* I think my favorite of all the bloggy Halloween festivities I’ve spotted today can be found at Jason Adams’s My New Plaid Pants, where he’s basically wallpapering the site with context-free horror:
* My pal “Beardy Kiel” Phegley’s trip down Halloween-costume memory lane was pretty neat too.
* So was Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s tribute to the best and worst covers, titles, and taglines from their monthlong look at VHS horror. Be sure to move your cursor over the box art!
* Midnight Meat Train is now available OnDemand! Something tells me this isn’t the Missus’s idea of Friday night viewing, but maybe I’ll be able to report back on Monday evening.
* I can’t decide what to go with here: “That’s no anthology–that’s a space station”? “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair”? “My God, it’s full of stars”?
* I thought CRwM was making a provocative, if ultimately unpersuasive, argument that horror critics need to see the Saw movies to be worth taking seriously and I responded to it as such, but apparently it was a joke? Dang.
* Plenty of interesting books to discover in Eric Reynolds’s belated SPX report.
* This font is getting a little overused on horror promos at this point, but I thought the poster for The Broken was quite striking, and not just because it’s of the gorgeous Lena Headey (well, part of her at least):
* Eerie work from Renee French. I know, shocking, right?
* This reel of sneak-attack murders from the video game Manhunt goes from disturbing to hilarious to appalling to even more hilarious and back again three or four times during the course of the clip. I wish the blood spurts were more realistic. (Via Joystick Division.)
Sorry Sean. I meant it to be a argument that got increasingly energetic the more it derailed. But I think I didn’t derail it enough.
Curiously, right after I responded to your comment I ran across a review of Dave Thompson’s new book. He seems to take the whole “If you aren’t immersed in the medium, shut the hell up” thing pretty seriously.
From the review of his book:
“Still, Thomson insists that judgments be made, and that they be based on a deep comprehension of the medium. This wasn’t so uncommon when movies were truly a mass entertainment—when they were what Thomson calls “the bloodstream of a great nation” and something like half or three-quarters of the population went to the pictures each week; even up through the early 1970s, a smaller audience had grown up in a movie-saturated culture. (“In the darkness at the movies,” as Pauline Kael romanticized the situation, “where nothing is asked of us and we are left alone, the liberation from duty and constraint allows us to develop our own aesthetic responses.”)
“But today less than 10 percent of the population goes to the movies weekly, and the older pictures that account for most of the entries in this book are unknown to nearly every young movie-watcher. The availability of sparklingly restored prints of classics on DVD and on cable stations like TCM hasn’t come close to compensating for the fact that old movies—good, bad, or indifferent, in all their creaky splendor—are no longer shown ad infinitum on local TV, where they weren’t enshrined by cineastes but were just part of the movie-watcher’s mental landscape. Today that landscape is awfully barren. The college seniors in a UCLA seminar I recently taught fancy themselves sophisticated filmgoers, but haven’t seen Grand Illusion, Chinatown, or a single John Ford, Cary Grant, or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. Urbane newspaper readers, as Thomson bemoans, deem Cinema Paradiso the best foreign-language movie ever made—because they’ve seen it, and don’t know its betters (“if you haven’t read much else, then Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger may be the best book you’ve ever read”).”
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