At the unsolicited but welcome suggestion of my old pal Jim Treacher, I recently read The Ruins, the latest novel by Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan. Literally all that I knew when opened the book and started the first page was that a) it was some kind of thriller; b) it was very, very good. Since I believe this is the ideal way to read any book, I recommend that those of you who haven’t read The Ruins go into it the exact same way–you’ll have a blast–and warn you that SPOILERS FOLLOW. However, we don’t give away the ending, so if you’re okay with knowing what the high concept is and getting some of the important details blown for you, I suppose you’re free to ignore my warning, although (as the events of the book demonstrate) that’s frequently a bad idea. I mostly recommend that if you’re at all interested in the kinds of things this blog frequently discusses, you skip this post and go and read this book at once.

Anyway, here is the email exchange between me and Jim.

There are 266 titles on the list so far.

—Dick Hyacinth on the database he’s compiling of comics people have put on their Best Of 2007 lists. That’s almost 300 different comics, and while surely some of them are bad and were listed by people with not-so-good taste, I think that’s indicative of both the scope of the industry and the number of high-quality releases out there right now.

* Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter site is back, thank God. I really enjoyed his interviews with two of my favorite people in alternative comics, Fantagraphics editor/publicist Eric Reynolds (worth reading for the beans he spills about Fanta’s upcoming releases–Rory Hayes!) and AdHouse publisher Chris Pitzer (worth reading for Pitzer’s overview of his company’s mission as a publisher).

* Bloody Disgusting reports that Doomsday, the post-apocalyptic thriller from The Descent director Neil Marshall, is now slated for a March 14th release.

* Lost star Matthew Fox lets slip some mild spoilers in a lengthy interview with Entertainment Weekly’s Dan Snierson (what, was Jeff Jensen busy?). So be warned, he does state some facts (both structural and specific) about the the show’s previous and upcoming seasons that are not readily apparent from what we’ve seen so far. But if you can stomach that, he also has some fairly candid and interesting things to say about what has worked and not worked on the show.

* Dick Hyacinth’s lengthy, catholic Best Comics of 2007 list is one of my favorites of its kind so far.

* Echoing Ted Rall’s complaint about the perceived New York Times/Best American Angsty Artcomix Axis, NeilAlien argues that such institutions lean so heavily enough to a certain flavor of comics to create the impression that “all artcomix are precious white suburban objets d’angst,” likening the phenomenon to the deleterious impact of the superherocentricity of the Direct Market. I’ve seen many a “new mainstream” adherent draw this parallel, which is bogus because a) a couple of editors at a couple of outlets don’t have nearly the level of control over access to comics that the spandex-fixated majority of DM retailers do, and b) the real complaint about the domination of one particular genre is not simply that the genre is dominant, but that many examples of that genre are lousy and and don’t deserve the dominance. Unless you’re an inveterate contrarian, this is not something you’d say about the work of creators like Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, and Jaime Hernandez (whose Maggie strip from the NYT doesn’t even fit into the lamely stereotyped mold the anti-angst crew is trying to push on it anyway).

* Finally, from the Ozymandias files, via Bryan Alexander: A joint US/Norwegian research team has stumbled across a bust of Lenin abandoned by Soviet scientists at the Antarctic Pole of Inaccessibility, the most remote point on the frozen continent, some 50 years ago. Look on my works, ye capitalists, and despair.

Speak of the devil: Ann Thompson of Variety pens an interesting article on the new wave of first-person docu-horror, focusing on Cloverfield and the indie haunted-house film Paranormal Activity and emphasizing both the format and the “less is more” approach to the scares. The Blair Witch Project looms over it all. (Via Dread Central, which calls the films “voyeur horror,” an intriguing label. The next “torture porn”?)

* It blows my mind that Della’morte, Dell’amore/Cemetery Man director Michele Soavi hasn’t directed a horror film since then, and has actually only directed one other movie of any kind in that time (he’s been doing TV work). But Fangoria reports he’s got a project in the works called Catacombs Club, which sounds like it’s got the same intoxicating mixture of romance and morbidity that the earlier film boasted. Click for details, including the news that The Adventures of Baron Munchausen co-writer Charles McKeown is writing the screenplay, and the factoid that Soavi shot second unit on that Terry Gilliam film. (Via Dread Central.)

* BC at Horror Movie a Day pans Blair Witch Project director Daniel Myrick’s supernatural teen thriller Solstice.

* State of the beast update: Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo reprints eyewitness reports from the San Francisco Chronicle that the two surviving victims of the fatal (to both human and animal) tiger attack at the San Francisco View on Christmas had been actively harassing the zoo’s lions shortly before the attack.

* Jason Adams at My New Plaid Pants takes reviewers of The Orphanage, and Roger Ebert generally, to task for overusing Alfred Hitchcock’s famous “surprise vs. suspense” anecdote. He does this in large part because he thinks The Orphange doesn’t earn the Master’s posthumous approval; I’ve gotta see it before I pass judgment and god only knows when that will happen. As an aside, Jason also mentions how scary he found The Others, a movie I think works exactly one time and then is pretty much useless, so badly does its ending skew everything that comes before it.

* Marvel Editor-in-Chief/Amazing Spider-Man artist Joe Quesada and long-time ASM writer J. Michael “Joe” Straczynski continue to very politely but very publicly blame one another for the shortcomings of the poorly received (by this blog and basically every single other one) “One More Day” Spider-Man storyline, in which Peter Parker and his wife Mary Jane make a deal with the devilish Mephisto to remove all traces of their marriage (past, present, and future) from existence in order to save the life of Peter’s wounded Aunt May. The funny thing is that both men focus on the story’s wonky continuity implications and slapdash use of magic as the narrative equivalent of universal solvent, but neither seem to realize that the emotional, psychological, and moral character-based underpinnings of the entire thing are just as shoddy.

* Finally, allow me to recommend the latest iteration of Dick Wolf’s venerable police and D.A. procedural series Law & Order. The Missus and I watched the back-to-back-episodes double season premiere on our TiVo today, and it’s the best the show has been in a long long time. It’s not just that new cast additions Jeremy Sisto and (particularly) Linus Roache hand in strong performances as lived-in, pointedly un-glossy characters–the whole show seems to have been tightened up, with scenes given more time to breathe, actors given more time to react, even better framing and lighting. It’s almost reminiscent of the show’s earliest Chris Noth/Michael Moriarty years, where half the fun of the show came from watching a George Dzundza or Steven Hill reaction shot. The cop material in particular showed a gravitas it hadn’t had since the departure of Jerry Orbach. Good stuff, worth putting off watching Project Runway and catching one of its countless re-airings instead for.

Joe “Jog” McCulloch reviews David Cronenberg’s seminal body horror/media satire/James Woods vehicle Videodrome.

And BC at Horror Movie a Day presents a Best Of/Worst Of roundup of his first year on the job, the job being watching at least one horror movie every day. Read the roundup for either the hidden gems he discovered or the hilariously bad budget-pack junk he watched to make the quota, or simply to reward him for living the dream/nightmare.

* The Daily Galaxy reports that some scientists are worrying that ages-old organic matter unearthed–or un-iced–as global warming melts the polar ice caps will accelerate climate change. Infocult’s Bryan Alexander notes the potential eldritch implications, obvious to fans of H.P. Lovecraft and John Carpenter everywhere.

* New Year’s gift number one: Blogger Ken Lowery, formerly of Ringwood, now has his own fancy new web site, Ken-Lowery.com To think I knew him when he still had the word “Ragefuck” in his blog name!

* New Year’s gift number two: I tend to enjoy The Best of Bootie, year-end mash-up collections compiled by mash-up DJs A Plus D.

* Adam Balz’s brief rumination on the Ed Tom Bell character in No Country for Old Men over at Not Coming to a Theater Near You strikes me as unfair to Ed Tom’s deputy. Balz labels him as “artless [and] simple-minded” whose “far from revelatory” thoughts “dance around the crime.” In fact, if I recall correctly, the deputy’s pretty much dead on in everything he says; the main difference between him and Ed Tom is that he verbalizes most of his thoughts while Ed Tom doesn’t.

* Finally:

They called him Iron Man, a hulking teenage football player with a baby face and winsome smile who lived with his parents in a small ranch house in the Buttonwoods section of town.

Then, one summer night in 1987, Craig Price crept across his neighbor’s yard, broke into a little brown house on Inez Avenue and stabbed Rebecca Spencer 58 times.

She was a 27-year-old mother of two.

He was 13.

Two years passed before Price struck again.

Joan Heaton, 39, was butchered with the kitchen knives she had bought earlier that day.

The bodies of her daughters, Jennifer 10, and Melissa 8, were found in pools of blood, pieces of knives broken off in their bones; Jennifer had been stabbed 62 times.

—“Hulking boy killer changes justice system,” AP, CNN.com

Why not celebrate by checking out my New Year’s horror resolution over at this week’s Horror Roundtable?

Caveats

1. All these lists are in order of preference.

2. The comics lists are by no means intended to be a comprehensive overview. There are just so many books that came out this year that I didn’t have a chance to read yet.

3. Every year, it seems like I end up listing my favorite comics in a different way. Sometimes it’s in alphabetical order. Sometimes it’s in order of preference with no regard to genre. Sometimes it’s a no-nonsense list. Sometimes it’s with explanations. This year it’s in order of preference, separated into two different categories, Artsy and Genre-Ish. That just felt right to me. And I limited myself to 15 each.

4. The movie list isn’t comprehensive either, because I never got to see There Will Be Blood or Control, to name a couple movies I think I might have liked a lot. No limit this time–I just listed the six movies I really liked.

5. The album and song lists aren’t comprehensive either, but I say that mostly because I haven’t gotten the new Wu-Tang Clan and Ghostface Killah records and haven’t gotten a chance to really listen to the new Beirut and Jens Lekman albums. A lot of the kinds of albums you tend to see on these lists don’t really interest me. I basically listed all the albums I really connected with; for songs, I stopped at 15.

6. There’s kind of miles and miles between the first three items on my TV list, which are three of my all-time seven favorite shows, and the rest. I stopped at 10. And I’ve never watched The Wire, so that explains that. (I know, I know.)

7. A lot of the things I first experienced and really got a lot out of this year, from Children of Men to Amusement Parks on Fire’s Out of the Angeles to Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club, actually came out earlier than 2007, so I didn’t list them. It’s all about ’07 baby! Woo!

Sean T. Collins’s Favorite [Blanks] of 2007

Comics (artsy)

1. The End, by Anders Nilsen

2. Asthma, by John Hankiewicz

3. Love & Rockets digests, by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez

4. Cold Heat, by BJ and Frank Santoro

5. Notes for a War Story, by Gipi

6. The Blot, by Tom Neely

7. Skyscrapers of the Midwest, by Josh Cotter

8. Garage Band, by Gipi

9. The Salon, by Nick Bertozzi

10. Mome, by various

11. Pulphope: The Art of Paul Pope, by Paul Pope

12. House, by Josh Simmons/Batman, by Josh Simmons

13. Johnny Ryan’s XXX Scumbag Party, by Johnny Ryan/Blecky Yuckerella Vol. 2: Back in Bleck, by Johnny Ryan

14. The Monkey and the Crab, by Shawn Cheng and Sarah Edward-Corbett

15. Uptight, by Jordan Crane

Comics (genre-ish)

1. The Immortal Iron Fist, by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, David Aja, and various artists

2. BPRD, by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Guy Davis

3. Captain America, by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, and Mike Perkins

4. All Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

5. 52, by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid, Keith Giffen, J.G. Jones, and various artists

6. Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus, by Jack Kirby

7. Jack Kirby’s Silver Star, by Jack Kirby

8. Dragon Head, by Mochizuki Minetaro

9. I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks, by Fletcher Hanks, edited by Paul Karasik

10. Green Lantern, by Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis, Ethan Van Sciver, and various artists

11. Daybreak, by Brian Ralph

12. Runaways, by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona

13. Criminal, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips

14. Daredevil, by Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark

15. The Perry Bible Fellowship, by Nicolas Gurewitch

Movies

1. No Country for Old Men

2. 28 Weeks Later

3. 300

4. Darkon

5. Eastern Promises

6. Beowulf

Television Programs

1. The Sopranos

2. Lost

3. Battlestar Galactica

4. The Soup

5. Dr. Phil

6. 120 Minutes

7. America’s Next Top Model

8. Judge Judy

9. Scrubs

10. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

Albums

1. Underworld: Oblivion with Bells

2. LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver

3. Radiohead: In Rainbows

4. Robyn: Robyn [UK]

5. Muscles: Guns Babes Lemonade

6. Beirut: Lon Gisland

7. Nine Inch Nails: Year Zero

8. Klaxons: Myths of the Near Future

9. Editors: An End Has a Start

10. Digitalism: Idealism

11. Kylie Minogue: X [UK]

Songs

1. Underworld: Beautiful Burnout

2. Radiohead: All I Need

3. Gus Gus: Moss

4. LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver

5. Beirut: Scenic World

6. Maria Taylor: A Clean Getaway

7. Robyn: Should Have Known

8. Muscles: One Inch Badge Pin

9. Editors: An End Has a Start

10. Klaxons: Atlantis to Interzone

11. The Horrors: Count in Fives

12. Tori Amos: Bouncing Off Clouds

13. Rihanna: Umbrella

14. The White Stripes: Icky Thump

15. Kings of Leon: Arizona

Via Fantagraphics’ Eric Reynolds we find Al Columbia’s take on Dario Argento’s Suspiria.

See the whole thing–created at the behest of an open call for B-movie-based art submissions to “a film fest that combines fantasy, sci-fi, horror, action, live burlesque and a special art exhibit sponsored by Fantagraphics Books” calledSupertrash Fest; there’s still two weeks left to submit, artists!–at Columbia’s website.

I thought that in light of tonight’s big Times Square soirée, this article by the New York Times’ Sewell Chan on filmmakers’ penchant for destroying New York City with aliens, monsters, natural disasters, nuclear war, terrorist attacks, rampant crime, marshmallow men, viral vampires, the passage of time and so on is all too appropriate. What’s more, it references The Blair Witch Project when discussing Cloverfield, thus providing fodder for my Blair Witch trend post’s lively comment thread.

One quote from the article perplexed me, however:

In contrast to “I Am Legend”–which like “The Omega Man” (1971) is based on a Richard Matheson novel–the “Cloverfield” images verge on being tasteless, [Celluloid Skyline author James] Sanders said. “They are playing on feelings not just about New York as civic symbol but on the shock of Sept. 11,” he said. “To some degree, that’s not fair ball.”

Okay, first of all, I Am Legend did the exact same thing, believe me. I don’t even think you needed to be in an opening-night screening in Union Square, listening to the uncomfortable laughter of your fellow New Yorkers as neighborhood after neighborhood and landmark after landmark is shown abandoned and destroyed, to figure that out. (Though it helped.) And Legend isn’t even the first such post-9/11 horror film to go there–Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, anybody? But the thing that really sticks out is Sanders’s assertion that playing upon 9/11 anxiety is unfair for a genre filmmaker to do. That’s really like saying it was unfair of, I dunno, Godzilla to play upon the Japanese people’s experience with nuclear war. Maybe he means that Cloverfield is crassly exploiting 9/11, but that’s not what he (or Chan, to be fair) actually said. It’s simply an unsupportable position as articulated.

(Via Matt Zoller Seitz.)

For a movie with such a seismic impact in terms of marketing and production, The Blair Witch Project didn’t really inspire any other films as far as I can tell–particularly compared to the other big horror hit of Summer ’99, The Sixth Sense. So my question is this: Between Cloverfield (Blair Witch meets Godzilla), Diary of the Dead (Blair Witch meets Night of the Living Dead), and The Poughkeepsie Tapes (Blair Witch meets Hostel meets Henry), are we finally seeing the wide-scale birth of the Blair Subgenre?

And hey, did it take the rise of YouTube to ultimately make first-person docuhorror feasible?

Last night me and the Missus watched the pilot and first episode of Twin Peaks (in her case for the first time!). In the opening minutes of the pilot, Laura Palmer’s body is discovered, her mother realizes she’s missing and frantically makes phone calls trying to find her, and then her father is notified of her death while speaking to her mother on the phone. As Mrs. Palmer’s screams of grief faded to black for the first commercial break I was surprised to find myself in tears. I turned to the Missus, who was similarly shaken up, and said “Wow, that was tough to watch.” She replied “I was just going to say it’s refreshing to see a murder mystery that treats the murder this way.” Indeed, I think that if the show hadn’t started this way–treating Laura’s death and its profound effect on her loved ones very very seriously–the whole thing wouldn’t have worked. Beneath all the weirdness, humor, and glamour beats an emotional heart of genuine sadness.

“91 – FLIX – Evil Dead 2 – Sat 12/29 10:00pm-11:25pm – Rated R AL, GV – Horror (1987) [three stars] Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks. Cabin visitors fight protean spirits of the dead with a chainsaw, a shotgun and Egyptian incantations. (CC, Stereo, SAP, Letterbox)”

Giant flying reptiles, believe it or not, have routinely been sighted in the Olympic National Park’s rainforest in Washington State. I’ve been hearing about reports from there for decades.

–Loren Coleman, “Pterodactyl Causes Car Crash,” Cryptomundo. More here.

The other day I noted the absence of the lauded-to-the-heavens No Country for Old Men from many a year-end best-of list, a backlash seemingly in full effect. On a related note, There Will Be Blood tops a lot of them and is on many more. Now, over the past couple of months it was tough to find a critic capable of mentioning one of those movies without mentioning the other in the same breath, if only to say “Paul Thomas Anderson will have his work cut out for him to top the Coens” or what have you. So I wonder: Does Blood‘s Christmas release date keep it in the sweet spot for the year-ender lists–smack in the first major flush of adoration, before the emperor-has-no-clothes contingent has a chance to coalesce?

Apparently Ted Rall decided to reprise his “King Maus” shtick with regards to the comics that have been running in the New York Times, repeating his absurd hyperbolic accusations of censorship because someplace is running the kinds of comics he doesn’t like as opposed to the comics made by him and his friends, and indulging in the sort of “altcomix are all navel-gazing stories about depressed white people for the New Yorker set” hogwash you’d expect from a Newsarama comment thread troll. Why are we acting like this argument is worth engaging? Why am I even posting about it? About the only worthwhile thing Rall’s rant has to offer is that it might make other critics think twice the next time they’re tempted to talk about how great “bombthrowing” or “just starting the conversation” is.

This charmingly lo-fi hack of the original Super Mario Bros. is the most hilariously mean-spirited video game I’ve ever seen. It’s really a rather brilliant Bizarro take on the basic philosophy of gaming: Instead of rewarding exploration, this game punishes it.The sadistic booby traps make that Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels thing look like a game on your nephew’s Leapfrog. When the floor dropped out from under the poor sap–that’s when I lost it. And when he eventually starts maneuvering through the level with evident fear, well, you’ll believe an avatar can cry.

Many more video clips can be found at Wiifanboy. Via the illustrious Justin Aclin.

Speaking of video games, I showed this astonishing unedited four-minute Tony Jaa steadicam slobberknocker to the Missus, who rather astutely pointed out that it’s like a video game: the guy navigates a multi-tiered environment, battling the bad guys who pop out at set intervals and benefiting from clever use of the environment they fight in.

And speaking of my ToyFare compadre Justin, Poe Ghostal has posted the final pair of interviews in his series of chats with TF staffers, photographer Dylan Brucie and Price Guide Editor/Twisted ToyFare Theater co-writer Jon Gutierrez.