Share your horror-related New Year’s resolution.

Kimberly - Cinebeats

To watch more Mexican horror films and catch up on all the Casa Negra DVD releases. I also need to catch up on all the Spanish Paul Naschy films that BCI/Eclipse have released. I hope to write a lot more about British and Japanese horror films next year and maybe I’ll start working on a book proposal. I’m dreaming big for 2008, which means I’m surely headed for disappointment. Viva la New Year!

Bill Cunningham - DisContent

I resolve to bring The Knightmare to life!

Sean - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

Keep going to see the movies I want to see at the movie theater. It’s fun that way.

Curt - Beyond The Groovy Age of Horror

Alas, the same horror-related New Year’s resolution for too many years in a row now: FINISH THE DAMN NOVEL!!!

Happy holidays from the Groovy Age of Horror!

Doug Nagy

I recently picked up a collection of about 20 Hitchcock films and I plan on working my way through all of them this year. Upon completion I will drink a liter of crow blood.

Eric - Bloody Good Horror

I’m not usually one for shameless self promotion, but we’ve got a lot of things cooking up right now at the site that I’m really excited about. A slightly tweaked look, t-shirts, collaboration with other sites and Horror Hound Magazine, and a whole new promotional push. These things are all resolutions because, well at this point none of it has been fully realized. The gears are turning though, so I hope everyone takes the time to visit the site this year and join us in the journey.

Nathan - MicroHorror

My big horror goal for 2008 is to hit one thousand stories on MicroHorror, but that’s not really a resolution, since it all depends on the generosity and creativity of others. I do resolve, though, to watch more movies and get caught up on the canonical titles, both classics that I’ve never seen and more recent successes that I missed. And just for the heck of it, I’m going to watch the entire series of Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, interleaved, so I see all the movies in chronological order of release date, culminating in Freddy vs. Jason. I think that will be fun.

Retropoliltan - Tales To Astonish

My horror resolutions for 2008 are threefold:

1. There’s this Stephen King book called “The Stand” — maybe you’ve heard of it — and it’s been propping up my bed for about three years. My resolution is to get a new bed frame so that I can finally read it.

2. Watch every Hammer film known to man.

3. Continue my grand plan to collect every major ’80s and ’90s television show’s special Halloween (or generically horror-themed) episode, if they had any. Especially the ‘haunted house’ episode of “Diff’rent Strokes.”

I’m making the same resolution I make every year; punching The Healthiest Man In Canada in the throat. Thanks to all this week’s Roundtable participants for putting up for me for another year. Make your improbable vows for 2008 in the comments below.

Describe your least favourite horror-related experience of 2007.

Sean - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

That would be seeing the New York premiere of Hostel: Part II. I mean, sure, it was fun to go to a screening with the filmmakers and stars. But that movie! It’s as though Eli Roth consciously chose to make a film that lived up to the inaccurate criticism directed at the first. Listening to the Q&A afterwords, as fawning true believers showered the movie with praise to the sounds of Roth obliviously tooting his own horn, was like watching a subgenre drive off a cliff.

Kimberly - Cinebeats

The whole idiotic “debate” over so-called “torture porn” and the ridiculous arguments I read against it. I think the term was created by lazy uninformed critics who wanted to start a controversy and they clearly haven’t watched a lot of horror movies. Some of the worst and most uninformed film criticism I read this year was directed at Eli Roth and it got really ugly, personal and unprofessional. Even some horror sites and publications started to parrot mainstream critics because it was popular or trendy to bash anyone associated with “torture porn” and that added to the level of noise and really got on my nerves frankly.

Retropoliltan - Tales To Astonish

While I can’t say that I’ve really had a *terrible* experience with horror in 2007, I’d say that “Saw III” comes the closest. I’ve long been a proponent of films having characters that are somewhat likable, but in this flick, I really couldn’t wait until they were all dead; and yet when they died it wasn’t even satisfying. I think Jigsaw’s big torture move in the final installment should be cutting off their eyelids and making these people watch the entire Saw franchise in one sitting. Could anyone possibly survive that? UNLIKELY

Eric - Bloody Good Horror

Finally being forced to watch the Black Christmas remake from 2005. One of the WORST movies I’ve ever seen, and a true insult to the original. Seeing the way that Rob Zombie butchered Halloween was also quite an unpleasant experience.

Jeff O’Brien

Watching Hills Have Eyes 2 - the freefall of Wes Craven continues.

Rony

It would definitely be seeing night of the living dead 3D. So much potential and yet one big piece of shit came out. BOOOOO!!!!

Nathan - MicroHorror

I can describe my worst horror experience of 2007, I have to retract my previous answer regarding the best. I don’t know why I failed to bring this to mind last week– I suppose I mentally filed it under “life-affirming memories to warm my soul forever” instead of under “horror”– but it happened at Baltimore Comic-Con, and it was when I got to meet, shake the hand of and express my gratitude to Al Feldstein. Feldstein, of course, is the writer of most of the stories that appeared in the great EC horror comics of the 1950s (in addition to his duties as editor and regular artist). No single person has done more to influence and inspire me as a horror writer and fan. He’s one of my idols, and having the opportunity to tell him so in person was one of the high points of my life.

I had to mention Al Feldstein because my worst horror experience this year was tangentially related to him. You see, an operation by the name of Papercutz somehow landed the rights to publish new comics under the “Tales From the Crypt” title, and I, blinded by the sight of the old logo, bought a copy of their first trade paperback. Guess what? It stunk like a six-week corpse. The stories were predictable and boring, the writing was weak, the jokes weren’t funny and the art just barely qualified as tolerable. The host segments were drawn by Rick Parker, and I don’t know who he is, but he’s sure as hell no Jack Davis.

To make matters worse, if you can believe it, the violence and gore were actually toned down compared to the originals. Papercutz, it seems, bills themselves as a “graphic novel publisher for tweens and teens.” Their other flagship titles include comic adaptations of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Clearly, this is not the house to be taking over where Feldstein and company left off. So save your money and don’t be fooled by the appealing title. These are not the Tales From the Crypt you’re looking for. I’m expecting the offices of Papercutz to be attacked by the shambling corpses of Bill Gaines, Johnny Craig and Graham Ingels any day now.

I’ll tell you what I’m liking about this year. My brother and I kicking it in a penthouse condo playing Marvel Alliance for Christmas. Thanks to all Roundtable elves for providing the coal for Horror’s stocking. Leave a message at the beep.

Everybody’s talking about I Am Legend, The Omega Man and Last Man on Earth, but no one is discussing Santo vs. The Vampire Women.

Plot: In a time when vampires were hot, a cabal of vampire women ruled over by Augusto, the Lord of Darkness, seek out an innocent young lady who holds the key to bringing about a demonic apocalypse, and only one man can stop them. Motherfucking Santo.

One thing I learned from Santo Vs. The Vampire Women is that humanity has been tricked into believing that vampires only have very specific weaknesses. We should just punch them. In the face. And if they get up, keep on punching. Punch them until the break of dawn. Baby got it goin’ on. Then dropkick the ashes.

Also, vampires will disguise themselves as luchadors and try to use karate on you so they can steal your mask. It may not seem fair, but at that point it’s alright to use karate on them yourself.

Describe your favourite horror-related experience of 2007.

Eric - Bloody Good Horror

To me, after being away from the genre for a few years, catching up on all the great stuff from over the last few years was great fun. By far the film that blew me away the most was Niel Marshall’s “The Descent.” It was one of those films that will scare the shit out of you and stays with you for days afterwards. Also, flying out to Indianapolis for Horror Hound Weekend (A horror convention put on by Horror Hound Magazine, which I also write for) and getting to meet John Landis was amazing. I met some great people that weekend and I’ll never forget the experience.

Sean T. Collins - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

Probably watching the opening sequence of 28 Weeks Later, the best horror movie of the year.

Jeff O’Brien

Watching THE EYE for the first time. Terrific Asian horror!

Kimberly - Cinebeats

I had a few that have really stuck with me. The first was discovering Fabrice Du Welz’s Belgium/French horror film Calvaire (2004) on DVD earlier this year. Calvaire was easily the best new horror film I’ve seen in at least two or maybe even three years. The French have been producing some of my favorite modern horror films of the last decade and Calvaire is just amazing in the way the unusual story plays out and the beautiful way it’s shot. I was also thrilled that I was finally able to see Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Pitfall (1962) and Teruo Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men (1969). I’ve been wanting to see both of these Japanese horror movies for years so when they were released on DVD in the US this year I was really excited and they didn’t disappoint me. As a matter of fact, I was so blown over by them that I haven’t been able to write anything about them yet. Words have sort of failed me.

JA - My New Plaid Pants

Hands down it was seeing the director’s cut of the first Hostel with Eli Roth in attendance a couple months ago. Not only did I end up preferring the director’s cut to the original, but Eli Roth was funny and articulate and, well, standing five feet from me in relatively snug jeans… I’m a simple man, with simple tastes.

Nathan - MicroHorror

My favorite horror experience of 2007, I think, was the Postcards From Hell project. I paid the low price of $6.66, and once a week for thirteen consecutive weeks I received a postcard in my mailbox containing a brand new short-short horror story, each one an eerie gem. The project was an original and delightfully tangible way of delivering stories to readers, and all of the postcards are now stored safely in a creepy little wooden box on my mantel. Sadly, the project is over now, and it’s not clear whether it will ever be repeated, but it was lots of fun while it lasted. My compliments to the organizer and participating authors.

Retropolitan - Tales To Astonish

My favorite horror-related experience of 2007?

The official ‘Monster Squad’ DVD. I’m sure I’ve seen the movie a thousand times already, but actually having a super-duper double-disc set with all the commentaries and documentaries and frills made 2007 worth living through. If the entire civilized world collapses before January 1st, the rise of human society will not have been in vain because of this DVD set. Now that I think of it, maybe we should just quit while we’re ahead.

My alternate answer: “Whatever the opposite of SAW III is.”

My best experience of the year? Why, thanking the Horror Roundtable participants each and every week, of course! Make like Zelda and check out the links above, while simultaneously letting the world know your own worthwhile horror-related experience in the comments below. I know you can do it. I believe in you.

Which piece of writing, artwork or other creative output do you feel is your best of the past year?

Sean T. Collins - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

I’m really proud of “Destructor Comes to Croc Town,” my contribution to the Elfworld indie-comics fantasy anthology. It’s a year or two old, but seeing it in print this year in that lovely collection was just wonderful.

In terms of blogging, I did a lot of writing I’m happy with this year. I’m pretty proud of defending of the “torture porn” label and drawing attention to the current critical fixation on political subtext in horror to the exclusion of other factors. But just in general I feel like I found a real groove in terms of talking about the art that interests me, probably aided by blogging daily with only maybe one week total of off-days.

Jeff O’Brien

http://www.bonedryfilm.com and click trailers. The “cactus scene” warms my heart.

Gary Wintle

Although not horror-related, I think my best work so far this year has been the story I made chronicling my adventure to the hippy town of Nimbin, Australia for Cannabis Culture Magazine. I’m most happy about it because I’ve done plenty of art in the past for people, but this was my first shot at writing anything. I had full creative freedom to boot, so that really rocked out too.

Kimberly - Cinebeats

I haven’t been working on much art lately and due to camera troubles I haven’t taken a lot of photos this year so that limits my choices to my writing. I’m not sure what was my best piece is, but the “What’s in the Box?” piece I wrote about Bunuel’s film Belle de Jour generated a lot of interest and the research I did seemed to offer fresh insight into that film. I’m personally really fond of my piece about Lee Marvin in Point Blank, as well as my piece on Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses so I’d have a hard time choosing between those three.

JA - My New Plaid Pants

Perhaps this is a cheat answer since it’s an entire series of posts that I’ve done for my blog, but I really, really enjoy doing my Thursday’s Ways Not To Die series. I’d been wanting some way to up the gore-quotient and this series has been effective in that regard, most assuredly.

Tim - Mondo Schlocko

Well, I have not completed anything this year. However, I have started on several projects or more including a music vid and screenwriting. If anything, I am just glad to finally have the gumption to get off my ass and make a go at making something.

David Z. - Tomb It May Concern

I’m really proud to have put all of the Thriller-A Cruel Picture / They Call Her One Eye material on the web. Enhanced by as much Christina Lindberg as I could find (with more to come)…this is something I just really needed to do. While I don’t think the writing is the strongest suit-though I think my coverage on Breaking Point is pretty good-just passing along all that stuff is something I hope lots of fans of the movie and exploitation cinema archaeologists find helpful for years to come.

And though there is some repetition in the tagging, there are lots of Christina Lindberg photos (ed. note - NSFW, and how!) that I’ve found via Usenets around the world as well as sent to me by collectors that I’ve tried to clean up and restore as best as I can.

Nathan - MicroHorror

I haven’t been as prolific with my own horror output this year as I would have liked. I can’t complain, though– my time has been occupied with work and piracy, as well as publishing the work of some very fine writers. I did sell an unpublished story to Apex Digest, though, as well as contributing to the upcoming Twisted Twins horror calendar, so I can’t say that I was unproductive. Apart from that, though, I wrote one thing that was very satisfying: an E-mail.

As some of you may know, I had some regrettable trouble with a plagiarist earlier this year, and of course I banned him from my site the moment I found him out. Some people just never learn, though, so he continued to try to send more stories from new E-mail addresses and under assumed names. I replied, reminding him in no uncertain terms of his banned status and forbidding him from contacting me again. He wrote back a few days later with a message reading, in its entirety:

“fuck you faggot”

When I read that, I knew that victory was truly mine, and I slept the sleep of the just.

Now that’s fast fiction! Thanks to all this week’s contributors for giving themselves a pat on the back. Won’t you check out their glorious achievements at the links above? And while we’re on the topic, feel free to crow about your own projects in the comments below.

I wanted to take a moment to thank all the contributors to Scarred for taking the time out of their busy schedules to share their fears. If you missed out on the series, please feel free to revisit the entire thing here. I would also like to thank Sean T. Collins for being the main cheerleader of the project and for helping get the word out to venues which would not have heard of it otherwise. Thanks, man.

On a related note, after a great deal of thought on the matter, I’ve decided to begin my New Year’s Resolution early and give The Horror Blog an overhaul. Beginning next week I will no longer be posting with as much regularity or in the style that you’ve grown accustomed. Posts will be made whenever a topic moves me, hopefully at least once a week though I can’t make that a guarantee. I mention this only so that those readers of the blog who check in for regularly updated news can adjust their habits accordingly.

Finally, The Horror Roundtable is reaching the home stretch and with many of the regular participants dropping out of the scene I thought I’d take this opportunity to extend an invitation to any interested horror bloggers looking to join the fun. If you run a blog or site that deals in horror a fair amount of the time (ie, at least a third of your posts), and would be interested in contributing during these End Days, drop me a line at steven@thehorrorblog.com. Space is limited. Thanks!

With this installment, Scarred draws to a close, and who better to show us out than one of the most respected horror and thriller writers of the past forty years. Ramsey Campbell is the critically acclaimed author of The Face That Must Die, The One Safe Place and numerous other novels and short stories. His latest novels include The Grin of the Dark and Thieving Fear, and a new short story collection, Just Behind You, which is forthcoming from PS Publishing. He’s currently working on a novel, Creatures of the Pool, as well as contributing a regular column in Video Watchdog.

What scares you, Mr. Campbell?

Very few films terrify me these days. I’d be happy if they did, and I always watch in hope. The Blair Witch Project, with its combination of documentary realism and Lovecraftian allusiveness, works rather well, and some of the Asian spectres that have haunted our screens recently are closer to M. R. James’ inhuman revenants than almost any of those in films of his stories. However, the one director whose work has conveyed unutterable dread to me several times is David Lynch. I’m not exaggerating: Eraserhead feels to me like being trapped in someone else’s bad dream. The old couple in Mulholland Dr. dismay me as soon as they start grinning, long before they shrink, and they’re by no means the only alarming element in the film. There are several passages of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me that I would find insupportably disturbing if they lasted any longer (the breakfast-table scene, for instance). However, Lost Highway outdoes them all for me. I’ve seen no other film that communicates such a sense of nightmare horror. The entire first section in particular does, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, and I was interested to learn that Lynch chose as his favourite scene from the film the one that terrifies me most - surely the most terrifying consensual sex scene in all fiction - where Fred’s impotence causes him to imagine that Renée’s comforting hand on his back belongs to someone else.

I discuss the film at length in Mark Morris’s anthology Cinema Macabre.

Tom Sullivan is probably best-known as the mastermind behind the visual effects and animation in Evil Dead 1 and 2, respectively. He also created of one of the most memorable horror props of the modern age; The Book of the Dead. Of all the entries in this series, his is the one I could most relate to.

I loved getting scared as a kid. I remember seeing the Vincent Price classic, House on Horror Hill, with my brother Mike and older sister Kathy after we had talked a babysitter into letting us see it. When the skeleton slides out of a closet we jumped through the roof and called it a night.

We both loved the film and Mike eventually forgave me for shutting the door.

J. and I watched Hot Rod and No Country For Old Men this weekend. One of them was probably my favourite movie of the year. The other was No Country For Old Men.

Movies
Watching the Black Christmas remake drunk.
Sundance Midnight genre selection announced.
Kinda sorta early reviews for Cloverfield. SPOILERS.

DVD
Ghost House keeps cranking ‘em out.

Interviews
Tim Sullivan - Icons of Fright.
Joe Lynch - Bloody Good Horror.
Basil Gogos - The Horror Channel.
Dave Alexander and Audra Butera - Mondo Mark. Via.

Reviews
The Mist - News Review.
XXXorcist - Horror Yearbook.
The Mist - House Next Door. Via.
The Dead Zone - Moon In The Gutter.
I Know Who Killed Me - Damaged 2.0.
Emmanuelle’s Revenge - Bloody Italiana.
Zombies of Mora Tau - Exclamation Mark.
The Mist (2nd viewing) - Horror Movie A Day.
Lady Frankenstein - Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies.
Hunchback of the Morgue - Exploitation Retrospect.

Literature
Hot.
What Dean Koontz and Stephen King are reading.
Matt Staggs is dissatisfied with horror literature’s timidity.
Gods In Spandex, a new non-fiction book on 80s genre filmmakers.

Comics
New book on the comic witch hunt of the 50’s.
Horror Yearbook checks out the new releases.

Misc.

Kelly Osbourne wants to be Columbia in Rocky Horror.