* It’s official: The Lost season finale has been expanded to two hours.

* Meanwhile, it should be noted that as much as I dislike the “theory” school of Lost fandom, it’s one that is actively headmastered by the show’s creators.

* Now this is what I’m talkin’ ’bout: The tandem comicsbloggers at Thought Balloonists tackle Junji Ito’s horror masterpiece Uzumaki.

First up is Craig Fischer, who to my surprise looks at the series through the lens of three texts that were key to my senior essay on horror from college: Linda Williams’s “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” H.P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature, and Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror. (Fischer misses the way Williams fudges her character/viewer physical-response chart for horror, but he’s forgiven.) His review is laden with deliciously debatable quotes about horror:

I think Uzumaki is effective at unsettling readers like me because of its fidelity to the general traits of the horror genre. On the most elemental level, the purpose of horror is to impart fear and nausea, and Uzumaki has that effect on me. Horror is the genre that raises goosebumps, that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.[…] For me, Uzumaki works as horror because its hybrid monsters and piles of spiral flesh violate enough natural, cognitive categories to make me sick.

Charles Hatfield’s follow-up focuses on the series’ self-reflexive theme of obsession and repetition. He also takes issue with two aspects of the story I consider features, not bugs: The characters’ comparatively blasé reaction to the horrific goings-on (I take it as a sort of “horror realist” approach) and the failure of the early chapters to cohere into a narrative (as Curt Purcell and I agree, side-stepping Noel Carroll’s “complex discovery plot” is no vice). Regardless, both Hatfield and Fischer’s posts are must-reads for fans of the comic and the genre.

* CRwM of And Now the Screaming Starts gives the film version of The Ruins a rave review, which is interesting because he argues that the “distillation” of the novel that so bothered me is in fact the key to making a successful film of the story. I might agree that it’s the key to making a film of the story, period; successful? Not so much.

* From the sublime to the ridiculous: This Guardian thinkpiece by John Patterson about how American horror filmmakers really ought to be concentrating more on how awful America is has got to be the nadir of the inescapable “I enjoy horror movies to the extent that they are allegories about political issues I don’t care for” meme among mainstream critics. Look, you don’t even have to disagree with the political premise of such critics (and while Patterson gets a little ridiculous and sloppy with his points of comparison, and also so grossly misreads Hostel that he pretty much invalidates himself as a critic, I’m guessing I do indeed agree with him on the underlying issues). It’s simply a question of whether or not sociopolitical allegory is either a necessary or sufficient component of good horror. If neither, then this unrelenting focus on it would seem to me to be a colossal misallocation of critical resources, akin to every single critic focusing on whether the monster’s teeth or killer’s chainsaw should have been more obviously penis-like. (Via Jason Adams.)

* My buddy Patrick Carone interviewed Gillian Anderson for Maxim, resulting in vague statements about the second X-Files movie and hotsy-totsy pictures that will likely remind you of small hours spent alone with the Internet ten years ago. You will then feel old and sad. (Also via Jason Adams, who will need to substitute Duchovny into this equation to reach this conclusion.)

* Battlestar Galactica mastermind Ron Moore will be helming a new sci-fi show called Virtuality, based on an idea by ABC’s axed early Lost proponent and “previously on Lost” voice Lloyd Braun. The description sounds intriguing. (Via my pal Sophie.)

* I’ve gotta file this one away for now, but the great Jon Hastings reviews M. Night Shyamalan’s much-maligned The Lady in the Water. I know it’s inexcusable that I haven’t seen it given that my affinity for Shyamalan’s films is inversely proportionate to that of the public at large (my ranking would go The Village, Unbreakable, Signs, The Sixth Sense).

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