So this is the end between the Livejournal and me ( Read more... )

Okay. So I am at 10,000 words on the new NaNoWriMo novel. That’s great. Only 70,000 more to go (only 40,000 this month!) After the pacing I used when I wrote my most recent WIP about werewolves in the 1900s, NaNoWriMo isn’t making me break much of a sweat. But as I’m writing, I’m realizing I don’t know where I’m going. With the werewolf book, I had ( Read more... )

I'm not looking forward to winter. This book didn't help. I had never heard of Snow or Ronald Malfi before it was assigned for the Monsters class. This was a solid little book. I read it while I was traveling to Columbus for World Fantasy Con, and it was neat reading the opening in an airport while sitting in an airport.

The characters, for the ( Read more... )

What makes The Thing one of the most awesomest movies ever? I will side step the obvious (and correct) answer of "EVERYTHING!"

The setting: Stephen King has made a career of trapping his characters and watching what happens. Whether he traps them in a car with a rabid St. Bernard outside, traps them in a snowed in hotel, or in his most recent, just ( Read more... )

 So tonight I watched an episode of Masters of Horror. It was the season 2 premiere, The Damned Thing, based on the short story by Ambrose Bierce, teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson (son of the horror great), and directed by Tobe Hooper. I didn’t much care for it. First, I didn’t like the camera work/editing. The episode started with a scene ( Read more... )

 Oh, Wolfman. I was so excited to see your movie last winter. It was technically perfect. Good cast, good effects, great moody shots of Talbot Hall and the moors. A really bitchin’ scene where Lawrence changes in the face of a hall full of doctors who are determined to prove that he isn’t a werewolf. The subplots: the Talbot family secrets and the ( Read more... )

 Is Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon my new favorite movie? It might have a place on the top ten list. Grad student Taylor Gentry and her two camera men are making a documentary about a serial killer. Leslie Vernon has given them permission to tag along as he lures a bunch of drunk, horny teens to a cabin in the woods and slaughters them ( Read more... )

In Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror With Stephen King, King tells an interviewer his greatest sexual fear: “The vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth. A story where you were making love to a woman and it just slammed shut and cut your penis off. That’d do it.” I hope he’s seen the 2007 film Teeth. The vagina dentata myth permeates most cultures ( Read more... )

 Written by Stephen King, and directed by George A. Romero, Creepshow was an anthology movie inspired by EC Comics. I really liked the theatrical feel, the five casts play like they’re on stage as opposed to the screen, and the lighting is very obvious and noticeable. The first story, “Father’s Day”, features a very young Ed Harris doing quite the ( Read more... )

 A horror movie with no blood and no scares? How does that work? Lake Mungo is a documentary style movie, in which 16 year old Alice Palmer drowns in a lake. What follows is, I would say, more suitably labeled as an exploration of grief, and how her surviving family deals with their loss. There are a few twists and turns along the way, but no ( Read more... )