Carnival of souls

A pair of real-world stories to get us started tonight: After killing just 17 people over the past 58 years, Florida alligators have fatally attacked three people in less than a week. In human predator news, the FBI is looking for the remains of Jimmy Hoffa in a Detroit-area horse farm with the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up name of Hidden Dreams Farm.

From real to not-so, Mac Slocum at The Lost Blog passes on word that Lost‘s third season will air without repeats–all the new episodes will be concentrated in two big chunks at the beginning and end of the TV season, so there won’t be any of that irritating bouncing around from two weeks of new episodes to two weeks of re-runs and so forth. The gap between chunks will be a big one, but this more or less brings the show’s viewing pattern in line with reality programs like, say, America’s Next Top Model, which run two “cycles” per traditional TV season.

Bloody Disgusting reports that the film adaptation of Clive Barker’s absurdly good short story “The Midnight Meat Train” has had its title drearily truncated to The Midnight Train. Sigh. Well, Barker beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose. The Variety piece BD reprints also indicates that Midnight Train director Patrick Tatopolous was the special effects designer on Silent Hill, which as I’ve noted before had a distinctly Barkerian vibe.

In other disappointing movie news, Dionaea House creator Eric Heisserer informs members of his Yahoo group that Warner Bros. has pulled the plug on the film adaptation of his web narrative, retitled Sanctum. However, Heisserer alludes to having found funding from another source, so the movie may yet go through.

In a pair of posts, the blogger known as Tolerated Vandalism recounts how he first got into horror and why he hopes he’ll never get out of it.

Finally, Curt at The Groovy Age of Horror has posted a lengthy response to my lengthy response to his lengthy responses to my lengthy responses to the torture-horror movie cycle. (And if that isn’t the phenomenon of blogging in a nutshell, I don’t know what is!) In it he advances what I think is a pretty agreeable baseline definition of horror. But I do want to stick up for myself in at least one regard: Curt characterizes me as thinking that the old Universal horror flicks aren’t real horror films, but in the post he’s referring to you’ll notice I have “real” in scare quotes; my point was that they weren’t horror films in the same way that post-Night of the Living Dead, comparatively hard-R horror films are horror films, that they aren’t horror films by the contemporary standard and/or definition. I certainly think they’re horror films; even if one were to apply my relatively narrow definition of the genre and say that only works that aim to frighten should be considered horror, these movies frightened the hell out of people at the time and I think they can still be frightening and haunting and disturbing today. I loves me some Universal monster movies, everyone, I promise!