my favorite person on stage.

So in the end what you get is a show that is trying too hard. It takes the already exaggerated tone of the films so far in one direction for laughs that the screams are pretty much snuffed out. The much-hyped “Splatter Zone” – the first few rows of the audience where you’re supposedly hosed down with so much gore they provide raincoats – appeared to, by the end, be more of a Trickle Zone. Somewhere between remembering their Michael Jackson dance-moves and, you know, not actually being decapitated, the actors had other concerns and I, well I just wished for a good eyeball down the throat.

For more information on the show, visit the Evil Dead - The Musical fansite.

Screenwriter Jeff O’Brien has pointed me in the direction of that most elusive beast, the Canadian backwoods creature feature trailer. I’m looking forward to a good ol’ fashioned foam and rubber monster bloodbath.

Name a movie that terrified you when you were younger that wouldn’t scare you now.

Bill Cunningham - DisContent

The Invisible Ray starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Absolutely horrified me as a kid - people couldn’t touch me for days as I was afraid of dying.

Today I admire it for its design…

Doug Nagy

The made for tv movie “V” spooked the shit out of me. Lizards pretending to
be humans freaked the shit out of me.

Billy - House of Irony

The Howling. Still to this day no movie has ever scared me more than this film. I’ve thought of watching it again, but the memory of how terrified I was is in an odd way special to me. I know if I watched it again I would see the special effects and probably laugh. It’s like when I recently watched old episodes of the Thundercats and I couldn’t believe how bad the animation actually was, but my recollections of it were filled with some of the greatest animations I remembered as a kid. Thundercats is still one of those defining TV shows as a kid for me, but now it’s just a teensy bit unpolished now, and I don’t want that to ever happen to a movie that was as scary to me as the Howling. I actually tried to scream when i watched it, and no sound would come out of my mouth.

Mark - Exclamation Mark’s SciFi/Horror Review

I thought 1963’s The Crawling Hand was the scariest movie ever. Now I watch it primarily for laughs. The Wizard of Oz also scared me a lot. Come to think of it, it still kind of creeps me out.

Red Hawk - Happy Horror

A movie that wouldn’t scare me now… I’d have to say The Video Dead. Growing up, zombie movies were the only ones that consistently gave me nightmares (which I’ve grown out of now, of course), and from what I remember of this one, it wasn’t really as good as some of the others out there. A second choice would be a short film that I saw when I was 2 years old called The Tape, about an old reel-to-reel tape that moved around by itself and ate people. Strictly low budget stuff, but it scared the heck out of me (which is weird, because right before it, I saw the mutant bear horror movie Prophecy, which didn’t phase me a bit).

Don May, Jr. - Synapse

Hmm… The one movie I lost sleep over when I was young (and it terrified the shit out of me) was THE EXORCIST. Unfortunately, it STILL bothers me, so that won’t count for this roundtable. I guess the other one that really stuck with me as a youngin’ was THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE. It really got to me as a kid but, now, it’s pretty tame for my tastes (although I still love to watch it).

JA - My New Plaid Pants

I was talking to my mother about this the other day, and she was saying she refused to let me watch scary movies when I was a kid, so remembering anything of this sort was hard to come by. But I do remember sneaking some of the original Amityville Horror on TV one time, and there’s that cheesy shot of “eyes” looking through the window that, now having seen again I can tell are basically a pair of glowing red Christmas bulbs, but those “eyes” were seared into my subconscious for years.

Joakim - Mexploitation

I think probably the “V” TV movie and subsequent series. I can’t really even remember that much of it, but I know it had my nerves really frayed. The lizard aliens are coming!

Also, “Night of the Demons”, from which I mostly remember the lipstick scene, although that was more of interest because of the nudity, I think. Oh, and the loose Lovecraft adaptation (of course, I didn’t even know who Lovecraft was back then) “The Curse”, aka “The Farm”, really terrified me, to the point where I could hardly watch it, but I watched it twice anyway.

I need to thank my mother for this some time. She was a horror fan, both in literature and film, and let me watch a great deal of movies that I probably shouldn’t have. Thanks, Edel!

T. Van - Tolerated Vandalism

I grew up in a rural community. My childhood home backed onto a corn field. It should come as no surprise that I was terrified of Children of the Corn. I saw this when I was about 10 years old and it scared the hell out of me. As a kid the thought of those freaky kids hiding out in the corn field really creeped me out. I’ve seen the film since and while I still enjoy it, it’s definitely not scary.

Sean T. Collins - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

When I was a wee lad, the scene in which that lady got thrown into the supercomputer in Superman III and her face got all freaky and shit scared me so badly I can barely even tell you. Not only did I run screaming and crying from the television, I was afraid to go back in the room itself, on the off chance that the TV would turn itself on and show that scene again. These days I think the scariest thing about that movie would be how it started the Superman franchise down a road that would lead otherwise intelligent grownups to believe that the remedy was a Superman movie in which the Man of Steel dealt with his daddy issues, didn’t throw a single punch, and had a climactic battle against a land mass.

David Z. - Tomb It May Concern

JAWS 2. Yep, I was terrified during this film as a kid. Now I’m a shark movie fan that can even love a Bruno Mattei Jaws rip off that features a dude that looks like Hulk Hogan minus the workouts and “vitamins!” Maybe I’m still hunting that scary thrill…

Tim - Mondo Schlocko

I could remember the first horror flick to truly terrify me was HELLRAISER. The very idea of Hell opening up with these sadistic freaks who were intent on causing you eternal pain was just goddamn scary to me. It still is, in fact.

More responses than usual for this one. I guess we’re all still a little scarred. If you have any childhood favourites that have lost their power to frighten you, please share in the comments below.