We imbue objects with a power that we sometimes can’t take back, and I love when a story explores that. But then I’m the guy fixated on doll and dummy horror and who recently visited the only ventriloquist dummy museum in the world. So if that kinda stuff terrifies you, this story’s for you.
This is horror in the way some stories from Tales from the Crypt are horror. Which is, not really. It’s doesn’t even have a comeuppance. Ice Cream Man appealed to me as an anthology series but I recall the last issue being pretty light on the horror as well, so maybe I’ll skip these going forward. But, the particular story in this issue was neat in that Heavy Metal sort of way, just wacky space fantasy shenanigans.
Yeah I can see why this hit and spawned a series. Controls feel great, looks good for the vintage, and that music is tops. It takes the beefy Conan the Barbarian type and throws him into a castle full of monsters, what’s not to love? The scariest creature by far is the little guy who hops around.
theres literally no wrong way to play singleplayer games btw. savescum, play on easy mode, mod, look up guides and walkthroughs, whatever the hell you want. always remember if it sucks hit da bricks
I spent about the last year or so writing this novelization of the very unusual and disturbing movie SPLICE. A friend recommended me to the guys at Encyclopocalypse Publications who specialize in both new and reissued movie novelizations. I didn’t even know if anyone still made them! But I remember them fondly from my youth because I got to read the details of movies my parents wouldn’t let me watch. I told the publisher my thoughts on SPLICE and we bonded over our shared nostalgia for specifically the CHILD’S PLAY 2 novelization, and then I spent the next ~12 months writing a book. It was a really intense process; besides just having to transcribe the movie (which is never exactly like a screenplay), I had to figure out how to name all the objects and processes that are only established visually on the screen, and of course you have to figure out how to convincingly say what it’s like to be the people in the movie, which is both a physical and emotional thing. If your movie is good, you don’t tell the audience everything in explicit detail, but a book becomes sort of an inner monologue that the reader is having, and you have to give them a little bit more if you want them to relate to what you’re describing–especially if you’re describing something really weird. Anyway the gif above is so evocative to me not just because I’ve seen the movie a thousand times now, but because I put a lot of work into this scene where the scientists are working in their lab for some untold amount of time; you see them eating a few different forms of cold takeout, and it gave me such a powerful memory of like being in college and doing all your work in a marathon and your skin is tight and your joints hurt and you’re dehydrated from salt and caffeine and alcohol and you really need to shower and change your clothes and sleep, but if you stop working you will die. I see that image of Adrien Brody chomping on that cold pizza and I remember the scene like it happened to me!
So I haven’t heard from my editor yet, but Vincenzo Natali wrote me an extremely nice and encouraging message about my draft, so now I’m feeling really confident that whatever shape it takes before it hits the shelves, it’s going to be pretty good.
IT MOI.
New Horror 2023 – Day 3
“Someone screamed – it was me, it was me – as her flesh blackened and greened and sank in around her bones like fallen cake.”
Horror-ish? Certainly in the spirit of the time. But it’s also just one of those meditative pieces about how one gets here through all the muck of youth and existence, where you are who you are and sometimes you have to wonder how you got to be this way.
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“I’ll tell them what we did and you won’t be able to stand it!”
Wow. This one’s pretty raw in terms of a character being abused and treated horribly. But the thing is, Machado’s story has the exact same scenes, only between a man (abuser) and a woman (victim) instead of a man (abuser) and a man (victim), like in this story. So why does a man abusing another man stand out to me when the other, more heteronormative abuse does not? And that’s the most fucked up thing here, realizing it’s just because it’s between two men and that’s not normalized in my brain the way it is when it’s a man abusing a woman. This one absolutely got to me.
Oh, so is this how Freddy Kreuger became a cartoon? Because pop culture definitely took this character and made him into a spooky family-friendly spokesman. And the movie isn’t being coy about it, but somehow the comedy and campiness doesn’t quite gel. The ending montage showing scenes from the previous movies definitely make me think I should go watch those instead.
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“Remember to carry matches; the HAUNTED HOUSE is very dark.”
It’s obviously of its time and technology, but I can see how this sort of thing is a progenitor to a lot of what we now know as survival horror. It has limited supplies, a house full of spooky creatures, and most importantly it’s explicitly dark with the need to light one’s surroundings. I also appreciate the many modes available so players can customize their difficulty level.
New Horror 2023 – Day 2
“Rather this old boat, rather a deserted grave under the stars, for my home!”
Hey that was something. A bit of cosmic horror vibes in there, but really just that same tack with coming to grips with unfathomable terror. And eventually it’s not something as wild as alien god things, but still a good buildup to a familiar horror in a different sort of environment.
Vampirella is one of those characters that gets mixed up in my head along with others like Lady Death and Elvira, but I never knew a thing about her other than the slinky red outfit. Did you know she’s an alien? This origin is an interesting exploration of that and a recontextualization of the vampire mythos.
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“Oh, they’re nice as pie until they’ve had their way with you.”
I felt like I’d been duped into watching a kids’ fantasy movie until Things start to happen in some especially gruesome ways. These sorts of fantasy-horror stories also find their way into my annual viewing and I’m all for bringing those classic fairytale terrors back around. All of today’s stories had that seductiveness of the darkness and unknown, so big ups to the recurrence of the theme.
Channel Country is a region of outback Australia, located mostly in the state of Queensland but also in parts of South Australia, Northern Territory and New South Wales. It is characterized by a network of intertwined rivulets that cover more than 57,900 square miles (150,000 sq km). This Overview shows a section in the southwestern corner of Queensland, not far from the town of Durham.
