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Movies Other Haunts

Other Haunts – Crotch Rocket to the After World

I’ve often wondered if my 1990 Electra Glide will take me to the grave but didn’t think it might be the actual vessel used. Shows how little imagination I sometimes have.

This youngun’ – shot dead while young enough to leave a beautiful corpse – was allegedly embalmed and mounted on his favorite motorcycle to lie in state. Even if this is a hoax, it’s a pretty fun one, eh?

Categories
Fiction

MoCon V – Come and Gone

My psyche wasn’t crafted for conventions – too many actual humans, far too close and in the case of writer’s conventions, humans who are mostly ape-shit crazy.

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Art Other Haunts

Other Haunts – Zombie Birthday Cake

Can we call the whole zombie craze, ah, “dead” so to speak, now that eight year old kids are asking that their birthday cakes be made in the shape of an undead corpse?

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Art Other Haunts

Other Haunts – Gloriously Gory Stationery


The violence of everyday office life – punched paper, sheets pierced with staples, envelopes ripped open – is lovingly expressed by this set of stationery designed for 13th Street (a German horror and crime channel.)

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Art Other Haunts

Monster-Themed Playing Card Set on Flickr


Thrill to the weirdness of these illustrated playing cards.

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Movies

Creature Feature: Gruesome Twosome (1967)


“…Gruesome Twosome is a joyously campy diversion only slightly above a home movie that manages to achieve some remarkable moments, absolutely NONE of which are the least bit “scary” in the traditional sense…”

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"What We Fear" Art

Artwork – Mansion of Death

…notice how the house actually BLEEDS…

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Other Haunts

Other Haunts – Zombie Night Light

If you sleep with the light on because you’re worried about the imminent zombie uprising, then I’m no so sure this product is what you’re looking for.

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Art Games papercraft

“Fright Factory” Papercraft Box

Everything I loved about this toy when I was a kid is summed up in its name: “Fright Factory.”

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Art Other Haunts

Other Haunts – Make Yourself a Zombie

I don’t mean make a zombie FOR yourself. I mean make yourself into a zombie.

Len Peralta makes these nice cartoon renderings of your face as if you were a brain-gobbling undead. (http://flipface.me/zombie/)

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Art Other Haunts

Other Haunts – Scary Clowns

Clowns, to put it mildly, are not universally loved.

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Art Other Haunts

Other Haunts – The Horrific Photographs of Joshua Offine

In this age of digital manipulation of everything, the old school craft shown on this blog of fully staged photographs is truly impressive. Oh, and they’re scary as all get out.

http://joshuahoffine.wordpress.com/

Categories
Other Haunts This Just In

Other Haunts – Monster Cereal

Ain’t pop culture grand? This blog is a loving collection of ephemera related to those monster-themed cereals of the 70’s. Remember them? They were just a bit too sugary for my taste but I remember tolerating “Frankenberry.” I *really* wanted the monsters themselves in their black and white murk and glory not these pastel pastiches, but honestly how horrifying can you really make breakfast? This blog allows you to relive the fun with none of the sugar crash.

Evidently, these little carbo-bombs are still available though not at the local mega-mart. I heard not too long ago on the Rue Morgue Radio podcast that one of the interns there will periodically buy a case off eBay and gorge himself into a diabetic coma.

http://monsterscereal.blogspot.com/

Categories
"What We Fear"

Monogamy, Morality and the Consumption of Media

I often try to puzzle out my attraction to “trash culture” given that I have advanced degrees in “snob culture.” A strange correlation came to me today. Many defenders of snob culture assert something like a moral superiority to certain kinds of media. For instance, it’s “better” to read than to watch TV or more recently, it’s “better” to surf the internet than to watch TV… like a Paper-Rocks-Scissors game where everything seems to beat on TV. And then even within certain media there’s the familiar claim that, say, literary fiction is “better” than romance fiction or whatever. And further there are grades of literary fiction too where the classics are better than the contemporary. During the big canon wars of the 1990’s, various explanations were trotted out to defend this intuition. One idea said that the best kind of literature is the kind that could be re-read profitably, that each time through the work the reader gains some nugget of lasting value from the experience. I think I’ve had that idea at the back of my head for quite awhile.
But today, I realized that that sort of argument sounds pretty similar to an argument for monogamy, literary monogamy. Stay true to the classics. Don’t be lured into the iniquity of all that faddish, contemporary fun stuff. Virtue over pleasure. And if you happen to read the million or so books that are on any of those “lifelong reading lists,” then start over again because you STILL can learn more from them. Again, there will NEVER be time in this life for casual texts.
And what’s funny of course is that the consumption of media is really nothing like sexuality… Roland Barthes and the Pleasure of the Text notwithstanding. And even if reading was like sex, at least it’s not like sex between two humans. When I close the covers on the latest novel, I don’t ask “Was it good for you too?” Books are objects and humans, regardless of our endless attempts to treat ourselves otherwise, aren’t.
I don’t know if it really belongs here but I am also trying out this thought, namely that there are only two kinds of writing: successful writing and unsuccessful writing. All this “genre” talk is a way of selling writing, an honorable, noble pursuit because it helps grab a paycheck for a writer, but one that really doesn’t say much about the writing itself. It’s a way of managing expectations for the consumer… and I suppose also why ColdPlay sounds so much like old U2. There are of course several ways of evaluating “success” not the least of which is to answer the question “Why Write?” and the other “Why Read?”

Categories
Movies Other Haunts

Movie – Buffy and Edward

As a footnote to the post from yesterday about how vampires suck, er, that is, how they don’t seem to suck anymore, here’s the obvious video clip. I know you’ve already seen this clip but I still crack up when I watch it.

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"What We Fear" Fears & Phobias Other Haunts This Just In

Other Haunts – “Vampires Suck” @ Slate

Fun little article at Slate.com about how contemporary vampires suck, or more precisely, that they don’t. The once terrifying Other is now just a cuddly idealized boyfriend – who no longer sucks blood. The article nicely traces a line from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to Anne Rice’s tortured immortals to Buffy’s beau Angel to the monster’s nadir in the paranormal romance genre a la the Twilight series.

( http://www.slate.com/id/2223486/ )

Makes me wonder if all objects of terror undergo a certain domestication, a processes of Disneyfication where anything that is truly terrifying is sanded flat, made safe and consumable. Happens with all attempts to depict the wholly Other, I suspect, making that “make no graven images” commandment a bit more sensible. After an experience of awe / wonder / terror / amazement it’s understandable to make some record of that encounter. But then there will be folks whose only experience of that Other is via the representation, through the vicarious thrill. At the risk of sounding like a neo-Platonist here, the continued repetition of representation pushes the Other farther and farther away from our actual experience. It’s how that piss-your-pants / fall-on-the-ground-numb / struck-blind-with-scales-on-your-eyes experience of true religion becomes gradually codified into something boring and mundane like ethics and orthodoxy.

Damn. Did I slip from talking about the Monstrous to talking about the Holy again?

Categories
Movies Poe

Movie – “Web of the Spider” (1971)

Spend a night in a haunted castle; win a hundred pounds. Familiar set up for a ghost story but this one has a few nice touches mixed in with various bits of silliness.

Like many horror films of its era, Web of the Spider was released with wildly different names in different countries, ranging from And Comes the Dawn… But Colored Red to Dracula in the Castle of Terror – though Dracula does not appear and there is only the slightest reference to vampirism – to several titles involving spiders – though, again, no actual spiders appear in the movie. Its origin is Italian and it is supposedly a remake of a 1964 movie Danza Macabra (aka Castle of Blood in the US and UK.) There’s a restored version of that movie available so I’m going to scare it up.

Poeposter

The version of the movie I saw was hardly restored and in fact, it presented a collection of faults from various source media. There were scratches from film stock and several passages of chromatic aberration likely from video tape transfers. And a maddening pan-and-scan attempt to collapse the widescreen composition to a TV. I feel like an idiot mentioning these problems, like a book reviewer who comments on the margins. The overall feel of the movie is a psychedelic mishmash. The costumes don’t match in period; the colors are wondrously lurid; the soundtrack is distortion and harpsichord; the audio felt like it was dubbed in later. In other words, a pleasant enough way to spend a summer afternoon.

This movie appeared on my Netflix queue because it features Klaus Kinski playing Edgar Allen Poe and because it is supposedly based on a story by Poe. Like many of the Corman Poe movies, the resemblance to anything actually written by dear E.A.P. is mostly one of suggestion and mood. Given Poe’s insistence on mood as the primary effect of literature, this isn’t as damning as it might be of other adaptations. Kinski is only on screen for 10 or so minutes in the framing story but his performance is everything I expected, a deranged, drunken, brooding Poe who insists that his writing is journalism, that everything he has described he has actually observed. There is a particularly nice P.O.V. shot of Kinski smashes open a coffin lid, filmed from inside the coffin.

I found Web of the Spider interesting as well as irritating. Some of my criticisms of the story could be directed at some ghost stories. I think the high brow academic description is the changing rhetorical position of the protagonist. Our hero, American journalist Alan Foster enters the house and spends most of the first act poking around, giving himself scares by seeing himself in mirrors, etc. Then he mistakes a portrait for a person and begins having auditory hallucinations (voices, music.) He plays a keyboard and thus joins the music/delusion and then is invited into a very physical interaction with Elizabeth, one of the ghosts. Nudge-nudge. Know what I mean. She is murdered by another ghost, then disappears. Then Alan happens upon a Dr. Carmus, a book of whose Alan has just been reading. Carmus is a metaphysical researcher and he lectures Alan somewhat tediously throughout the middle of the movie until Carmus leads Alan to a vantage point to observe a ghostly party. For a large portion of what I estimate is act two, the protagonist is even less than a passive observer. He is not depicted in the action and he does not interact with what he presumably is watching. He’s as good as taken the seat beside us in the theatre. After this segment ends, Alan is able to watch a previous attempt to spend the night in the now haunted castle, again as a pure spectator, and to see the tragedy repeat. However, this time, Alan appears in the frame of the action and actively tries to interact and prevent the tragedy. He cannot and the participants again dissolve. After that “play” has ended, poor Alan finds himself all too apparent to the ghosts, now who move in narratively convenient slow motion. They need his blood to live, evidently, though that metaphysical explanation didn’t seem to be adequately foreshadowed. All he needs to do is survive a few minutes more and to escape through the castle grounds. But he dies, crushed by the castle gates and in a voiceover Alan says he did it to spend eternity with Elizabeth, the ghost he was intimate with earlier. The various rhetorical placements of the protagonist with respect to the action could have been exploited better to be more effective. For instance, say Alan finds he is no longer able to carry a candelabra that he once was carrying around. There are moments shown when he is unable to move certain doors but the overall effect was to muddy the action rather to heighten the terror.

I am not a gore-hound but I really would have appreciated a bit more vivid depictions of the deaths. It was sometimes so understated (or censored?) that it wasn’t entirely clear who was being killed. Also, geesh, a little more sex too, or at least “chemistry,” that electric attraction between characters. I find it hard to believe that Alan would give up his life for such a passion-less one-night-stand. But then again, little is revealed about Alan’s character. Perhaps he was fated to land in this particular spider’s web… and I would have felt so much more satisfied if I had the slightest inclination that was the case. There was really nothing connecting the central character with the events of the story.

Quibbles all. As I mentioned earlier, I think the mood of the piece was Poe-esque and to be brutally honest, Poe’s own characters and plot-lines were often not the most interesting aspects of his stories. Web of the Spider was a good popcorn movie, not particularly scary though moderately intriguing. Think about screening it next January 19th (Poe’s Birthday)

Categories
Other Haunts

Other Haunts – Cremation Urns that Resemble the Deceased

personalurn

This clever marketer produces cremation urns that actually resemble the deceased. Seems to me, you could keep it on the same shelf as the honey jar that looks like a beehive or a cookie jar that looks like a chocolate chip cookie.

Cremation Urns that Resemble the Deceased

( http://www.cremationsolutions.com/Personal-Urns-c109.html )

Categories
This Just In

This Just In – Police Stage Alien Abduction

File this under “All the Fun Stuff Happens in England:”

Just when I thought police budgets were being squandered on surveillance cameras that no one watched and tasers with lethal force, I at last hear of some police who are taking an active and more narratively direct approach to inciting paranoia and fear. These officers staged the crash landing of a spaceship and the abduction of a schoolteacher by aliens all for the benefit of a school children. The intention was to heighten the students’ power of observation and I’ve heard of stunts with a similar goal though nothing on this scale. I for one wish this story had detailed every glorious moment in photos… though I realize that sort of defeats the purpose.

Children (allegedly) traumatized by War of Worlds abduction of teacher

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5842324/Children-traumatised-by-War-of-Worlds-abduction-of-teacher.html?farkworthy

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Other Haunts This Just In

Other Haunts – Morbid Gnomes

HungGnomejpg
What else could the Grim Gnome do but grin when confronted with these statues of self-destructive garden gnomes? They depict scenes of grievous bodily harm, like an arrow skewering the head, a sword impaling the heart, swallowing the barrel of a handgun, all depicted with the maniacal glee one expects of a garden gnome. Collect ’em all!

Morbid Gnomes

( Or http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?ie=UTF8&x=0&ref_=nb_ss_lp&y=0&field-keywords=dead%20gnome&url=search-alias%3Doutdoor )