I became a vegetarian two years ago, and I’m married to a vegan recovering anorexic who initially became a vegetarian because of upsetting scenes in the horror movies Wolf and Jurassic Park. Naturally, I’ve picked up on the relationship between horror and carnivorousness. (You might have noticed this in my “state of the beast” posts, among others.)

A pair of noteworthy posts elsewhere make this case. First up is David Carter of Not Coming to a Theater Near You on PeTA’s Chew on This: 30 Reasons to Go Vegetarian, which views the animal rights organization’s bloody documentary on the treatment of animals by the meat industry through a horror lens.

Meanwhile, Lindy Loo of Yeah, That “Vegan” Shit (and, not coincidentally, horror blog Come Play with Us, Danny…) examines the anti-meat implications of arguably the meat-movie (rimshot!) masterpieces, The Texas Chain Saw Massacare and Hostel–and Motel Hell for good measure.

The Onion AV Club has posted two lengthy, boffo pieces on horror in time for Halloween. First is Noel Murray’s film-by-film overview of the Friday the 13th franchise, with special attention paid to the ways each film is a creature of its era. Lately I’ve been almost preoccupied with how gratuitous violence works in a movie, so this is like crack to me. Highly recommended.

Next is an imaginary 24-hour horror movie marathon curated by Eli Roth. Listening to Roth repeatedly place himself in the company of the likes of John Carpenter and Sam Raimi indicates just how much the guy believes his own press at this point. Actually, perhaps “believes the press he thinks he should have” is a more accurate way of putting things post-Hostel: Part II. But that aside, he’s made many interesting choices from a range of eras and styles, and has some intriguing things to say about them, from their influence on his own work (which only feels like he’s paying himself a compliment some of the time, and frequently yields insights like his characterization of the second half of Hostel as driven by a Vanishing-derived compulsion to know) to an almost elegiac appreciation for the kinds of horror films that could never get made today (the original Wicker Man, for example). Also highly recommended, and with the hope that he eats some humble pie and finds his way again.

Watching the film once again, Romero’s carefully calculated deconstructions on social woes of the time seem most brilliant in their simultaneously identifying the film as a distinctly American work rooted in the cultural anarchy of the 1970’s as well as one packed with universal truths on the human condition, borders of time and place notwithstanding. The former packs the greatest punch in the third-act war between the main protagonists holed up in their shopping mall fortress and the military convoy that overruns them (bringing the zombie population flooding back in), stealthily evoking not simply the tensions between pacifist movements and more aggressive social orders of the time, but any scenario in which men turn on each other in the face of greater disorder (in other words, look at any historical timeline and pick your example of choice)….In a prolonged television debate meant to inform viewers on how to handle the crisis at hand, a lone scientist stresses the importance of exterminating the dead “without emotion.” How fitting, then, that the soldiers who underestimate the zombies – treating them more like disposable hunting targets worthy of ridicule than a lethal force to be reckoned with – are generally those who find themselves being torn limb from limb.

—Rob Humanick on Dawn of the Dead.

I feel like I pick on another one of Humanick’s zombie-blogathon posts every day, but the people who overrun the mall simply aren’t soldiers in a military convoy–they’re a biker gang. Meanwhile, the people who supposedly represent “pacifist movements” in this formulation include two SWAT cops.

Time Magazine has posted its list of the Top 25 Horror Movies of all time, by critic Richard Corliss. It’s pretty ridiculous. Red Dragon? It includes a lot of films that are fondly remembered but not in serious contention for the canon–Dead Alive, Black Sunday, freaking Blood Feast. And then there are the countless omissions–obviously these things are subjective, but the absence of The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, Dawn of the Dead, and Rosemary’s Baby seems particularly glaring, and that’s before we get into more tenuous or debatable territory like The Sixth Sense, The Ring, Hellraiser, Evil Dead 2, Henry, Suspiria, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hostel, 28 Days Later, etc. And again, The Silence of the Lambs doesn’t make the cut but Red Dragon does. Finally, the too-clever-by-half non-horror selections are pretty preposterous–Bambi? Arrival of a Train? I understand what they’re saying, but those films aren’t horror films, they’re movies that had parts that scared people. The flying monkeys scared the shit out of every little kid in America but The Wizard of Oz is not a horror movie.

Lists like this one really make me question the value of listmaking as part of the critical enterprise, because the “hey, it started a conversation” thing is only worthwhile if the conversation doesn’t muddy the waters and force knowledgeable people to spend valuable time smacking down stupidity. This goes double when the list is presented not as one dude’s opinion but by a publication that presumes authority on all topics about which it speaks.

Read: Wolves of the Calla–The Final Argument

Another book, another infodump of stuff that had never been revealed in the actual story. The magical crystal balls are called Bends o’ the Rainbow. The guy who accidentally ran Jake over when he was pushed into the street by Jack Mort, who’s now called “Walter’s representative on the New York level of the Dark Tower,” was mafia don Enrico Balazar. The Turtle’s name is Maturin. Roland is the last seppe-sai (“death-seller”). Books Two, Three, and Four are subtitled “Renewal,” “Redemption,” and “Regard” to match Book One’s “Resumption” and this volume’s “Resistance.”

And yet King still can’t bring himself to make it clear that Walter is the same person as Marten Broadcloack/Richard Fannin/Randall Flagg/John Farson/The Good Man/The Walkin Dude, just in disguise. At the beginning of the Argument he even appears to use the names “Walter” and “Marten” interchangeably, with no explanation as to who this “Marten” character might be.

Also, the letter R is not the 19th letter of the alphabet. Come on, man.

Bruce Baugh sings the praises of Children of Men and 28 Weeks Later, my two favorite films of the past year and harrowing post-apocalyptic narratives both. Interestingly, he cites Children of Men‘s long-take action and suspense sequences, singled out by many critics as a case of ostentatious filmmaking getting in the way of emotional immediacy, as doing precisely the opposite–recreating the emotional endlessness of traumatic moments in filmic terms. That feels right to me.

I think criticism of the technique used in those set pieces bespeaks a certain conservatism among film critics in its implicit belief that movies use the stuff of moviemaking at the expense of emotional resonance.

I’m linking to Tom Spurgeon’s post in praise of the current state of comics because I think it’s at least as important to read as the recent complaints about same by Craig Yoe and Frank Santoro and Heidi MacDonald. Hell, I was going to write something along the lines of Tom’s post (particularly the “Craft and Story Are Valued as Never Before” section) myself, but my version would have come out something like “if you are interested in and knowledgeable about comics enough to write about them but still think they’re in dire artistic straits right now, WHAT THE HELL????” so I didn’t.

Brian Ralph presents the Zombie Hall of Fame, parts one and two.

There’s more at the links, but not enough, goddammit. I want to see Flyboy, Bub, Big Daddy, the priest from 28 Weeks Later, the little girl from the Dawn remake, the mom from Dead Alive…and then I want to pay money to own these things, so Brian, if you’re listening, let’s make this happen.

Troma is selling its Hell’s Kitchen walk-up and moving to Long Island City due to financial woes. I spent a summer in that building, and I have, well, let’s call them vivid memories of the place. In a way I feel like the McDonald’s next door that Lloyd Kaufman has blamed for Troma’s rat problem in every interview he’s done for the last decade has won some sort of titanic struggle for the soul of that block.

Read: The Gunslinger (revised)–“The Slow Mutants”; “The Gunslinger and the Man in Black”

This page enumerates the non-grammatical/stylistic differences between the original and revised Gunslingers. IIRC it only contains three spoilers that made me want to chuck my laptop out the window, which is a minor miracle when it comes to online reference material about fiction. Part of me feels like I could have just read the list and saved myself the trouble of reading the book, but it’s probably worth seeing the changes in context. They’re hard enough to wrap your head around as it is without having a full-fledged reading experience to help you internalize them.

So, Jake is dead, and unless the lobstrosity attack that kicks off The Drawing of the Three is to be interpreted as karma-by-shellfish, Roland still doesn’t get his comeuppance for letting the kid die. The man in black now openly cops to being both Marten and Walter during his post-chase palaver with the gunslinger; the servile relationship of the latter to the former is redacted, as is the one between Marten/Walter and the Ageless Stranger, who is now called Legion and not Maerlyn. The Beast has been removed altogether, replaced by a king with a red hand–the crimson king, I presume. And now Roland basically says “yeah, right” when he comes to at the end of his mystical chat with Walter to find the dark man’s bones on the ground.

In other words, everything you thought you knew about the villain of the series is wrong. Listen, I appreciate King wanting to go in what he thought was a better direction, but when you have to change that much about the second most important character in the series, whose nature defines the quest of the first most important character in the series, maybe, to quote LCD Soundsystem, it’s late for revision?

Finally, my guess is that the series ends with the gunslinger stuck in some kind of moebius-strip time-loop. I can live with that, I guess. It’s slowly dawned on me that Roland’s world is what things would look like if Flagg really won at some point, and that’s too cool to let the good guys screw up by winning themselves.

Keith Uhlich calls our attention to several interesting pieces on horror films at Reverse Shot, part of their “A Few Great Pumpkins” horrorblogging series this year.

The funny thing about Reverse Shot is that they published maybe the most spectacularly wrong-headed horror movie review I’ve read all year, Andrew Tracy’s angrily dismissive take on 28 Weeks Later. (I gave that review the business here and reviewed the film myself here.) So you might be forgiven for ignoring a horror blogathon that kicks off by reiterating his sentiments and decrying 28 Weeks Later‘s “useless ‘verité.'” But lo, the intro quickly rights itself by lambasting the “tired excess” of Robert Rodriguez’s “waste-of-space” Planet Terror half of Grindhouse. (Agreed.) Best of all, it refers to Hostel: Part II as “loathsome, self-congratulatory” and “the granddaddy of all badness,” all of which it is.

The critical schizophrenia continues at the site’s review for Hostel: Part II itself, by Michael Koresky. This has to be one of the juiciest bits of horror criticsm I’ve read in some time, because it’s split about evenly between insights with which I agree so emphatically I’m tempted to have them tattooed on my person and real head-slapping howlers. Most of the latter arise from Koresky’s conflation and dismissal of the two Hostel films, which to me are as different as night and day–so different that each day I grow more convinced that the first one was a fluke. Once again he repeats the fatuous notion that Hostel merely presents torture for the gratification of the audience in the most businesslike and unartful way possible, and I’m just baffled that you could watch a movie with (just a few examples) that factory shot or the American businessman’s monologue or the heart-stopping cat-and-mouse game at the end or that meaning-laden conversation about staying in the closet and think that there’s nothing going on in that movie.

But for every head-scratcher, there’s a passage like this:

The need to align epochs of genres, especially horror, with sociopolitical realities has always made for neatly encapsulated criticism and terrific sound bites, but this sort of assessment works better in retrospect. Those who make up this contingent of new filmmakers are from such disparate backgrounds and sensibilities, nationally and otherwise, that to group them together as some kind of coalition comes across as desperate at best, disingenuous at worst. The truth is that the need to place instantaneous social readings on this new wave of horror willfully ignores the pathetic opportunism behind some of the films, as well as the savvy genre reclamation of others. Those influential Seventies horror films, from the dingy cult basement specials of Wes Craven to the multiplex delights of John Carpenter, were for the most part recouped decades later as trenchant post-Vietnam meditations on social disillusionment as a way of putting a neat bow atop a tumultuous past.

Heh, indeed! And the thing ends with an encomium to The Blair Witch Project, which of course is the way to my heart.

And oh, while we’re on the subject of Hostel, Jason Adams reports that the director’s cut of Hostel–and how annoying is it that the unrated cut I already own isn’t the director’s cut? If Roth cares about the fans as much as he says he does, he wouldn’t participate in this kind of transparent, almost clichéd DVD-rebuying huxterism, but oh well–makes a change to the original ending that’s supposedly a vast improvement. I wasn’t wild about that ending, though not for Jason’s reasons–I didn’t read it as homophobic catharsis, but simply as a not-particulary-believable move for the characters involved. Maybe that’s changed.

Back to Reverse Shot, in a move sure to make Jason happy, their aforementioned “Great Pumpkins” series contains a review of Paperhouse (by Robbie Freeling), a movie that I don’t think I’ve ever seen discussed outside of horror blogs.

Better still, Freeling also looks at Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the explicit goal of giving it the credit it’s due as an unqualified classic of the genre. I think he’s right. I don’t know any horror fan (or even casual, Halloween-time horror-movie watcher) who hasn’t seen that movie and loved it, and gotten the bejesus scared out of them at least twice (you can probably guess when if you’ve seen it), and yet even I rarely give it the time of day. I’m thinking the reason it’s not talked about in the same way and with the same frequency as, say, John Carpenter’s comparable ’50s-scifi-parable-as-body-horror-and-paranoia remake The Thing is because it wasn’t made by a genre stalwart like Carpenter, but by the guy who did The Right Stuff.

Follow those links and read is my advice.

Like an ugly duckling, Day of the Dead took some time to get the love it deserved (and even then it has remained a black sheep amongst its brethren) – a scenario not uncommon to works of art that tell people what they simultaneously need to know and want not to hear.The film was – and to a large extent, remains – a victim of its own implicit place in film history; like the occasionally artful summer blockbuster, Romero’s third “Dead” entry is routinely examined and dismissed less for its own qualities than its “failure” to conform to the expectations unfairly assigned to it sight unseen, here as a zombie movie sequel indebted to two highly lauded works come before. Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were both brilliant and easily among the greatest horror films ever made, but that Day of the Dead doesn’t follow the expected trilogy arc of capping off its saga with all-out climactic spectacle is hardly an inherent strike against it. Part of this degrading misconception lies in the fact that Romero’s original vision was cut short by budgetary restraints over issues with the increasingly more powerful MPAA rating system, the final result being far from the originally conceived “Raiders of the Lost Ark with zombies”, and gore hounds subsequently decrying the relative lack of visceral bloodshed (regardless of the fact that, during its brief moments of splatter, Day features some of the sickest zombie action ever filmed).

—Rob Humanick on Day of the Dead.

Is this really accurate? I know that supposedly the initial audiences were let down by the movie’s failure to be as large-scale in comparison to Dawn as Dawn was to Night, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about it on those terms in any present-day conversations. I’ve certainly never heard anyone “decry the relative lack of visceral bloodshed,” since it’s easily the goriest, most disgusting entry in the trilogy. The reason most people I know who don’t like it don’t like it is that they feel it’s boring and slow and sloppily paced and the characters are poorly written and acted.

I happen to like it more each time I see it, but in the defense of those who don’t, I hardly think this is because “they can’t handle the truth!” or what have you.

Why does Batman laugh so much in All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder?

There’s a number of possible, more-or-less mutually inexclusive answers.

First, maybe writer Frank Miller is completely fucking nuts, and simply has no control over what his fingers are doing anymore, which, naturally, is why he’s been entrusted with creative roles on expensive movie projects.

—Joe McCulloch.

You’d be surprised how many times this theory has been advanced to me by a straight face by people you’d think would know better. Or I dunno, maybe you wouldn’t.

What was my worst Halloween costume ever? Find out at this week’s Horror Roundtable–the answer may surprise you!

Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, but I thought you’d be entertained.

(Via B-D)

Read: The Gungslinger (revised)–“The Oracle and the Mountains”

In reading The Gunslinger again (for the first time), I’ve discovered part of what made The Drawing of the Three feel so lame by comparison. In Book One, the gunslinger (calling him Roland in this book’s context doesn’t feel right) reacts to any tenderness he feels toward Jake with shock bordering on horror. Eventually he allows himself to love the kid, but puts it aside the second the man in black makes it clear that he will face a choice between saving Jake and chasing the Tower. Finding and then killing Jake adds another log on the simmering fire of the gunslinger’s guilt, but it doesn’t change him in any fundamental way. As we’re constantly reminded, he’s got a lot of dead friends, many of whom ended up that way thanks to him.

But along comes Book Two, and by the end the guy’s a changed man, using the idioms of, genuinely caring about and taking risks on behalf of other people. Two of the most irritating people of all time, by the way–a junkie who never shuts up and a woman with a split personality, half of which is psychotic, who also never shuts up. We’re supposed to buy that these clowns peel away Roland’s layers to find the still-warm heart within, but not Jake? Bullroar.

I am traveling this weekend and may or may not have Internet access, so there may or may not be a gap in my Dark Tower blogging. Whenever I have net access again I’ll add in those entries, then pretend they were always there, revised-Gunslinger-style.

Read: The Gunslinger (revised)–“The Way Station”

Maybe I just needed to vent. Maybe I’m less tired and grumpy, I don’t know. I’m a lot less irritated with the revisions made in this chapter, that much I can tell you. I think many of the changes are still on the obnoxious side–more overt references to the events of Wizard and Glass‘ flashback, more “hey here are some references to NYC that Roland doesn’t understand, because Jake comes from New York in the modern day, get it?”, and for some reason more references to poop, which is something this chapter has in common with the previous one. What I’m guessing the most pivotal change will be is the insertion of a warning about “the taheen”–a man with the head of a bird; a reference Roland spotting one as he chased the man in black had been inserted into “The Gunslinger” as well–into the prophecy of the speaking-demon in the way station’s cellar. Considering how crucial the other two sentences the demon uttered (“Go slow past the Drawers, gunslinger” and “While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket”) have been, this’ll probably be big too. It also happens to describe the creature that appears in the delightfully, mysteriously incongruous man-vs.-monster logo for The Stand.

One revision cleared up a major plot point: Marten is Farson, the Good Man. I actually had to go back and check this against the original version to make sure this wasn’t another brand-new element. After all, this means that all four big bads–Farson, Marten, Walter, and Flagg–are the same being. But sure enough, the original has Roland musing on the love triangle formed between his dad, his mom, and Marten, “known in some quarters as the good man.” But as King mentioned in his foreword to the revised edition, the original passage that led up to this revelation used Farson as the name of the town the Good Man’s saboteur Hax was going to poison, not the name of the Good Man himself. Changing the sentence to read “Marten–known in some quarters as Farson, the good man” brings it all home to those of us with cloudy memories. And now I find myself a lot more open to the idea that Flagg, Marten, and Walter are all the same dude, since there’s no longer the mystery of what their real relationship to Farson is–I probably should have remembered that passage during my read through the subsequent three books, but yep, all four are one and the same. Throw in the Ageless Stranger and you’ve got five. But what about the crimson king, and the Beast that rules the Tower? They seem to be references to Flamartersonger’s boss. (Apologies to those Wes Anderson phone commercials.)

I’m still confused, but at least I’m a bit less infuriated.

So to me, the exciting thing is watching trajectories of all these media crossing, and watching them all go their merry ways is very, very interesting. I feel like we’ve only begun. I’m thinking about the way books are published now and the way they were 20 years ago when I first came in. The way that comics are held now, the regard with which comics are held. How much of cinema–commercial cinema–is dependent upon our comics. That astonishes me. There was a time when you couldn’t get a comic book on a screen for neither love nor money. Now, it seems like something that’s had a two-issue run is legitimate fodder for somebody somewhere. So I think we’ve got a lot of very interesting collisions coming, and I’m glad to be sitting at the crossroads as the various media race towards the same spot, each from a different direction.

—Clive Barker, in part four of his interview with N’Gai Croal at Newsweek‘s video game blog, Level Up.

This is what it’s like when worlds collide.

Go read what he has to say about The Sopranos and Melville, too.

If you can remember when the comics blogosphere consisted of about dozen people, this will come as a blow: David Allen “Johnny Bacardi” Jones has decided to close down his long-running (five years!) blog. Johnny had a well-defined, intelligent viewpoint about comics and he intelligently articulated it for a long, long time. I’ll miss him, especially now that I’m getting back involved in comicsblogging. Fortunately he’ll still be keeping up Elton John blog, where he’s writing about every song in John’s 1966-1979 catalog one post at a time, which is the kind of fabulous idea only good bloggers would come up with in the first place.

Johnny’s departure, hinging as it does on his impression that blogospheric tastemakers had him on the pay-no-mind list, also brings up the kind of “why blog? and for whom?” issues that are worth airing from time to time. I can tell you that getting away from comicsblogging and shifting gears to horror was probably a great thing for me to do. The horror blogosphere isn’t nearly as concerned with industry punditry or advocacy as the comics blogosphere is; for one thing, in horror media like film, television, and prose, the lines of demarcation between fan, critic, and creator are a lot firmer than they are in the still comparatively romper-room industry of comics, so you’re operating at a remove from the business end of things and therefore feel like you have less clout, so who cares? It’s just people talking. There also tends to be less snark involved–I don’t know what it is about funnybooks that makes people come out swinging, but I noticed that my own dick-o-meter started edging up the second I started blogging about comics again a few weeks ago and it takes some doing to force it back down. All this makes horrorblogging an enterprise that feels much less dependent on the approval or opprobrium of others for its survival, which is a feeling that carries back over into other kinds of blogging you do, which is why I’d keep this thing up regardless of how much feedback I got or didn’t get.

Anyway. Go tell Johnny goodbye. Goodbye Johnny!