I think [“Werewolf Women of the SS”] would be a great movie but I don’t know how they’re feeling now because “Grindhouse” didn’t live up to [Dimension’s] expectations. So I don’t know if they really want to make movies based on the trailers. [Laughs] I think “Grindhouse” was a great idea and doing more of them would be great but—and we’ve discussed this to death because we have the trailer and it’s the same company doing “Halloween”—the main thing that went wrong was that the average person was confused about what it was. Because there were two movies—“Planet Terror” and “Death Proof”—but the actual movie was called “Grindhouse.” I’ve talked to people I consider to be fairly intelligent and they were confused. “Like, wait, is this a movie? Do I have to pay twice?” Because movies are all the same—all the trailers, all the marketing. So when something is different, people just get confused. I just don’t think people got what it was and stayed away. I thought it was pretty self-explanatory. But the concept of “Grindhouse” is a very obscure concept. Not to me, not to [director Quentin] Tarantino, but to the average person. Kids today are like, “What’s a double feature? What are you talking about?”

—Rob Zombie, in a really interesting, really long interview with Wizard’s Chris Ward about Halloween and all things horror. It actually makes me want to go see Halloween, in fact.

Wizard’s also got an interview up with Tyler Mane, the new Michael Myers.

Presenting the scariest three minutes of my entire life:

At the 25-second mark I was pretty convinced I was about to die.

The movie doesn’t say, “Here’s the dirty truth about you people,” but rather, “Look into my eyes, then tell me you don’t see yourself” — a distinction that separates hacks from artists.

–Matt Zoller Seitz, “Caveman valentines: The French Connection, Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs“

Okay, so I finally got to see the trailer for The Mist thanks to the good people at YouTube:

And it looks pretty good–I actually had a Mist-related nightmare last night, for whatever that’s worth, although that’s probably at least in part because the TopSpinner and that swinging boat ride at Astroland literally had me convinced I was going to fall out of them and plummet to my death. Like Jason, I was happy to see that Marcia Gay Harden’s Mrs. Carmody isn’t a Jonathan Edwards fire-and-brimstone whackjob, which works great in the story but not so much in a movie. It seems like they’re painting her as your run-of-the-mill pastel-wearing minivan-driving evangelical, who’s read every Left Behind book and sees what’s going on and is like, “Finally!” That’s actually pretty scary. The problem is that it’s nowhere NEAR as interesting as giant tentacle monsters, and the trailer seems to overvalue the scare factor of an angry church-fundraiser organizer and her yokel minions in the context of A MONSTER APOCALYPSE. As for the SFX that have come in for some criticism, well, yeah, I hate boring glory shots of what the computer team hath wrought as much as the next guy, and we’re not talking Weta Digital here. But on the other hand I love the Mist monsters so much that I’m not sure how much I’ll care. We’ll see.

Also on the giant monster invasion beat, MTV’s Movie Blog has posted a Dragon Wars creature gallery, and it’s pretty bitchin’. (Via Cinematical.) This movie is already experiencing some “the effects suck!” backlash, and let’s face it, the effects will probably be noticeably cheesy. But also let’s face it, so what? This isn’t like The Host where we’re all supposed to think the ridiculous-looking giant monster is a new milestone in horror filmmaking–it’s a Godzilla-like B-movie. If primitive stop-motion and guys in suits still delight us while we’re watching the just-for-kicks monster movies of yore, I don’t think digital should be any different.

Finally, they’re making a movie out of the old arcade video game Joust, the one where you fly around on giant ostriches and fight pterodactyls who eat eggs, if I recall correctly. (Via Cinematical again.) The high concept is “Gladiator meets Mad Max,” which on the one hand is cool, and on the other hand sounds like one of those comic books that are so common right now that exist primarily as mercenary glorified movie pitches. Let’s just hope they keep the flying ostriches.

Me and the Missus, taken tonight on the log flume during Astroland’s likely final Labor Day weekend ever. The Wu-Tang Clan shirt was purchased at the local Hot Topic. Some kid at Coney Island came up to me and said “sick shirt!” I agree. Greatest Of All Time.

It’s probably too late, but Save Coney Island.

This week’s interview subject in my I Can Has Comix? column is one of my favorite cartoonists and the guy who really got me started on alternative comics in general, Jordan Crane. And just so you horror fans don’t say I never did anything for you in this column, he talks about why he doesn’t like The Walking Dead and how he keeps writing and drawing ghost stories because he has yet to read a good one.

Paging Bill Shatner and/or Frodo Baggins: A 200-yard spiderweb is attracting entomological attention in Texas’ Lake Tawakoni State Park. Theories differ as to whether this is an effort for multiple spiders to work together or get the hell away from each other. I know which one I’d do if I were there.

The trailer for The Mist, in glorious Firefox-busting streaming Quicktime. Via AICN.

Dig this, post-apocalyptic fiction fans: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, a collection of eschatological short stories by everyone from Stephen King to Jonathan Lethem to Cory Doctorow to George R.R. Martin. (Via GalleyCat, via Justin Aclin.)

Jason Adams didn’t like Monster Squad all that much, at least in part because kids called each other “faggot” in it. I’ll admit that my main reaction is “that’s how kids talk, so maybe lighten up a bit.” This despite being absolutely ruthless in weeding out uses of the word “gay” as an epithet on the Wizard message boards where I am a moderator, for example. IIRC it was mainly the asshole bullies in the movie who used the word, if that matters.

We all have sort of real-world hot-button issues we’re more sensitive about when they come up in a horror context. Frex, Jason couldn’t bring himself to cheekily salute the curb-stomping from American History X, but was okay with tipping the proverbial bowler hat to Alex crushing a woman’s face with a ceramic penis in A Clockwork Orange. In my case I’m really not crazy about killing animals, with children in second place, and if I get the sense that the filmmaker is getting off on violence against women, I tune out.

Anyway, what do we think of this?

The film student in me still can’t quite get over this, but Kristin Thompson has started a blog spin-off of her new Lord of the Rings book The Frodo Franchise. I’d image the blog will mostly chronicle the continuing saga of the attempts to make a film or films out of The Hobbit.

Mike Mignola on Hellboy 2 and his new prose novel Baltimore.

My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way on his new comic The Umbrella Academy.

Director Tim Sullivan on the comic version of his Southern horror film 2,001 Maniacs.

Voice actor Phil LaMarr on Samurai Jack, Futurama, and the new Transformers cartoon.

A sneak peak at Robert Kirkman, Sean Phillips, and Arthur Suydam’s Marvel Zombies 2.

Hayden Panettiere on Heroes Seasons One and Two.

Pretty much the entire Heroes cast and writing staff on Heroes Season One, episode by episode.

Can YOU spot the error in this horror-themed LOLcat?

Via where else?

Jeff Lester saw Cemetery Man (aka Della’morte Dell’amore) and didn’t like it! (You know you’re in trouble when he says “It’s designed to be a horror film for the Smiths set”; simply put, no.) Here’s a bunch of reasons why he’s wrong.

In other news, I didn’t tell you that I saw Wolf Creek a few weeks back. It was good. Intense, at least in part because of all the baggage I took into it. The “torture porn” label is honestly the best thing to happen to a lot of these movies, because the dread you feel when you start to watching them is 50% due to that label alone. I forget who it was who pointed out that that’s the genius of the title The Texas Chain Saw Massacre–it does half the work for the filmmakers right there. But that of course is also a brilliant movie. This isn’t on that level I don’t think, but it’s rough. Parts of this reminded me of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, though the setting, protagonists, and antagonists are all very different. Haneke, I’ve learned through Jason Adams, is remaking that movie in English. I think he’s a little too late to catch the torture porn wave, which crested and crashed, but oh well.

Curt Purcell, whose Groovy Age of Horror blog has been bringing us the heavy heavy monster sound for quite some time now, has announced his attention to expand past his “60s/70s sleazesploitation horror” niche to include whatever genre of fiction is tickling his fancy at the moment. Good for Curt, I say! Though he’s certainly correct that his laser-like focus on horror’s groovy age put him on the map, my guess is he’ll find the freedom to follow his bloggy bliss on the newly rechristened Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror blog rewarding as all get-out (he already has, by the sound of it). Anyway, Curt and I have discussed this in the past; click here and here to see.

Jog on Darko Macan and Igor Kordey’s Soldier X, the Cable-starring “existentialist/absurdist superhero” series that’s the hidden gem of the late Bill Jemas era at Marvel. Cancelled just before the “we’ll collect any goddamn thing” era at Marvel began, its individual issues are among the few floppy-format comics I continue to treasure.

“Lovingkindness,” from the series And Jeopardize the Integrity of the Hull, Charlie White

I urge you to look at more of White’s deeply horror-inflected work, which I believe has made the blog rounds at some point in the past, at his website.

(Via Strange Ink)

My thoughts on the latest issues of The Immortal Iron Fist, Batman, Green Lantern Corps, Amazing Spider-Man, Green Arrow: Year One, Thunderbolts, and World War Hulk: Gamma Corps may be found at this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback at Wizard.

Turns out that cool 31 Days of Spielberg blogathon is plagued with plagiarism (click here for examples). The author’s kind-of sort-of not-really mea culpa is here; Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door comments here.

Look, any time one of these cases pops up people talk about how it’s a thin line. It’s not. It’s a giant mile-wide crystal-clear line. It’s really, really easy to not plagiarize, and it’s really, really hard to do it, especially in the fashion illustrated by those examples, without knowing that you’re doing it.