* Terrible, hard-hitting news from The House Next Door: Longtime House contributor and fine film and television critic Andrew Johnston has died from cancer at the too young age of 40. My absolute best to those who cared about him.
* I think Brian Hibbs’s apples-to-apples comparison of the competing superhero event series Secret Invasion (Marvel) and Final Crisis (DC) is a pretty even-handed look at what’s up with the two books (even though I’m more of a fan of Final Crisis as a work than Hibbs is). It’s noteworthy that the problems he has with Secret Invasion are all intrinsic to the book itself while the problems with Final Crisis have nothing to do with the actual series and everything to do with how it’s been situated in relation to the rest of the titles in the line by DC. It’s also interesting to see another voice in favor of Brian Michael Bendis’s SI tie-in work in New Avengers and Mighty Avengers versus the comparatively lackluster Bendis-penned SI itself.
* This Entertainment Weekly list of the 20 Scariest Movies was rock solid. And yet I’m going to list enough “hmm, how about that”s that it’s going to look like I don’t like it, even though I do. Notes:
1) I could quibble with films like The Omen and Poltergeist, which have two or three terrifying moments surrounded by incoherent and derivative silliness.
2) No Blair Witch Project. That film is well on its way to critical reclamation but in terms of general-interest publications it seems it’s not quite there yet.
3) Looks like Shyamalan has fallen far enough out of favor that The Sixth Sense, the highest grossing horror movie ever, doesn’t even rate anymore.
4) No Saw or Hostel–torture porn of whatever stripe is out.
5) No foreign-language films.
6) Nothing older than Psycho, but I’m fine with that. If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t find anything pre-Psycho genuinely frightening.
7) No The Descent. I thought that one might sneak in there.
8) Everything is pretty clearly a horror film. No David Lynch, no David Cronenberg, no curveballs like Un Chien Andalou or A Clockwork Orange or something like that.
9) I suppose the one obvious omission I can’t really understand is Alien.
10) I think that generally, these kinds of lists ought to consist of the canonical scary movies and this one does. I’d happily hand it to someone who asks “What are some scary movies I should see?”
* Quote of the day:
Is it just me or does it feel like we’re going through a slight FRIDAY THE 13TH craze? Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Actually I’m loving it. The new trailer hit the other day and it seems like every horror fan out there is talking about it. It’s not too often you see a teaser trailer get people talking like this one has.
—Jared Pacheco, Arrow in the Head. I certainly didn’t expect to be talking about it, that’s for sure.
* Gorilla vs. zombies. Thank you, World of Warcraft.
* Bruce Baugh advances several explanations for why online fandom is primarily a culture of complaint.
* No shortage of real-world horror stories today: the story of the slaying of Jennifer Hudson’s family grows ever more heartrendingly awful; what the Barack Obama assassination/anti-black killing spree plotters lacked in smarts and realistic expectations they made up for in gruesome imagination; and unknown assailants grabbed an Afghan farmer and gouged out his eyes in front of his family.
* Lane Milburn posts some images from Cold Heat Special #8.
* Matt Maxwell’s horror-Western comic Strangeways begins its serialization at Blog@Newsarama today. Neat.
* I’m still somewhat shaken from writing about all those terrible crimes. But even so, what am I, not going to post the picture of the slave Leia metal-bikini pillowfight? (Via Topless Robot.)
* Finally, good luck and good vibes to Steve Blackwell, Wizard’s longtime creative director and a really kind-hearted guy who is the latest casualty of the company’s long-running bloodbath. The day I was let go with two designers, Steve was visibly shaken by it, and his emotion and kindness that day meant so much to me. Every time a new issue of All Star Batman & Robin came out, I spent the day anxiously awaiting the moment he’d show up at my desk, so full of fury at my wrongness in loving it that he had a hard time getting going–but believe me, he would. I missed him when I wasn’t working there and I bet the company, which by my count has seen the loss of 26 of 43 full-time creative employees since mid-2007, will miss him too.
Yeah, the EW list isn’t bad, but I don’t know if I would have included either Evil Dead or 28 Days Later. The former has a few effective scenes (the tree rape bit in particular), but it’s more silly and gory than scary, and its sequels are probably better, even if they go for comedy over scares. I don’t think the latter is very scary either, and introducing “running zombies” is kind of a dubious accomplishment. I think your suggestions of The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project (or The Descent) would be better choices. But hey, that’s what lists like this are for, right? To quibble over and offer better suggestions?
I think 28 Days Later is a very frightening film. For starters, I disagree that “fast zombies” is anything but a brilliant innovation. (There’s a reason that that’s now the default model.) Moreover, it viscerally drives home the terror of being placed in a kill-or-be-killed situation better than any other zombie movie–except perhaps 28 WEEKS Later.
Total agreement with Sean on 28 Days Later.
Slow zombies are powerful incarnations of everything that is relentless and inexorable, bearing down on you like glaciers, like the collapse of industrial economies, like racism. Fast zombies are equally powerful incarnations of everything that is overwhelming in an instant, like lynch mobs, like the collapse of financial networks. They reflect different styles of doom.
OK, I’m not feelin’ that EW list one little bit (“The Ring” but not “Ringu”? I don’t even know), but I will try to be constructive here! So this is about movies that really, really scared me.
Broken record time: Have you seen “I Walked with a Zombie”? When you mentioned scary pre-PSYCHO movies it was the first to come to mind. There’s a close-up of a zombie’s face which does for me what I think maybe the twin girls in “The Shining” do for you. (OTOH I hated the movie of “The Shining”–and thought the amazing novel was near-unfilmable–so I know we’re coming from really different places here.)
I don’t know that I was definitely scared by “Carnival of Souls,” but it is really, really spooky and… I’ll say _unsettling_. Incredibly memorable, although maybe that’s my intense Candace Hilligoss love talking. Pretty sure it’s pre-“Psycho” though I could be wrong.
And I would’ve put “Suspiria” (and “Opera,” but OK) and _especially_ “Vertigo” on that list. I think you can even make a horror-genre case for “Vertigo,” let alone a scary-movie case. I come away from it horrified on a deep level, like when I wake up from the very worst nightmares, where you KNOW the nightmare is still there in your head somewhere, waiting.
Also-also, I should take this chance to say that you were right about Carpenter’s “The Thing,” and I was wrong. I’m completely unsold on the acting and dialogue, and honestly that kind of creature horror never ever works for me, but the scenario and music are enough to make it a LOT better and more memorable than I thought it was upon immediate reaction. It’s awesome.
And yeah, Bruce Baugh is right about fast zombies. I always go to bat for pre-Romero zombies, but he’s totally right, their symbolic flexibility is part of what makes them so awesome, unlike the somewhat more symbol-stable vampire.
I was talking with a zombie-fan friend, and I said kind of bewildered that zombies can be used to signify _anything_–they’re a shell into which almost any set of cultural cues can be poured–to which she replied, “I know! That’s why they’re ZOMBIES!”
And that’s why they’re awesome. They’re like “The Birds,” only an entire genre, and made of people!
Eve, it occurs to me that Walker Percy might have put zombies at the end of the slide into semiotic void that he describes in Lost in the Cosmos. Which suggests some interesting story ideas. Hmm.
Don’t Look Now – and Wait Until Dark (the latter not horror genre) are scarier than – I’d say at least 7 of these, largely because of their success in developing the audience’s emotional investment in the threatened characters.
Bruce: fast zombies can also stand in for riots, police brutality, airstrikes, terrorism…
Eve: I really think they just said to themselves “no foreign language films” when making the list, which is a pretty acceptable boundary for a list of this kind. Regarding Ringu specifically, I’ve spoken with enough people on both sides of the debate to come to the conclusion that usually whichever one you see first, you find scarier. I do need to see those old movies, though, you’re right.
John: I found Wait Until Dark stagey and not so scary, and Don’t Look Now atmospheric but something of a failed experiment (with the notable exception of the climax, and no, I don’t mean that overrated sex scene).
Carnival of souls
* Here is the trailer for the next Clive Barker-based movie, Book of Blood. The Radiohead remix adds hella production value, I think. Also, how nice is it to see a Barker adaptation retain the original English setting and accents?…