Everyone saw my serial-killer comic over at Top Shelf’s site, right?
Happy Mother’s Day! Celebrate with Jason Adams’s look at five horror-movie moms. “You got red on you.”
If you love water monsters the way I love water monsters, you’ll love these promotional pics from the upcoming giant-shark movie Meg.
I admit, this isn’t necessarily hitting my buttons the way it might if the beast’s size was simply implied–as it is it doesn’t take advantage of water’s depth and consequent mystery. But still, pretty cool, no? (Hat tip: Bloody Disgusting.)
Over at Slate, Sam Anderson reviews He-Man and the Masters of the Universe on DVD. God, did I love that show as a kid, and I’m realizing how influential it continues to be on my imaginary life today. Anderson pinpoints why, ironically, when he talks about what he thinks doesn’t work about the show:
It’s set among craggy gothic castles and dramatic stone arches on a generic action-planet called Eternia; the time frame is a kind of medieval future in which battle axes coexist with freeze rays, video screens, flying Jet Skis, and memory-projectors.
To the young (and old) Sean T. Collins, that was precisely what was so cool about the cartoon: It took everything a young boy digs–superheroes, fantasy, sci-fi, swords, guns, monsters, villains, secret identities, superpowers, aliens, cool vehicles–and smashed them together, logic be damned. I don’t think the journey from He-Man to Kill Bill (or to David Bowie, actually) is a terribly long one, you know?
Also on the fantasy beat is Dark But Shining’s Daniel Laloggia, who’s touting Lloyd Alexander’s young-adult mythology series The Prydain Chronicles. (And he does it without spelling “Prydain” correctly even once! Aw, I kid because I love.) I’m one of those rare birds who read Tolkien as a child but gave Narnia a pass entirely until I was in my early 20s, so much of my elementary-school reading time was occupied by other, lesser-known fantasy cycles, the best of which were Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Tales of Earthsea, and Alexander’s very Welsh Prydain books (as well as his high-adventure series, The Westmark Trilogy). I’ve found that where Tolkien, LeGuin, and even Cooper hold up when read as an adult, the Prydain books do feel like kid stuff–but very smart, and increasingly dark, kid stuff indeed, kid stuff deeply infused with the joy of imaginative storytelling. If you’ve got a kid with Harry Potter fever, The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron and all the rest are highly recommended for your rugrat’s reading pleasure.
Here in the real world, Mexploitation’s Joachim Ziegler takes a trip to Tepito, Mexico City’s anything-goes street-market district cum free-fire zone. Among the goods (illicit and otherwise) he finds for sale are prescription drugs, high-end electronics, child pornography, and human remains. Stranger than fiction, as the saying goes.
If you’re in the market to expand your horror-based reading on line, you could do a lot worse than to visit Where the Monsters Go, the ever-expanding listing of horror blogs. I’d estimate that I’ve added around twenty sites in the last week alone. Check it out!
Finally, in the next day or so (possibly sooner) I’ll be posting a big thinkblogging piece I’ve been meaning to write for a long, long time–a response to this post by Curt at The Groovy Age of Horror. Until that time, why not click over to Curt’s and bone up?