It’s Toonie Tuesday at The Horror Blog, and today I’m offering up two fellow Canadians who are keeping the fine tradition of Canuxploitation alive and well into the 21st Century.

Brett Kelly directed one of my favourite horror films of last year, My Dead Girlfriend, recently wrapped Prey for the Beast with screenwriter and Horror Roundtable contributor Jeff O’Brien and is hard at work on a remake of Attack of the Giant Leeches.

When I was a kid I think the piece of art that frightened me the most was the old Michael Redgrave movie “Dead of Night”, there was a scene involving a coachman and a prmonition of death that freaked me out. I still love that movie.

Nothing recently has scared me.

David DeCoteau has been crafting totally hot horror films for more than two decades, including Creepazoids, The Brotherhood, Witchhouse and personal favourite Leeches! and shows no sign of slowing down.

I remember back in December 1978 I was invited to a sneak preview of a little horror movie called HALLOWEEN. The movie scared the crap out of me and my friends. Never heard an audience scream louder since! Amazing evening!

Like many young horror movie directors, J.R. Bookwalter set his sights impossibly high. Unlike most of his peers he not only completed his project, the epic zombie flick The Dead Next Door, but also spun that cult classic into a career that’s still going strong over twenty years later, culminating in the founding of Tempe Entertainment, home of some of my favourite direct-to-video releases. What terrible things could possibly set a young man on this path to madness?

It may sound like a cheesy choice, but I remember as a kid watching the Dan Curtis TV movie BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA starring Jack Palance and it scared the hell out of me… there was some scene where Dracula was trying to get into a locked door and the man or woman inside the room were freaking out… it’s one of the only times I went running to my mother’s bedroom after watching a horror flick on TV, that’s for sure!

Runner up has to go to the also-cheesy ’70s documentary THE MYSTERIOUS MONSTERS… the reenactment scene where Bigfoot smashes his arm through the window to grab someone sitting next to it totally had me moving my bed away from the window for weeks afterward… and my bedroom was on the second floor!

Why introduce today’s guest when he’s more than willing to do it himself? And with 300% more haiku, to boot. Ladies, gentlemen, and regular readers of The Horror Blog, I present Stu Charno, known in some circles as Ted, the prank playing misfit from Friday the 13th Part 2.

After 40 year playing jazz piano, twenty-five as an working actor, twenty teaching internal martial arts, and fifteen building one-of-a-kind furninture, I’m now mostly writing. My life has led up to this — a just published book of haiku, called “High Koo — Wisdumb from our time…”. It’s available on Amazon. (A Haiku is a Japanese verse form, with 3 lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively)

Such doozies as;

Being can tickle
Certainty gets in the way
Enjoy not knowing…

Anyone asked why
will tell you all kinds of things
Words can’t hold the truth…

It only looks like
other people are thinking
We’re on the same bus….

www.StuCharno.com is where to find further invitations…

Smiles n’ vertical head shakes,

utS

Like a magician’s assistant, who knows the tricks, I’m no longer ordinarily scared or as entertained by films, as others may be. But, before I became an actor, the film, “The Haunting”, scared me senseless.

I think that madness is much scarier than gore, and that movie pointed in that direction beautifully, and scares me to this day. Bellowing walls and doors, squeaking their horror-filled resistance, are the stuff of my nightmares…

One of the most influential names in modern horror fiction, Anne Rice reinvented Gothic fiction for the latter half of the 20th Century and beyond. While she’s best known for her Vampire Chronicles, it’s another horror icon that instilled in her a fascination with the macabre, as you’ll see below.

What first frightened me and frightened me terrible was a cheap B movie about “the Mummy.” It showed the bandaged figure of the mummy staggering relentlessly towards his victims, with one hand out, dragging one foot as he bore down on them; and it terrified me so badly that I never quite recovered; it was an image of death, of mortality — in action. In other words, I saw death coming for us in this moving image. — The last scene in the film, where the mummy staggers into the swamp carrying his beloved, who slowly changes from a vital woman into a twisted dried up corpse herself put me over the edge. I had nightmares and as I said never recovered. This was an iconic lesson in mortality delivered with a power that written words did not have. I have spent my life responding to the images in that film.

I couldn’t let this one go without wishing Ms. Rice a very happy birthday!

James Farr is the evil mastermind behind the incredibly popular cartoon serial Xombie, which is quickly becoming an industry onto itself with spin-offs including an illustrated novel, a comic series currently available from Devil’s Due Publishing and a feature film in the works. What scares you, James Farr?

The Shining. Yes, it’s a ridiculously obvious choice. Although I can’t honestly remember being scared by any other film quite so much. Aside from the seemingly random yet masterfully placed flashes of dead children, angry bathroom ghosts and blood that could ride elevators, the overall atmosphere was consistently chilling. The same feeling you get being alone in a giant, empty house, or traversing the halls of a strange hotel late at night - The Shining was able to maintain that basic, profound sense of unease for the entirety of the film.

Also, I think we all know it’s only a matter of time until Jack Nicholson comes to kill us with an axe.

Scarred Tuesdays double your pleasure with contributions by two exploitation greats with similar tastes.

Not many people can claim that they changed the face of cinema. Herschell Gordon Lewis, the undisputed Godfather of Gore, is one such person. Director of seminal gore flicks Blood Feast, 2,000 Maniacs, The Gore Gore Girls and countless others, as well as current projects like The Gore Gore Gore-Met, Lewis has spilled more blood in one scene than most modern horror filmmakers will see in a lifetime. All this may make what he finds frightening a bit of a surprise to some.

The nature of my involvement in the entertainment industry makes my attitude so unrelentingly analytical that fright doesn’t enter the mix, although occasional “startlement” might occur. For fright, I recall my initial reaction to the painting “Scream” by Edvard Munch. The primitive nature of this art has to be a major factor in evoking an emotional reaction.

Brandon Maggart pulled at the heartstrings while simoutaneously attempting to sever them as the greatest murderous Santa of all time in Christmas Evil. Maggart’s truly unhinged performance focuses as much on a true love for the holidays as it does taking out those on his naughty list, to great effect. With that in mind, what makes even Old St. Nick tremble in his coal black boots?

I was afraid of… the dark… then, of course, I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula…scared the crap out of me… of paintings:”The Scream” is unsettling…don’t want it around… but the winner is still… as a child, being left alone in the house in THE DARK.. But I found that a baseball bat by my bedside was an amazing comfort.

Our first guest is David Wellington, author of the acclaimed zombie trilogy Monster Island, Monster Nation and Monster Planet. David got his start online and continues to move effortlessly between print, such as his latest, the vampire action novel 13 Bullets, and the internet, with the post-apocalyptic zombie saga Plague Zone and the frozen werewolf terror of Frostbite. All of his horror tales are still available for free online at the links above, and if you like what you see please consider purchasing the print editions.

David’s encounter with terror is near and dear to my heart, as I had an almost identical experience. I don’t doubt a few of you will feel the same.

A lot of things scared me when I was a kid. The first I can remember was a special news report in 1981 by Walter Cronkite called “The Defense of the United States”, a documentary about what we could expect following a global thermonuclear war. I was nine years old at the time, and in love with special effects movies and had heard there were going to be some state of the art “recreations” included in the show. I begged and pleaded to be allowed to watch, sitting through endless talking head interviews I couldn’t understand, wondering if this dud was ever going to pay off. Boy, did it. About halfway through the program Cronkite warned that what we were about to see was a simulation based on the best available data, and that sensitive viewers might want to look away. You got to see what would happen to downtown Omaha Nebraska when the bomb hit. Exploding buildings, people with melting faces… for years afterward I ran and hid under my bed every time an airplane passed over the house, convinced it could be a Russian bomber.

Then there was the time my parents stayed out till two in the morning, and at midnight they started playing The Shining on HBO. I don’t think I need to go into details. When the front door opened and my Dad stepped inside, a little drunk and pissed that I was still awake… well. We’ve all been there, I suppose.

It’s that time of the year again, when horror blogging gets swept up in the Halloween hullabaloo. To help me get through the month with my sanity intact, I’ve enlisted the help of over two dozen guest writers for a special column entitled ‘Scarred’. Each participant was asked to describe a piece of art or entertainment that frightened them, whether it was a matter of circumstance or if it still haunts them to this day. Posts in the series can be found through the ‘Scarred’ tag, starting later this evening. Please join me in welcoming the Scarred crew to The Horror Blog, and if at all possible show your appreciation by checking out their respective sites or leaving a comment.

In the meantime, The Horror Blog will continue on as always, with weekday news, opinions and reviews, the weekly Horror Roundtable, a bunch of contests and the return of an old favourite, the Clip of the Day.

Trick or treat!