Name your favourite horror novel.

Sean T. Collins - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

It’s a toss-up between It and The Stand, which is 50% the origin of my oft-repeated maxim that Stephen King is at his best over 1,000 pages or under 100. (The other 50% is the short-story collections Night Shift and Skeleton Crew.) I’ve re-read them both recently and I think The Stand holds together better, but with the exception of the superflu section, which always makes me paranoid when I get a case of the sniffles, It is much scarier.

Bill Cunningham - DisContent

Probably the Dracula series written by Robert Lory for Pinnacle. Drac is back and he’s being used by an old Van Helsing-ish professor to fight evil. It had the flavor of the old Universal monster series of films where Drac or Frankenstein’s monster met other horror characters.

Lots o’ fun.

Jeff O’Brien

FADE by Robert Cormier

Nick - DVDTrash

Definitely a toss up between “Nemesis” by Shaun Hutson (How more of his work has not been filmed, Slugs aside, is a travesty, all great B-Movie material!), Clive Barker’s “Cabal” or finally anything of Richard Laymon’s, great vacation horror reading!

JA - My New Plaid Pants

Well I’ve been seriously lax on being all I can be when it comes to reading horror as of late, but I will say that one of my fondest memories is the Summer post-college when I had no job and no prospects for three straight months and spent a couple of weeks therein sprawled out on an air mattress in the laundry room of my mothers house - don’t ask - plowing through The Stand and It for the first time. I’d stay up until 5 or 6 reading them every night, scaring myself silly, and then sleep all day. Ahh, good memories. What’s weird is sometimes I think my entire life after that moment has been a dream and someday I’ll wake up back on that air mattress. Is this considered an over-share? What was the question again? Where am I?

Tim - Mondo Schlocko

THE HORROR SHOW by Greg Kihn which is the most perfect homage to b-movies, FAMOUS MONSTER MAGAZINE, and filmmaker Ed Wood and his gang of cohorts. The plot of the book mixes it up with the supernatural and a few other pulp elements all which culminates into a very cool twist ending. It had two sequels that followed it but it never seemed to be as perfect as the first.

Kimberly - Cinebeats

This is a tough question to answer because I like a lot of books. I also tend to like short horror stories over full-length novels. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is probably my favorite full-length horror novel of all time, but I also really love Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House. J. K. Huysmans’ classic L-Bas and Clive Barker’s Damnation Game are some other personal favorites. I could go on naming books forever!

Nathan - MicroHorror

Novel? Who has time to read novels these days? Oh, sure, the classics are required reading– Frankenstein, Dracula, The Shining– but if you’re a person of limited attention span like I am, then short story collections are where it’s at. Here are three great ones to get you started:

The Collection, by Bentley Little
Peaceable Kingdom, by Jack Ketchum
100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories, by Michael A. Arnzen

Each of these books contained multiple scenes that kept me good and haunted for several days. You’re bound to find something to your liking. And if a story starts to bore you, just skip to the next one!

Gary Wintle

I haven’t read many horror novels, but one I did read back in the day and really enjoyed was Cabal. It’s the one by Clive Barker that became a not-so-successful (but I thought still rocked) movie called Night Breed. Something about it was just cool to me reading it, kinda like X-men, but more “realistic”. These creatures were outcasts and everything, but you totally wanted to be one. That, and the book was great for sexy monster sex scenes and pretty short which is great for my attention span (it took place in Canada too I think or am I thinking of something else?). Give’er diesel, sex monsters, give`er diesel.

Like the Bookmobile, the Horror Roundtable delivers. Thanks to all the well-read ladies and gents who participated in this week’s salon. If you’d be so kind, please give us your literary recommendations below.

Movies

Ferdinando Baldi 1917 - 2007.
Lloyd Kaufman vs. Paul Haggis.
Violence and the Academy Awards.
Cinebeats celebrates Ingrid Pitt’s 70th.
Grindhouse split up in Rue Morgue Best Of Poll.
PopMatters on Stephen King work that should be adapted.
MNPP celebrates Sleepaway Camp’s Angela. MAJOR SPOILERS!
Rope of Silicon counts down the top ten Stephen King adaptations.
Film Stew looks at two upcoming Thanksgiving-themed horror features.

Interviews

Crispin Glover - The Onion.
Andrew Currie - IF Magazine.
Stephen King - The Dead Bolt.
John Leguizamo - Movie Maker.
Dustin McNeill - Rue Morgue’s Abattoir.
Stephen King and Frank Darabont - The New York Times.

Reviews

Tremors - GeekDad.
The Mist - Cinematical.
Ghost Story - Cinebeats.
The Mist - Boston Herald.
[REC] - Box Office Prophets.
The Mist - Detroit Free Press.
Redsin Tower - Cinema Fromage.
Killer Cup 1 & 2 - Horror Yearbook.
The Mist - San Jose Mercury News.
The Mist - San Francisco Chronicle.
The Nude Vampire - Comic Book Bin.
Friday the 13th - Undertaker’s Lounge.
The Corpse Vanishes - Horror Movie A Day.
After Dark HorrorFest - What?!! This Column!??.
Zodiac: Director’s Cut - The Blood Spattered Scribe.
The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion - Bloody Italiana.

Television

Dexter renewed for a third season.

Literature

Groovy holiday wist list.
Spooky literay tours of Scotland.
Frankensteinia on children’s book illustrator Brian Selznick.

Comics

The Horrors Of It All dances the Mad Mamba.
Tomb It May Concerns posts a Strange Suspense Story!

Contests

Snag autographed Masters of Horror DVDs.
Win a ‘Who Wants To Be A Vampire’ tour of Japan.

Theatre

Edinburgh undead win Highland Quest musical competition.

Misc.

The Hauntening.
Count Yor Blessings.
Dracula has passed away.
Psycho, starring Mr. Potatohead.
The search for Weng Weng in 2008. (via)
Misfits of Science coming to DVD! In Germany!
Final Girl celebrates 500 posts. Corpse Eaters who?

Madame Tutli-Putli, crafted by Clyde Henry Productions in association with the NFB, is a short animated film I’ve been anticipating for quite some time. It’s the first instance I’ve come across of someone deliberately using the “uncanny valley” of realistic animation for the purposes of establishing an unsettling mood. What sold me was this statement, made by co-director Maciek Szczerbowski in one of the numerous interviews available on the site.

“When the train starts going very fast, you’re quite happy because you’re going to get there on time if not earlier. There’s nothing scary about a train going fast. What’s paradoxically very scary is the train actually being stopped in the middle of the night. Nowhere. And you look out the window and you just see 100 km of nothing until the horizon, and the other way as well. And that’s the kind of thing we discovered was actually the real fear of being on the night train.”

What other macabre images inspire Clyde Henry Productions?

Attached is a photo that we came across recently while doing research on an upcoming project, The White Circus, a fantastical war story we are in the process of writing. The picture shows a World War I battlefield, with earth, wire, clothing, and a German corpse blending into a macabre, yet oddly beautiful pallete of grays; a singular landscape broken only by bare white teeth.

I may have been hasty in denouncing the new, sunnier ending concocted for the most recent adaptation of I Am Legend. I’ve spent the last 24 hours, both asleep and awake, happily imagining new ways to end the film.

For instance, the creatures capture Will Smith and drag him blindfolded to his fate. They reach their destination, take off the blindfold, and Will Smith discovers that they’ve resculpted the Statue of Liberty in his image, with the inscription “I Am Lejend” scratched into the base, not unlike the statue of Michael Jackson from the infamous HIStory video. Speechless in his disbelief, Will Smith turns to the leader of the creatures who rests his hand on Smith’s chest and intones, with some difficulty, the word “Friend”. Will Smith replies in kind, and the screen fades to black as the sun rises on a new day.

Leave your own faux-happy endings, for I Am Legend or any other downbeat horror movie, in the comments below. My favourite entry will receive a DVD copy of the surprisingly fun Flight of the Living Dead as well as any other goodies I can gather together.

Thanks to JA for “Lejend”.

Today’s journey into fear comes courtesy of Sam Costello, original member of the defunct horror weblog Dark, But Shining and proprietor of Split Lip, a monthly showcase of gruesome and original comic stories just entering its second year. Don’t let his poor taste in choosing testimonials dissuade you.

It’s a foundational tenet of horror that fear is motivated by, among other things, the unknown. Whether the unknown is embodied in The Other or a dark corner where something might be lurking, that possibility, that mystery is a source of fear.

Fear of the unknown is at the root of my favorite new horror movie of the last year or two, The Descent. When I started thinking about this essay, I expected to write about The Descent. It deserves to be written about — it’s nuanced, intense, and so scary that after seeing it I used my cell phone as a flashlight to illuminate the far corners of my bedroom.

But despite The Descent’s use of a fear of the unknown, I knew I’d be writing about something else when I saw this picture:

That’s a hole in the floor of the ocean, featured on a site with a collection of pictures of, no snickering please, giant holes.

No matter how scary I think The Descent is – and that’s pretty scary – this picture is far scarier, this goes to the gut, the viscera of what makes the unknown scary.

That hole, called the Great Blue Hole, is off the coast of Belize. It’s 1,000 feet wide and 400 feet deep.

I think this hole, especially seen from this perspective, is scarier and encompasses fear of the unknown better than any movie I can imagine.

I’ve always found large bodies of water, especially those so dark that you can’t see what’s beneath you, somewhat frightening. It’s a child’s fear, but even as an adult every so often I’ll swim in a lake with forests of long weeds growing from its floor that invariably brush my legs or wrap lightly around my feet. At the moment of their touch, a queasy electric charge shoots through my body, lighting my stomach up with fear.

It’s irrational, of course. What’s in a lake that’s going to harm me? A monster? Of course not, but those dark waters beneath me could contain anything – anything – and I wouldn’t know it.

I look at that picture of the Great Blue Hole and I imagine swimming or sailing over it. I imagine cruising along in the beautiful blue water, seeing the ocean floor beneath me and not worrying at all about unknown depths. But suddenly the ocean floor has fallen away profoundly, deeply.

And nothing happens. That’s surreal, it violates our understanding of how the world works. When a hole opens up below you on land, gravity pulls you down into it. When you see a hole below you, you should fall. Instinctively, in your pre-human, lizard brain, you know you should be falling and you panic. But you don’t fall in water. The world has fallen away from you and you haven’t followed it.

More than that, a hole like this feels wrong. These geological features occur, but we don’t expect them. And if something so profound as the ocean floor – the very skin of the earth itself – can collapse like that, then what could be in the hole? If the world contains mysteries deep enough to contain that hole, then what does the hole contain?

These pictures are beautiful, of course, but they’re also awe-inspiring. And that’s just the right word: awe. Dictionary.com defines it as:

an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like

Isn’t that feeling inherent in horror, the feeling that arises in a character when the monster is seen for the first time, when the terrible truth is acknowledged, when the unknown becomes known?

I haven’t really been following the latest adaptation of I Am Legend, so it came as a bit of a surprise to me that not only did they reshoot the ending to make it less dismal, but apparently their first take wasn’t faithful to the source material to begin with. What, is it going to end with the vampires wheeling out a giant cake that says “Congratulations! You Am Legend!”

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I rarely get worked up about lousy interpretations of my favourite genre offerings. I stopped caring long before my top three horror movies were remade into shoddy copies, so it isn’t the fact that they’re tinkering with my favourite horror novel that has me upset. I’m just dismayed that my estimation of Hollywood could sink even lower. Why purchase the rights to I Am Legend only to change arguably the best part of the novel? Isn’t that a little like buying the rights to Jaws and asking Steven Spielberg to take out the shark?

This reminds me of what happened with the movie Payback. Director Brian Helgeland wanted to succeed where others had failed and make a straight-up, modestly budgeted adaptation of a Richard Stark novel. Then Mel Gibson became interested. By the time the studio was done with it Helgeland was kicked out of the editing suite, just about every scene was altered, an additional third of the movie was tacked on, and Payback was a farce.

There’s no reason that I Am Legend couldn’t be made on a tiny budget which would allow for greater artistic risks and less of a need for a huge return. 30 Days of Night certainly showed that it was possible. Add Will Smith and the outlandish budget that comes with him and suddenly Robert Neville’s greatest threat isn’t creatures of the night but focus groups and nervous executives.

One thing’s for sure. I’d love to see this creative team take a crack at something like Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl.

Mr. Lombardo Radice (aka John Morghen) would like you all to know that he’s made his peace with being a European cult icon, having appeared in such classics as Cannibal Apocalypse, City of the Living Dead, The House On The Edge Of The Park, and too many others to mention. His next theatre engagement will be acting in “Off” by Michael Kearns, which he has also translated into Italian, in Rome during May of next year. Also, his translation and adaptation of Reginald Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men” opened this month. Check it out and let us know how it went, won’t you? Finally, he’d also like you all to know he prefers to be referred to as Johnny. I hope one day to meet him at a convention (Are you catching this, Dave?). He seems like a nice, if not fearless, guy.

I definitely was an easy scared kid.

More recent movies?
You must be joking.
I stopped being a masochist many years and many hair(s) ago.

Movies

Thanksgiving merch.
The B-Movie/Porn connection.
Stephen King raises his prices.
YouTube serial adds zombies to the mix.
Vagina Dentata the next big trend in horror?
Make your own damn no-budget horror movie.
I, too, fucking love Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Friday the 13th remake opening sequence revealed?
Frankenweenie to pop off of screen and into your face.
In a surprise move, Igor gets a Halloween release date.
Viggo Mortensen in the running as hottest Poe ever. (Via)

Interviews

Crispin Glover - Suicide Girls. (via)
Sarah Michelle Gellar - Moviehole.
Tim and Donna Lucas - Studio Kaiju.
Frank Darabont - The New York Times.

Reviews

Red Roses - India Times.
Beowulf - Steve Bissette.
Follow Me Quietly - Arbogast on Film.
Hard Rock Zombies - Tuscaloosa News.
Rise: Blood Hunter - Horror Movie A Day.

Literature

Blogslinging continues.

Gaming

House of the Dead takes to the Wii.
Gamedaily on Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles

Events

From the Horrorhound floor.
Edgar Wright and special guests to program the Beverly.

Misc.

Welsh zombies to try for world record.
Zombies to vacate Port Gamble peacefully.

I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate occasional Horror Roundtable contributor and Brother in Metal Douglas Nagy for achieving the dream by blogging for a living. Nagy has been a profanity-laden presence on The Movie Blog podcasts since its inception and this new development will allow him to contribute written wisdom in addition to his aural participation. Expect to see numerous articles devoted to The Devil Master, Shaolin vs. Lama and Patrick Swayze in the near future. Black Dog, represent!

When is the Golden Age of Doctor Who? Around ten or eleven, I imagine.

For the past couple of years the team behind Doctor Who have been providing exclusive video clips bridging seasons for the charity Children in Need. This year’s selection showcases one of the traditions of the original series that hasn’t been touched yet; multiple Doctors. It’s a sweet little tribute by current doctor David Tennant to his Doctor.

I especially liked the crack about the Master’s beard.

Courtesy of Ain’t It Cool News.

Name your favourite horror movie tagline.

Bill Cunningham - DisContent

BRIDE OF CHUCKY

“Chucky gets lucky.”

Sean T. Collins - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

“Who will survive and what will be left of them?” from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Greatest Of All Time!

Donald May, Jr. - Synapse

“When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth…”
That one always struck me as genius marketing. It’s catchy, thought provoking and it made me want to see the movie!

It’s a tie with: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

Stacie - Final Girl

Aah, there’s so many good ones, though I feel like it’s a dying art. Of course, that just might be my cynical, bitter half talking, but it seems to me that taglines (and posters) used to be much more effective at getting your curiosity piqued. Maybe with the glut of information about films- trailers, on-set reports and the such- at our fingertips now, posters and taglines have become less essential? I have no idea. But anyway, some of my favorites:

“The night he came home” - a simple and chilling line for a simple and chilling film, John Carpenter’s Halloween.

“Man is the warmest place to hide” - eww! From another Carpenter classic, The Thing.

“If this movie doesn’t make your skin crawl, it’s on too tight!” - Black Christmas ‘74

Zombie movies tend to have killer taglines:

“They won’t stay dead!” - Night of the Living Dead ‘68

“When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth” - CLASSIC! Dawn of the Dead ‘78

“We are going to eat you!” - Fulci’s Zombi gets right to the point.

And one of the absolute greatest (if not THE greatest) in my humble opinion:

“Who will survive and what will be left of them?” - The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ‘74

Mark - Exclamation Mark’s SciFi/Horror Review

I’ve always loved the tagline to The Abominable Dr. Phibes: “Love means never having to say you’re ugly.”

Red Hawk - Happy Horror

I have three taglines that are my favorites. The first one I thought of was from Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead: “We Tried To Warn You. If You Don’t Get It This Time We’re Going To Have To Drill It Into Your Head!”, which was made all the more poignant with the picture of the Tall Man holding one of his driller balls. My second favorite was from Return of the Living Dead Part II’s “Just When You Thought it Was Safe to be Dead”. It really cracked me up, especially with the scenes in the ads that it showed (one with a zombie trying to come up out of the ground only to keep getting stepped on, the other with a zombie falling into an open grave as he’s shambling along). My third favorite is from the 1980s classic Night of the Creeps: “The good news is… your dates are here. The bad news is… they’re dead.” Hearing the main cop deliver the line in the trailer basically made me want to see the movie.

Tim - Mondo Schlocko

The one that sticks to my mind at the moment would have to be LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT’S Taglines: “It rests on 13 acres of earth on the very center of hell!!” And the second tag on the same poster: “Mari, seventeen is dying, even for her the worst is yet to come!”

You have to admit that the last tagline would give anybody the creeps just by imagining what goes on in that flick. No one ever seems to have those great taglines anymore.

Louis - Damaged 2.0

For pure kick-ass value: “He’s in town with a few days to kill.” from PREDATOR 2.

For pure WTF value: “Can a full grown woman truly love a MIDGET?” from TOD BROWNING’S FREAKS

For pure nostalgic value: “We are going to eat you!” from ZOMBI 2

The Horror Roundtable. They’ll answer any question… For a price! Have your say in the comments below, if you value your soul.

Describe a piece of horror entertainment that you enjoyed but can no longer remember the name of.

Sean T. Collins - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

When I was in elementary school I was super-scared by any horror that wasn’t of the black-and-white classic-monster variety, but I was big into “enigmas”–the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Atlantis, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, ghosts and so on. The school nurse, to whom I was a frequent visitor, had a little paperback book on them that contained two tales that haunt me to this day. One was on the mystery of Flight 19, the group of Naval bombers that disappeared over the Bermuda triangle, leaving only the cryptic echoes of their increasingly distant-sounding call numbers over the radio waves behind. The other was the story of a 19th-century farmer (I did a little googling a couple weeks ago and his name was David Lang) who disappeared into thin air while walking in his field; the only trace of him were faint cries for help from the ether and the dead grass on the spot where he vanished. This one had a creepy illustration with a guy waving in the middle of a field, only instead of really seeing him there’s just a dotted line to indicate he’s invisible. Even though both of these stories have basically been debunked, the whole “vanishing/desperate voices from beyond” thing still gives me the willies. I wish to god I knew the name of the book it was in so I could add it to my bookshelf, next to my Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Omnibus and the abridged and illustrated Tales of Mystery and Terror by Edgar Allen Poe, two other proto-horror touchstones.

Actually, while we’re on the subject, there was this magnificent series of thin orange hardcover books, each spotlighting a different classic monster (the Universal stable, King Kong, Godzilla, etc.), that I took out from my elementary school library CONSTANTLY. The back page was always a picture of Kong plugging the other books in the series via a word balloon reading “I SUGGEST YOU READ ABOUT MY FRIENDS!” A similar series of purple hardcovers covered ’50s sci-fi/horror flicks. Please, please tell me someone out there knows what the hell I’m talking about.

Jeff O’Brien

This odd Czech film that featured these HUGE sets and actors playing miniature people moving out of the walls, over the furniture. WAY pre CGI, damned if I can find the title though…

Nathan - MicroHorror

First is a movie that got screened at Camp Airy, circa 1990 or thereabouts. All I remember was a bunch of short little troll guys creeping around– I think they were wearing hooded robes– and a boy with longish hair who inspired me to burst into an impromptu rendition of Aerosmith’s seminal hit “Dude Looks Like a Lady,” to the amusement of the other campers. In hindsight, I think the movie was “Phantasm” or one of its sequels, but as of right now I’m still not certain.

The second, on the other hand, was found on late-night television at my friend Will’s house, also many years ago. It was an old movie even then, and the plot concerned a killer, possibly giant, crocodile. I remember that Our Hero, your standard Great White Hunter type, had a cowardly native sidekick who at one point cried out in his phony accent, lamenting, “I would make some croc a tasty dee-ner!” Yeah, it was bad, but I’d love to know what on earth that movie was.

Mark - Exclamation Mark’s SciFi/Horror Review

When I was eight years old I saw a made-for-tv-movie that haunted my memory until I was into my 40s. All I could remember was that at one point a woman is placed on the ground with a large board over her body. A procession of what appeared to be pilgrim women came by and placed large stones on the board eventually crushing the woman to death. The point of view would change from a shot of the tortured woman’s face, to her view as she watched another stone being placed on the board. As an adult I talked to other people my age and they, too, could remember the scene but nothing else of the movie. Thankfully, years later, with the help of the internet, I was able to put my curiosity to rest. The movie is called Crowhaven Farm, a film about witchcraft and reincarnation. Apparently the “pilgrim women” were witches . I’ve still not viewed the movie as an adult, but I would love to see it again.

Kimberly - Cinebeats

There was one movie I saw on TV when I was a kid that (if my memory is serving me right) involved a bunch of college age kids (maybe with an adult or two?) going on a camping trip and being attacked and terrorized by some kind of monster/mad man/thing in the woods. The group was traveling in a camper and I think most of the film took place at night. It had to have been made in the 70s or maybe the late sixties and I’m pretty sure it was an American movie unless it was dubbed. I’ve always wanted to find out what it was since it scarred me silly and I couldn’t watch it all because my mom made go to bed before it ended. I’ve tried looking for it over the years, but I haven’t had any luck. If anyone knows what it is, I would love to know!

It’s quality over quantity week at The Horror Roundtable. If you can help any of this week’s participants, won’t you please ease their minds in the comments below? Or if you have your own Unholy Grail, drop us a line and we’ll see what we can do for you.

With the end of 2007 rapidly approaching I’ve been giving a lot of thought to which are my favourite horror movies of the year. One film that keeps fighting for the top spot is Mulberry Street, which I caught at the Fantasia Film Festival over the summer. It’s about as straightforward a siege film as you can get, with the denizens of a New York City tenement building fighting off hordes of people infected by a rat-borne virus. What really struck me about the film was how director/co-writer Jim Mickle and actor/co-writer Nick Damici made the audience care about the characters by making the characters themselves care for each other. It’s easily the best independent horror film I’ve seen in years, and you can catch it on the big screen as part of the 8 To Die For horror festival taking place across the United States. Don’t miss it.

“Black Hole” the Charles Burns graphic novel

Read it and dig it!

Today I present two of the actors that made Cabin Fever such an enjoyable experience for me. First up is Arie Verveen, unrecognizable as the hapless hermit who introduced the plague to the gang. Mr. Verveen recently wrapped up a pilot for Guy Ritchie’s new project ‘Suspect’.

In response to your question, the first thought that pops in my head was an almighty clap of thunder that woke me in the middle of the night when I was maybe 7 years old. Don’t remember what I had been dreaming at the time but when I hopped out of bed, my knees were so shaky, I could hardly walk down my hallway. Almost threw up. Of course I’m much tougher these days!!

If I had to name one thing that has prompted me to watch and rewatch Cabin Fever it would be Giuseppe Andrews’ turn as Deputy Winston and his return to that role is the only reason I’m looking forward to the sequel. His response is so to the point that it doesn’t even require punctuation, but it made me laugh, hence it’s inclusion here.

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