Jaws author Peter Benchley has died. I remember the novel very fondly: Every summer when my parents would go away on vacation they’d leave my siblings and I with my aunt and uncle in Delaware, and I’d read their copy of the novel while my little brother played the Jaws Nintendo game in the basement. I loved the sea monster; I loved the flawed grown-up characters as they lied and misbehaved, making the monster’s work all the easier; I loved the sex stuff even though I didn’t get all of it. Slate’s Bryan Curtis turns a slightly more jaundiced eye on the book, which he gently mocks for its unreconstructed pulpiness but praises for the way it constructs a singular and vivid monster out of sheer marine-biological accuracy.
Heidi MacDonald points us to this L.A. City Beat interview with Black Hole author Charles Burns. (I’ll shut up about this book when it stops being one of the four or five greatest graphic novels of all time.) Among the points of interest is a funny look at the pros and cons of placing your fiction in a relatable, recognizable period setting, in Burns’s case 1974.
Stacie Ponder at Final Girl posts some fascinating pictures of a character named Pyramid Head from the upcoming Silent Hill video-game-to-film adaptation. The character is genuinely Barkerian; this, along with those creepy girl-with-no-mouth teaser images, makes this the first video-game horror film I’m even remotely interested in seeing. (I know nothing about the game other than it’s supposed to be pretty scary.)
Brian at Giant Monster Blog sings the, uh, praises? of the Toho film King Kong Escapes, a true Saturday Afternoon Cinema classic. One word, people: MechaniKong!
Finally, given everything I’ve been talking about around here lately, Wednesday’s torturiffic installment of Lost (here’s a good summary at The Lost Blog) was certainly thematically appropriate. As an episode, though, it didn’t work for me. We already knew that Sayid is a torturer, that torture is awful and dehumanizing to all involved parties, that Hurley is nice and Sawyer is not, and that the presence of both the Others and the countdown clock are making everyone into paranoid basket-cases. All we got that was new is the most predictable possible reversal in terms of when Sayid became a torturer (one saved from genuine ridiculousness (“everything would have been fine here in the Republican Guard if it weren’t for those pesky Yankees!”) only by real life’s troubling penchant for proving our most horrifying fictions true); a new is-he-or-isn’t-he-an-Other situation, of which we’ve already had several; and some fanservice cameos and hieroglyphics. Whoop-dee-doo.