From Zombos Closet

JM Cozzoli

A horror and movie fan with a blog. Scary.

Meet the Author: Chad Helder

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chad helder by Chad Helder

Author Chad Helder walks the twisting path between the grim fairy tale and the dark forest. Meet him right now…in his own words…near a dark playground nestled deep within the brooding pines.


After attending the Horror Writers Association’s Stoker Weekend in New York a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been reflecting on why I am a horror writer. For me, being a horror writer is my personal response to being gay. With all of the cultural pressures and individual fears associated with being gay in a homophobic society (fear of rejection by family and church community, fear of AIDS, fear of hate crimes, and–worst of all for me–fear of becoming a reviled stereotype), each person responds in an individual way. I became a horror writer.

Growing up in the ‘80s, I was exposed to a variety of negative gay stereotypes. One of the unfortunate psychological responses to living in a homophobic culture is to internalize homophobia, which becomes a strain of self-hatred.  I think Jung’s concept of the shadow is very helpful to understand this. Wanting to deny the emerging gay feelings and desires, I banished them to the shadow side of the psyche–the same place where all unwanted thoughts and feelings are banished. Then a strange thing happened–my unconscious mind associated my fear of becoming gay with the monsters of the horror genre. I don’t intend to make this sound like some kind of simple cause and effect scenario–I actually find it to be quite mysterious.

From the time I was about fourteen-years-old until my mid-twenties, I had a horrifying series of nightmares about Satan and vampires. For me, these universally recognized shadow figures embodied my fear of becoming gay.

Jung wrote about levels of the unconscious mind: an individual unconscious, a cultural unconscious, and a collective unconscious from which our most universal archetypes emerge. Clearly, the archetype of the vampire is a universal shadow figure that appears throughout the world. In my personal unconscious, the vampire embodied internalized homophobia–the monster I was afraid to become. However, I would also argue that the vampire was associated with homophobia in the cultural unconscious of the ‘80s, best represented by Lost Boys (or Nightmare on Elms Street 2 with Freddy as the shadow figure).

For a terrifying summer before I started high school, I was preoccupied with being possessed by Satan. It seemed that Satan could hear my thoughts, and he was waiting for me to slip up and allow him inside. In retrospect, this fear of having my body taken over by Satan (or by vampires) seems a vivid metaphor for becoming a gay man against my will.

After many years psychological work and finding a wonderful partner, I consider myself to be a very well-adjusted gay man–and a very nice, caring person to boot. However, the shadow side of my psyche is still populated by monstrous vampires and Satanic shadow figures. I’ve heard it said that the unconscious mind does not know time.

Over the years, I explored these connections between queer theory and the horror genre on my blog, which eventually led to editing an anthology of queer horror with Vince Liaguno. The anthology is called Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, and it won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology, which was a wonderful validation for all of the exploring, blogging, and theorizing about the underpinnings of queer horror and those closet chapters of my earlier life.

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Meet the Author: Chad HelderRead More »

Book Review: Guilty Pleasures
Reviewed by Professor Kinema

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Guilty Pleasures of the horror film

As a Cinema Historian, archivist, and collector, I especially enjoy being on just about everyone's mailing list. This results in an influx of catalogues. Always one of my favorites is the latest from the Midnight Marquee Press. Of the many books offered by this small, but dedicated press are two edited by Gary J. Svehla and Susan Svehla called Guilty Pleasures of the Horror Film and Son of Guilty Pleasures of the Horror Flim. 

The Kinema Archives houses many periodicals from the house of Gary and Susan Svehla. It makes one pine for the days of FanEx when one could visit their table and peruse the piles of literary treasures on display. Like all true MonsterKid-friendly dealers, a bargain could always be gotten. The more one bought, the more one could get a deal and all were interesting and welcome additions to any and all libraries of fantastic literature.

Both Guilty Pleasures books offer interesting insights into B movies such as Rodan, Two Lost Worlds, The Indestructible Man, The Tingler, Frankenstein's Daughter, Robot Monster and Giant Gila Monster among others.

True, as the titles of the books would indicate, as well as the catalogue descriptions state, these are far from cinematic masterpieces. Yet because they are less than perfect (or even good by any sense of the word) they are still fun to watch and entertainingly so. Personal reasons why they are treasured are given in individual essays by authors like Tom Weaver, John Parnum, Gary Don Rhodes and Don Leifert. These reasons ring true. The cover of the first book is a different design than the one housed in the Kinema Archives, but the content is the same.

These two books offer a counterbalance to how these films are written about in other books; mainly 'scholar' Bill Warren's Keep Watching the Skies. The above mentioned films, along with many others, get far less than positive individual treatments in his third (count 'em three) refurbished edition of his work. In a film genre he claims to have a true affection for he finds a variety of truly pseudo-creative ways for trashing them, as well as insulting the 'auteurs' involved.

Truly, one could view these films, research them by consulting previously published accounts and critiques, seek out and interview people involved in the making of them, and offer personal opinion, but determining them to be guilty pleasures provides refreshing insight.

Many of the other book titles offered in the Midnight Marquee Press catalogue, as well as Warren's opus, are all welcome additions to the Kinema Archives, too.

Teenage Monster (1958) Pressbook

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Howco International distributed many Drive-In movies during the 1950s, and their campaign books (sometimes presented as a folder with inserts if  a double-bill) are concise and neatly arranged. This campaign book is for Teenage Monster. Two things you should know about this movie: Jack Pierce had a hand in the hairy monster's makeup, and it's a horror western that takes place around 1880. Otherwise, it doesn't live up to the "teenage titan of terror on a lustful binge" billing. 

teenage monster pressbook

teenage monster pressbook

teenage monster pressbook

teenage monster pressbook

The 4 Stages of Your Writing Career
By Scott M. Baker

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SCOTT_BAKER

There’s an old joke that states an author has four stages in his or her career. There’s the first stage when a reader walks into a bookstore, lifts your book off of the shelf and asks, “Who the hell is Scott M. Baker?”

There’s the second stage when a reader walks into the bookstore and asks the sales clerk, “Do you have the latest book by Scott M. Baker?”

There’s the third stage when a reader walks into the bookstore and asks the sales clerk, “Do you have any books by authors who write like Scott M. Baker used to?”

And finally the fourth stage when a reader walks into a bookstore, lifts your book off of the shelf and asks, “Who the hell is Scott M. Baker?”

For anyone who has been published, there’s too little humor and too much reality in that joke.

Every author has to endure that first stage. Even Stephen King and J. K. Rowling were unknown entities at one time, at least until readers became aware at how incredibly adept they were at story telling. Now they’re household names. If only the rest of us were that lucky.

The sad truth, however, is that most authors will never make it beyond the first stage. If they’re really fortunate. If they’re good at telling a story, or developing great characters, or writing catchy dialogue. If they’re lucky enough to find a publisher who will distribute their books nationally. If the day their book comes out they’re not competing with an instant bestseller such as a kiss-and-tell book from one of Tiger Wood’s mistresses, or the latest Dan Brown tome, or a diet plan on how to lose weight by eating red velvet cheese cake, or the biography of a pet the cover of which is adorned with an incredibly cute ball of fur. And if, over time, they are fortunate enough to develop a small, loyal cabal of readers who will follow them regularly and read everything they write, then an author might pull in enough money annually to make ends meet (as long as they have an understanding spouse with a really good day job).

Depressed yet?

If you said no, then you truly are a writer. Not necessarily a good writer. Or a prolific writer. Or a rich and famous writer. But a writer, nonetheless. Someone consumed by the hunger of putting words to paper. Someone who can listen to a quirky story on the news or spot a unique looking individual on the street, and within an hour have the plot of a story or novel mentally outlined. Someone who brings their laptop on vacation because you can’t relax and enjoy yourself if you haven’t written something that day. For us, the writing is the passion, and seeing a complete story or novel in print is reward enough (though none of us will shut the door on fame and fortune if it comes knocking).

For those of you following me, you know that I have entered that dreaded first stage of the writer’s career. The first two books of my vampire trilogy are in print, with the third scheduled for publication this October. My first zombie novel should be out in 2012. Now I have to come to grips with the reality that writing the first novel and getting it published was the easy part. There will be plenty of work in the months ahead to market myself and attract readers, with the goal of reaching stage two. It’s going to be a long road, with no guarantee I’ll reach my goal.

For those of you who are just starting your writing career, over the next few weeks I’ll be offering some words of advice on how to get that first novel written and published. Will it guarantee you success as a writer?  No. Will it be depressing yet irreverent? Yes on both counts. My goal is hopefully to encourage beginning authors to pursue their passion and to let you know you are not alone.  

So get your notebooks ready.

 

About Scott M. Baker

Born and raised outside of Boston, Massachusetts, I’m a horror/urban fantasy author who now lives in northern Virginia. I’ve authored several short stories, including “Rednecks Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things” (which appeared in the autumn 2008 edition of the e-zine Necrotic Tissue); “Cruise of the Living Dead” (which appeared in Living Dead Press’ Dead Worlds: Volume 3 anthology); “Deck the Malls with Bowels of Holly” (which appeared in Living Dead Press‘ Christmas Is Dead anthology); “Denizens” (which appeared in Living Dead Press’ The Book of Horror anthology); and the e-chapbook “Dead Water” by D’Ink Well Publications.

My most recent works include The Vampire Hunters trilogy, which is being published both in electronic format (by Shadowfire Press) and print (by Pill Hill Press). Recently, I signed a contract with Permuted Press to publish in 2012 my first zombie novel, Rotter World, which details the struggle between humans and vampires during a zombie apocalypse. And I’m finishing up my fifth novel, which will be a homage to the monster movies of the 1950s set in northern New Mexico.

Please visit my website at http:\\scottmbakerauthor.blogspot.com.

TrollHunter (2010) Troll-ble With Giants

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troll hunter posterZombos Says: Very Good

I had two questions in mind after watching Andre Ovredal’s TrollHunter: Why does Hans (Otto Jespersen) work alone, and why can’t American Horror movies take off-the-wall risks like this small budget Norwegian movie more often?

Hans is the laconic troll hunter followed by three students from Volda College. They’re filming a documentary about bear poaching and he’s pointed out by the local hunters who suspect him because he’s a stranger. He tells them to go away, but they persist and follow him at night, deep into the woods. Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), the leader of the trio, makes a joke about meeting inbred pig farmers (but this is not a French Horror movie, so he needn’t worry).

Now comes the refreshingly audacious part: flashes of light and strange roars in the distance, followed by Hans running past them yelling “Troll!” I’m thinking this is going to be silly and it is, terrifyingly so. The troll crashes through the trees he nearly towers over and hunts them. All of the trolls in this movie are big or bigger, slow moving, and look like Jim Henson’s furry Muppets, but uglier and nastier than you’d find on Sesame Street. They are also quick to kill in this mockumentary, especially if they smell Christian blood. Hans isn’t sure about a Muslim’s blood when asked if the trolls hate it, too.

Hans uses UV light to turn the three-headed troll chasing them to stone. Later, the veterinarian he works with explains the biological factors behind that for us, but UV light either makes them explode if they’re young, or turns them into concrete if they’re old. Seriously. It’s this droll seriousness that keeps TrollHunter’s humor from trumping it’s chills, which come each time we meet different trolls,  each getting bigger as we do. Telling Thomas, Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) the cameraman, and Johanna (Johanna Morck)—who holds onto a boom microphone—that he “doesn’t get a night bonus,” Hans finally agrees to let them follow him as he hunts trolls for the Troll Security Service. The TSS, using bear attacks as a cover, is not happy Hans let the secret out.

The funniest images happen when the veterinarian tells Hans she needs a blood sample. The needle he uses is a tad smaller than the one they used in the Amazing Colossal Man, but it’s still big enough to be a clown’s prop. Dressing in what looks like a suit of armor with a big red button on his chest, he carries a bucket filled with a “Christian man’s blood” to attract a troll living under a bridge. There’s a terminal amount of blood in that bucket so I wonder how he got it. After getting chomped on, slammed, and dunked by the annoyed troll, Hans warns Thomas not to touch the button as Thomas helps him up.

Given the this-is-film-footage-found-after-the-fact style of this movie, with the now standard night-vision scenery and budgeted special-effects viewing angles further obscured by shaky-cam, the story hangs onto its Blair Witch quality of suspenseful immediacy at the cost of details, especially when that footage ends abruptly.

Even so, the American remake is already around the corner. We’re always good at taking safe risks after others take the more riskier ones.

Book Review: Dog Blood

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DogBlood

Zombos Says: Very Good

This conflict wasn’t faction versus faction or army against army; it was individual versus individual, more than six billion armies of one. Beyond that, the Hate didn’t care who you were, where you were, or what you were. You were simply on one side or the other, your position in this new, twisted, f**ked-up world decided without your involvement by unknown variables and fate.

The beauty of David Moody’s Dog Blood is how you can read so much or so little into it. Pile on the metaphors of your choice and pontificate away, or ignore them and become mired in a broken world crumbling down around broken lives. This downward spiral of  hopelessness, of collapsing societies, of forlorn, shock-weary masses of people crushing in on themselves, and of mindless hatred leading to endless killing is depressing, frightening, and shamefully engrossing.  

Picking up the apocalyptic speed from Hater, his first book in this it’s-them-or-us trilogy, the Unchanged are struggling against shattered selves and the Haters, those aggression-infected individuals who hunt and kill anyone not like them; family members kill family members, strangers kill strangers, friends kill friends, grinding them into bloody pulp in the process. As in any good horror play, the Haters are more organized, more determined, and much more deadly than the Unchanged, who are herded into the cities and penned up by the military providing questionable protection while stripping away their humanity, and quelling any incursion of agression by mass obliteration of the infected area. Making a terrible situation worse are the Brutes, a new generation of Haters that are stronger, totally unreasoning, and never tire of killing. They’re like Saruman’s Uruk-hai in the Lord of the Rings.

Danny McCoyne, a Hater, has one goal: to find his five year old daughter, Ellis. He will stop at nothing to accomplish his goal because she is like him. We watch and follow him through his own voice, but this is no longer only about him. There are millions of others, on both sides, and Moody slices chapters between Danny’s search for his daughter and Danny’s Unchanged cousin, Mark–and his squalid existence–to open up the bigger situation all around both of them enough to slip it all neatly into a handbasket and kick it hard and fast down a steep slope leading straight to a hellish climax of destruction.

Mark is one of thousands of Unchanged, holding on with exasperation and desperation as food, water, shelter, and safety dwindle. Assigned a small hotel room by the military, he shares it with his pregnant wife, her overwhelmed-to-shutdown parents who can’t get out of bed, and someone else hiding in the locked bathroom. Mark tries to keep it all under control but failure is imminent when another person, a loudly complaining stranger, is dumped in the room with them, by the military, in spite of his protests.

As Mark deals with escalating frustration and worries over his unborn child, Danny fumes at being delayed from finding Ellis by an organized group of Haters who have a secret plan for killing every Unchanged man, woman, and child, and by the bipartisan-thinking Mallon, a man who forces Danny to control his hate enough to keep him from bashing heads in at every opportunity. Their combined effect on Danny make him question the ultimate purpose of everyone involved, including his own.

Moody piles up the rotting bodies in every nook and cranny without remorse or compassion because heroics and sanity play no part in this shattered world. His paragraphs are long but concise and filled with small details to describe much, like the ubiquitousness of the dead when Danny realizes he’s stepping on a corpse only by the crunching sound of its brittle fingers he’s grinding underfoot.

Even now I can hear those metaphors rustling furtively in your brain and similes kicking up gray dust. Just remember it’s only a novel, though it would be best if you read it on the beach during a bright summer day.

Dementia 13 (1963) Pressbook

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The movie gimmick here is the D-13! Test, a questionaire theaters could hand out to "…screen out those persons who may be adversely affected by this picture." Question 12 is the one I'd pay particular attention to: "The most effective way of settling a dispute is with one quick stroke of the axe to your adversary's head?" I'd answer yes to that one. How about you?

20110627234510_001

dementia 13 pressbook

dementia 13 pressbook

dementia 13 pressbook

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Dementia 13 (1963) PressbookRead More »

Comic Book Review: The Search for Swamp Thing 1

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0093_001 Zombos Says: Very Good

John Constantine smokes up a storm in the first of 3 issues for The Search for Swamp Thing. With only 20 pages to involve Batman and Zatanna, Jonathan Vankin and Marco Castiello keep Constantine moving before he can suffer from jet lag.

After the Swamp Thing sends a vibe to Constantine by way of the bloke's morning paper (try doing that on an iPad), it's a quick hop and half a pack to the Royal Botanic Gardens to commune more closely with "old lettuce-breath." The greenery takes Constantine's breath away instead, and leaves him with a spreading fungus tatoo for old time sake.

Lazy sot that he is, Constantine hooks up with Batman to do his legwork while a mobster impaled on a tree limb in a Gotham City junkyard may hold more clues as to what's making Daddy Iceburg Lettuce so petulant. In a tender moment of holding hands and frolicking in The Green's etherealness to commune with Swampy, Constantine winds up a few butts short and with a headache only Zatanna can make worse, what with their romance magic all zapped out and all, even with all that cleavage a-burgeoning (it's discretely shirted up for the issue's cover).

The art and story make Constantine a walking chimney of twitty droll wit armed with handy pocket magic spells, and keep this glummy mystery moving along briskly to the capper splash page lead-in for issue 2.

I just hope he can solve it before he finds out how much cigarettes cost here in the States and the page count drops again.

Meet the Author: Paul Bibeau

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SundaysPaul Bibeau’s Sunday’s With Vlad is a monsterkid’s dream journey, a wild carnival ride, and a sheer delight as Jeffrey Lyons would say. Spend a Sunday or two with Paul and Vlad, or while away a weekday at his Goblin Books blog, or meet him right now…in his own words…near a dark desk.

 

Let me tell you about the dead men hidden in my office.

Twenty years ago when I was a recent graduate from college I took a job as a reporter for a small town newspaper. I lived over the bingo hall of the local Catholic church, I smoked a pack a day of Camels unfiltered, and when the night came over that place and it turned a rich country dark…I went out walking. I talked to vagrants, drug dealers, and cops. I snagged a dinner invitation from a man who’d turned his property into some kind of paramilitary fortress, like he was ready for an attack. The local criminals threatened me because they thought I was an undercover cop. And the real undercover cop, standing nearby and wearing a wire, recorded it all. I saw things and did things I will never forget.

Ten years ago, when I was a magazine writer living in New York City, I took a trip back to the town, took notes, and began writing a novel about my experiences. It was filled with death and crime and sexual perversion, and the sharp-sweet and terrible smell of that paper mill that dominated the whole region. I hated it and I miss it. The novel took three years of my life and went through four drafts. It was a piece of crap.

Seriously. My best friend took me out for drinks and told me how bad it was as gently as he could. I still have some of the rejection letters from agents — there were more than a hundred. The novel had great parts, but they didn’t add up to a great novel. Someone once said you write a good novel twice and a bad novel over and over.  That’s exactly right. I am a big proponent of rewriting and editing, but a novel has a window of time in which you can either make it right or fail forever. How many of our life’s moments are like that? How many perfect near-misses do you have?

Anyway, now I look at the thing and I see the 20 year-old man I once was, who lived in this world and let it break his heart… and the 30 year-old man who tried to write about it and couldn’t. Those men are gone. I can’t get them back.

But someday soon, I promise you, friendly reader…I will write the story of a 40 year-old with a stack of paper in a dark desk drawer. He has his secrets and his regrets, and he realizes to make this story right, he will have to solve the mystery at the heart of it — a murder, actually. But isn’t every failed story a bit like a murder? I will write it as boldly as I can, until the old authors come back to me and speak their secrets. I need to do it soon.

My time is running out.