* My Strange Tales Spotlight interview series at Marvel.com continues: Yesterday’s guests were Nick Bertozzi and his good friend MODOK; today, we heard from Dash Shaw and Doctor Strange. Meanwhile, Tom Spurgeon posts preview pages from Nick, Dash, Johnny Ryan, and Junko Mizuno.
* Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman pens a nice little paean to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as “the template for modern horror.” I think that’s true, Dawn of the Dead‘s recent rehabilitation notwithstanding. Romero’s a hipper name to drop than Hooper (not surprising given their comparative oeuvres), his films combined horror and social commentary in the more-or-less explicit fashion mainstream critics appreciate, and there simply couldn’t be a zombie craze without him; but while Dawn was more haunting and/or biting than actually scary, watching Texas Chain Saw for the first time leaves you feeling like you’ve been in a car accident–a feeling aimed for not just by torture-porn standards like Hostel, but everything from The Blair Witch Project to the French horror wave to the modern zombie movies themselves. Tonally, the opening segment of Zack Snyder’s Dawn remake, and the entirety of the two 28 Days movies, owe a lot more to Leatherface than Flyboy. (Via Jason Adams.)
* Jesus Christ, it’s probably been ten years since I last watched Mike Leigh’s Naked, the subject of Scott Tobias’s latest New Cult Canon column for the Onion AV Club. (I have, however, listened to David Thewlis’s tour-de-force apocalypse monologue courtesy of the Orb’s “S.A.L.T.” quite a few times in the interim.) What a movie that was! I feel like the ending in particular is still at work inside me. I wonder how I’d feel about it today.
* Holy shit Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club is so funny. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)
* It’s kind of a throwaway in an unrelated item, but Tom Spurgeon’s nutshell recommendation of the manga megahit Naruto as an action-driven cultural depth charge has me pretty intrigued.
* So does Hellbound Hearts, a(n occasionally illustrated) prose Clive Barker tribute collection featuring stories from Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, Steve Niles, Peter Atkins, Mick Garris, Richard Christian Matheson and more.
Naked remains an excellent, unsettling film with a lot to say about masculinity and many other things. If you liked it, have you seen Leigh’s recent Happy-Go-Lucky? It plays like a pretty straightforward repudiation of the pessimism/nihilism of Naked.
Now you make me want to rewatch Massacre.