CIA Bans Water-Boarding in Terror Interrogations

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Never let it be said that goofball hipsters are good for nothing. This fine fellow is sporting a shirt that reminds me of that corpse they find upstairs in the Night of the Living Dead house, and good for him. (Misshapes, via the never-miss-a-week Blue States Lose.)

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks what horror-related event from the past we wish we’d been present for. My answer sort of begs the question: Is it possible to “be there” for what I’m pretty sure is an urban legend?

Underworld – Dark Train (Live Central Park 9-14-07)

In the shadow of no substance?

I will never understand so many comics readers’ apparent desire for “hugely popular” comics, and the implied belief that that popularity goes hand in hand with being “aesthetically vital”….I don’t care if comics in the future are aimed at 13-year-old girls or 31-year-old boy-men or both. I don’t care what genre they fit into, or what country they’re produced in. All I want are comics that are good.

—Timothy Hodler

Right on:

After all (the theory goes), one must be interested in what is popular and therefore relevant. (You see similar arguments being made against comics readers who don’t read a lot of manga, incidentally.) My question is, what is it about hip hop (and manga, I guess) that has enabled popularity to replace quality in terms of the reason why a listener/reader/critic should or should not get into a particular work?

—Me, March 2006

The need for my opinions on this week’s issues of B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground, Green Lantern, Daredevil, Punisher War Journal, Ultimate Spider-Man, and The Walking Dead is the disease. Wizard’s Thursday Morning Quarterback is the cure.

Just found this in my inbox: DeepDiscount.com is holding a “buy 2 get 1 free” sale on all of Anchor Bay’s horror DVDs, from Abominable to Zombi. Am I the only one who had no idea they had that many releases?

God bless America
Land that I love
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above
From the mountains
To the prairies
To the oceans
White with foam
God bless America
My home sweet home

—–
As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problems. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names…the faces…

Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.

All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.

“A season of rest,” he repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.

Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death–they’re flashburns and radiation sickness, and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please…please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.

“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.

“What, Stuart?”

“Do you think…do you think people ever learn anything?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:

I don’t know.

–Stephen King, The Stand

Here’s another cataclysmically violent trailer for John Rambo.

Amazing.

Here’s a cover image for the upcoming installment in Brian Ralph’s first-person post-apocalyptic zombie comic, Daybreak.

Just lovely. Via the New Bodega blog.

This week at The Horror Blog’s Horror Roundtable, we’re down on our knees, we’re begging directors who’ve left horror behind to come home. Here are a few hints as to the man I’d welcome back:

(Images via Arwen Undomiel.)

Learn what one Sean T. Collins thinks of the most recent issues of Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Amazing Spider-Man, Captain America: The Chosen, Countdown, and The Exterminators over at Wizard’s Thursday Morning Quarterback.

Sean and the Missus, Negril, Jamaica, August 2007.

The David Bowie shirt was an eBay find–I wish I could dig up the vendor, but alas. It’s a shot of Bowie holding a revolver, from The Man Who Fell to Earth, part of the era during which David was the best-looking man in the world.

Sorry, old habits die hard.

My post in defense of the term “torture porn” has resulted in some interesting responses. In favor are Bruce Baugh and Craig Moorehead, opposed are Steven Wintle and Kimberly Lindbergs, and somewhere in between are Jon Hastings and Jesse Mazer.

Steven’s response is the lengthiest, so I’ll take it point by point. He starts by arguing that appending the word “porn” to the equation adds a qualitative connotation above and beyond what a straightforward might do. (In order to illustrate the point, he tacks the word on to a whole bunch of different genres to striking and humorous effect here.) “I’m sure someone will come along to correct me on this,” sez Steven in the original post, essentially tossing me a softball right down the middle, “but I’m fairly sure ‘Torture Porn’ is the only horror sub-genre label that denotes not only the content of the film but also suggests a particular quality, as well.” Now, I’ve already suggested that the term “horror” itself has a pejorative connotation. But even putting that aside, there’s the entire “-sploitation” super-genre: exploitation, sexploitation, blaxploitation, nazisploitation, et cetera and sometimes ad nauseum. Then you’ve got “trash,” an appellation enthusiastically embraced by many niche horror bloggers. And surely “splatter,” “slasher,” and “creature feature” were not coined in the same value-neutral fashion as, say, “romantic comedy.” The recently en vogue “grindhouse” sure wasn’t. Hell, I think “torture porn” fits a lot more comfortably in the same continuum as “weepies” and “chick flicks” and “queer cinema” than Steven would admit.

Next, he quibbles with my attempt to play Webster, saying he’s encountered at least three applications of the “torture porn” label that hold to different definitions than the one I proposed (“horror films in which the physical brutalization of a person or persons, frequently to death and always while somehow immobilized or held captive by the brutalizer or brutalizers, is the primary locus of horror in the film”). He cites this John Campea post, arguing that “torture porn” refers to films that focus on torture to the exclusion of all other considerations, as exhibit A. In this case I think the problem lies not with the term, but with the person using it–he’s clearly out to use the phrase to describe only “bad” movies with torture on them. He’s written good movies involving torture clean out of the term, in a micro example of what the “transcending the genre” crowd does with horror writ large. But just because he has doesn’t mean we have to! As the above list of horror sub-genres demonstrated, we horror fans have embraced any number of labels with the scent of disrepute lingering about them, and I don’t see why a few misguided attempts to conflate “torture porn” with “horror movies that suck” should steer us away from doing so again.

Steven’s second example of a rival, irritating “torture porn” definition is one where it’s used to attack both film and audience, indicating a film designed for people who “get off” on torture. Steven means this in the “enjoying watching other people suffer” way; Jon takes it a step further and says it implies that they enjoy watching other people suffer “in a sexual way.” Again, I wouldn’t let certain critics’ attempts to use the term to deride the films’ audience dictate whether I must use it the same way. But regarding the linguistic point, Jesse points out “food porn” as an example of a genre wherein the “porn” tag is not meant to imply that people literally get aroused by watching the Food Network (unless, of course, Nigella Lawson is on), just that the food content is designed to bypass your usual rational filters and hit you straight in the lizard brain. Along those lines I’ve seen references to kitty porn, shoe porn, and T-shirt porn (I coined that last one myself, naturally). In my view, the violence in torture porn movies and in many horror movies in general is spectacle in the filmic sense, material that through its confrontational, aestheticized, frequently plot-independent presentation is meant to bypass the typical processes by which we view and comprehend film narratives and access you in a rawer way. “Torture spectacle,” though, doesn’t have that catchy internal rhyme to it. (I kid.) If the porn fits, wear it.

Finally, Steven points out that there are, in fact, literal torture porn films, movies involving extreme S&M and sex. Well, yeah. But this just reminds me of the argument that there are literal “graphic novels,” novels containing graphic sex or violence or language or whatever. That’s certainly a drawback to that particular term–and even if it weren’t, one need look no further than From Hell artist Eddie Campbell’s blog on any given day to see that you can haggle about definitions until armageddon–but take a look at my bookshelf and you’ll find a lot of book-length comics with the words “graphic novel” above the ISBN.

Here’s Mike Mignola on Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus, his pulp-inflected new Hellboy spinoff. Which is AMAZING, by the way.

And here’s ToyFare Magazine’s Top 100 Toys of the Past 10 Years, containing oodles of stuff you didn’t know you needed. (Super-Grover!)

Not torture porn the genre, mind you–“torture porn” the term.

The Horror Blog’s Steven Wintle today called the label an “utterly useless term”. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you already know that you can’t swing a dismembered arm in the horror blogosphere without hitting just that very kind of expression of both dismissal and angry contempt from the cognoscenti. You hear it quite a bit from filmmakers, too.

But why?

First of all, why is it “useless” as a descriptor? You know what it means. I know what it means. We all know what it means and what movies it’s meant to encompass. “Torture porn” (noun): Horror films in which the physical brutalization of a person or persons, frequently to death and always while somehow immobilized or held captive by the brutalizer or brutalizers, is the primary locus of horror in the film. I’d imagine the intent would be clear upon introduction to many people who’d never heard the term before–sure, “porn” might give them the wrong idea, but it’s a hell of a lot more instantly grokkable than, say, “graphic novel.”

My guess is the dislike of the term stems from the facts that it’s frequently seen as pejorative, that it tends to lump together films that we horror buffs like (Hostel, Wolf Creek) with films that we don’t like (Chaos, the Saw franchise, sequels to remakes of classic ’70s genre antecedents like The Texas Chainsaw Massacare and The Hills Have Eyes), and that it lumps together films that, in terms of things like plot structure and financing and intent, don’t really have much in common. But isn’t all of that true of the term “horror” itself?

On this blog, I myself have tended to use other terms when referring to the movies generally placed under this rubric, like “meat movies” or “the current brutal-horror cycle.” But that’s because I made them up and like them, not because I have any beef with “torture porn” per se. I know exactly what it means and so do most people who care about this sort of thing.

Own your torture porn, people. Live your torture porn. Love your torture porn!

Wizard went wall-to-wall Iron Man this weekend, posting interviews with the movie’s director Jon Favreau, stars Robert Downey Jr. and Terrence Howard, and Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, plus a set visit report.

I managed to sneak a peek at the San Diego Comic Con footage from the movie, and they really seem to “get it”–more so than the past year or two of comics starring the character, if I may be so bold–from Downey’s hilariously confident yet not arrogant performance to the use of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” on the soundtrack. This could be pretty cool.

I’ve watched the Mist trailer quite a few times now, because it’s based on my favorite Stephen King short story and that’s how I roll, and one thing I meant to comment on but didn’t was how wonderful Andre Braugher is as the supermarket’s main Flat Earther, Brent Norton. In the story, Norton’s one of those trademark King “man, I can’t WAIT until he gets eaten” infuriating know-it-all types, which is a blast. But Braugher seems to be playing it extremely cool, as well he should: Norton has to be believable as a character to whom other people would rally. If his approach to the mist is tantamount to sticking his fingers in his ears and chanting “la la la la not listening to you not listening to you,” the conflict evaporates. He needs to be persuasive. I know this is just based on the trailer, but so far I’d follow Braugher’s unflappable Norton before Tom Jane’s tough-guy David Drayton.

This free-associated post title is brought to you by Lost writer Brian K. Vaughan, who’s talking about his upcoming tenure on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight comic book at, yeah you guessed it, Wizard.