From Zombos' Closet

Meet the Horror Bloggers: The Moon is a Dead World

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Ryne Barber of The Moon is a Dead World talks about his dad's involvement with his love for horror, and why the shadows on your ceiling are so important to dwell on.

You know when you’re lying in bed, looking at the shadows that a particular object is throwing off on your ceiling, and thinking up different ideas of what the shapes look like? Trying to decide what looks most similar? Attempting to define the experience that really hooked me to the horror genre is kind of like that.

Movie Review: Sorority Row (2009) Party Hardy Till You Die

Zombos Says: Very Good

What a difference a decade or two makes. In this remake and retinkering of The House on Sorority Row (1983), the overheated and nubile Theta Pi girls are non-stop partying like it's 2009; and the usually horribly-deformed-and-mentally-somewhere-beyond-Saturn stalking killer is easily a People or US magazine cover candidate. Stewart Hendler'sSorority Row is overly-sexed, overly slick and glossy, and murderously fun.

All the elements for successful slashing are here: a prank gone horribly wrong; a deep dark secret to be kept; a mysterious killer who, months later, knows the deep dark secret that apparently has not been kept very secretive. And then people start dying in creative, bloody ways with a signature weapon--in this case a pimped out lug wrench. What is different is Hendler's playfulness with an audience's expectations for the murderous mayhem, and the sincere acting from a cast that is not just eye-candy, which balances this cat and mouse game between tongue in cheek and serious terror. Carrie Fisher as the shotgun toting house mother, Mrs. Crenshaw, puts up a classy mean fight, bringing legitimacy and sophistication to the action.

Bacchanalian partying, hot tub simmering, and excessive drinking round out the sorority girls' studies. Bossed by Jessica (Leah Pipes, when the prank they play on Megan's (Audrina Patridge) cheating boyfriend, Garrett (Matt O'Leary) results in death, they hide the body down an old mine shaft. Arguments for going to the police and for not going to the police are heatedly exchanged, leaving the sisters in disagreement and the body still hidden; until eight months later, at graduation time, when their ringing cell phones tease them with a picture of the lug wrench. Does someone else know or is it Garrett succumbing to remorse?

Ellie (Rumer Willis), the bookish one--she wears glasses--starts to crack under the strain, while Claire (Jamie Chung) gets hot and not so bothered with her boyfriend in the hot tub. Meanwhile, the keep-it-warm-between-my-legs Chugs, (Margo Harshman) goes in search of prescription-strength fun only her shrink can provide, but finds a nasty mouthful instead. Chugs is my favorite. I was sorry to see her go so soon. The death by bottle is not pretty or humorous and so smoothly executed it kicks off the slashing with promise. Hendler draws more suspense out of the subsequent killings, dwelling over each dispatch with a fine eye to gruesome--but not gory--detail. I do not want to spoil the hot tub and bubbles everywhere walk and stalk for you, but I will leave you to imagine how a misused flare gun can brightly light up the bubbles and a sister at the same time. Another moment to savor is when Claire's hot to trot boyfriend Mickey (Maxx Hennard) has a fatal bottoms-up interlude with a dumbwaiter.

Who the killer turns out to be is not much of a brain-twister: Hendler telegraphs the identity throughout by emphasizing a certain handy feature available on most cell phones these days. But the fun is getting to that point, even with the preposterous time it takes for the fire engines to finally show up and the somewhat jittery camera eye. 

Halloween Sighted 2009: Target Laboratory Shocker Door Knocker

Target has begun to stock Halloween gruesomeness onto their store shelves. I fell in love with this Laboratory Shocker Door Knocker immediately. It's shockingly detailed--nice touch with the dangling electrical wires--and fun to use. Just press down on the handle and it lights up.

Oh, and blood-curdling screams will be heard in-between jolts of zizzing electricity, adding to the merriment. A must for haunted attraction fans.

You can find it online at the Target.com website as well as the store. Click the image to see it close up. Just don't drool.

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Unspeakable Horror

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Chad Helder of Unspeakable Horror tells us how his unintentions paved the royal road to his horror writing career in poetry, fiction, and comic books.  

The horror genre gained my fascination in the turbulent years of Junior High School. The first most important thing I remember was reading Poe in Ms. Shoemaker's English class. I stayed after class one day to ask her if writing horror stories made Poe more mentally unstable, and she told me that writing horror stories probably helped him release his demons and made him more stable. I liked that answer, and I wrote a couple of horror stories in Junior High, a story about a phantom hockey player and a story about an insane person with fog in his mind.

Comic Book Review: North 40 1 2 3 In the Mouth of Conover County

Zombos Says: Excellent

The residents of Conover County are in the grip of an eldritch, surreal, horror like the one John Trent faced in John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. Changing everyone into demons, devils, or potential deliverers from the green sticky spawn of the stars, the-sleeper-awakened, Cthulhu, writer Aaron Williams and illustrator Fiona Staples leaven their apocalyptic despair with dry humor and back end o' the Bible bad monsters.

Now Entering Conover County, North 40, Issue 1 -- The water here must make people retarded...

One very bored Goth girl, Dyan, and her eager to please, slow-to-glow, acolyte, Robert, wile away the time by reading from a restricted--but cool looking--book at the local library. Robert remarks "D&D geeks make things like this all the time out of old dictionaries and epoxy resin." Paging through it, they inadvertently read that spell; you know, the one that opens the gate-never-to-be-opened that lies between our backyard and theirs.

And theirs is some backyard.

Events happen quickly in the hayseed town of Lufton. People start changing in one of three ways: loathsomely, powerfully, or not at all. Sheriff Morgan falls into the not-at-all category, but he must deal with the people who fall into the other two. For them, the transformation can lead to bad personality traits becoming really bad for everyone else.

Helping the Sheriff is Luanne, who is powered up with a World of Warcraft kind of far sight, so she can tell him what's happening around town and direct him accordingly, and Wyatt, who can fly and becomes impervious to harm. Stirring up trouble is David--make that a giant-sized trouble--and his backroads kin, and the townsfolk who have metamorphosed into nasty hungry creatures or undead ones.

The witch, Marguritte DeVris, instructs her apprentice Amanda--a halfie--from the shadows. She empowers Amanda with a symbol of authority, a scythe, and the always-useful-in-chaos-magic sigils to battle the darkness.

Staples disarming artwork is both humorous and serious when needed--her character's faces are full of life--as Conover's predicament worsens, and Williams dialog and narrative are concisely measured for each character and situation, and especially for Sheriff Morgan, who remains unrattled by the chaos around him and surprisingly (suspiciously?) resourceful at handling its more challenging moments.

An' the Word Was Law, North 40, Issue 2 -- Somethin' went wrong with the world in Conover County last night, and folks was just startin' to see how deep this well was...

In issue two, Amanda arrives in Conover County to join the fight for salvation, Wyatt tries to come to grips with his couch-potato dad who has turned into a potato on the couch, sprouts and all, and the local high school dance is still on in spite of the dangers. Teenagers. Sheriff Morgan also has his hands full with the redneck, misbehavin' Atterhulls and David, who can toss around big cars like Matchbox die-casts.

The opening gruesome splashpage sets the tone, and while I am not sure whether Staples and Williams did the panel layouts together or it is just Staples' arrangement, each page moves the story smoothly along with an economic, yet stylistically expressive, visual storytelling. The colorization for daylit scenes is comprised of rustic tones, reinforcing the small town countryfide quality of Lufton.

A Time to Mourn, an' a Time to Dance, North 40, Issue 3 -- Conover County's past is steeped in hate n' blood. The lines was drawn over a hundred years ago, an' nobody's erased 'em since...

Night. A giant robot. Zombies crash the high school dance. The Atterhulls get help from Granny, who can now see with her new eyes (a very clever way to also give her far sight), and Dyan--filled with the spirit of vengeance--becomes a key player in the fight to save Lufton, but for the wrong side. Williams and Staples ante up with issue three; there is more dialog, more tension on every page as the situation worsens. Old rivalries heat up and Sheriff Morgan needs Wyatt to focus more on helping him rather than spraying his dad with a water bottle. Staples draws the variously afflicted teenagers--some are glowing ghosts, some are stalk-eyed, some are just plain undead, humorously terrifying.

North 40 flips the black flavors of American Gothic's relationships and characters, salt's them with the simplicity of The Walking Dead's direness, and then runs amok with monsters, mayhem, and a Stephen King's worth of darkness stretching across the landscape. And with all of this powered by Lovecraft's leviathan from the stars, the reading experience is exhilarating.

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Temple of the Matmos

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Robyn (aka The Great Tyrant and Diabolik72) of the Temple of the Matmos reveals there is no hot babe minding the temple. Damn.

If I had to pinpoint a moment where it ‘all started’ it would have to be Xmas 1984 (I think) when I was given Denis Gifford’s Pictorial History of Horror Movies as a gift from my Uncle Steve. Pouring over it for the next few days, I decided that I absolutely had to see every goddamn movie in there. I saw An American Werewolf in London around the same time and from there got into the Universal and Hammer movies. The next big leap was discovering Fangoria, when my father brought me a copy home from a shop he’d been signing at (he was and still is a comic artist) and through this I discovered Romero, Argento, Fulci and the likes. I’ve been pretty much obsessed ever since.

LOTT D: Pick a Post Sensation 13

Beware! Once again, the archives have been unburied, and the hideous horrors unleashed! For your entertainment and edification pleasure, of course. Members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers dig six feet deep to find their past misdeeds...and reveal them to you, one favorite and notable post at a time!

Drunken Severed Head bids a fond farewell to the King of Pop in Goodby, Michael:

Like millions of others, I still have warm memories of seeing the video for the song "Thriller" for the first time. The song replaced "Monster Mash" for the post-Boomer generations as THE anthem of Halloween, my favorite holiday.

Classic Horror kicks off the action with Ten Sadistic Ways to Die in a Horror Movie:

They said, "Hey, guys, we have somebody getting yanked apart by two semi trucks in our movie. What about listing off some other brutal and/or sadistic deaths?" These aren't necessarily the ten most brutal or sadistic deaths in a horror movie, just the ones we thought were notable.

Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat reviews Tarantino's bloody masterpiece Inglourious Basterds:

...In that sense Inglourious Basterds may be the punkest movie I've seen in I can't even think how long. Maybe ever. It's about nothing less than the power of art to destroy evil. It's about how important it is to love film more than the likes of Hitler hate life. It's about how movie violence, art violence, art designed as a FUCK YOU, can help you deal with the violence that so terrified Chamberlain's cohorts and to which Hitler and his cohorts were so indifferent.

I Love Horror didn't love Captivity, and gives us the top ten things they would have preferred doing:

Including...Spend three hours pressed between the well-lubricated buttocks of two 600-pound Jamaican women while listening to reggae as sung by the Chipmunks.

 

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Classic Horror

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Nate Yapp of Classic Horror hits the wall, and climbs over it in classic style to continue his quest for horror.

Even without horror, I would still be a movie blogger of some kind. When I was seven, I read Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide from cover to cover, imagining each film in my head. Cinema is part of my basic identity. Horror came to give that identity a focus, not once but twice in my life.

While I was still seven (or possibly eight), I wandered into the living room just as the infamous sewer grate scene from Stephen King's It began. I was terrified. I did not like it. My mother, who grew up watching a local late-night horror program, decided that the best way to handle my almost crippling fear was to show me her horror films -- Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Pit & the Pendulum and the like. I was hooked. For whatever reason, these resonated with me. I would search bookstores and libraries for tomes on my favorite monsters.

At age eight, I was proud owner of William K. Everson's Classics of the Horror Film and Alan Frank's Horror Movies (although many of the full-color pictures in the latter volume disturbed me). I even bought a copy of Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen, because Count Orlok loomed on the cover. A friend's parents were kind enough to tape AMC's Monsterfest for me and I pored over all of those movies. I could not get enough.

Until I eventually did.

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Dinner With Max Jenke

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Jeff Allard invites us to Dinner With Max Jenke and reminds us how easy it is to be a horror fan these days.

Writing about horror has been a constant in my life for, well, long enough to scare me. In the early ‘90s, inspired by the Lester Bangs of horror journalism, Chas. Balun (Horror Holocaust, The Gore Score, Deep Red magazine, GoreZone’s “Piece O’ Mind” column), I thought it’d be a great idea to start self-publishing my own fanzine and with some expert help from a friend who did layout and design work at the newspaper I wrote for at the time, the first issue of Gravedigger’s Union made it into the world back in 1993 – a year that now seems ancient to me.

Looking back on that issue, which included a tribute to Night of the Living Dead – then celebrating its mere 25^th (!) anniversary – I have to marvel at one thing: how much free time I clearly had on my hands back then! But I’m very glad I had the time and money to devote to publishing Gravedigger’s Union as the four issues that eventually saw print over the next four years (the mag that started as an intended quarterly became an annual event!) before being forced by financial realities to throw in the towel (seeking out advertisers might’ve been a smart move but I opted not to) remain a nice little personal snapshot of a different age of fandom.

Meet the Horror Bloggers: The Day After

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Chris Zenga of The Day After runs with the Undead. And loves it.

I was very lucky as a kid and was introduced to monsters at a very young age. I'm a child of the 80's and had plenty to inspire me. I had a love for all things Scooby-Doo, and My Pet Monster and to this day re-watch my Hilarious House of Frightenstien DVD's as often as I can; only now I include my two children.

I saw The Monster Squad multiple times in the theater and was convinced that the fastest way to take down the wolf man was to tag him in the nards!. My father and I sat down to watch The Exorcist on the Halloween after my 12th birthday and I knew I wanted that adrenaline rush that only comes from pure terror, all the time. Although raised in a catholic household my parents were quite liberal when it came to me being allowed to watch horror films; perhaps they thought God would cleanse my soul next Sunday at mass? Now that they know I'm an atheist they're rethinking how liberal they were all those years ago.

LOTT D: Pick a Post Sensation 12

Beware! Once again, the archives have been unburied, and the hideous horrors unleashed! For your entertainment and edification pleasure, of course. Members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers dig six feet deep to find their past misdeeds...and reveal them to you, one favorite and notable post at a time!

Classic Horror looks at a solid example of Italian Giallo, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage:

As a giallo, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is an exemplary combination of all the things associated with this particular breed of Italian mystery-thriller. It features violence that is heavy on the crimson, stylized camera work, and sex and sexuality as major parts of the plot. One could argue that Bird is the film that defined these as characteristic of the subgenre, but in reality, it merely accentuates and clarifies an existing format.

Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat peers into DC Comics' Blackest Night:

For as long as I've been reading it, Johns's superhero writing has consisted almost solely of finding ways to express through action and dialogue exactly what each of DC's superheroes means. As they fight, heroes will explain what it is that makes them tick and what iconic qualities they represent in DC's pantheon, while villains will berate them for failing to live up to those demands. If this sounds boring or precious, most of the time it's neither, because Johns just happens to be really good at identifying those core components of each character and basing fun action adventures around them.