Pete Mesling at Fearfodder points out some news that, as I’m sure you can imagine, is awfully awfully exciting to me: Clive Barker has a new short horror story out! Called “Haeckel’s Tale,” it’s going to be adapated into a film for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series by James “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” McNaughton. Well, that’s tough to beat, isn’t it? I haven’t been watching the series–it’s difficult for me to watch a lot of horror at home given my wife’s sensitivities to things like gore and vomit; moreover, without making a big thing about it, I find what I’ve heard about the Joe Dante-directed agitprop installment enormously tedious–but this, along with Pete’s rapturous praise for the Dario Argento and Tobe Hooper episodes, makes me want to reconsider. At the very least it appears that the TV setting is enabling these filmmakers to take risks they’re unable or unwilling to take in the comparatively high-stakes theatrical realm (even Dante’s episode is proof of that, whatever else it’s proof of). Fascinating to consider that the consensus is that TV is producing some of the country’s best horror, just as it produced some of the country’s best crime fiction via The Sopranos…well, I’ll do what I can to check out the series.
In a pair of posts, Mexploitation’s Joachim Ziegler considers the unexploited potential of technology in horror. I know what you’re thinking, but seriously, Joachim’s thesis is a convincing one: For all the horror/sci-fi hybrids and Poltergeist/Ring-inspired spectral-static-on-your-screen images there have been, the vast majority have used technology only to explain away something bogus, or to show it as impotent in the face of the supernatural or otherwise unreliable when confronted with whatever the horrific antagonist happens to be. Technology rarely is a window into a clearer understanding of what is threatening us in a horror film, that’s for sure. As Joachim puts it,
Horror as a genre has been good at using technology as a creator of the horror (Frankenstein and innumerable other over-reacher/mad scientist stories), sometimes as a medium for the horror to twist and distort or use for its own ends (The Ring, The Mothman Prophecies), and often as a feeble strawman for the horror to destroy as an illustration of man