Online video service Guba has nearly four dozen Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons available, from Boo Bop to Spook and Span and all points in-between. I was always more of a fan of the Harvey comics than the cartoons, which makes the fact that I immediately recognized all five random cartoons I checked out just a little disturbing.

Link courtesy of the always entertaining Monsterama.

As much as this article’s tone gets on my nerves, the quotes from those actually involved in 1408 have prompted me to take in the movie this weekend. I particularly enjoyed Samuel Jackson’s take on the recent spate of hardcore horror thrills.

“People used to jump for Vincent Price and now they jump for different shit … Kids are special-effects savvy. They’re making their own slasher movies in the sixth grade.”

Other highlights include Cusack’s comparison of his character to Houdini, director Mikael Hafstrom’s praise of Stephen King’s short stories and the revelation that Eli Roth was once slated to direct 1408.

Cinematical has posted their Box Office predictions for the weekend, with 1408 at number one with a 50 million dollar take. That seems pretty crazy to me, especially when it’s up against the family-friendly Evan Almighty.

And finally, a hotel in Florida is actively inviting guests to stay in room 1408 after watching the film. William Castle would be proud.

A man returns to his hometown to uncover the decades-old mystery that resulted in his wife’s murder. With puppets.

I think it’s admirable that after creating the Saw franchise and initiating the recent trend of gritty horror films James Wan and Leigh Whannell have decided to take a step in a different direction with their follow-up film, Dead Silence. Unfortunately, they haven’t started with a clean slate, bringing with them a load of baggage from Saw that muddies the proceedings.

Dead Silence is filled to the brim with characters discussing what’s going on without very much actually happening. Stories and folktales are evoked, added upon, then proven untrue, making for a very frustrating experience. The scenes where Wan most emulates silent films and the old Universal horror movies prove to be the most effective, particularly in their use of sound, but these elements are immediately undercut by machine gun editing and a techo-metal soundtrack so as not to lose it’s core audience. The whole thing is wishy-washy, never completely having faith in its own vision.

While the acting was touch and go, with Donnie Wahlberg standing out as the most sardonic cop this side of Tom Atkins, lead actor Ryan Kwanten gave the blandest performance I have seen in years and was one of the main reasons the film tanks. To be fair, his presence was in keeping with the pace of the rest of the movie, where seemingly important plot points were revealed with little to no emphasis placed upon them. Sure we learn why everything is happening to the characters, but the answers are delivered in such a matter-of-fact manner that not even the victims register shock.

A complicated storyline doesn’t necessarily equal a complex one. And it should be noted that despite all the CGI, elaborate sets and stattaco editing, the creepiest part of the movie was a simple tableau of an old lady with a ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on her lap. I just wish there had been more of an emphasis on that.

The Messengers follows a dysfunctional family composed of a father, mother, sullen teenager and mute toddler as they escape the big city and a tragic past for life on a sunflower farm. Unfortunately for them, their new home is inhabited by spirits who communicate their sorrow in physically harrowing ways.

I’ve never understood the appeal of The Messengers directors the Pang Brothers. The Eye was only passably entertaining, and Re-Cycle was one of the few films I have ever considered walking out of. Maybe it’s because The Pangs were among the first successful South Korean creators to come out of the Asian horror boom, but taking into consideration all the talent coming out of that country I can only imagine their days are numbered. If so, The Messengers may be the nail in the coffin.

Plot-wise, the film plays out like three or four movies mixed together, but unlike most I found those disparate horror conventions worked fairly well. Where the cross-breeding failed was in its mixture of styles. The inclusion of the rather overplayed Asian ghosts with the other more Western menaces was a good idea gone horribly wrong and didn’t do either camp any favours. The Messengers other major failing is in its characterization, with the underlying tension between family members turning out to be both a let-down and downright unbelievable. The impression one gets time and time again is that this family has almost no concept of either personal safety or responsibility for others. They constantly let each other out of their sight when it would be inadvisable in real life, let alone during a crisis. I was half expecting a character to fall off the roof because another character holding the ladder saw something shiny and let go to investigate. These people are precisely why natural selection is a great idea.

Surprisingly, there are a few good ideas buried in The Messengers. It’s tricky to plausibly keep the victim of ghostly encounters from fleeing and never coming back, but in the case of a relatively powerless and voiceless teenager there really isn’t any choice. Having the protagonist chained to the location by social pressures, rather than imprisonment of a physical or mental variety, is a novel idea that would definitely resonate with the intended audience. What teenager doesn’t feel as if they know all the answers, yet no one is willing to listen to them? While Kristen Stewart is only passable in the role of the family’s daughter, she excels in screaming, sobbing and freaking out, and that puts her well above the rest of the cast who hack out their roles. Another interesting characterization is that of the youngest child, able to see the ghosts but unable to voice his observations. The intriguing part about his role is that at almost no point in the movie does he realize the extent of the danger circling around him. There is something refreshing about watching a character in a movie react to blatant horror with awe and wonder.

To its credit, The Mesengers is one of the best of the bunch for PG-13 horror films of the past few years, though that’s about the most damning praise I ever hope to heap on a movie. Recommended only if you’re a sucker for recycled J-Horror (via Korea), jump scares or butt cracks.

One of the selections from last year’s 8 To Die For festival goes solo with a trailer for The Abandoned. Though it appears to be yet another ghost story, director Nacho Cerdà has an interesting pedigree what with the controversial short Aftermath under his belt. This is his first feature, and if this is one-tenth as transgressive as his shorts I’ll be there on opening night. Kudos to Cinematical for the head’s up.

For a movie which I knew almost nothing about, I’m suddenly receiving an awful lot of information about The Return. A supernatural thriller that, while made in North America, seems to have it’s share of stylistic similarities to Japanese ghost stories, The Return stars Sarah Michelle Gellar as a woman guided by murdered spirits trying to find the killer. Today Yahoo Movies posted a number of clips, as well as the trailer, and it seemed as if Rogue Pictures was finally pumping out the advertisments in time for the film’s November 10th release date.

But wait. According to Arrow in the Head (via The Movie Blog), The Return is moving to January 19th.

As most film fanatics know, the early months of the year as usually reserved for studios dumping projects that they really don’t have much faith in (BLOODRAYNE, BIG MOMMA’S HOUSE 2, WHEN A STRANGER CALLS, and so on).

Odd considering the clips they just posted. That and both the Yahoo site and the official site still have Nov. 10th as the release date. Maybe it isn’t as bad a situation as they’re making it out to be. After all, Hostel opened in January and it did very well.

As my unwatched movie collection grows closer to the 100 mark, I find that I’m trading in my former obsession with quantity for a new appreciation for quality. And even though I still love hamburgers (or, in most cases, sloppy joes), sometimes I just need to sink my teeth into a juicy steak.

The Criterion Collection usually only releases a horror film once a year or so, but 2006 has seen a bumper crop for creepy films. First there was their Equinox release, which I picked up a little over a week ago, and now they’re getting ready to spring two ghostly tales from foreign lands upon an unsuspecting public, The Spirit of the Beehive and Jigoku.

In a small Castilian village in 1940, in the wake of the country’s devastating civil war, six-year-old Ana attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes possessed by the memory of it. Produced as Franco’s long regime was nearing its end, The Spirit of the Beehive is a bewitching portrait of a child’s haunted inner life and one of the most visually arresting movies ever made.

Shocking, outrageous, and poetic, Jigoku (Hell, a.k.a. The Sinners of Hell) is the most innovative creation from Nobuo Nakagawa, the father of the Japanese horror film. After a young theology student flees a hit-and-run accident, he is plagued by both his own guilt-ridden conscience and a mysterious, diabolical doppelganger. But all possible escape routes lead straight to hell, literally. In the gloriously gory final third of the film, Nakagawa offers up his vision of the underworld in a tour de force of torture and degradation. A striking departure from traditional Japanese ghost stories, Jigoku, with its truly eye-popping (and -gouging) imagery, created aftershocks that are still reverberating in contemporary world horror cinema.

I hope this trend continues and Criterion releases further horror films in the near future, be they esoteric gems or established classics.

Let me introduce a ghost that’s… out of this world. Caspar the Friendly Ghost.

I’ve been digging through a lot of mash-ups the past few days, and unfortunately too many of them are simply slapped together. By far one of my favourites, and most successful, is Music for Maniacs’ Caspar the Friendly Queen. Mr. Fab has concocted a sweet little mash-up composed of the Caspar the Friendly Ghost theme and the instrumental bits of Bohemian Rhapsody, and it seems as if they were always made for one another.

We miss you, Freddie.

Patrick Curry is a video game designer, known primarily for his excellent work on the recently released Stubbs the Zombie. On his blog, he has been posting a different game idea per week as a mental exercise, a few of which are horror related. One is based around a haunted hotel, while my favourite idea is for a werewolf game.

Game Idea #15: Loup-Garou

Loup-Garou is the game where you play as a werewolf. Actually, you play as a human, who’s been cursed with turning into a werewolf. During the daylight hours you are human, going about your “normal,” everyday life. But once darkness falls, you’re transformed into the legendary werewolf – now everything looks, feels, sounds, and smells different. Try to keep yourself from being found out… and try to keep yourself from destroying everything you hold dear…

This is just the concept. A detailed description can be found at Curry’s site.