* Over at Marvel.com, I’ve got a piece up regarding real-world “superflu”-style epidemics, tying in with The Stand: Captain Trips #4. I’m finding it’s a real pleasure to be able to write about one of my favorite books and get paid for it.

* While I’m on the plugging my own stuff tip, I suppose I should be reminding people about my short comics collection Murder on a more regular basis. Won’t you please consider buying it?

* Behold, The Top 50 Horror Films of All Time as voted for by 32 horror bloggers, including yours truly, and compiled by the great and terrible B-Sol of The Vault of Horror. I must say, it’s a rather more conservative and old-skewing list than I expected, though I think the top 15 are all rock-solid members of the canon. That, of course, presupposes that one can disagree with the quality of a film but still think it’s canonical, which would be my take on Halloween, our little group’s number one.

* I am rather impressed with the high ranking we gave to The Blair Witch Project, though a little less impressed that it’s only the second-most recent film on the whole list! I think that’s probably because we voters were limited to listing our top ten films; more recent movies probably need a little more time to stew with us before a lot of us are comfortable putting them near the top. I know that was the case for me with Hostel, 28 Weeks Later, 28 Days Later, The Descent, and the remake of Dawn of the Dead, just to name a few. The one movie to break the millennial barrier is The Mist, which probably owes a lot to the familiarity bred by having the original story around for a couple decades beforehand.

* Big ups to the group also for including the video for “Thriller,” and for not getting hung up on whether or not this or that movie is “really” horror–if enough people voted for it, on it went. Of course, this mostly applies to stuff that’s scary and gory and involves monsters but some people believe to be simply science fiction or action, like Alien and Aliens. There’s no David Lynch or David Cronenberg or anything like that. And I myself didn’t pitch things like Eyes Wide Shut or Heavenly Creatures or Barton Fink–my own list went no further afield than Lost Highway and Deliverance.

* Anyway, check it out, check out CRwM’s analysis (I was struck by his point regarding our affinity for sequels and remakes), and check out the lively comment thread, where a second list consisting solely of films from the past 15-20 years is suggested. I second!

* They say it’s your birthday: The Beatles’ White Album turned 40 recently. The White Album is my favorite Beatles album, and my favorite album by anyone ever. It contains pretty much every emotion I’ve ever felt. I honestly could think about it and read about it all day long, and now I can actually come close: PopMatters celebrates the album’s anniversary with a lengthy, multi-part look at the record and all its songs. All five official parts can be found here, and there’s a postscript here. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)

* Is Sylvester Stallone’s upcoming movie The Expendables, which just added Dolph Lundgren to a cast that includes Jason Statham, Jet Li, and Sly himself, the Manly Movie Mamajama-est Movie Ever?

* Midnight Meat Train finally comes out on DVD on Feb. 17th, which means I’ll finally get to see it shortly thereafter.

* The new blog Top Drawer: 10 Questions serves up interviews in the titular ten-question style with Hans Rickheit and John Hankiewicz, two of my absolute favorite young-ish cartoonists. (Via Mike Baehr.)

* Strange Ink’s Sean B. reviews Let the Right One In. I sure do wish the Angelika were playing the movie at times other than 5:15 and 7:45pm–those really don’t work for me!

* CRwM reviews Videodrome. The title of the post, “The new old flesh,” reveals a bit of how he approaches the film.

* Did I link to the first installment of Tim O’Neil’s series of posts on the business and aesthetics of mainstream superhero comics in the early ’90s? If not, I should have–I really liked it, because it echoes my overall perception of how the major industry players looked at the time, if not necessarily the specifics of how that perception did or didn’t drive my buying habits.

* Go, look: Kate Clark’s taxidermized human-animal hybrids.

The link is via Tor.com’s Irene Gallo, who complains of the exhibit:

Certainly they are disarming for a moment but, surprisingly, the effect of a human face grafted onto the animal body does not seem to ennoble either species. They are neither wild nor intelligent…mainly just a little sad.

That’s a feature, not a bug.

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