#HALLOWEEN: THE MYERS HOUSE

"You're not supposed to go up there. Lonnie Elam said that's a haunted house. He said awful stuff happened there once."

#HALLOWEEN: JACK-HO-MAGE

I tried.

#HALLOWEEN: HADDONFIELD HORROR

Source

COLD IN JULY

Remember the good old days when John Carpenter used to do this own music? And remember way back when, during the late '70s/early '80s, when all he used was a shitty Casio...and they sounded amazing?

We can kind of pretend those days are back, with the soundtrack to filmmaker Jim Mickle's latest romp in the darkness, Cold in July. Jeff Grace's soundtrack for the film is available now - you tell me if this doesn't sound like something that belongs in the third act of The Fog.

Click on Dexter to hear it.

THE JOURNAL OF FATHER PATRICK MALONE

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Happy Birthday, Antonio Bay.

 See previous celebrations:

1340 KAB: This is Steve Wayne, Your Night Light

Antonio Bay: A Soundscape

One More Story: The Risa Jane

ONE MORE STORY...

 

"In five minutes, it will be the 21st of April. One hundred years ago on the 21st of April, out in the waters around Spivey Point, a small clipper ship drew toward land. Suddenly, out of the night, the fog rolled in. For a moment, they could see nothing, not a foot in front of them. Then, they saw a light. By God, it was a fire burning on the shore, strong enough to penetrate the swirling mist. They steered a course toward the light. But it was a campfire, like this one. The ship crashed against the rocks, the hull sheared in two, mars snapped like a twig. The wreckage sank, with all the men aboard. At the bottom of the sea, lay the Elizabeth Dane, with her crew, their lungs filled with salt water, their eyes open, staring to the darkness. And above, as suddenly as it come, the fog lifted, receded back across the ocean and never came again. But it is told by the fishermen, and their fathers and grandfathers, that when the fog returns to Antonio Bay, the men at the bottom of the sea, out in the water by Spivey Point will rise up and search for the campfire that led them to their dark, icy death."

UNSUNG HORRORS: THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

Every once in a while, a genuinely great horror movie—one that would rightfully be considered a classic, had it gotten more exposure and love at the box office—makes an appearance. It comes, no one notices, and it goes. But movies like this are important. They need to be treasured and remembered. If intelligent, original horror is supported, then that's what we'll begin to receive, in droves. We need to make these movies a part of the legendary genre we hold so dear. Because these are the unsung horrors. These are the movies that should have been successful, but were instead ignored. They should be rightfully praised for the freshness and intelligence and craft that they have contributed to our genre. 

So, better late than never, we’re going to celebrate them now… one at a time. 

Dir. Adam Simon
2000
IFC
United States

“I think there is something about the American Dream…the sort of Disney-esque dream, if you will, of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white-picket fence, Mom and Dad and their happy children, god-fearing and doing good whenever they can…that sort of expectation, and the flip-side of it – the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that's not the truth of the matter. I think that gives American horror films in some ways kind of an additional rage.”


Horror genre documentaries have become all the rage as of late. Whether they focus on one horror franchise (Crystal Lake Memories; The Psycho Legacy), or one particular sub-genre (Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film), their aim is to break down and scrutinize this thing previously and often described as dark, threatening, unwarranted, unnecessary, and wrong. Horror, the least respected genre of all, is often misunderstood and condemned for the simple fact that sometimes a head gets cut off or a girl is fed to a lawnmower. A critic unwilling to shed his or her self-righteousness couldn’t sit down with a film like The Last House on the Left without dismissing it outright, labeling it pornographic and void of purpose.

This 2000 documentary from filmmaker Adam Simon (also responsible for the Bill Pullman head-scratcher Brain Dead), perhaps the first to openly discuss and celebrate a specific period of the horror genre (the 1960s/70s), might also be the first to let America’s most culturally significant filmmakers explain their thoughts and motivations behind their earlier work. The 1970s, perhaps the last truly celebrated decade of film, saw an uptick not just in quality storytelling, but also in anger, frustration, and sometimes hopelessness. Filmmakers like Frances Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Sydney Lumet, and so many others ran rampant, free from the type of studio constraints that have today become commonplace. And this kind of independent mentality naturally found its way into the horror genre.

Kicking if off was George A. Romero with his antecedent Night of the Living Dead (1968), to be followed by Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), David Cronenberg’s They Came From Within aka Shivers (1975), Romero's Night follow-up Dawn of the Dead (1978), and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Supporting these filmmakers’ highlighted bodies of work are director John Landis (An American Werewolf in London), special effects maestro Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead), and professional film historians/professors Tom Gunning, Carol J. Glover, and Adam Lowenstein.

Director Adam Simon has not only managed to gather together the modern age’s greatest horror minds for the definitive interview, but he’s also managed to create, hands down, the best examination of modern horror in existence. The previous horror documentaries earlier mentioned are all certainly well made in their own ways, and for the approaches that have been taken, they could certainly be viewed as definitive. But at the end of the day, they are just novelties – impressively expanded versions of IMDB trivia and Fangoria Magazine. Going to Pieces, for instance, is a hell of a lot of fun, and introduced me to films I hadn't previously seen, but beyond that, it doesn't have much to say – certainly not about our culture. It never feels “important” – it never makes the horror films we love feel like anything more than 90 minutes of titillation.

The American Nightmare lets its subjects do all the talking, in their own uncensored, unfiltered, and uncompromising voices. Their words will be tinged in anger, melancholy, and even disbelief. And you’ll know exactly what you’re getting into with the opening of the doc: A scary montage of the films being discussed, intermingled with real news footage of the Vietnam war – of chemical weapons, soldiers with completely brainwashed expressions, and presidents telling us the war is a worthy endeavor. But Vietnam is just one of the several issues discussed here, and whether the inspiring events be damnable (political assassinations, economic collapse) or commendable (the sexual revolution, economic rebirth), all have had their part to play in this collection of high horror cinema watermarks.

"I loved this idea of a revolution… It's a new society devouring the old, and just changing everything."

You all know this one – this story of a group of strangers barricaded inside a Pennsylvania farmhouse as they try to defend themselves from a growing army of the living dead. Since 1968, this concept has been appropriated literally hundreds of times for thousands of films, books, comics, video games, and now television shows – and they all owe it to one man. Shot and released during the height of America’s racial conflict, it had the gall, the audacity (read: the balls) to cast a black actor by the name of Duane Jones, not just prominently, and not just as the lead, but as the hero. And it has perhaps one of the most soul-crushing endings of all time.

Though Romero is quick to dismiss with great modesty anyone's commendation for him for having cast a black man as the lead in his seminal film by simply saying that Jones was the best actor they knew, filmmaker John Landis (interviewed here as a participant, not a subject) recalls having his mind blown at his young seventeen years of age, in awe that he was seeing a black hero on screen during one of the most turbulently racial times not seen since the Civil War. "I just went 'Wow!' because there's this black guy...and he's the lead. The movie was hitting me from all angles."

Complementing NOTLD's footage of lynch mobs assembling with their shotguns, and dogs on leashes barking furiously and pulling men across a field are Lowenstein's thoughts: "[As you watch NOTLD] you can’t not think of lynchings; you can’t not think of freedom marches in the south; you can’t not think of the Civil Rights struggle."

As for the why of it, Romero offers: “Obviously what’s happening in the world creeps into any work. It fits right in, because that’s where the idea comes from – where you get the idea in the first place.”

In a fit of awful irony, insofar as what the film would eventually go on to mean culturally, Romero somberly shares that after having completed the film, he threw it in the trunk, and he and his co-producer took a road trip to New York to try and sell it. On the way there, on the radio, they learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated.

“All of a sudden, you really don’t know – it certainly shatters your faith in what’s going on at the top. It really gives you a sense of fragility of things – not just your life, but the nation’s life.”

In the NOTLD sequel of sorts, Dawn of the Dead (also explored in the doc), the character of Fran peers down at a crowd of zombies and asks, "What the hell are they?"  But Romero has the answer this time: "Us. We know we're going to die, right? We're the living dead."

"It just seemed that there was nothing to be trusted in the establishment and everything to be trusted in yourself, and that was the context in which Last House was made." 

 

Likely the most infamous film in Wes Craven’s filmography, The Last House on the Left is an angry, disturbing, and at times vile reinterpretation of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Two young girls on the way to a concert run afoul of three convicts, who proceed to kidnap them and drag them into the woods, where they are then tortured, raped, and unceremoniously killed. Thinking they are free and clear, the convicts, through complete dumb luck, end up at one of their victim's houses, and are then slaughtered one by one by the girl’s revenge-seeking parents. The attack waged against the unsuspecting killers by the dead girl's parents comes close to (and perhaps successfully achieves) a reversing of the protagonists and antagonists roles, presenting a set of parents so bloodthirsty for revenge against their daughter's monstrous killers that they become monsters themselves by film's end.

Craven further explains the film’s tie to Vietnam: "Those kids running down the road, just screaming, naked, after the napalm attack; that was kind of my coming of age to realizing that Americans weren't always the good guys, and that things that we could do could be horrendous and evil and dark and impossible to explain." Examining the film and the young man who had made it, he remarks that it was "made by a man who had a lot more rage than [he] ever realized."

Though the infamous tagline of Last House was the reiterated "it's only a movie..." Lowenstein shares, "What's going on here isn't only a movie. It has everything to do with Kent State, the Vietnam War – that this kind of pain isn't a sick isolated episode. It has everything to do with the world I live in."

This segment is likely the most powerful of the entire documentary, especially after the talking heads somberly recount the war, how they say if you were growing up during that time, you were a veteran of Vietnam whether you were directly involved in the war or not. Even after discussing the film’s inspiration in broad strokes, Craven adds one chilling detail: You will know why he chose to have Krugg execute Marie in such a particular way at the tail end of Last House’s horrific rape scene. It wasn’t just posturing, or what looked good on camera. Instead it was reactionary; it was a real anger transforming into a cinematic one.

Capping off the Vietnam segment of the documentary is a brief but mesmerizing interview with Tom Savini, and there’s really no recounting it. His words are extremely powerful and raw. His remembrance of the awful sights he experienced and captured (as a war photographer) are incredibly difficult to process, but deeply affecting. He explains that, as a child, he would go to see the vintage monster movies – Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man – and try to recreate them using his effects materials. And so in 1969, in the midst of Vietnam and mere feet away from dead bodies, and as a way to separate him from the reality of the conflict, he would instead study them, and concoct in his head what materials he would use to eventually recreate the piles of the dead around him.

As far as his eventual approach to special effects, he said, "If Vietnam did anything, it was: If it's going to be horrible, then it's going to be horrible the way I saw it. But you will never see it the way I saw it, which is [with] absolute fear; that if someone walks out of the jungle, he wants to kill you. He has a gun and he's going to try."

"My Wisconsin relatives told me about this guy [Ed Gein] that lived about twenty miles from them. [They told me stories of] these human-skin lampshades and I think maybe hearts in the refrigerator...but really the image I came away with, almost my entire life, was there was someone out there making lampshades out of people."

 

Perhaps kicking off the whole “kids in the middle of nowhere who run out of gas” plot device, Tobe Hooper’s Ed-Gein inspired film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, though we wish were plucked from someone’s imagination, was instead plucked right out of real life. Borrowing elements of the Gein case, along with a personal anecdote in which a medical colleague of Hooper's once wore a cadaver's face to a Halloween party, scenes from Chain Saw of a van rolling up to an out-of-gas fueling station is meshed with real-life footage of the 1974 gas shortage that occurred in America – of gas station officials and police waving off the lines of cars stretching down the street that were hoping to fill their tanks. How something as innocuous as a lack of gasoline could throw society into such disarray and instability directly compares to these kids whose van runs low on gas and forces them to pull over, thus throwing them into the midst of a cannibalistic nightmare. Normal, middle-class, and pretty kids (and Franklin) soon cross paths with a den of cannibals, starving, out of work, and improvising simply to stay alive.

“I was really scared at that time, and I had to find a way to work that out,” Hooper explains. He goes on to add that his film contains “…the stuff in the darkness, in the shadows, and in particular, the stuff we don't open the door on. And those doors start cracking open a bit, because you're forcing them open with images that really blow into the nightmare zone."

And he's very correct. Chains Saw feels more like a nightmare than any of the other films. Its documentary approach gives it the appearance of a well-staged snuff film, where a "real" family of cannibal deviants pray on and decimate a group of kids one at a time. The film takes the elements borrowed from real life and combines it with the anecdote in the next paragraph, and what we end up with is not just a seminal film or the beginning of a still-going-strong franchise, but about the collision of social classes bathed in the blood of middle-class kids traipsing where they ought not be traipsing. Still relevant today due to the current economic climate, it's easy to forget that a lack of good, high-paying jobs affects everyone, from the well-to-do rich right down to the lower class cannibals who rob graveyards late at night and dwell somewhere within the bowels of Texas.

Hooper’s interview segment ends with him explaining, "Mothra didn't scare me. Godzilla didn't scare me. It's people I'm afraid of." Hearing this, following the genesis of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – in which he was at a Montgomery Ward’s hardware department store and slowly being surrounded by more and more shoppers, finding himself standing directly in front of a rack of chainsaws…and realizing, if he really wanted to get out of there, he knew he’d found a way – becomes deeply unsettling. That “normal” people have thoughts like these is scary enough…but there are people out there who don’t have the mental capacity or the emotional barriers to make them realize that doing something like that would be wrong. So you take that, and then take away their job stability and their right to make a home for themselves, then disaster can happen. “It’s people I’m afraid of,” indeed.

"That seemed to be where we were then, in the '70s. It was a different decade, it was a different time. Beginnings of prosperity. Major crises seemed to be over, and everyone was just dancing away."

 

On the run from a chaotic and bloody Philadelphia, four individuals from different walks of life somehow come together, commandeer (steal) a chopper, and get the hell out of dodge as the city burns behind them. They soon find themselves at a shopping mall, originally only stopping to find fuel and regroup until they can come up with a plan. But the longer they rest there, the quicker they realize they're sitting on a potential bounty of every necessity, and every comfort and convenience, they could ever need or want: gourmet food, top-of-the-line electronics, the finest fashion and jewelry – even an arcade! With one member among them pregnant and all of them exhausted, it seems like the most obvious choice to make. The plan is simple: Bed down, fortify a living area, and then clean-house, ridding the mall of the walking dead threat and securing every entrance. But, what begins as simple survival soon devolves into a life of opulence, and when danger comes their way – in the form of both looters as well as zombies – they refuse to give it up.

I've been to one public and several private screenings of the original Dawn of the Dead, and without fail, every time our survivors fly over Monroeville Mall and say, "It's one of those shopping centers; one of those big indoor malls," it always gets a laugh. And that laugh signifies: "Well, no shit – of course it's a mall." What the people who react that way don't realize is that, yes, granted, malls are part of every day culture now and have been for decades, but they were a new phenomenon in the late 1970s. During this time, the reign of mom-and-pop shops and corner stores had begun their decline in popularity while huge corporations moved in and constructed gigantic monstrosities filled with every specialty store you could imagine. What we take for granted as always having been part of American culture was a newborn back during Romero's second zombie film, which many would argue is his masterpiece.

"My zombies have gotten a taste of McDonalds and the good things in life," Romero notes with a grin. "And they can't figure out why it's not happening anymore. They're just sort of lost souls."

The materialism and consumerism aspects of Dawn of the Dead have been discussed ad nauseum over the years, by Romero et al. as well as film critics and film fans. While The American Nightmare's discussion of it is brief, it is discussed perhaps with the most openness from Romero that I have seen yet.

He sums it up rather well:

"Domesticity is not what it's cracked up to be and having all that 'stuff' winds up meaning nothing. There's always that underlining realization of how synthetic this is. 'I have this and that'...without thinking much beyond that."

"There really was [a sexual revolution]. The '60s were unprecedented in terms of openness and experimentation, and it was always political. The sex that you were engaging in had strong political overtones... Sex had meaning beyond sex... beyond the physical realm."

  

A Dr. Frankensteinian scientist is out to prove that humanity has lost its instinct, and so he begins a series of experiments in which he purposely applies a parasite of sorts into willing living hosts in hopes that the afflicted will begin acting on impulse rather than their rationale. The test patients' sexuality is suddenly awakened with an animalistic fury, leaving them acting strictly on impulse. Soon a sex plague of sorts begins to spread and it threatens to tear down society as a whole. In continuing with the Frankenstein theme, the scientist's experiment is ironically and unfortunately a success.

It's strange to think that the sexual revolution of the '60s, which continued into the '70s, actually took place in this, our country. Founded on this artificial ideal about wanting to live free of oppression, and with the freedom to pursue our own religious beliefs, our country has been terrified of sex since we first set foot on this continent. Funny, since we use sex to sell every imaginable product, service, food, or anything else you can think of. Sex sells films, television shows, books, music, make-up, underarm deodorant, and yep, even kids' clothes. Further, it's perhaps not widely known that John F. Kennedy's win over Richard Nixon during the 1960 presidential election is attributed to the nation's first ever televised presidential debate, and the American people got their first mass glimpse of the handsome and distinguished Kennedy versus the sweaty Nixon. But when it comes to our own sex – something private, shared between two consenting adults, it suddenly becomes a dangerous and ugly thing. Homosexuality, sodomy, polygamy – these things are suddenly looked down on, preached against, and even outlawed.

Leave it to David Cronenberg to attack this hypocrisy head-on with his first wide-release film, They Came From Within, in which he turns sexuality into an inescapable tangible and intangible force:

I had a very disturbing dream last night. In this dream I found myself making love to a strange man. Only I'm having trouble you see, because he's old... and dying... and he smells bad, and I find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh. That disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully. 

While showing real footage from feminist and political rallies, angered verbal prose on abortion rights, as well as scenes from Cronenberg's infamous "body horror" portions of his filmography (They Came From Within, Videodrome, Rabid, The Brood), Cronenberg explains, "Biology is a course destiny... From beginning to end, biology is destiny. But it's a very human thing to want to derail destiny. Therefore it's a very human thing for us to want to derail biology. And many of my characters are in the process of trying to derail biology in order to derail their destiny as well."

Perhaps most tellingly, Cronenberg states that his own personal goal for They Came From Within was not only to avoid filtering out his ambivalence about his belief system that inspired the film, but to let that guide its events. He states that he believes things can be both dangerous and wonderful at the same time, disgusting and beautiful at the same time. Therefore, it's only appropriate that the parasite in the film that spreads from host to host is both an aphrodisiac...and a venereal disease.

Cronenberg says, "I, on a very very basic level, am afraid of revolution. I don't want to have to experience that. And yet I recognize that there are times when those things are absolutely necessary, because there's no other way to change things."

"My father came up to me and said, 'Look, if you hear the [air raid] sirens, I want you to go down this museum building into the basement. And if you see a flash or something, cover yourself up.'"

 

Halloween night, 1963. The parents are away, the little brother's supposedly out trick-or-treating, and the big sister is sneaking a quickie with her even quicker boyfriend. Someone, you – the audience – sneaks alongside the house, in through the back door, grabs a knife from a drawer, climbs a set of stairs, slips on a clown mask, and stabs that big sister to death. You hurry back down the stairs and out the front door, when you're accosted by the big sister's parents. You, the audience, the killer, are a six-year-old boy. You've just murdered your own sister, and no one will ever know why.

Halloween has long been thought of as the ultimate morality tale. John Carpenter's second film, shot independently, went on to make back its budget nearly 150 times. It created a sub-genre, kick-started the idea of the movie maniac, and established all the rules that are still adhered to in films today. Fuck and die, drink/do drugs and die. If you're the virginal type who prefers schoolbooks and quiet nights to sexual escapades and reckless teen behavior, you might not only survive, but perhaps help put an end to a Halloween night of terror created by that masked man Michael Myers.

This segment of The American Nightmare, and the last film to be discussed, eschews cultural and societal discussion in favor of a psychological one. After all, in all the other films discussed previously, each had its own political inspiration for existing – each came about as a reaction to something awful occuring in our world. Therefore it's only appropriate that Halloween – the most innocent film in the bunch – does the heavy lifting of explaining the why. Why do we like to be scared? Why do we come for this? What can be derived from seeing the innocent (and not so innocent) torn apart, vivisected, their life ended with a thick blanket of red stuff?

"People often say a horror movie is a roller coaster ride," Professor Carol J. Glover questions, "but what is a roller coaster ride?"

Professor Tom Gunning might have the answer, equating an audience's entertainment by a horror film to a protective membrane – something we use to screen out the real horrors of the world. If we invest ourselves in terror on the silver screen, it helps us to deal with the actual terrors that await us on city streets, suburban backyards, or in our own homes.

This was never more relevant than during the 1950s, when our filmmakers were just kids, trying to eke out a life in this nasty world bequeathed to them by their parents. And ironically, they were more scared than the audiences whom they would soon terrify with their bodies of work – a direct result from a period of international unrest known as the Cold War.

"There was a sense that we weren't going to make it," Carpenter remembers."There was a sense that all of us were going to die in atomic war."

"Every fourth Friday – every Friday of the month – we heard the air raid sirens," Landis adds. "And we did drop drills. We were told 'face away from the glass.'"

"If the bomb falls in the center of Manhattan, here's complete devastation, here's partial devastation, and here was radiation poisoning," Romero recalls, using his hands to emphasize how glibly the different devastation zones were discussed back then. "I think we were somewhere in the partial devastation zone."

"I started asking my mother and father, 'Is the world going to come to an end?'" Hooper recalls. "I didn't know if death was going to fall from the skies at any time."

So, after all has been said and done, why horror films? Why present these terrible ideas and images to audiences? Why challenge them and scare them, especially in a world that needs no help in causing fear and helplessness?

"[Horror films are] boot camps for the psyche," says Craven. "It's strengthening [kids'] egos and strengthening their fortitude... That's something the parents never seem to think about... Even if [the films] are giving them nightmares, there's something there that's needed."

HALLOWEEN 35th

For the 35th Anniversary Edition release, Anchor Bay and Trancas went back to the vaults to present the film as never before, creating an all-new HD transfer personally supervised by the film's original cinematographer, Academy Award-nominee Dean Cundey (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Apollo 13, the Back to the Future trilogy), a new 7.1 audio mix (as well as the original mono audio), a brand-new feature length audio commentary by writer/director John Carpenter and star Jamie Lee Curtis, an all-new bonus feature with Ms. Curtis, and select legacy bonus features from previous ABE releases. The new release is being made available in collectible limited-edition DigiBook packaging (only for the first printing), with 20 pages of archival photos, an essay by Halloween historian Stef Hutchinson and specially commissioned cover art by Jay Shaw.

"Anchor Bay Entertainment has been home to Halloween for almost 20 years," noted Malek Akkad, President of Trancas International Films and son of Moustapha Akkad. "I'm so happy that we're partnering with them to present the definitive edition of what is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal horror films of the 20th century."

Halloween: 35th Anniversary Edition features 1080p video, Dolby TrueHD 7.1 and Original Mono audio tracks, and the following extras:

• All-new commentary track with writer/director John Carpenter and star Jamie Lee Curtis
• "The Night She Came Home" new featurette with Jamie Lee Curtis (HD)
• On Location
• Trailers
• TV & Radio Spots
• Additional Scenes from TV Version

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This sucker streets September 24. While I am glad we're finally getting an approved transfer from Dean Cundey, I remain cautiously optimistic about which older extras they'll be porting over. That feature-length doc from previous releases better be in place. Still iffy on the artwork, but it's growing on me.

And bring on that new commentary. Criterion's old one was good, but I hate that spliced-together approach. Put 'em in the same room, I say.

1340 KAB: THIS IS STEVIE WAYNE, YOUR NIGHT LIGHT

It had been a long day for Al Williams. With the April heat suddenly coming on in full force, all he had wanted to do was stack the Sea Grass with a few twelve-packs and head out into Bodega Bay with Dick and Tommy. Making this difficult was Kathy, his well-meaning but neurotic wife, who had been driving herself crazy – along with Al by default – trying to organize the town’s Centennial. “Had the statue been finished? Had the candles been ordered? Would the dark and somber Father Malone remember he was to perform the benediction?” That’s right, their town of many years, Antonio Bay, was turning one hundred years any minute, and while many townspeople seemed excited at the prospect, he could only scoff and wonder if he should be so lucky to live that long. But he had finally managed to escape, and after handing off the final case of beer to Dick and Tommy, who waited impatiently on the Sea Grass, they shoved off from the docks and motored for a while – far enough away where the only sign of life from town came in the form of some phantom dog barks, but close enough that they could still pick up the signal from the KAB station lighthouse off Spivey Point.

He needed this – bad. Good friends and cheap beer, and sure, maybe they’d try to catch a fish or two. His old vessel creaked and cracked like she were about to fall apart at any moment, but she was sea worthy, alright – he'd been taking her out for years.

He wasn't sure where to set his sights: Whateley or Arkham Reefs, maybe. But he knew the where didn't matter; all he wanted was to kill his engine and drift along with the tide. The journey to the docks where the Grass was tied had been a long one – figuratively and literally – and the evening had grown dark and late. But everything was perfectly in place now, and hopefully, nothing would come along to ruin it. The water was calm, softly lapping at the Grass’ hull, and the sky was clear – not a bad patch of ominous looking weather in sight. And the men had all night to fish – Nick couldn't make the trip, but had said he'd meet them back at the dock at 7:30 the next morning for breakfast.

Al settled into his cot, snapped a beer, and flipped the switch on his ancient radio.

And Stevie Wayne’s show was already in full swing…

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Notes:
¹ In order to present all the source music heard in The Fog, I had to play around with the film's timeline. Technically, 1340 KAB transmits on two separate nights, so in order to recreate these two shows as one uninterrupted program, I had to do some combining.

² Only one track from the film does not appear, as far too much of it was talked over, chopped up, and impossible to isolate. I was unable to locate its title or artist to secure a clean copy, so I replaced this missing track with "The Charleston," which is a pretty good doppelganger. Additionally, I added "Moonlight Serenade," which does not appear in the film whatsoever, but I needed one more track to end the show, and it seemed in keeping with the station format, especially alongside the Lindup/Moorehouse stuff.

³ Three of the songs found in the track-list have made-up names, as ID information on them is non-existent. The song titles are phrases lifted from the film, and the artist names are bits of John Carpenter-related trivia (for extra dorkiness).

For all of these artistic liberties, I would normally say I'm sorry, but I'm not, because this was really, really hard.

BUY ME THIS

There are no words. It's Mondo, and awesome, and I want.

Pay it forward and buy it for me.

DAY 31: IT'S TIME!

Is this overused?

Maybe.

Does that make it any less awesome?

No way!

Happy Halloween, readers! Watch out for those bugs and fire in your skulls!

* To those affected by Sandy, I hope your recovery is speedy.

DAY 15: HALLOWEEN MASSACRE

Source.

FORMALDEHYDE FACE

Coming November 6th from Scream Factory.

They influence our decisions without us knowing it. They numb our senses without us feeling it. They control our lives without us realizing it. They Live.

Horror master John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing) directs this heart-pounding thriller in which aliens are systematically gaining control of the Earth by masquerading as humans and lulling the public into submission. Humanity’s last chance lies with a lone drifter who stumbles upon a harrowing discovery — a unique pair of sunglasses that reveals the terrifying and deadly truth.

Special Features:

• Audio Commentary with Writer/Director John Carpenter and Actor Roddy Piper
• Independent Thoughts – An interview with Writer/Director John Carpenter
• Man vs. Aliens – An interview with Actor Keith David
• Woman of Mystery – An interview with Actress Meg Foster
• Watch, Look, Listen: The Sights & Sounds of They Live – A look at the visual style, stunts and music from the film with Director of Photography Gary B. Kibbe, Stunt Coordinator Jeff Imada, and Co-Composer Alan Howarth
• 2012 Cast Reunion Q&A with Roddy Piper, Keith David, and Meg Foster. Presented by Ain’t It Cool News and Texas Frightmare Weekend
• Original EPK: The Making of They Live
• Never-Before-Seen Footage from the Commercials created for the film.
• Original Theatrical Trailer
• TV Spots
• Still Gallery 

The commentary seems to be ported over from the Region 2 release from several years back. If that's the case, I can safely say us 'mericans will be getting a great and fun commentary.

YESSSSSSS

 

This.

First News.

VINDICATION

SOUNDSCAPE: THE FOG

My obsession with John Carpenter's The Fog should be well-known 'round these blog pages by now. At various times over the years, I've hailed either Halloween or The Thing as my be-all/end-all favorite Carpenter movie—it's a strength of the filmmaker's talent that I was unable to nail down a perpetual favorite. When I was young, it was Halloween all the way. Slasher movies were pretty much king to me at that time, and Halloween was king of them. Later on, I'd decided to move onto his more complex and impressive remake of The Thing. And while his bloody and gooey gore show is an absolute classic – one that should not have derailed his career as a studio director – I am simply head-over-heels in love with The Fog. No, it's not perfect, nor is it his best film, but horror set at a sea-side town is always going to intrigue me, and there's nothing like a nice, old-fashioned ghost story. His score is the best he's ever done, and when you mix all that up with some Atkins, you've got a nice little flick that plays well at any time of year.

So here is my ode to The Fog. In its running time of eleven minutes, I use maybe 10-15 seconds from the film itself – all the rest was cherry-picked from other sources and weaved together to recreate what Antonio Bay might have sounded like on that infamous April 21st. The emphasis is mostly on ambiance, not story. It's told from the point of view of a fly-on-the-wall witness who is dropped into the middle of Antonio Bay and is left to wander the beach and the streets as the clock strikes twelve...and the sins of Antonio Bay come back from their watery graves...

As always, please listen with headphones.

MENTAL HEALTH DAY

ONE MORE STORY...

"My father was a fisherman. He ran a trawler out of Whitley Reef. One night, late, he was coming back in. He was out beyond the reef, out near Spivey Point. He looked to windward and saw a brig under shortsail, heading right for him. And he radioed, there was no reply. Nothing moved on deck, but she held her course. My dad and two of his hands, they boarded the brig, the Risa Jane. No one was on board. There was food on the table, and a hot, steaming cup of coffee. But underneath, the tin cup was rusted to the table. And then something caught my father's eye. It was a gold doubloon, minted in Spain, 1867. My dad picked up the coin, put it in his breast pocket of his jacket, and zippered it up. He came home, told us the story, and he unzippered the pocket to give me the coin. It was gone."

 Nagrobek.

UNSUNG HORRORS: THE INTRO

Horror fans (and I of course am one) are often unfairly maligned by the rest of cinema-viewing society. Because for some reason, we can’t seem to get enough of our beloved genre. The good, the bad, and everything in between, we need it—we need to consume it; and we do, in voracious, uncontrollable amounts. We have conventions and television channels and entire clothing lines; comic books and websites and collectible figures; and every single DVD release of Halloween that’s come down the pike (five so far). We live for it. To quote from "Millennium" (hey, a horror show!), this is who we are. And people notice this, and think us weird. Because, c’mon, who in their right mind walks around in a Freddy Krueger shirt? Who has the Tubular Bells as a ring tone? Who will actually wait two hours in line just to meet the guy who played a bit part in John Carpenter’s The Fog?

We do. Because we’re horror fans.

No one’s going to conventions for romantic comedies. No one has t-shirts dedicated to The Notebook or any of Tyler Perry’s nonsense. And sure as shit is no one waiting in line to meet Rob Schneider—that much I can guarantee you.

Horror, much like life itself, is cyclical. Fads come, we relish in them, we get sick of them, and then they go. After Halloween, we got sick of slasher movies. After Scream, we got sick of teen-casted, pop culture-centered, self-aware who-done-its. After The Ring, we got sick of wet ghost girls crawling out of wells and up walls and across ceilings. After the truly anemic Saw series, we got tired of seeing someone strapped to a table while their fingernails were removed. And could it be…after the poor box office performances of Let Me In, Fright Night, and The Thing…are we finally sick of remakes? (Some would argue that they were sick of them ever since Platinum Dunes saw fit to give us their take on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre back in ‘03, but horror fans’ opinions on message boards are not adhered to as much as they would like to think—it’s the wallets of the mainstream audience that speak volumes.) And sure, while remakes are bad ideas in general, and have only illuminated just how idea-bankrupt Hollywood has become, some of them are just fine. Like that Texas Chain Saw Massacre remake I spoke of earlier. It ain’t half bad. And neither is Zack Snyder’s take on Dawn of the Dead. Sure, your fiercely protective horror fans will lambaste them in some misguided sense of loyalty, and I can understand that. But as far as both of these remakes are concerned, audiences and critics agreed, and the two movies were rightly considered successes. (Entertainment Weekly gave Dawn an A-! Entertainment Weekly! A zombie movie! An A-!)

But what about the other hundreds of remakes and sequels that have come out? Did the world really need Rob Zombie’s truly abhorrent take on Halloween (2007)? Did we really need to find out the back-story of Billy in Black Christmas (2006)? And my goodness, how do you fuck up Friday the 13th (2009) so badly? We’re not talking Shakespeare here, people—we’re talking Voorhees. It’s a pretty cut-and-dried concept, and yet these tepid filmmakers managed to produce a movie filled with annoying characters, boring deaths, and the lazy presence of an iconic figure whose own myth was underrated and disrespected. I’d rather have seen a sequel to the truly ridiculous Jason X than this mess. And speaking of sequels, did you know that with the recent release of the by-all-accounts-terrible Hellraiser: Revelations, there are now more Hellraiser entries that went direct-to-video than were released in theaters? Did you know there are now TEN Children of the Corn movies? Fucking ten! (One of them being a big budget remake in the hands of Dimension Films.) Who the fuck is still renting Children of the Corn ??

So why am I railing on this genre I so claim to love, you ask? What does this have to do with anything? Because I have a problem with horror fans. A huge problem. I love them all, and I count myself as one amongst their flock, but they are a very persnickety bunch. Though they consume every subgenre of horror in bulldozer-sized chunks, they are constantly begging for something new and different; and yet, when something new and different finally comes their way, they ignore it. They claim to desire something fresh and unique, and not just a rehash of everything that has come before, but at the end of the day, they’re sell outs—the same they accuse their beloved filmmakers Carpenter, Romero, and Craven of being for selling off the rights to their film properties for many of the ill-advised remakes that have assaulted our community (and in most cases were not even owned by the filmmakers in the first place). Horror fans speak loudly, but do not carry a big stick. They stay home. They download Hostel 2. They fight on IMDB. But they do not support the original horror that needs to be supported. They instead rent Hellraisers 6, 7, and 8, which has now led us to 9.  Those movies are garbage, and they know they are. And while they claim to want more, they simply don't deliver. Why do they eagerly pony up their money to go see bullshit like The Hitcher (2007), in some cases more than once, but let something like the brilliant Zodiac fall by the wayside (which was released the same god damn year)?

Before finally coming to the end of my rant, allow me to explain what a horror fan is, first, in order to help mend fences: We’re the ones who stick by all the bullshit that gets released. We’re the ones keeping the candle lit for further (pure) adventures in Haddonfield, Springwood, and Crystal Lake. We’re the ones who (used to, anyway, while they still existed) sifted through the bargain bins of mom-and-pop video stores looking for an unheralded little gem to thrill us for 90 minutes. We’re the ones who ultimately ended up dipping into European cinema to grab at their take on the zombie subgenre, whose levels of gore and violence blew our own out of the water. We’re the ones who grin and bear it through tedious franchise pictures (looking at you, Child’s Play ) in hopes that the next installment will actually be good. (We know it’s possible; there have been high points in long-running franchises: Halloween 4 for one, The Exorcist III: Legion, another, and even Freddy vs. Jason—yeah, I said it.) We’re even the ones who every once in a while actually have a bit of power and help shape a movie like, say, Snakes on a Plane. (Sorry about that one, by the way.) And sure, sometimes those “other” people—read: mainstream audiences—dip their toes into our pool and walk away with a Paranormal Activity, a Silence of the Lambs, or a Seven. And good for them. But we remain behind, like ever-loyal soldiers. We suffer through horseshit like One Missed Call and the Resident Evil movies, and my goodness, Prom Night (2009). Because it’s our genre. It’s our family, and like family, you take the good with the bad. For every fun Cousin Dave, there’s a thousand creepy Uncle Chesters with whom you’ve got no choice but to co-exist, and we’ve made our peace with that. Like wedding vows between a bride and groom, we’ve signed on for the long haul—through good and bad, health and sickness, [REC] and Quarantine. For every Dracula, there’s a thousand Twilights. But horror fans need to be more discerning. You want to rent one of the rip-offs produced by the Asylum? Fine. I can't tell you any different. But why not keep an eye out for the movies actually worth your time? Why not keep an eye on message boards, or any of the top horror movie websites out there (ShockTillYouDrop.com, DreadCentral.com)? Except for radical misfires every so often (people love Repo: The Genetic Opera? Really?), these guys are on the money, and they know their shit.

Horror shapes the world—it’s a part of our history, our culture, and our subconscious. Fear is our most primal emotion. As John Carpenter states, we’re born afraid. We die afraid. It’s the only emotion we’re guaranteed to feel as human beings. It’s the first and last emotion we’ll ever experience.

The very first narrative film is believed to be Edison’s take on Frankenstein. To date, there have been more books written about Jack the Ripper than Abraham Lincoln. In fifty years, no one will be talking about The Social Network, "NCIS," or even Snooki. They’ll be talking about Michael Myers, "The Twilight Zone," and George Romero. They won’t be breaking down the events of "House" or "Big Love," but they’ll still be analyzing "Twin Peaks" and "The X-Files."

The horror genre is staggering—it’s an aphrodisiac. It has the power to stay with you long after you leave the theater. It’s that palpable force that makes you cautious to turn off the light—that makes you check your backseat, or gives you pause before flashing your high beams at a passing car whose own headlights are off.

Every once in a while, a genuinely great horror movie—one that would rightfully be considered a classic, had it gotten more exposure and love at the box office—makes an appearance. It comes, no one notices, and it goes. But movies like this are important. They need to be treasured and remembered. If intelligent, original horror is supported, then that's what we'll begin to receive, in droves. We need to make these movies a part of the legendary genre we hold so dear. Because these are the unsung horrors. These are the movies that should have been successful, but were instead ignored. They should be rightfully praised for the freshness and intelligence and craft that they have contributed to our genre forevermore.

So, better late than never, we’re going to celebrate them now…one at a time.

Part one: Lake Mungo. Coming soon.

AGONY

1978.

2007.

Yikes.