In Horror Blog Steven’s latest Horror Roundtable, I sing the praises of David Jacobson’s excellent film Dahmer.
Does YouTube have a first-person horror mockumentary phenomenon on its hands? This post on the celebfotainment LiveJournal community Oh No They Didn’t indicates that it does, in the form of a series of video blogs by a homeschooled 16-year-old girl named Bree whose parents are slowly being revealed to be followers of…well, I’ll let you discover for yourself. As I’ve mentioned before (and hopefully demonstrated), it’s fascinating to watch the various media available on the Internet be put to use for horror storytelling.
Speaking of first-person horror mockumentaries, they’ve been much in the news lately. George Romero has revealed that the next film in his Dead series, Diary of the Dead, will be made in that style. Meanwhile, several pundits, notably Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly, have brought up you-are-there fright flick and proto-viral marketing phenomenon The Blair Witch Project in their attempts to explain the relative failure of Internet-beloved Snakes on a Plane at the box office. (SoaP was great, incidentally, box office or no.) Could Sam Jackson’s Folly (along with such “yeah, I said it” critical praise as the oft-linked Seven Best Horror Movies of the Past 7 Years at Cinematical) be the unlikely catalyst for putting Blair Witch back in the horror pantheon where it belongs?
Finally, this past weekend my coworkers and I got liquored up and watched Red Dawn, Invasion U.S.A., and Rambo: First Blood Part II in the latest of our periodic Manly Movie Mamajamas. I rememeber hearing when I was a kid that action movies were destroying the moral fabric of our nation with their mindless, gratuitous violence, and wondering what they were talking about because the only action movies I was really watching at the time involved George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. Now I know exactly what they mean. Awesome.