The big day is drawing nearer, and horror thoughts abound in the blogosphere. A lot of them are in response to stuff I’ve written, which is, in the words of Charlie Meadows, “a pip.”
Bill Sherman reviews Pet Shop of Horrors, a horror manga targeted at girls. Good for it, but let’s hope it manages to be frightening as well as female-centric. I’ve found that people who go into their project with the noble goal of making it feminist (or at least femme-friendly) end up doing so, but pay little attention as to whether or not the thing is actually, y’know, scary. The teen-girl werewolf movie Ginger Snaps falls into that disappointing category.
And as I mentioned earlier, Bill also chimed in on my reviews of The Wicker Man and The Birds.
Big Sunny D, meanwhile, responds to me and Shawn Fumo‘s thoughts on David Lynch. Sunny focuses on Lynch’s penchant for dream logic and voyeuristic camerawork.
Eve Tushnet recommends an unlikely horror comic–Love & Rockets. This is not the first time I’ve heard folks praise L&R‘s occasional forays into the dark side.
Eve also has a lengthy post responding to several of the films I’ve been talking about. She challenges the sexiness of the pagan religion in The Wicker Man, the scariness of the dead people in The Sixth Sense, and the lack of sympathetic characters in the film version of The Shining. It’s interesting to see how Eve and I are sort of running on parallel tracks when it comes to what we appreciate in horror–we move in the same direction but never reach the same destinations. I think the appeal of the pagan religion in TWM is maximized if you’ve been raised in a religion that denies the worth of human sexuality, which is what I got in my years of Catholicism. (Eve’s experience as a Catholic convert is vastly different than mine as a born-and-raised Catholic who went to a Catholic high school. I only realized how different when I started reading Homage to Catalonia and mentally cheered when Orwell described how all the churches had been destroyed. CLARIFICATION: I was not terribly proud of this feeling.) Regarding the ghosts in The Sixth Sense, no, they’re certainly not as scary as the ones in The Shining, but then they’re not evil and the Shining ones are. (There is at least one great nightmare image in TSS: the woman in the kitchen.) But mainly The Sixth Sense is a sad movie first and a scary movie second. As for The Shining, Eve, have you seen the TV-miniseries version of The Shining, scripted by King himself? Sympathetic characters shoved so far up the viewer’s ass you can taste the vanilla. Ugh. (Props to the dead-woman-in-the-bathtub scene, though, which is almost as scary as Kubrick’s version–the only really scary part of the whole minseries, actually.)
Jason Adams has been quite the busy little horrorblogger, thoughtfully writing about Books of Blood, Donnie Darko, and the remake of Texas Chain Saw–the latter two of which, along with Kill Bill, I still have yet to see. Sigh.
Shawn Fumo comments on my review of Heavenly Creatures, saying he loves the film but isn’t quite sure it’s horror, classifying instead with the brutal-but-not-scary work of Lars Von Trier. I’ve only seen Dancer in the Dark, but my sense is that Von Trier simply piles abuse on his protagonists for no good reason other than the ability of critics to mistake melodramatic misogyny for Saying Something About Life. I know that’s weird coming from someone who lists The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as one of his favorite films, but I’m weird like that.
According to John Jakala, in comics, zombies are the new electroclash trucker hats flash mobs Howard Dean candidacy Friendster Britney-Madonna kiss Wesley Clark candidacy oh, I give up.
Johnny Bacardi apparently began to respond to some of my 13 Days of Halloween entries, but scrapped it. Thanks for the kind words, but c’mon–bring it on back, Johnny!
Finally, I’m appreciative of Slate’s apologia for the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but maybe next time the writer in question could take five minutes to actually watch the film before writing the article, thus learning that half the information he was planning on putting into the article was taken from the film’s sequel. Sheesh.