Halloween Bash...With Reed Rothchild...Sitcoms are worse than Ke$ha.

Sitcoms are worse than Ke$ha.

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...this show just sucks hard.  It's about two friends who live in Holliston, Ma and host a horror review cable access show.  The only horror aspects of the show are their reviews of fake films and the occasional appearance by a B horror movie star that shows up in a random Family Guy style flashback or dream sequence.  The show is more or less a shitty sitcom complete with a laugh track and the main character (Adam) pining over his high school girlfriend.  I don't think I laughed once and all of the gore dream sequences sucked hard.  The special effects were awful, but not so awful they were good.  Dee Snider as their boss at the station was a nice touch and Oderus from Gwar's appearance was pretty cool, but otherwise this was the longest 40 minutes of television I've sat through in a long time.

Funny or Scary:  Neither, but boy does it try to be!
Funniest Scene: When Oderus Urungus shows up, not because the scene was particularly good, but because it reminded me of jamming out to Gwar cd's in like 8th grade that me and my friend John got for free from Columbia House.
Overall Corpse Rating: 3 bored as shit corpses.

Fucking Clowns

Halloween Bash...TreeHouse of Horror XXIII

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Halloween Bash...John Everson and The Seduction of Horror Film… Unchained.

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The Seduction of Horror Film… Unchained.

By John Everson

I am a Eurotrash film fanatic.

There. I've said it. I've confessed. Give me '70s horror/exploitation films from Italy and France… or give me death. You can quote me on that. 

You want to talk Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, Harry Kumel, José Ramón Larraz? I'm your guy. Come into my basement, won't you?

Be careful. This could be you someday. 

Maybe it starts innocently with the Universal Frankenstein or Dracula. Maybe it grows up with you, and progresses through the Hammer Films versions of the same names. Maybe it is still with you as an adult, and wades through 30 years of Hollywood generic trash only to finally realize that the best films are often those made on a low budget with only half-believable effects - but they work and engage the viewer because they were made from the heart. By people who truly believed in their art and vision.

What is that "it" I'm talking about? 

I don't know, exactly. But "it" started out for me as the side of my brain that loved the strange, the unconventional, the gothic. It is a love of the thrill of spookiness. Of the romance of dark castles and the promise of everlasting life… or not-life (sometimes called, the undead). "It" is the thrill of encountering the unknown.

As a horror author, everyone asks me why? Why do you like horror? Why do you want to see skulls and monsters and things that are creepy and dangerous?

I don't know, really. It's not like I want to die. It's not like I'm fascinated with pain or blood; heck, I've gotten faint a couple times when I got a bad cut and saw it running down my leg. 

Still, I am always drawn to the thrill provided by the macabre. I blame the stories I read as a kid by Roald Dahl. And Richard Matheson. I blame "Twilight Zone," and "The Outer Limits," "One Step Beyond" and especially "Creature Features."

When I was a kid, we had "Creature Features" in Chicago, a TV show on the weekends that showed all the old black and white monster movies. I loved them. The fuzzy grey backdrops of all those castles and crypts? They were exotic and beautiful to me. Strange beauty. The worlds of monster movies to me were a portal to places far outside of my dull life -- places where the unusual could happen. Where magic was possible. I think I grew up to love horror (supernatural and monster horror, not serial killer stuff, which is kind of mundane and “real”) because it really hinges on the idea that there is something more beyond this. It says that the gutters in the street may lead to a secret necropolis where strange creatures live. It says that the crypts beneath the old church may hold some bizarre spark of life from another eon yet. The idea that there is more to this world than the pedestrian is like a drug to me.

I love horror – especially non-pedestrian horror -- because it promises that life may be more than going to work in an office Monday-Friday and cutting the grass on Saturday. That an entire other world may exist of spells and magic and creatures.  Who wouldn't like to have a witch living in an old tilted house at the end of their subdivision? Sure, it would bring a tinge of danger to your everyday life… but it would bring magic too. And what good is magic without a little danger in it, to spark things up a little?

That's the appeal of horror and Halloween… the patron day of horror. 

I watch horror movies all year long, but October is naturally, my favorite season. Haunted houses and creepy decor abound and spook stories are everywhere. Halloween is like most people’s Christmas to me.

I watched the Universal and Hammer horror films growing up, and then spent quite a few years watching the horror films of Hollywood in the '90s. After awhile… I grew immune to them. They were predictable, every one feeling the same. Those sharp, shock surprises, were no surprise. In the modern age, we've really lost the ability to create "lurid" masterpieces that really build on mood.

And so I started looking elsewhere for my horror fix. (This is all a really long way of getting back to my thesis by the way. Don't worry… we're getting closer).

The horror films of the '60s were mired in a fear of the effects of science (radioactively mutated bugs, women, gila monsters, blobs from outer space…) but they managed to maintain a sense of wonder that was entrancing. I loved watching those films as a kid. As an adult though, ultimately, I craved something more.

Horror through the '70s maintained some of that sense of wonder, but it diverged down two paths that were definitely NOT for kids. One was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre style brutal stalker horror film. The other I find more interesting, since it tends to maintain a connection with the supernatural. With the changing acceptance of nudity in film, the "naiveté" of radioactive monster horror movies dissolved and an era of "exploitation" cinema began.  There were vampires and ghouls and witchcraft and there was also… sexuality.  Sexploitation, nunsploitation, and a torrent of Satanic and vampiric movies (filled with wanton flesh and Bacchanalian rituals that could never have been previously filmed) began cropping up. Girls have been showing their boobs in horror movies for decades now, but those first few years when filmmakers around the world realized they could truly create a Satanic orgy on screen, or really sexy vampires and actually release flesh in their films… everything changed. There is an enthusiastic exhibitionist energy about those 1970’s horror/exploitation movies that you just don't find in the films made today. No matter how "out there" modern filmmakers are, they still ultimately tend to show more restraint than some of the horror films of the mid-'70s.  Obviously none of this impacted me at the time that it was being made – I was like, 10!   I was there… but I wasn’t.

I grew up in the '70s, and never saw these films until I was in my 30s and 40s, after being jaded on the films of the '80s and '90s. And while the production values are often poor, and the acting frequently questionable, the directors and writers back then were not held in by boundaries. They experimented with light and music and sexuality in a way filmmakers today almost never do. The '70s were a period in filmmaking that is really fascinating to watch for its explosion of excess, and the filmmakers of Europe were even more unfettered than their American compatriots.

Almost ten years ago, I was doing occasional DVD reviews for the newspaper I worked for, and I received a 3-DVD box set called The Vampire Box. Image had put it together in combination with England's Salvation/Redemption Films. It was comprised of the sensual vampire movies of Jean Rollin, a French filmmaker who gained renown in the '70s and '80s. Rollin's camera is a sensually poetic one; he loved capturing the female form, and had an obsession in all of his films with the bond between two women. Shot against backdrops of real French castles and cemeteries, all of his films feel like strange fever dreams to the modern viewer. Sometimes clumsy, always strange… they were my introduction to European horror and exploitation films. And since then, I've discovered a wealth of other strange productions along the way. Ramaz' Vampyres is one of the sexiest, evocative vampire movies ever filmed, and it's paired on some releases with Daughters of Darkness, an almost "cold" erotic horror movie that updates the Countess Bathory story.

Then there are the late '70s Dario Argento horror films, which focus on color and blood and gloved killers. I'm not usually a fan of the serial killer genre, but Argento's films drew me in, especially when he deals more with the supernatural, as in Suspiria, or the psychic bug-driven plot of Phenomenon.

How about Lucio Fulci, who's known for his Zombie 2 color reprisal of Night of the Living Dead, but made a film called The Beyond that literally uncaps the doorway to hell?

You have to see these movies if you are really a horror fan. They are all flawed. And yet, they are in so many ways so much more interesting than the latest paint-by-number effects-laden mousetraps that Hollywood produces.

So in some ways… I guess as I’m aging, I'm doomed to rediscovering the past. My own past. And the past has certainly influenced my writing along the way. I wrote The 13th after about a six-month stretch of constantly watching Euro-horror films. And I tried to approach my new novel, NightWhere with the kind of manic abandon that some of my favorite crazy old films displayed.

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My biggest fear now? There were only so many movies shot in the '70s, no matter how obscure. And with every over-the-top "I can't believe they did that" movie that I discover from the dust bins of Eurotrash… I worry that that is the last one of its kind that I haven’t already seen.

Luckily, so far, I keep stumbling on one more. And one more. The good thing is, I have a horrible memory, so by the time I've mined it out and watched all the Eurosleaze treasure there is to find… I guess I'll be able to just start over!

My assignment for you? This Halloween, if you've not seen a Rollin or Fulci or Franco… seek some of the following list out. Kick back with a beer or a bourbon in a dark room, put your mind on hold, and prepare yourself for a trip through the surreal, sometimes seedy celluloid past when all the bonds came off. And please, watch them subtitled where appropriate. Hear the soundtrack and actors’ voices as they were meant to be heard, not embarrassing dubs.

So here is my list for you to get you started -- 10 films from 5 directors, none of which are too hard to find, but provide a good entree into the world of Eurotrash horror. You can even find some of them on Blu-Ray now:

1. Jean Rollin - Living Dead Girl or Fascination

2. Lucio Fulci - The Beyond or House by the Cemetery

3. Jess Franco -- Female Vampire or A Virgin Among the Living Dead

4. José Ramón Larraz -- Vampyres or Black Candles

5. Paul Morrissey -- Flesh for Frankenstein or Blood for Dracula

Dark, twisted dreams.

John

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 John Everson is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the horror novel COVENANT, as well as its sequel SACRIFICE and the novels THE 13TH, SIREN, THE PUMPKIN MAN and NIGHTWHERE. He has also written several horror/dark fantasy short story collections, as well as a heartwarming collection of CHRISTMAS TALES for the whole family, and a short book for 5-8-year-olds called PETEYBOO AND THE WORM.

John shares a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a cockatoo and cockatiel, a disparate collection of fake skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, Alan Clark illustrations and a large stuffed Eeyore. There's also a mounted Chinese fowling spider named Stoker, an ever-growing shelf of custom mix CDs and an acoustic guitar that he can't really play but that his son likes to hear him beat on anyway. Sometimes his wife is surprised to find him shuffling through more public areas of the house, but it's usually only to brew another cup of coffee. In order to avoid the onerous task of writing, he occasionally records pop-rock songs in a hidden home studio, experiments with the insatiable culinary joys of the jalapeno, designs book covers for a variety of small presses, loses hours in expanding an array of gardens and chases frequent excursions into the bizarre visual headspace of '70s euro-horror DVDs with a shot of Makers Mark and a tall glass of Newcastle.

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Click here for my post on John's Site

Halloween Bash...Troy McCombs shares make up tips

Please Welcome Troy McCombs

Halloween: the time of the year when the leaves change color, die, fall to the ground, and give off that distinct smell that foretells the coming of a new season. Halloween: the time of year when we trick people and treat ourselves to buckets of sugary, teeth-rotting candy. Halloween: the only time of the year when we can dress up, become someone else, and try to scare the crap out of each other for a good laugh.

I’ve always been fond of this holiday. At an early age, I decorated my porch with leaf-filled dummies, threw masks over the neck cavities, and angered my mom when I doused everything in too much blood. I never used that cheap vampire blood in the squeeze bottles, either. I used Stage Blood--it tastes like sugar and looks very real. I purchased this out of special-effects catalogues before there were many Halloween stores. None of it ever went to waste. I used it excessively in short films and simple video clips to see how many people I could gross out. When I was 15 or 16, and learned how to make it, I once filled a garbage can with water and added LOTS of food coloring. My friends and I would fill syringes with this stuff and squirt the gore everywhere.

Fun times.

HOW TO MAKE STAGE BLOOD: Needs:

1. Clear Karo Corn Syrup

2. Large bottle of red food coloring

3. Small bottle of blue food coloring

1. Pour the Karo into a bowl.

2. Add as much red as you can. Depending on how much corn syrup you use depends on the food coloring. I always used to get just the quart-size bottle of Karo, a tiny drip bottle of red and a larger pour-bottle of red (the one that comes packaged alone).

3. After saturating the Karo with red, mix well with a spoon. Then add blue--you’ll only need a few drops of this. Without blue, the blood will look too red and unrealistic.

4. Add blue and mix until it looks right. You may have to dip your fingers in it and rub it to check color. If it’s pink or blue or purple, add more red.

Remember: lots of red, little blue.

Lastly, you can add some water to thin it down, and, if you like, put some mouthwash in it to give it taste.

HOW TO MAKE A REALISTIC CUT USING SKIN WAX (nose putty)

1. Buy skin wax putty--not the stuff with the cotton in it.

2. Roll into worm, and apply to where you want it.

3. Smooth in using Vaseline as a lubricant to keep it from sticking and gumming up.

Note: smoothing is the longest process.

4. Next, get something dull (a butter knife or such) and use the dull end to make a gash.

5. Gently apply proper skin color to match your tone.

6. Then, just add blood!

Have fun this Halloween season! Just make sure you don’t scare anyone who’s too old! Pick out a good costume, mask, and become somebody else!

Trick or Treat!

Ever since Troy’s third grade teacher made him write a short story for class credit, He was hooked to the art of writing. Creating and designing worlds that don't exist, and populating those worlds with interesting and unusual characters, is what he does best.

If you read work by Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft (his favorite author), then you've definitely come to the right place! He also has some coming-of-age stories as well (The Graveyard; The Black Place Inside; The Music of 1997).

Halloween Bash...Uninvited Book Sale

Now through the end of Halloween All books from Uninvited Books are 99Cents

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M.R. Interviews....Sumiko Saulson

Please Welcome Sumiko Saulson 

Your novel solitude has many apocalyptic elements. What sets your book apart from the apocalypse books that are growing in popularity?

 Apocalyptic fiction is growing in popularity? I had no idea, to be very frank... the closest thing to any recent popular apocalyptic fiction I can think of is "The Hunger Games" and that is post-apocalyptic. It is hard to answer your question without giving away too much and having to issue spoiler alerts for my own novel. I can say this: although as you mention, the story has apocalyptic elements, it is not necessarily apocalyptic. An apocalypse occurs on a global scale, for one thing, and the reader soon finds out that the elements of "Solitude" are very local, isolated to one city, San Francisco, where all of the action takes place. Although the story neatly rides the borderline between horror and science-fiction, incorporating elements of both genres, another, unspoken genres present and perhaps most convincingly celebrates it from apocalyptic horror: and that is mystery. The reader and the characters alike will spend the first third or half of the novel not really knowing what is going on.

 

 In Solitude where did the characters of Angela, Jordan and Margo come from?

 

 Angela comes from San Francisco, and Margo comes from Los Angeles... remember? Okay... right. I'm being facetious. I realize you are asking me what inspired them, and I learned my character development skills in film school, so I always sort of dislike those kinds of questions because the trick of character mixing is that people should in no way, shape or form be able to identify any resemblance to any actual person. Ever. While I do have quite the imagination, I like anyone else am inspired by actual events and real people who I know and have contact with on a day to day basis. All of my characters are very blended, though... none of them is inspired by one single individual, to my mind that would kind of be cheating. One of my friends who read the book and knows me very well did mention the fact that he notices that there is a bit of me in every single one of my characters: possibly including the chihuahua,I didn't really ask. I put a little me in them to help prevent them from to closely resembling someone I know: even accidentally. It also helped me to develop their thinking processes. So I can honestly tell you where they came from: they came from me.

 

 Is there a particular character you feel the most attachment to? How so?

 

The chihuaha, Crazy. I feel particularly attached to her because she is the first character in any of my books that another human being start to talk to me about as if that character *really* existed. It is the most amazing feeling in the world as a writer to find out that a character stuck with someone so much that they are talking about her as if she was a real dog somewhere. I even started a fan page for her, and did a month worth of promoting chihuaha adoptions in her honor. It was only when my friend Beth's chihuaha "Jackie Dog-butt" died that I realized she was one of the characters mixed in the dog - that the dog had a character mixing process like my other characters. My neighbors have a neurotic one-eyed poodle named Repulsa, which means Repulsive. She went into Crazy, too, definitely inspired the name - which at one point was going to be "Loco". And of course there was some of me in there, as eventually there was a scene where we get into the dog's head, which is a defining moment for a character. Both of her canine real-life models were geriatric dogs, even though Crazy was a young adult. Beth named her new puppy "Josefina Dog-butt" aka "Crazy" so she's named after the story dog and one of the dogs the story dog was named after. Ironically, Josette was Crazy's original human name's, and Josefina was the name of the person who gave the puppy to Beth. A year AFTER Crazy was written. So spooky. Okay... enough for ironic canine coincidences and giving myself the chills.

 

Solitude deals with both the internal and external struggles of your characters. How did you balance these two elements?

 

 Because the characters spend so much time alone in the story, I had a lot of time to develop their internal lives and make them real to the reader. This was an intentional choice, because when I began writing prose many, many years ago, I was told that I had a gift for writing characters. My characters were stdrong when I was an eighteen year old in a writing workshop, but it would take another twenty or more years before I would be able to master the other elements of storytelling. Therefore the character-driven nature of the plot allowed me to get over that hurdle and complete the novel. Then, later, in editing, I was asked to increase the amount of external conflict. Scenes like the one where Gerald was being chased by the pack of wild dogs were added in the first round of editing. It is going through yet another round of editing, to draw out the final action at the end of the book.

 

How does your background in poetry impact your writing as a novelist?

 

I have the tendency to be very sense-oriented in my descriptives. My writing often uses rhythmic structures: something for which I am very greatful now that I am starting to do public book readings to increase the local paperback sales. It is a sort of subconscious tendency, very deeply ingrained. I am happy with the characters and the lyricism and I am working on increasing my tendency to use action and show, show, show the reader what is happening. Speaking of lyrics, I write lyrics for my alt-rock band "Stagefright", and I guess that the whole time I was writing the book there was a rock soundtrack running in the back of my mind.

 

What is your favorite fictional character? How has this character impacted you over the years?

I am not the sort of woman who has one favorite fictional character: I am the kind of avid reader who has an entire universe populated with a diversity of characters. When I was in 3rd grade, it was Pippi Longstocking. When I was in 4th Grade, it was Charlotte from Charlotte's Web. But by 5th grade it was Loki in the Norse mythologies I was reading at the library - or perhaps it was Psyche in the Greek, I really can't say. I read Toni Morrisson's "Song of Solomon" and fell in love with Pilate. I read... and I read... and I read. And perhaps my favorite character became in each of these stories the omniscent narrative voice... the character who can peek in and out of these character's minds, that puppetmaster you are not supposed to see, but I always did manage to envision. I saw her in the work of another and I became her in Solitude. That makes me ever the more convinced she - he - or it must be my favorite fictional character of all.

 

What was the first truly frightening novel you remember reading? Was your reaction to bury it in the closet, or to run out and find other stories like it?

 

 I *could* say it was "Ghost Story" by Peter Straub, since I read it - aloud - to my little brother one summer when I was in the sixth grade, and I read it just the way one tells spooky campfire stories. But it did not truly terrify me. The first novel to give me nightmares was Frank Herbert's "Dune Messiah". I read "Dune" first and it was scary... but "Dune Messiah" struck every chord of subconcious fear over the nature of men and religious zealots, of governments, of predestination in my pubscent mind. Yes, I was in the seventh grade when I read "Dune" and "Dune Messiah" but it might not have been age appropriate. I put it down and started reading "Chronicles of Narnia" instead. You see, being intellectually advanced does not make one emotionally mature enough to process such things. The nightmares were about nuclear war. I would resume reading the Dune series five years later.

 

 What current genre authors are you following?

 

 It depends on what you mean by "Current". How current? The most current writer I began to follow was L.A. Banks, and on a deeper level it was reading her novels that made me feel that I could write one: you see, as an African American woman I was, as so many of us are, given the faint impression that if I wanted to write I would have to have a voice like Toni Morrisson or Alice Walker. The idea that  is acceptable to be a genre writer: not all women of color must be literary writers in America, it is a new one. People like L.A. Banks opened that door for me. But growing up I read Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Frank Herbert - a lot of short stories in Asimov Fiction and Fangoria - so I have been a long-time genre fan.

 

What current trends in the horror genre do you find encouraging?

 

As I mentioned before, it is really great that it is becoming increasingly acceptable within the black community for write genre fiction, including science fiction and horror. That's a really big deal. I also think that self-publishing is making it so more and more new authors are out there. So are e-Readers like Nook and Kindle.

 

What current trends do you find disparaging?

 

When I was in English class and I was hosting a reading lecture on the classic tale "The Monkey's Paw", I noticed that the majority of the students were making references to horror movies - not novels or even short stories. I am a bit concerned that people are reading horror less and watching it instead.

 

 Do you have anything else coming down the pipeline you would like to share?

 

I have a book of short stories called "Things That Go Bump In Your Head" coming out on Halloween - right around the corner! A.L. Peck, the author of "Abstract Murder" is writing the introduction for it and it is in final editing as we speak. It contains horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction shorts and was inspired by my life-long love of the Dell Magazine short fiction stories and the kind that they always profiled in the comics like Tales from the Crypt.

Sumiko Saulson is a horror novelist, published poet and writer of short stories and editorials. Her novels include "Solitude," "Warmth", and "The Moon Cried Blood". A native Californian, she was born and spent her early childhood in Los Angeles, moving to Hawaii, where she spent her teen years, at the age of 12. She has spent most of her adult life living in the San Francisco Bay Area. An early interest in writing and advanced reading skills eventually lead to her becoming a staff writer for her high school paper, the Daily Bugle (McKinley High, Honolulu, HI) one of the nation's only four such daily High School papers at the time. By the time she moved to San Francisco at age 19, she had two self-published books of poetry and was a frequently published poet in local community newspapers and reading poetry around town. She was even profiled in a San Francisco Chronicle article about up-and-coming poets in the beatnik tradition. Over the years she's written numerous articles for local and community papers, non-profit and corporate newsletters, poetry and lyrics and novels.