Courtesy of Antipax’s Hellraiser Gallery comes this super-informative interview with producer John Harrison at iF Magazine. A collaborator of both Clive Barker’s and George Romero’s, Harrison reveals among many other juicy tidbits that the forthcoming Diary of the Dead is most definitely a return to the initial zombie outbreak portrayed in Night of the Living Dead rather than a sequel moving us further forward into the post-apocalyptic world of the subsequent Dead films; that Barker’s multimillion dollar Abarat project at Disney might well have seen its film incarnation die with Disney’s feature animation department upon the absorption of Pixar; and that the framing stories from Barker’s Books of Blood series are being combined into a film entitled, appropriately enough, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. Jeez, go and read it already!

Some know-it-alls will indulge in Darwin Awards-style idiocy. They fail to undestand that Steve Irwin was a man who lived and died in an effort to impress upon people that all animals–even the scary, ugly, deadly ones–deserve our compassion, respect, and protection. Good on ya, Steve. I’ll miss you.

Over at the day job, I had a hand in editing our big pre-Season Three Lost feature, sort of one-stop shopping for catch-up info, speculation, and established facts about this October’s big comeback (for which there’s already a promo or two buzzing around). Not a bad read for a lazy Labor Day afternoon.

My contribution to the Horror Blog’s Horror Roundtable this week: the story of how The Missus and I lucked into seeing the premiere of one of the best shows on television.

Speaking of both the Horror Blog and television, courtesy of the HB’s quote of the day I’ve learned that the new video for avant-rock combo TV on the Radio will involve a pair of awesome things: werewolves and America’s Next Top Model. (This is still pretty cool even if they’re using ANTM winner Naima, who always looks like she just smelled a fart.)

Finally, the remake of the The Wicker Man came out this week, for better or for worse, and my Wizard co-worker Jeremy James interviewed director Neil LaBute about it. Me? I saw The Illusionist last night–now that’s a good time at the movies! Recommended.

I didn’t know that even one great white shark had been successfully held in captivity, but the Monterey Bay Aquarium recently unveiled its second white shark. My sea-monster-loving hormones just went into overdrive.

Meanwhile, in far bleaker real-world news, the mother of Johnny Gosch, a little boy who was disappeared while on his paper route 24 years ago, says she’s received a picture of the boy bound and gagged. But potentially even more disturbing are the reasons for skepticism about this development professed by astute and tireless crimeblogger Steve Huff.

Courtesy of Fantagraphics’ house blog Flog! comes word that Charles Burns, author of the horror graphic novel Black Hole, and Chuck Palahniuk, author of the horror prose novels Lullaby, Diary, and Haunted (as well as Fight Club, duh) will be holding a joint appearance at Seattle’s Bumbershoot arts festival. Holy smokes.

I think Morrison is treating Luthor as a manic-depressive who’s stuck on manic. Endless talking, constant moving, restlessness, euphoria, racing from one idea to another, grandiose thinking, irritability, belief in his own infallibility, aggression, provocative behavior–they’re all symptoms of the ‘high’ periods of bipolar people I’ve known, and Lex displays them all.

That’s yours truly on Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman #5, “The Gospel According to Lex Luthor.” For more where that came from, check out this week’s installment of Thursday Morning Quarterback, WizardUniverse.com’s weekly comics review roundtable discussion, in which I am a regular participant. Hope you enjoy them!

Offered without comment:

“There’s nothing more terrifying than Dick Cheney…I think he’s a sick monster who’s power hungry. I think that George Bush is terrifying. These people that are so out of touch with society, they kill people for real, and they try and go after guys like me. That’s the irony that it’s the filmmakers and the horror filmmakers that they try and shut up. No one ever died from a horror movie but people die all the time because of them and war.”

–Eli Roth, from “Eli Roth’s Hostel: Empty exploitation or sign of the times?”, by Stephen Applebaum, netribution.co.uk, August 5, 2006

Food for thought.

Posting that link to my Lord of the Rings Limited Edition DVD review yesterday reminded me that I frequently have work up on Wizard’s website.

Several of the trade paperback and graphic novel reviews I’ve written for the print magazine have made their way online:

Spider-Man Visionaries: Kurt Busiek Vol. 1

Absolute Dark Knight

More day-job stuff to come…

Over at my day job, I’ve reviewed the new Lord of the Rings Limited Edition double-disc sets (not to be confused with the Theatrical Widescreen, Theatrical Full Screen, or Extended Edition versions you may already own, having purchased them individually or in two- or three-packs). Check it out here.

In Horror Blog Steven’s latest Horror Roundtable, I sing the praises of David Jacobson’s excellent film Dahmer.

Does YouTube have a first-person horror mockumentary phenomenon on its hands? This post on the celebfotainment LiveJournal community Oh No They Didn’t indicates that it does, in the form of a series of video blogs by a homeschooled 16-year-old girl named Bree whose parents are slowly being revealed to be followers of…well, I’ll let you discover for yourself. As I’ve mentioned before (and hopefully demonstrated), it’s fascinating to watch the various media available on the Internet be put to use for horror storytelling.

Speaking of first-person horror mockumentaries, they’ve been much in the news lately. George Romero has revealed that the next film in his Dead series, Diary of the Dead, will be made in that style. Meanwhile, several pundits, notably Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly, have brought up you-are-there fright flick and proto-viral marketing phenomenon The Blair Witch Project in their attempts to explain the relative failure of Internet-beloved Snakes on a Plane at the box office. (SoaP was great, incidentally, box office or no.) Could Sam Jackson’s Folly (along with such “yeah, I said it” critical praise as the oft-linked Seven Best Horror Movies of the Past 7 Years at Cinematical) be the unlikely catalyst for putting Blair Witch back in the horror pantheon where it belongs?

Finally, this past weekend my coworkers and I got liquored up and watched Red Dawn, Invasion U.S.A., and Rambo: First Blood Part II in the latest of our periodic Manly Movie Mamajamas. I rememeber hearing when I was a kid that action movies were destroying the moral fabric of our nation with their mindless, gratuitous violence, and wondering what they were talking about because the only action movies I was really watching at the time involved George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. Now I know exactly what they mean. Awesome.

I’m really happy to say that there’s an interview with me about my “autobiographical horror” blog The Outbreak over at Dark But Shining. Sam Costello, one of my favorite horror bloggers since way back when he was the only one I knew of, conducted the interview, and it was really rewarding to participate in. Added bonus: It’s DBS’s 666th post.

I hope you enjoy it–go check it out!

There’s a new horror roundtable up at Steven’s Horror Blog. The topic is “favorite horror weapon,” and my answer probably won’t come as much of a surprise.

Meanwhile, Stacie Ponder at Final Girl has come up with the best idea for a series of posts EVER.

Kinda sorta.

Blogger Matt Maxwell recently wrote to inform me that in Max Brooks’s most recent zombie-survival mockumentary book, World War Z, there’s a mercenary character named “T. Sean Collins.” I certainly don’t mind interpreting this as a tip of the hat to my little autobiographical zombie fiction blog The Outbreak, and nor should you!

Meanwhile, Steven of the Horror Blog has posted his latest Horror Roundtable, this time asking what factors can get the roundtable’s participants to watch a horror movie they know is going to be bad. My answer won’t surprise long-time readers of this blog, that’s for sure…

Is this the return to Oz?

The grass is dead, the gold is brown, and the sky has claws

–Scissor Sisters, “Return to Oz”

I’ve been, as they say, otherwise engaged lately. Mostly I’ve been very busy with the day job, my duties at which have expanded of late in ways vaguely reminiscent of the kind of writing I’ve done around here. So that’s one thing I’ve been doing: Talking about comics again (mostly supercomics), here and sometimes here and infrequently here. I’ve been freelancing a lot too, and doing some free-time comics-related work as well.

But I’ve still been lurking amid the shadows, mind you: I’m a regular participant in the illustrious Steven’s Horror Roundtables over at the Horror Blog. If you haven’t been reading these, you’re missing out on a juicy cross-section of horror blogospherian opinion, notable as much for their variety as anything else. Go sink your teeth into ’em.

So what have I missed around here?

Well, there’s the sadly and horrifyingly familiar story of Robert Charles Browne, who is either an exceptionally vicious fabulist or a potential claimant to the title of America’s most prolific serial killer, though I would imagine Gary Ridgway will retain that dubious distinction for some time to come, and of course we will never know for sure.

In much less morbid territory, there are the two newly discovered Australian plesiosaur species, which for some reason have been compared to my beloved Loch Ness Monster in pretty much every news report I’ve seen about them. If paleontologists discovered a new species of Tyrannosaur, would they compare it to Godzilla? But still–water monsters!

Speaking of which, I’ve had the pleasure of watching a pair of totally awesome Discovery Channel documentaries on real, non-extinct sea monsters: Killer Squid, examining the pack-hunting Humboldts that plague the California coast (about which more here), and Killer Jellyfish (aka The Sting), chronicling the quest of a lone marine biologist to combat the fingernail-sized jellies whose lethal sting threatens the beaches of Australia (about which more here). Good God.

Then there’s the land of make-believe, where the news that most struck me coming out of the big San Diego Comic-Con is that Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s b-movie anthology Grind House will be a full-fledged double feature, rather than two short films; and that two animated Kill Bill prequel/sequels are planned. This bums me out a little–I was looking forward to watching the daughter of Vernita Green seek vengeance against Beatrix Kiddo in about 15 years–but I’ll take what I can get.

Finally, I read 1984 (for the umpteenth time) and The Handmaid’s Tale (for the first) back-to-back, so I’m all aflutter with dystopia. The main question in my head (a SPOILERY question, I suppose, though I’m not gonna say for which novel) is whether dystopian fiction in which the dystopia is revealed eventually to have fallen is more or less depressing. From a storytelling standpoint, does an omnipotent totalitarianism ennoble any struggle against it, however vain, through its very unassailability; does a totalitarianism destined for failure render the hopes and fears and torments of those who rebel against it fatuous, since the thing against which they struggled was finite, and therefore in some way pointless? I’d love to hear what you think.

Read this review, then imagine its diametric opposite!

And you’ll sometimes be able to read me do so here, and also here. Thought you might like to know!

It turns out that the remake of Hitchcock’s masterpiece The Birds isn’t going to be a real remake, but instead will re-adapt Daphne DuMaurier’s original short story. Okay then.

Hey, look: Steven from Corpse Eaters and The House of Irony has a new horror blog! It’s called The Horror Blog!

Of all the 6/6/06 stories I’ve read today, the only one that actually feels evil is the news that today, of all days, Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez’s lawyers appealed for a new trial.

The third half-hour-long one-track EP from Underworld’s download-only RiverRun Project is now available at UnderworldLive.com. It has the delightful title of “I’m a Big Sister, and I’m a Girl, and I’m a Princess, and This Is My Horse.” Underworld is the best band on the planet. The end.

Roxy Music is recording a new album. They’re recording it with the original line-up. Including Paul Thompson. AND BRIAN ENO. The end, again.