* Goddammit: Greg “Wolf Creek” McLean’s killer-crocodile movie Rogue‘s release by the Weinsteins is so limited…

How limited is it?

…it’s so limited, it’s not even being screened in New York Fuckin’ City! (Via the suitably outraged Jason Adams.) Truly it seems like there’s a neverending litany of bad news for horror projects dear to the hearts of us in the horror blogosphere, from Rogue to Cowboys for Christ to All the Boys Love Mandy Lane to The Midnight Meat Train to the Hellraiser remake. And it’s not exactly like Doomsday or The Ruins set the box office on fire, either.

* Here’s your unintentionally all-too-accurate quote of the day–Brad Meltzer on Justice League of America #150:

I was eight years old and it had Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest all trapped in this intricate (remember, I was eight) villain deathtrap. Seeing all those superheroes together in one place set my eyes on fire. My addiction was born right there. To this very day, I treasure the idea that you can have a group of friends who will always be there to catch you. Why else would I spend the next 30 years fighting to get right back to that exact same space?

Emphasis mine, although Meltzer’s career to date is probably emphasis enough. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* And while I’m feeling uncharacteristically grumpy: Though I am indeed kind of hostile to the Meltzerian “gussying up your childhood favorites with Seriousness so you can keep loving them without being embarrassed” school of superherodom, at this point I’m starting to prefer it to creators of children’s entertainment product browbeating people about their weekly half-hour licensing showcase.

* I’m being slightly facetious by saying that a proper 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time list should contain 50 Monty Python sketches, but only slightly. Actually, I do love The State quite passionately and have always been amazed at how well their stuff holds up given how much of it parodied ’90s alternative youth culture in some way. And the SNL sketches they selected were pretty awesome, particularly Bass-O-Matic and the Chase/Pryor thing. But no Upper-Class Twit of the Year? Nigel, please. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* You know what’s funny? A few months ago I realized that while I may like individual albums by, say, Soundgarden or Alice in Chains better than any one album by Stone Temple Pilots, I like more Stone Temple Pilots records than Soundgarden or Alice in Chains or Pearl Jam records, and they’re only slightly outpaced by Nirvana (depending on how you count live albums and odds’n’sodds collections) and Smashing Pumpkins. They were actually pretty terrific and unpredictable songwriters, their first three albums are all solid listens from beginning to end and full of weirdness, they had Jawbox open for them when I saw them at Jones Beach way back when. In other words I like them more than many of the much “cooler,” more credible grunge bands–to my credit this was one time when I never pretended otherwise; I always liked them and was pretty unabashed about it–so it’s nice to see a full-scale, early-Weezer-esque reevaluation of the band going on. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)

* Here’s a pleasant little story about a woman who found a skeleton in her late mother’s closet–literally. Well, more of a decomposing corpse of the mother’s missing housemate, wrapped in plastic, but that doesn’t have that same ring to it.

* The indispensable Aeron at Monster Brains reports that there are Mat Brinkman prints for sale at PictureBox Inc.’s website (which is down at the moment, but maybe you can get there).

* Finally, via my pal David “The Face of Evil” Paggi: Can you beat this gallery of posters for ’60s and ’70s porno flicks? I submit to you that the answer is no, you cannot.

* Another episode of Lost this season! I’m not even gonna pretend this doesn’t excite me greatly. (Via The Tail Section.)

* Bruce Baugh takes on Cloverfield in a pair of excellent posts. First, he focuses on how the good stuff was quite good but the bad stuff was not just bad but avoidable, which is dead on; he also has some insightful things to say about why 9/11-esque imagery is going to be showing up in disaster movies simply by default, and about a missed opportunity for the otherwise great creature design. (Meanwhile, check the very active comment thread for a Blair Witch bash-fest, and then click here to find out why they’re all wrong.) Second, he focuses on mainstream critics of monster movies and their “allegory or bust” approach to analyzing the films; Bruce wonders why the monsters aren’t first and foremost considered for what they are and what they do within the world of the film, and then considered for whether what they are and what they do is reminiscent of something going on in our world. (There’s a useful comment thread on this one too.)

* In a thoughtful review, Jason Adams echoes my take on The Ruins: Strong performances and memorable horror imagery undercut by rushed pacing and a loss of tension. He also points out something I forgot, which is that the time frame for the events of the story is shortened considerably not just before we get to the ruins, but after. He’s reserving final judgment until he gets a second viewing free from annoying audience members, though.

* Jason also runs down five of his favorite things from the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica. I’ve gotten the impression that people are classifying it as “good but not great,” and I would actually lean toward great. Granted, I was a little taken aback by the way (as Jim Henley astutely noted) the sci-fi/mythos aspects were foregrounded as opposed to the whole “human drama in a sci-fi setting”–I mean, they changed the intro from describing the basic premise to a more or less context-free description of a particular dangling plot thread, even. But from the cinematography and the performances on down–is there a better ongoing performance on television than James Callis’s?–I was constantly reminded what a great show this is by this episode. I mean, at varying times three or four of the main characters looked/look like they could be in the process of getting killed, and I believed in it every single time. That to me is a signal of great television.

* Art show, part one: Daybreak cartoonist Brian Ralph is cleaning out his morgue and putting some killer pulp covers on display. This, uh, unique water monster struck a chord with me, as you might have guessed:

Giant hippos!

* Art show, part two: The Blot cartoonist Tom Neely has another weekly comic strip up and it begins like this:

* Art show, part three: Aeron at Monster Brains digs up another awe-inspiring Hieronymus Bosch knockoff, Herri met de Bles’ “The Inferno”–here’s a glimpse:

* First we learned that Lionsgate was pushing back the release of the upcoming Clive Barker adaptation The Midnight Meat Train. Then (i.e. this morning) we find out that they may have once again shortened the title to the Pips-esque Midnight Train (prompting hyuk-hyuk approval from the same doof who was baffled by what The Ruins was about.) And now we discover that, meaty or meatless, it’s going straight to DVD. For crying out loud.

* Here’s another bummer: Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and David Aja, the founding creative team of The Immortal Iron Fist—the best superhero comic of 2007—are leaving the book.

* B-Sol at the Vault of Horror serves up another of his sharp overviews of horror-movie history. This time he’s kicking off a series of posts on the modern zombie movie with a look at the early years of the genre, starting with its foundational text, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and the “rules” for zombie behavior it established.

* And here’s the first of a weekly series of interviews with Battlestar Galactica writer/producer Mark Verheiden over at ComicMix. Okay, I feel a little better about life now.

* Let’s get started with some Clive Barker beefcake, shall we?

(Via Dread Central.)

* And let’s follow it up with some Frank Quitely Batman and Robin, why don’t we?

(Via Newsarama.)

* Back to Barker for a second, you kind of had to see this coming when their screenplay got shelved in favor of one from the people who write the Saw sequels, but French director duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury are now officially no longer directing the Hellraiser remake. The Weinsteins’ horror-movie reign of terror continues. (It’s a good thing Jason Adams was taking the day off.)

* I have good news and bad news about the new, decade-in-the-making Portishead album. The bad news is that there are no beats, and that’s a huge letdown. But the good news is that band members Adrian Utley and Geoff Barrow are talking about director John Carpenter’s work as a film score composer.

* In recent months I’ve talked a bit about how the video game tropes we take for granted are actually incredibly bizarre and merit examination and exploration, perhaps even within the framework of narrative fiction a la Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books. Because I don’t actually play video games and therefore don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, it never even occurred to me to think about this in terms of not just weird story/worldbuilding elements (a star makes you invincible, you fight turtles and mushrooms, etc.) but also in terms of the mechanics of gameplay itself. Why should you be able to climb walls and ceilings as easily as walking? Why, when you have a rocket launcher, can you not open certain doors without a particular key? Why does just touching certain objects instantly kill you? God bless the Internet, and reader kiss the next few hours goodbye, because the TV Tropes wiki has an absurdly comprehensive and well-written list of every video game trope you can think of. Besides being both funny and nostalgic, it’s actually quite eye-opening if you haven’t thought about this stuff in this way before. (I found this via Nate Patrin at Joystick Division, who lists some of his favorites.)

* Finally, I only have one word to say about this unique Lost recap (via Jim Treacher)…what?

I’m sure it says something about me that with the exception of Doomsday—Doomsday!–I can’t remember the last time I went to a movie that made me feel good. I’m talking about feeling good thanks to what happens in film, of course, not the film’s quality. I’ve certainly seen plenty of good and even great movies in recent months, movies that make me feel good the way all great art does. But the vast majority of films I’ve chosen to see in the theater since 2005–this includes The Ruins, Rambo, Cloverfield, The Mist, I Am Legend, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Eastern Promises, Hostel Part II, 28 Weeks Later, Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Host, King Kong, A History of Violence, War of the Worlds, and Land of the Dead–are about making the audience feel the emotional effects of cruelty, brutality, violence, and despair in some combination or other. Checking my review-link sidebar over on the lefthand side of the page I see that I also saw some movies that are slightly less interested in making one feel awful, like Dragon Wars and Grindhouse and Shoot ‘Em Up, but they were too crappy to make me leave the theater whistling a happy tune, and at any rate I’m stretching it with Grindhouse, while Shoot ‘Em Up is in many ways more bothersome than your average torture-porn flick, and needless to say all three were violent. Hell, even my feel-good flick contained a viral semi-apocalypse and dismemberments galore, while the most recent one before that was 300, which is in the same boat.

Looking back on all those movies, I would guess that becoming a horror blogger has influenced what I consider to be “must-sees” in the theater. And hey, that’s fine. Back when I did my first horrorblogging marathon while this was still mostly a comics blog, I very consciously was trying to reconnect with the genre that had given me so much enjoyment as I discovered it late in high school and throughout college. Making this a full-time horror blog was done with that in mind as well. I mean, I like being the guy with a Hellraiser T-shirt on at opening night of Cloverfield. I like being the guy my friends and co-workers turn to when they want an “authoritative” opinion about the adaptation of The Mist or I Am Legend. Moreover, I simply enjoy seeing movies in the theater. It’s one of my favorite things to do, and since horrorblogging (for me at least) is largely a subset of filmblogging, I do it a lot now, which is great.

But there have been times recently when the lights go down and the trailers roll and the opening credits finally start and I wonder to myself what it would feel like to have this experience knowing that I’m not going to see people get brutally killed in the next 90 minutes. I’ve actually forgotten!

* I saw and reviewed The Ruins today.

* And while we’re on the subject, Bruce Baugh reviews The Ruins author Scott Smith’s first novel, A Simple Plan. I haven’t read the book so I’m skittish about reading the whole review, but I got a lot out of Bruce’s opening paragraphs regarding differing approaches to moral criticism in fiction.

* Here’s a character breakdown for the upcoming Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica which I will be trying to avoid spoilers on so I’m not reading it but you can if you want and I won’t judge you.

* In one of her all too infrequent geekblogging breakouts, Eve Tushnet tackles a slew of horror films: Audition, May, Session 9, Ringu, and The Ring. Regarding those last two, like most people she prefers the version she saw first, but for a different reason than I’ve ever seen anyone cite before.

* Chris Butcher continues to refer to the Geoff Johns/Grant Morrison/Greg Rucka/Mark Waid/Keith Giffen/cast of thousands weekly series 52 with words like “pablum,” and I continue to be baffled by this given how clearly, even ostentatiously weird, idiosyncratic, and follow-your-bliss its peripatetic plot and themes were. Also, I liked the last issue of World War Hulk.

* This week’s Horror Roundtable is about out favorite writings on horror. Curt at Groovy Age takes issue with my citation of Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, pointing out the way Carroll treats horror plotlines like mysteries in which the characters attempt to “solve” the horrific presence. (Kind of like the initial set-up of The Ring, now that I think about it.) The funny thing is I didn’t even REMEMBER the focus on “solving” the horror until Curt brought it up in this post. What resonated for me was Carrol’s emphasis on how horror violates our sense not just of safety (like a lion on the loose or a mugger would) but also our sense of normalcy and even sanity. That seems like such a key distinction between horror proper and other things that are just scary. I read TPoH at a time when I was searching for a theory to explain why images that didn’t present a physical threat to the character who sees them–the girls in The Shining are the best example–were still so scary. This was an issue the prevailing Carol Clover-driven horror-film theories couldn’t account for.

* Finally, this shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S: Frank Miller’s The Spirit, ladies and germs. Get ’em while they’re hot. (Shhhhh.)

I probably went into Carter Smith’s film adaptation of Scott Smith’s (no relation) The Ruins expecting too much. I don’t see how I could have avoided that given just how wonderfully written the novel was. Unless they were to get very lyrical with landscapes and objects and sound, a la No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood, there was simply no way the filmmakers could translate the book’s ferociously intense interiority to the screen. (Well, now that I think of it, that was a way, and it was a way they didn’t take.) They made a good movie, don’t get me wrong. If you haven’t read the great novel you might think they made a great movie. I’m not sure.

What they did is rely on the ability of their actors to perform pain, and whenever that was going on they succeeded in a big way. As I’ve said before, the casting of this film was a real coup. Each of the main characters is attractive not in a plastic MTV/CW way, but in a your-girlfriend’s-cute-best-friend or your-good-looking-roommate way. You’re instantly attracted to each not in the way you’re attracted to matinee idols or pin-ups, but to good-natured, presentable people in the prime of their lives. Perhaps that’s why the necessarily truncated intro—which collapses our American foursome’s meeting and befriending of German tourist Matthias and a group of party-hardy Greeks and their subsequent decision to set out to an off-the-map Mayan ruin to track down Matthias’s brother and his newfound archaeologist lady friend from days into literally minutes—doesn’t feel nearly as rushed as it probably ought to. If I bumped into any of these people on vacation, I’d probably go offroading with them too. (Certainly I defy you not to come away from this movie with a crush on Jena Malone, if you’re oriented in that direction.)

The cutting and splicing doesn’t start to hurt until they reach the ruins, where a series of decisions made by the Smiths (Scott wrote the screenplay as well as the novel) in the interest of economizing character and conveying the stakes as quickly as possible upset the complex, nuanced interplay that made the novel such a pleasurably unpleasant read. (I’m about to SPOIL THE HELL OUT OF THIS MOVIE, so be warned.) Instead of putting two and two together regarding how much business the Mayan guards mean via the discovery of the body of Matthias’s brother, the movie gets the point across by having the Mayans kill the Greek right away. With him down, it’s left to Matthias to become the outsider figure who breaks his back in an ill-fated descent down the ruins’ shaft. So not only do we lose the pathos of a mortally wounded character whom the language barrier has rendered completely isolated (the Greek), we also strip ersatz group leader Jeff of his other competent counterpoint (Matthias), whose calm and melancholy works in strange harmony with Jeff’s frustration and angry optimism in the novel.

Then, for reasons less immediately apparent, Stacy and Eric swap roles so that it’s she who becomes infested with the killer vine and subsequently falls apart at the seams. This switch has the unfortunate effect of producing a far more stock character—the hysterical female, the Barbara from Night of the Living Dead—than what we had in the book. It also creates less of a contrast between Jeff and Eric, so now instead of a sullen MacGyver and an OCD self-mutilator we’ve got two shades of macho, one simply less take-charge than the other.

But let’s get back to the good—the suffering. It’s palpable and at times hard to watch. Though essentially asked to embody a cliche, Laura Ramsey as Stacy in particular is extraordinary. As with Malone, her body is used astutely by the filmmakers first to entice and then to unnerve with its soft, all-underbelly physicality. Her screams and sobs during the scene in which her friends finally take a knife to her to try to extract the infestation are so gutwrenchingly convincing I literally almost started crying myself out of sheer sympathy. Shortly thereafter she’s asked to carry the biggest gore effect in the film and aces it with understatements and false bravado, which quickly give way to utter (and utterly believable) despair. Malone is mostly her support throughout, but she’s quite good at it, repeatedly drawing on childlike gestures (hand-holding, hugging). And the person-on-person gore is as unflinching as you’ve heard, as raw as David Cronenberg’s recent crime movies.

What about Jeff, though? In the novel his was one of the most unique survival-horror characters I’d ever seen: He got more and more on top of his game as events progressed, as though on fire with the knowledge that his whole life had led him to this moment—yet he became less and less likable as this happened, and he knew it, and he still couldn’t do anything about it. (Along with Will Smith’s competent-to-the-point-of-neurosis Robert Neville in Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend, Jeff was one of two fascinating riffs on the Survivor Type I came across last year.) Actor Jonathan Tucker has a hangdog handsomeness, a weary beauty, that lights him from within as he plays out Jeff’s ever-increasing level of no-nonsense decision making. The problem is that he’s not playing it out against anything. The aforementioned changes to the characters and their relationships gives him less to work with. Meanwhile the novel’s relentless emphasis on quotidian physical deterioration (as opposed to the menace of the vines or even just the Mayans)—thirst, sunburn, filth, starvation, heat, aches and pains, the need to find and conserve food and water and pain medication—is almost completely eliminated from the film beyond a few token shots of rationed grapes and swigs from a water bottle. What I missed most of all is the characters’ use of booze: The fact that the Greek packed more tequila than water, Eric Stacy and Amy repeatedly getting drunk despite knowing it will help kill them, and most importantly Jeff (and Matthias)’s reaction to their drunken stupidity. With none of those factors there to test him, we don’t really feel Jeff’s pain over knowing he’s got to be good enough to survive on behalf of the whole group.

Which leads us to the end of the film, the most rushed part of the whole movie. It deviates significantly from the novel, which is fine in principle, and could have even worked in practice. But since they couldn’t depict Jeff’s struggles throughout, they condense it into an incongruous “his name was Robert Paulson” speech to the Mayans that feels grafted from a different movie and makes Jeff’s sacrifice feel like it was done out of a kind of shakily established chivalry rather than fatigued rage. The penultimate sequence is straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Descent, a nice bookend to the Shining riff of the opening credits. But given what we know of the vines’ epidemiology, this development has eschatological repercussions that are completely unexplored. Instead we get a coda involving the remaining Greeks that cuts so quickly to the closing credits and their mood-killing Yeah Yeah Yeahs music that it’s almost like the movie had a plane to catch or something. I understand the filmmakers’ need to shorten a marathon to a steeplechase, but not this breakneck sprint to the finish line.

Part of me wishes I’d gone into the movie sight-unseen, like all those Ain’t It Cool reviewers. I probably would have remained mightily impressed by the performances and by Carter Smith’s taut, smart shots. I doubt I’d have felt the cuts and the rush, and I probably would have gone and read the book afterwards anyway. Coulda woulda shoulda.

Jason Adams reads my mind and posts about the bizarre reaction to The Ruins by all of Ain’t It Cool News’s reviewers. (Thanks for saving me the work, man!) Basically, they all loved it, but they were all totally stunned by this because they assumed it would suck. I’ve seen similar bafflement about the movie expressed on some of the big horror sites–statements like “I just have to know what the hell is going on. Hopefully I won’t be disappointed when all is revealed.” If only it were based on an acclaimed novel available at your local library!

My friend Jim Treacher wrote me to say he was nervous that the studio wasn’t screening the movie for critics. But can you blame them? If the CW among genre-centric reviewers, who really ought to know better, was that it was gonna stink, what do you think your average mainstream-media critic would make of it? After all, it’s about violent and horrible things happening to attractive young people–unless you can cobble together a metaphor for the Bush Administration’s treatment of Latin America out of it, it must be garbage, right?

* I’d say “God damn it,” but maybe that was the problem: Cowboys for Christ, Robin Hardy’s Christopher Lee-starring follow-up to The Wicker Man, has been shut down due to lack of funds.

* Looks like Guillermo del Toro really will be directing the Hobbit movies. Did I mention that Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth were not good? Because they were not good. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Reverence brigades be warned: Frank Miller is going all Sin City on The Spirit‘s ass! (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Finally, Slant Magazine’s Jeremiah Kipp offers up a lengthy, thoughtful review of one of my all-time favorite films, David Lynch’s Lost Highway.

* As you may have heard, my buddy Ben Morse, his special lady Megan Sherlock, and woman-I-shared-an-SPX-hotel-room-with Sam Walker have created quite the viral marketing sensation with their secret Secret Invasion tie-in “Kinsey” videos on MySpace.

* Meanwhile, my pseudonymous Marvel.com pals Agent M and Annihilator 882 serve up Marvel’s 10 Mightiest Mullets. The Longshot pic is really spectacular.

* Daily Topless Robot link! Here’s your quote of the day:

Nothing bad ever comes out of a question mark block. The question they’re asking is, “Hey, Paisan, want something awesome?” And the answer is always “Yes.”

That’s my compadre Jackson Alpern on The 8 Most Insane Things About Super Mario Bros. (When You Stop and Think About Them). As you might recall, this is a subject close to my heart.

* Finally, at Topless Robot’s new videogame-centric sister site Joystick Division, my chum Chris Ward shows off four of the most prized items from his frighteningly extensive Pac-Man memorabilia collection. Here’s one now:

Curt Purcell keeps the discussion about the potential impact of a centralized host-driven linkblog on the horror blogosphere going in a new post on the topic. (Earlier: here and here and here and here.) In it he includes a gentle reminder to me to post regarding the positive impact such blogs can have in terms of the obnoxious fannish tendencies a cohesive, collective blogosphere can display. Frankly, I’m not sure there is one beyond leading by example. If a Big Important Linkblog manages to avoid indulging the kinds of myopic, know-it-all behaviors that Bruce Baugh lays out here much more coherently than I’ve done in any of my posts, well, that’s one less blog doing so, and a prominent one at that. I don’t think their impact would go that far beyond that, however. Insofar as the big problems I have with cohesive blogospheres stem from the bloggers’ mutually reinforced conviction that they’re absolutely right about what they choose to talk about, it’s not as though any one other blogger can really put a dent in that.

BUT! First of all, it’s important to remember that the emergence of a cohesive horror blogosphere would have its own positive aspects, several of which Curt and I have talked about enthusiastically–increased exchange of ideas with one another, exposing genre fans to ways of discussing the genre they might not have had access to before and may get something out of, etc.

Second of all, as J.E. Bennett and ILoz Zoc point out, horror bloggers in the main seem to be a slightly less combative and self-serious bunch than those in more problematic blogospheres. I don’t think that’s at all true of horror fandom generally–you don’t need to look any further than comment threads and forums at the big horror sites to figure that out–but I can say that the horror blogs I read tend not to stoke the fires of faux outrage or make proclamations regarding what kinds of horror count or don’t count. Then again, there’s obviously some selection bias in that group. But who knows, maybe a more interactive group of horror bloggers would remain less given to belligerence and dogma.

I think the biggest problem facing the creation of a horror blogosphere is that it’s based on a genre, not a medium. The comics blogosphere is, after all, about comics, and Scott McLoud notwithstanding it’s basically easy to understand what constitutes comics: comic books, graphic novels, manga, BD, editorial cartoons, comic strips, etc. Even if you factor in occasional digressions into illustration proper or animation or superheroes in other media or nerd-culture in general, it’s clear that while different comics bloggers’ tastes may vary, it will at least be clear to each that the other is, in fact, a comics blogger.

Horror is different in that it’s based entirely on qualitative judgments regarding what horror is, which means that differences in personal taste have a lot more impact on whether we can even agree we’re blogging about the same subject. I mean, as Curt and I have discussed in the past, our interests in terms of the genre have very little overlap, and in some fundamental ways we disagree on what constitutes horror in the first place. Now, we’re both broad-minded or informed or whatever enough to acknowledge each other’s interests in horror as horror, but multiply us two by however many other horror blogs there are with however many other interpretations of and interests in and takes on and views of the genre those blogs have, and it becomes that much more difficult to create a cohesive feel.

Any centralized, hosted horror linkblog is going to have to deal with this, and it might end up being difficult. Again, when Dirk Deppey or Tom Spurgeon looks around the internet for things to link to, it’s pretty easy for them to figure out what qualifies as “comics.” Taste enters into what they choose to link to to a certain extent, but here there’s the added wrinkle that whatever their differences they both have what is generally considered to be “good taste” in comics–both of them having been in charge of the English language’s preeminent comics criticism magazine, for example. But for horror, how would such a blogger figure out where their purview begins and ends? What does “good taste in horror” even mean? It’s so much more subjective than the problems faced by comics linkbloggers…which might mean that the subjective will become the objective out of sheer necessity and cause even more of the problems I was talking about before. Or it might mean that a horror linkblog, and the horror blogosphere in general, becomes a lot more open to the kinds of “blog what you feel” blogs that Bruce Baugh is talking about.

My point, I suppose, is…I don’t know that I have one, as a matter of fact. I’m kind of just thinking through the pros and cons. Both exist, and while one might outweigh the other for a given reader or blogger, certainly neither can erase the other.

* There’s gonna be some consternation over at My New Plaid Pants: The goddamn Weinsteins have announced that they’re consigning Wolf Creek director Greg McLean’s killer-crocodile movie Rogue to a 10-market limited release on April 25th—that’s just 24 days from now! Where’s a man-eating croc when you need one, man.

* It’s posts like this that are why I make Monster Brains a daily stop: He’s posted a gallery of images from Among the Gibjigs and Among the Woblins, children’s fantasy books from the 1880s written by Sydney Hodges and illustrated by Horace Petherick. They don’t make ’em like this anymore.

* Doug Wolk reviews Ganges #2 and All Star Superman #10.

* Daily Topless Robot: My pal Zach Oat runs down the 10 Star Wars Toys They’ll Really Never Make.

Curt at Groovy Age has posted the latest installment in an ongoing conversation regarding the state of the horror blogosphere and the role a prominent, hosted linkblog could play in its maturation. In this go-round, I am particularly fond of his rationale for wanting a more cohesive blogosphere for the genre in the first place:

I think there’s a massive horror fan-base that’s almost entirely oblivious to the existence of horror blogs, and I suspect that’s largely because we remain “a bunch of intense loners off in their own corners.” My hunch is that if we pulled together and achieved some kind of critical mass, we’d make a much bigger splash in horror fandom. Which is another way of saying, the audience most likely to appreciate and embrace what we’re doing would actually begin to find its way to us in increasingly significant numbers.

Yeah, numbers. There, I said it. A thousand or a hundred or even just ten more people every day sitting down with their morning coffee or evening drink, visiting my blog in eager anticipation, and smiling at what they see or read? A thousand or a hundred or even just ten more heads nodding or shaking when I spin out my theories on horror and genre? A thousand or a hundred or even just ten more personal tastes educated to appreciate the kind of vintage horror I love so much? A thousand or a hundred or even just ten more pairs of eyeballs on reviews of current writers or artists I’m excited about and trying to promote? Hell yeah, you’re goddamn right I want that! And so would those thousand or hundred or even just ten more people, if only they had some clue that Groovy Age existed.

I REALLY appreciate the rationale he gives for wanting to develop a horror blogosphere–essentially, simply giving horror fans access to a different array of voices and approaches to the genre than they’re probably getting right now.

I think what burned me a bit on the comics blogosphere–and don’t get me wrong, I still read dozens every day while reading nearly zero comics magazines or websites proper–is this sense of “blogger triumphalism” that arose when it became apparent that comics blogs as a collective entity had a substantial readership and therefore could actually have an impact on the areas they cover. Because comics blogs became able to drive conversation about comics online, I think they (and I) developed a sense of self-importance that does not become them, which manifests itself in all different ways: A need to comment in backseat-driver/armchair-quarterback fashion on industry and artistic issues that the blogger may know little or nothing about; a tendency toward tempest-in-a-teapot outrage over the latest stupid move by the corporate publishers; falling into the hype cycle of PR because a given book is the new big thing and as “industry players” the blogs feel that they should be covering it; a tendency to overinflate their own importance and impact, etc. I was certainly guilty of all of this in my comicsblogging days. When I returned to blogging after my brief hiatus and started reading horror blogs and doing one myself, I remember consciously thinking how refreshing it was that no horror bloggers actually felt any kind of proprietary role in the horror industry, and were simply commenting on it from the perspective of well-informed buffs as opposed to the wannabe captains of industry who populate the comics blogosphere, myself included again. So, calls for a more concentrated horror blogosphere have turned me off.

But what Curt calling for is keeping the horse in front of the cart in terms of the importance of readership. He’s not saying that we should have a horror blogosphere because of what we horrorbloggers could get out of having an increased readership, he’s saying we should have one because of what an increased readership could get out of us. And I think that’s absolutely spot-on. I mean, if you’re a horror fan and you’re looking to read informed, intelligent, and idiosyncratic commentary about genre efforts, you basically have, what, Rue Morgue and whatever decent reviews/criticism/essays you can find in the mainstream media. The online non-blog scene is pretty dire, and Curt’s right, I don’t think most fans really know about the blogs at all. It would be nice if people had an alternative to the big sites! And as I’ve said, Curt (who kindly attributes the genesis of this whole discussion to reading various things I’ve written) is quite right to say that a big Journalista-style horror linkblog would help shore up such an alternative.

But the problems with a collective-identity blogosphere I listed above still would remain, most likely. Moreover, while Curt’s call for a linkblog with a strong personality is no doubt intended to stave off the kind of “hey here’s the news on every single movie with a decapitation in it no matter how unwatchable” feel of the big horror sites and other qualitative linkblogging hazards, I actually think that popular personality-driven linkblogs can exacerbate the blogospheric problems I mentioned earlier rather than ameliorate them. The main difficulty is that points of view that seem unobjectionable or even noble in principle can easily devolve into sweeping generalizations or calcified thou-shalt-nots. Meanwhile, sensible aesthetic advocacy can make a clumsy transition into ill-conceived industry second-guessing–the kind of situation where people who note a particular creator or subgenre’s quality go on to demand that the entire industry abandon whatever business models had been working for it up until now in favor of a new approach that benefits that creator/subgenre, or pleases people who are fans of that creator/subgenre, or simply shames those who aren’t. In that sense, popular linkblogs can even magnify that tendency since their voices are so much louder, shaping the discussion both in terms of links they select as noteworthy and the commentary they provide about them. I mean, that’s true of any blog of any kind, but it’s enhanced with the clearinghouse-linkblog type of blog.

All that being said, I now find myself in love with the idea of a Comics Reporter-style link’n’news blog with an old-fashioned creature-feature horror host personality. We need a Web 2.0 Zacherle!

PS: I am going to try to enable comments once again, but this post will be going up while I lay me down to sleep and it’s entirely possible I’ll discover that the comments aren’t working when I wake up–they haven’t in months so I don’t really figure they’ll start now. But it’s worth a shot. Just know that if your comment is in a moderation queue, that means my comment feature is in fact busted.

* Whenever the topic of Thor comes up, which in my life is often, I say that any and every Thor comic should be at least as cool as Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” or it’s not worth doing. While this video uses a different song to make its point, it is otherwise exactly what I’m talking about.

When Thor shows up in a comic, all the other characters should go “OH FUCK IT’S THOR RUN FOR YOUR FUCKING LIVES HE’S A VIKING WAR GOD WITH A FUCKING MAGIC HAMMER” and if they don’t then that writer and artist FAIL.

* Sounds like the great Howard Shore will be returning to Middle-earth to compose the score to The Hobbit parts one and two, though this same report acts as though Guillermo del Toro has been confirmed as the films’ director, so who really knows?

* Tom Spurgeon serves up two scoops of well-deserved contempt today. The first is directed toward students at the University of Utah who are protesting the inclusion of Alison Bechdel’s excellent graphic memoir Fun Home on a course syllabus:

The fact that they’re so casual in both calling this award-winning book pornography and throwing out the leads-to-children-being-abused idea as if they’re givens and not acidic, horrible, super-serious things to say about anyone’s work makes this whole matter difficult to blog about except to in every way express my derision and contempt for that point of view and the spectacularly childish way in which it’s being expressed.

Indeed.

* Tom’s second scoop o’ scorn is aimed at fans whose reaction to the Jerry Siegel/Superman copyright decision is so repugnantly base and abysmally imbecilic to me that I’ve literally been trying not to think about it:

Shame on every stupid-ass, morally ignorant fan out there who has expressed even the slightest opinion that this course of legal action in any way reflects an agenda of greed on the part of people not directly involved in the act of creation, or worse, has articulated as their primary concern the potential interruption of their monthly four-color fantasy intake. Part of me wishes we lived in the might makes right moral universe that supports such a piggish outlook, because then I could quit my job and drive around on a motorcycle punching people in the face until they penned a formal apology to the Siegel family.

Indeed. (Astute readers will note Tom’s appropriation of the mission statement and modus operandi of Justice Society of America member Wildcat, and “indeed” to that as well.)

* Tom also reviews Grant Morrison’s excellent All Star Superman #10, but his review ends with what to me is an unsupported assertion:

…the rush to a conclusion after so many promising starts reminds us all that this is in the end a very clever superhero comic book, and may end up more of a sparkling commentary on the best of comics than a great one in its own right.

Personally I see All Star Superman‘s neverending parade of beginnings—i.e. standalone stories involving funhouse-mirror Superman doppelgangers of varying sorts—to be not commentary but a statement of its own. Sure, it’s an homage to the shotgun-blast approach of Silver Age DC superhero comics to science fiction’s “literature of ideas,” but insofar as it links up with Morrison and Quitely’s portrayal of Superman himself, it also stands as a message that being a caring, competent, helpful, clever, cooperative, kind person is what enables us to navigate the wild web of ideas we find ourselves tangled in in our everyday lives and come to our own ends with fewer regrets. It’s not just a love-letter to Mort Weisinger.

* Your seemingly daily Topless Robot link: Todd Ciolek runs down the 10 Most Regrettably Missing Movie Scenes of All Time. Horror is well represented, from the giant bugs in King Kong to Paul Reiser’s fate in Aliens. And there’s pie!

* News flash: Katee Sackhoff is attractive.

* Creeping Coruscant Alert: A Saudi Arabian prince is planning to build a mile-high skyscraper. What could possibly go wrong there? While the fan of science-fiction manmade immensity in me jumped for joy after reading this story, it also triggered my fear of heights so badly I got nauseated.