* Chris Mautner reports that Charles Burns will be the guest editor of the next volume of Best American Comics. Neat.
* Doomsday & The Descent director Neil Marshall doing an Ancient Rome war movie called Centurion? Sure, I’ll eat it. And have a second helping! (Via Dread Central.)
* The Blair Witch Project extended edition? Blair Witch Project prequel? Lots of stuff to chew on in this interview with Co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez on the occasion of the film’s 10th anniversary. The pair talk about how the film got made, say they’re mulling over prequel ideas, and reveal that there was once a 2 1/2 hour cut of the film and that they’d like to see that footage restored in an anniversary-edition DVD release. Personally, I’d like to see a certain scene cut: the bit where one of the townspeople in the beginning explains what ends up being the last shot. It was the only thing from the final version that wasn’t included in the rough cut I saw, and the movie’s much scarier without it. Yikes, shivers. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)
* I think I already mentioned that the guy who’s directing Army of the Dead for Zack Snyder, Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., is going to be directing the prequel to The Thing, which fact was confirmed today. But I don’t think I noticed that the movie is centered on…Kurt Russell’s character’s brother? All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again, eh, screenwriter Ronald D. Moore?
* Here’s a great line from from Tom Spurgeon’s review of a Marvel Adventures Two-in-One thing:
They’re really ordinary comics, easy to read because they’re simple, not because they can boast of any special clarity.
* Evil on Two Legs posts what seems to me to be a pretty solid list of the best horror movies of 2008.
* So this would be, what, the Barbara Alert system? (Via Tor.com.)
OK, so maybe I’m stupid – and I wouldn’t rule that out – but there’s no way I would’ve understood the significance of the final shot in Blair Witch without that explanation at the beginning. Without it, my response to the end would’ve been even more “WTF?” that it was, and that’s saying something.
That’s what I liked about it. It was so bizarre, and any explanation you could come up with for it just made it even creepier and more disturbing. God how it scared me!