Good Lord.

Nic “Gone in 60 Seconds” Cage as Sgt. Howie in the remake of The Wicker Man? Directed by Neil “In the Company of Men” LaBute? Set in America? With Ellen Burstyn in the Christopher Lee role?

This is going to be Stepford Wives-remake bad, isn’t it?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…

The Hellraiser Playset!

Details here. If I wanted to be persnickety I’d complain that the Female Cenobite (I’d use her on-set nickname, but this is a family site) is the one from Hellbound rather than Hellraiser, but when the words “Hellraiser Playset” are being used I’m put in a mood that’s far from persnickety indeed.

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that I had in my possession mp3s of the entire new Death Cab for Cutie album, Plans. Is linking to them from here the kind of thing one gets in trouble for? My email is to the left.

Now that I’ve finally gotten around to reading Haunted, the latest book by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, I think I’m joining the consensus: This would have worked much better as a straightforward collection of short stories than it does as a novel with short stories told/written by the characters therein.

For starters, each of these different individuals speaks in almost the exact same voice. (Palahniuk gives a couple of them the Chuck Palahniuk equivalent of down-home American accents, but you almost can’t tell.) Next, and I’m going to try to be spoiler-free about this, but the notion that this is the collection of people such a “writers’ retreat” would assemble…I’m sorry, but there’s only so much disbelief I can suspend. Moreover, and again trying to be spoiler free, 90% of them really don’t need to suffer through this sort of event to make them famous–they could almost all become (in)famous through their own life stories, and at least two that I can think of should already be famous anyway. That’s to say nothing of the masochistic behavior in which the group indulges en masse, which would be tough enough to swallow (no pun intended) even if the bulk of the book weren’t dedicated to chronicling the very different lives and neuroses of the characters involved. There also are some weird problems with structural asymmetry, in that almost but not quite all of the characters on the retreat have done a certain thing (something very specific, but again, trying to be spoiler-free), and in that almost but not quite all of the stories they write/tell (it’s never made completely clear, though by the end the context clues and the occasional reference to the framing story would indicate the latter) are autobiographical. It’s in those asymmetries that Haunted really betrays its origins as a short-story collection; or if that’s not really the case, it’s in those asymmetries that it at least shows why it would work better that way.

That being said, I really think the short stories are almost all top-drawer. The foot-massage one was hilarious–it read like a perfect parody of Palahniuk’s trademark “literature of obscure expertise,” you know? Taken in tandem with the “Chef Assassin” story, it’s proof that for all Palahniuk may vocally rage against his critics, he is one himself. But genre fans who don’t belong to either the Cult or to the Cult-haters will find much to appreciate here too. There’s a great Bigfoot horror story (!), a great rural urban-legend horror story, one of the most unique serial-killer horror stories I’ve ever read, a great masturbation horror story, a couple of traditional “Jesus Christ these people are sad and messed-up” Chuck P. stories…excellent work, and really excellent horror. In fact, I daresay that in the latter regard, Haunted is more effective than Palahniuk’s previous two stabs at the genre, Lullaby and Diary. Hell, I think that if you took the overarching conceit about the writers’ retreat, scrapped the notion that the people on the retreat are the people telling the other stories, and condensed IT into its OWN short story, you’d have maybe the best book Palahniuk ever wrote–better even, perhaps, than the masterful and moving Choke. Instead you’ve got what you’ve got: a flawed though compelling, or compelling though flawed, work overall.

I love, love, love Stephen King’s novella “The Mist.” Collected in Skeleton Crew, it tends to find its way to my bedside every summer, when the nights get hazy and warm and the insects gather ’round the light outside the front door. (Fans of the story will understand the connection.) Just this week I brought up with my co-workers at lunch what a terrific freaking movie it would make.

And lo and behold, Frank “Shawshank” Darabont is making it! Lots and lots of details can be found here at Lilja’s Library.

Post-apocalyptic horror and giant monster horror, together at last! Joy, rapture!

Heidi MacDonald’s recent shout-out reminds me that I’ve been meaning to plug Giant, the genuinely excellent entertainment/pop-cult mag that occasionally employs me, for some time now. Simply put, if I didn’t receive free contributor’s copies, I’d subscribe to this magazine in a heartbeat. (And I’m not just saying that because they pay me.)

Why? Because recent issues have included such features as a profile of State-offshoot comedy group Stella as written by the State’s “red-head gay” Kevin Allison; a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon; a full-page photograph of Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian, labeled simply “Just Because”; a profile of Joy Division featuring interviews with Bernard Sumner and Deborah Curtis; photos and excerpts from Matthew Modine’s on-set memoir of Full Metal Jacket; a lengthy Office Space cast reunion; a “Where Are They Now?” write-up for each member of Faith No More; a Top 20 guide to Asian horror; an interview with David Patrick Kelly of Twin Peaks, Flirting with Disaster, and The Warriors, which among other things reveals the origin of “Warriors! Come out and plaaayaaay!”; a guide to Lebowski Fest; an interview with Law & Order: SVU star Christopher Meloni focusing solely on his character from Wet Hot American Summer, Gene the cook; and on and on and on. It’s so close to having a pipeline directly from my brain that they could well call the magazine Sean. My guess is many readers of this blog will feel the same way about the magazine themselves.

And since I might as well plug what I’ve got in it this month (issue #6–the one with Mischa Barton on the cover): I’m oddly Marvel-centric this go-’round, with a quick “Break Into Comics in Five Easy Steps” interview with Brian Michael Bendis and a review of Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways Vol. 1 hardcover. I also plug the upcoming Mark Newgarden collection from Fantagraphics, We All Die Alone. Next ish, my piece on Charles Burns’s Black Hole, the best horror comic of all time, is the Books section’s lead review, and I’ll have a write-up of the new Chris Ware Acme Novelty Library hardcover in there as well.

It’s a great magazine, is what I’m saying, and according to the subscription card in the latest issue it’ll cost you $7.97 for a year’s subscription. I don’t know how to beat that, folks. Go read it already.

I was just getting around to adding Neil Gaiman’s weblog to the Horrorblog Update Page when I came across this entry about some sort of contretemps involving Terry Pratchet, J.K. Rowling, and the pre- and post-Potter fantasy landscape. It includes this extremely astute observation from Gaiman:

Mostly what it makes me think of is the poem in Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest’s NEW MAPS OF HELL, which went, from memory,

“SF’s no good!” they bellow till we’re deaf.

“But this is good.” “Well, then it’s not SF.”

And it’s an odd double-standard that applies to all genre work as much as to SF. It’s always been easier for journalists to go for the black and white simplicities of beginning with the assumption that the entire body of SF (or Fantasy, or Comics, or Horror, or whatever the area is under discussion) is and always has been fundamentally without merit — which means that if you like someone’s work, whether it’s J.G. Ballard or Bill Gibson or Peter Straub or Alan Moore or Susanna Clarke or J.K. Rowling — or Terry Pratchett — it’s easier simply to depict them as not being part of that subset.

This is something I’ve railed against for ages; I best remember discussing it in terms of 28 Days Later, the excellent non-zombie zombie movie that was touted hither and yon as a horror movie too good, therefore, to actually be horror…

Anyone who refers to any movie of any genre as “a genre-busting vision” is an asshole who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. If a movie of a particular genre is good, it hasn’t “busted” the genre or “transcended” the genre or any other dopey pseudoeducated cliche–it IS the genre, insofar as it’s the best the genre has to offer.

The topic comes up often in superhero-comic circles as well, as in this post‘s brief examination of the notion of “transcending the genre”:

Listen, folks: If a given work is of a particular genre, and it’s really good, it hasn’t transcended the genre–it epitomizes the genre. It shows you what the genre is capable of. To say it transcends the genre is to write the potential for greatness out of that genre by definition!

Great works “transcend their genre” only if that genre is defined in terms of its hoariest cliches and worst excesses. Dig?

Fantagraphics’ Kim Thompson has done a real public service by posting a breakdown of every issue of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library and where (if anyplace) the material therein is available. Acme is the best comic book of all time, but it can be dizzying for newbies to dive into, so this little guide is really invaluable. Thanks, Kim!

A propos of a chapter in Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted (about which more later, probably) and my wife’s voice student’s claim that she saw a dinosaur in Canada: Bigfoot Sounds, recordings allegedly made of the vocalizations of the North American sasquatch. Some are more obviously fake than others, but quite a few are pretty damn bone-chilling, no matter what they actually may be; before Peter Jackson made his Lord of the Rings movies, I thought these would make excellent Nazgul screams.

The Horrorblog Update Page is already paying dividends–for me, at least. Here are a few of the dark delights I’ve found thus far:

Discovered today at Dr. Mysterian’s Essential Ghoul’s Record Shelf is this terrific analysis of Robin Hardy’s brilliant film The Wicker Man, all written by way of introducing an mp3 from the film’s Paul Giovanni soundtrack. And if it gets you to watch the movie (either again or–and I’m insanely jealous–for the first time), so much the better.

Next, courtesy of Exclamation Mark comes Empty World, a website dedicated to post-apocalyptic fiction. As you might have guessed, narratives of societal breakdown in the face of some cataclysmic disaster really toot my horn–my interest in zombies is really just an offshoot of the same fascination that leads me to dig The Road Warrior, The Stand, a lot of Stephen King’s short fiction–hell, even The Warriors has hints of it. A great idea for a site.

Not from the Update Page, but still horrifying: Courtesy of Wretchard comes Totalitarian Art, a website for a 1999 course at Northwestern University that among other relics of the fascists, Nazis, and Communists features this scale diagram of the statue of Lenin that was to have stood atop the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow:

Tough for zombies to beat that.

Finally, another great idea for a site: Old Haunts, Keith Milford’s collection of old photos and art from Halloweens gone by.

Boo! And remember, there’s more where all that came from…

As I was driving to work today I saw, out of the corner of my eye a logo on a delivery van. And if I hadn’t used google to dredge up proof of its existence, I’m not sure I’d believe that I actually did see it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you paint manufacturer Sherwin-Williams’ logo:

Is this the most horrifying corporate logo you’ve ever seen in your life, or what? Forget the Trilateral Commission–at least we now know what the Illuminati’s REAL front organization is…

Now this is a thing of beauty:

Boing Boing reports on a zombie flashmob roaming the streets of San Francisco. Pertinent links may be found here, here, and here.

My only question, besides “why couldn’t this have taken place on Long Island?”, is “were they slow zombies or fast zombies?” My guess is slow. This is legendarily mellow San Fran we’re talking about, after all.

A big hello to ADDTF’s new visitors and readers! May I suggest that after perusing the Horrorblog Update Page, you check out my pride ‘n’ joy, The Outbreak? It’s my account of my life during a major zombie infestation (not an apocalypse, and it’s a distinction with a difference I assure you). I think you’ll like it.

I’ve also written some horror-tinged comics you may want to check out. (Watch out for “1995” if you happen to be at work or around impressionable eyes, though.) And I did a whole huge horrorblogging marathon a couple years back, with all sorts of papers and essays from college and big long movie reviews and such sprinkled throughout. And if you’re in the mood for some yuks, you could do worse than All Too Flat proper–just click around those tabs above and see where the day takes you. The sites in my blogroll have the ADDTF imprimatur too.

Finally, if you want my webmasters and hosts to love you forever, click through to those three ads you see on your right. Hell, use tabbed browsing and you’ll barely even know you did it.

And I think that about covers it. Welcome!

The original incarnation of Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat (at least once I hit my stride) was a comicsblog. When I started, there were just a handful of people regularly blogging about comics; it was a thrill to watch that number grow, and that community mature and thrive, before my very eyes. I like to think that my relentless link- and think-blogging had a hand in that, though the credit should really go to the Blogfather of us all, Neil, and the great Journalista, Dirk.

But the final piece of the puzzle, the thing that transformed the comics blogosphere from a small group of people talking amongst themselves to a big giant self-perpetuating communal chunk of the Internet, was Dave “Babar” G.’s Comic Weblog Update Page. The Comics Weblog Update-A-Tron 3000, as it is affectionately known, keeps running track of each time each comics blog is updated–it’s the world’s largest comics-centric blogroll and the most comprehensive comics-centric live bookmark page all rolled into one. It’s one-stop shopping for the ‘sphere, it enables you to keep tabs on what everyone is doing and saying, and (incidentally) it generates tons of hits for each page listed on it. For the comics blogosphere, it was a godsend.

Regular readers of ADDTF will know that the emergence of the horrorblogosphere has been a subject of fascination and delight for me ever since I started blogging here again (and at The Outbreak, for obvious reasons). But psyched as I was to discover all these kindred spirits, I found myself visiting their sites a lot less frequently than their comicsblogging brethren, simply because the Comic Weblog Update Page had spoiled me so. And thusly, and idea was born:

Where the Monsters Go: The Horrorblog Update Page.

It works just like the CWUP: get your blog an RSS feed, start pinging blo.gs (many blogging platforms do this automatically, but I like to do it manually at Ping-O-Matic), let me know you want to be on the site, then I’ll check out your blog. If it qualifies–and all that means is “if it talks about horror in any way shape or form with some frequency”–I’ll throw it on up there.

Please keep in mind that the blogs you’ll find on there now are just the ones I’m currently aware of. I scoured my blogroll, then scoured the blogrolls of the blogs on my blogroll, and here’s what I came up with. If there are noticeable absences, there’s a chance they don’t ping blo.gs, but it’s more likely that I just missed ’em, so please let me know. The more help and feedback I get from you all, the better a resource for the horrorblogosphere Where the Monsters Go will become.

Two special thanks must be made at this point: First to Dave G.–the hard work was his, and we pretty much just ripped him off; second to Ken Bromberg, member of the All Too Flat triumvirate and webmaster extraordinaire–he’s the one who set all this up at my behest, and he’s basically the man.

Enough of my yakkin’. Click here and start exploring. There’s a lot of horror on this Internet. Here’s hoping we’ve made it a little easier to find.

…will be happening for the horror blogosphere around these parts shortly. Watch this space.

Apparently, a murder has been solved on a blog. More here. Blogger John Allore, who maintains a a website dedicated to the investigation of his sister’s still-unsolved disappearance in 1978, blogged about a similar case that occurred earlier this month, and an anonymous commenter provided a theory that, if a recent arrest in the case is any indication, may well be true. Fascinating and chilling, this is one for the Infocult files (indeed, my first thought was “this must be another fictionblog“). And in a way it serves as a relatively uplifting counterpoint to the case of Joseph Edward Duncan, who wrote on his blog that “the demons have taken over” four days before killing a family of five.

(Link courtesy of Glenn Reynolds.)

A couple of quick items:

The Yahoo mailing list for the very good horror fictionblog project Dionaea House was updated today by site creator Eric Heisserer. Money quote:

Wheels are still turning at Warner Brothers as we get closer to a green light for The Dionaea House. The producers have begun hunting for a director who understands the tone and feel of the story, and some of their choices are quite exciting. I don’t want to jinx anything just yet, but soon as a director comes on board, I’ll let this list know.

Meanwhile (and I hope the Dark But Shining boys will pardon me for walking their beat), the Internet Archive has made Robert Wiene’s seminal German horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari available for free download. This is a remarkably beautiful, creepy, and complex film even by today’s standards–simply put, it’s a must-see.

That’s all!

Has everyone seen this UK TV promo for Lost, directed by David LaChapelle and using the show’s cast in a sort of strange music video for Portishead’s song “Numb”? No? Well, you have now.

I really like this passage from Julia Turner’s Slate piece on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

[J.K. Rowling is] not using Harry to make points about terrorism. She’s using terrorism to make points about Harry. Rowling culls the scariest elements of modern life and uses them as a kind of shorthand, a quick way to instill fear.

I hadn’t thought about it in that exact way before, but I think it describes the situation perfectly. I think the thing that has most intrigued me about the series as it’s gone on is the way the mechanics of Voldemort and his minions the Death Eaters have slowly transformed from nebulous fantasy-stock Dark Lordisms to real down-and-dirty hands-on torture and, especially, murder. As compelling as Tolkien’s Sauron is, there’s something impersonal in his grand-scale plottings and massive armies; Voldemort, on the other hand, has his cult members break into houses, schools, and government offices and execute people. I think Rowling likely went this route because unlike most fantasy villains, Voldemort does not control territory, not even a castle or fortress. Quite like terrorist cells or organized crime gangs, he and his followers are everywhere and nowhere, and when they strike, it’s with individuated strikes against civilians. It’s wetwork.

Haunted houses, werewolves, demons, Dracula, and lots and lots of zombies: Genre-based fictionblogging is where it’s at. Lately I’ve found a couple of sites to add to that roster:

Velvet Marauder, a long-running semi-parodic superhero blog run by David Campbell, proprietor of the deservedly popular comics humor site Dave’s Long Box;

and Siege Mentality, a new zombie blog by Crobuzon that appears, if Crobuzon’s comment at my zombie blog The Outbreak is any indication, to be operating in the fictional world I’ve already established. Neat! I’m curious to see where he goes with things–most zombie blogs tilt to a far more survivalist slant than I’ve given my own, and indeed the mechanics of the zombie outbreak I’m chronicling were designed to reflect this preference.

Finally, on an unrelated topic, David Edelstein at Slate defends the right of Steven Spielberg–of genre, really–to tackle real-life tragedy. (He also rejects screenwriter David Koepp’s interpretation of the film’s politics. (Hey, the horrorblogosphere today, the poliblogosphere tomorrow!)) In one passage he echoes what I’ve been telling people who ask about the movie:

[War of the Worlds] has more in common with Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan than with Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park.

And he even throws in the horror-fan CW that Night of the Living Dead is one of the best depictions of late-’60s turmoil ever made. We’ve come a long way, baby!