Told you so!
Let’s start with one for Infocult’s Cyberspace Gothic file: Presenting the Craigslist-post-as-horror-story. Done in the standard “missed connections” style, this post chronicles in graphic detail the dream-relationship the female poster believes she is having with an attractive but increasingly frightening ghost who haunts her apartment. Lord only knows if the dreams are even real, let alone the ghost, but to me the intriguing aspect of the post (aside from her obvious talent with gruesome imagery, unconscious or no) is the way that horror seems able to seep into virtually any available space on the Internet, not just the blogs and journals that seem to lend themselves so easily to the genre.
Speaking of Infocult, Bryan Alexander offers his thoughts on Lost. Unsurprisingly, given the way it dovetails with his own uncanny interests, he likes it quite a lot; also unsurprisingly he makes explicit the series’ connection to the enigmatic phenomenon known as numbers radio.
And speaking of uncanny interests, my own affinity for recorded media as a locus of horror was piqued by Bryan’s post on eerie wax cylinder recordings. Noises picked up where no noises were meant to be–all horror comes back to “the things that should not be,” doesn’t it?
Back on the Internet-horror beat, Eric Heisserer, creator of the Dionaea House project, reports to the Dionaea Yahoo group that obstacles have been encountered on the project’s road to film adaptation. First is a new, low budget; as Heisserer puts it:
[Warner Bros.] may also be
attempting the SAW business model for horror, which translates to “tiny budget = decent profits.”
There are some publish-or-perish problems involving similar projects heading to the screen first, too. Overall, Heisserer is startlingly candid about his misgivings. If you’re interested in this project in particular or the journey idiosyncratic horror must take to get to the screen relatively untrammeled, you’d do well to join the Yahoo group and receive these email updates.
My irregular “Meet the Horror Blogosphere” series continues with Mexploitation, by Norwegian expat Joakim Ziegler, a genre actor and filmmaker living and working in Mexico City. Lately he’s been chronicling the film he’s currently working on; he’s also written on Mexploitation’s place in Mexican culture and put up a fascinating pair of posts on “What’s Scary,” which touch on (flatteringly) my senior essay on the subject along with such lodestones as Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, as well as offer a defense of the actual scariness of Lovecraft. Go ye and read.
Jeez, where’s Sean at The Outbreak been? I hope everything’s alright over there.
Finally, The Family Shoggoth. (Link courtesy of Heidi MacDonald.)