Dead Man's Bones Conjure NCBD

Tracked a copy of Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields' 2009 Dead Man's Bones last night. Super excited. This is one of those weird, one-off records from the 00s that I adore but often forget about. With all the bands currently pulling their music from Streaming, I've been thinking a lot about musical sustainability. I've always preferred physical media, but have come to rely on streaming a lot over the past decade. I think a healthy mix of the two is the best way to navigate the world in 2025; however, the idea that some music could disappear from my life scares me terribly. This is one of those albums I need to make sure I always have access to, even if I don't access it a lot. 

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NCBD:

Huge pull this week. Damn! Let's get into it:

We're inching closer to the Quintesson War, and for those who don't see Void Rivals as a monthly Transformers book, you're wrong. 

On the fence with this one-shot from Image. Here's the solicitation from League of Comic Geeks: 

"A nightmarish terror once again haunts the shadowy woods of a small town community. Three young friends have to confront their own childhood fears, undead creatures that stalk the living, an enigmatic tree that seemingly collects souls, and an ancient forest entity that seeks to reclaim these lands as its own. It's Tom Sawyer meets Pan's Labyrinth meets It in this coming-of-age tale of redemption and courage in the face of pure evil."

Sounds fantastic, but it's already a tall week in the duckets column. We'll see.

I love Zander Cannon's Sleep so much that it's become one of my most anticipated reads every month. 

Jeff Lemire's Minor Arcana continues to be one of the books I most look forward to each month. Not Horror, but more of a 'supernatural drama,' if you will. The idea of a real psychic taking over her fake psychic mother's psychic shop in a small, podunk town really resonates. Maybe it's the dabs of Seaside Horror that I pick up in this one, but it just feels so mysterious. Love it so much. 

It's awesome to see this final iteration of Greg Rucka and Michael Lark's Lazarus come out on the nose every month. I've been buying these but not reading them, as I still have not begun my reread of the previous two series. That's coming soon, though!

JG Jones and Phil Bram's delightfully twisted Dust Bowl horror, Dust to Dust, returns. I'll admit that I'm going to require a re-read to move forward, but I look forward to revisiting this one. A very nuanced tale of Americana Horror that would make a great "double feature" with Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft's Severed.

While picking up issue 1 was something of a lark, so far, I'm enjoying this. Even though the importance of these "Death of" books is all self-invented and transient. Still, it's been a while since I read anything with the Surfer, so this five-issue mini-series is a nice dalliance with a character I've always admired from afar. 

The final issue of this Black Metal piss-take. I've really enjoyed Dark Regards. 

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Watch:

Monday night I hit the local theatre for a re-release of 2013's The Conjuring. This is a flick I really liked when it came out, but that all the spin-offs and sequels had convinced me was no longer worth my time. My disdain for the handling of the property crept backward, and when I saw it would be on the big screen again, like I saw it the first time, I figured, let's give it a day in court, shall we?

Glad I did. James Wan's original The Conjuring 100% holds up as one of the best haunted house flicks of the modern era. Yes, the spin-offs and franchising has dragged the overall name down, but this first film... It's almost breathtaking at times with the sequences of sustained fear peppered throughout. 

Here's short IG video I did to sum up how I felt directly after leaving the theatre Monday night.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Horror Vision (@thehorrorvision)

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Playlist:

Massive Attack - Blue Lines

Ruelle - Emerge

Woodkid - Woodkid for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

Mastodon - Emperor of Sand

How To Destroy Angels - Eponymous EP

Slipknot - Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses)

Judas Priest - Screaming for Vengeance

Dead Man's Bones - Eponymous

NIN - Full show Toronto, 8/23/25

PLaNETS - THEDARKWOODS

Deadguy - Near-Death Travel Services

Deafheaven - Sunbather

Ghostbath - Moonlover

The Body - All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Three of Cups

• VI: The Lovers

• XVII: The Star

Love brings abundance and a positive turning point. Oh boy. This may be directly related to something in Black Gloves and Broken Hearts. I can't say anymore at this point, but I may have to spend part of my writing time this afternoon addressing this. 

Mastodon - Pushing the Tides

 

New Mastodon before year's end and it's a double-fucking-album! In general, double albums don't work out so well, but Mastodon inspires enough faith in me that I don't think that will be the case with Hushed and Grim, dropping October 29th. Pre-order in the band's store HERE.

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Watch:

Hell, what haven't I watched in the last two weeks? Laid low by what definitely turned out to not be COVID-19, I still spent a week and some change on my couch. I read three books (well, read one and finished reading two others), and watched something like 15 flicks. For most of those, you can see my Letterbxd. What I specifically want to mention here are two readily available new flicks that I absolutely loved, Ben Wheatley's In the Earth, and James Wan's Malignant.

 

I loved this flick. Wheatley seems to never disappoint - I even dug his recent remake of Hitchcock's Rebecca he did for Netflix - and this is a bit of a return to his previous dabblings in UK Occult/Folk Horror, only this time, with a technological twist I found very much needed. Folk Horror is becoming a bit like Steampunk, i.e. there's a checklist of images and themes associated with it, and all a filmmaker needs to do is add those ingredients to produce an entry in what is becoming a somewhat tiresome set of tropes. A Classic Horror Story attempted to do this as well, I believe, but failed, while Wheatley conjures what could easily be seen as a sister-work to some of what Warren Ellis did with his and Declan Shalvey's comic series Injection.

I had no interest in seeing this but changed my mind for review purposes (The Horror Vision's deep-dive on Malignant drops tomorrow). In a nutshell, the only things I liked about the first 33 minutes of this flick were DP Michael Burgess' cinematography and Joseph Bishara's score. Then, around 40 minutes I understood what Wan was doing and totally fell for the film. 

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Playlist:

The Cars - Eponymous

T. Rex - The Slider

Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting

Concrete Blonde - Eponymous

Electric Wizard - Dopethrone

Sleep - The Sciences

Ghost - Prequelle 

Powerplant - People in the Sun

Pearl Jam - Vs.

Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full

An Autumn for Crippled Children - The Long Goodbye

Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen

Anthrax - Spreading The Disease

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

Mastodon - Pushing the Tides (pre-release single)

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

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Card:

This makes sense - I've recently found a new path into the second Shadow Play book, which was very much needed. 

Happy Halloween 2019!!!

Yes, I post this song every year. I will continue to do so for the rest of my time on Earth. Nothing sets the Autumnal mood for me like this song, and this album (digipak version). My, how I miss Peter Steele and the boys.

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31 Days of Horror:

10/01: House of 1000 Corpses/31

10/02: Lords of Chaos

10/03: Creepshow Ep 2/Tales from the Crypt Ssn 1, Ep 1

10/04: IT Chapter 2, AHS 1984 Ep. 3

10/05: Bliss/VFW

10/06: Halloween III: Season of the Witch/Night of the Creeps/The Fog

10/07: Halloween 2018

10/08: Hell House, LLC

10/09: Dance of the Dead (Tobe Hooper; Masters of Horror Ssn 1 Ep 3)

10/10: Creepshow Episode 3

10/11: Jenifer (Dario Argento; Masters of Horror Ssn 1 Ep 4)

10/12: Poltergeist/Phenomena

10/13: AHS 1984 Ep 4/In the Tall Grass
10/14: Invasion of the Body Snatchers ('78)
10/15: Rabid (2019)
10/16: Wounds
10/17: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
10/18: Creepshow Episode 4
10/19: Ed Wood/AHS 1984 Ep. 5
10/20: Sinister/Sinister 2
10/21: Uncanny Annie
10/22: Scream
10/23: Simpsons 666: Treehouse of Horror
10/24: Jennifer's Body
10/25: Belzebuth/The Lighthouse/Halloween
10/26: Murder Party
10/27: AHS 1984 Ep. 6/Arsenic and Old Lace/The Fair Haired Child (Masters of Horror Ssn 1 Ep 9)
10/28: May
10/29: The Exorcist (Theatrical Cut)
10/30: Nightmare Cinema

I felt considerably saddened two nights ago when, for the second time in the last ten years, I watched William Friedkin's The Exorcist and felt nothing in the way of the fear that the film used to evoke in me. If you chart my experiences with Friedkin's masterpiece, there was my awareness of it as a kid; I'm certain I saw parts of it as a child, but I don't think I saw the entire film until somewhere in the early to mid-90s. I don't really remember that viewing, other than as an introduction. My critical faculties for film, in general, were burgeoning at the time, but still largely unsophisticated. Then, in the early 00s, I watched it with a friend, stoned out of my mind in a darkened room, and felt a very real fear that bordered on dread. This feeling stayed with me for at least a day afterward and inspired my oft-repeated axiom, "I don't believe in the Devil, except for three days after I watch The Exorcist."

This used to be exactly true.

I watched the film again in 2004 with the same friend and a few other fellows, all stoned, lights out, in the living room of the house some friends and I used to rent in the Beverly neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. I remember that viewing best because I was so freaked out during it I didn't want to get up and go to the restroom, which was about three feet beyond the television.

Fast forward to somewhere around 2009-2010. Living in Los Angeles now, I invited a few friends over to watch the Director's Cut of The Exorcist, the version I had never seen that contained the freaky and much-hyped Spider-walk sequence. After having talked it up for quite some time to everyone present, this was the first viewing where the film really did not affect me almost at all, certainly not the way it had in the past. That brooding, sustained fear is what I look for in 'scary movies.' I chalked this up to the Director's Cut potentially having different pacing.

After my viewing of the Theatrical Cut again two nights ago, I now find that it's not the film, it's me.

Most Horror films use jump scares, because they're fun and easy. Some use gore or disturbing premises and images to achieve their desired effect. FEW can create the air of menace I'm talking about here. The Exorcist - which although it appears no longer affects me I still consider the scariest movie ever made - definitely does it the best. The original Blair Witch Project also does this and has the advantage of real human fear being captured on film in places (no, I am not suggesting the marketing that the film was real is true. But BWP was partially shot with the three actors operating under false pretenses, and long before the hype of that film began, I read an article that talked about how the directors followed the actors through the woods for several days, employing a magnet to disrupt their compass and actually preying on them by making the strange noises in the middle of the night and, at one point, actually running up and attacking the tent while the actors were inside freaking out). More recently, during its original theatrical run, I was surprised to find James Wan's Insidious had some genuinely scary scenes - the baby monitor and the ghost that walks through the wall, in particular. In fact, several of Wan's franchise films have great moments of sustained fear - think of the two sisters reacting to the dark corner or the handclaps in The Conjuring - but the films usually also take a misstep along the way that neutralizes the overall effect. This year, as part of 31 Days of Horror, I was pleasantly surprised to find Hell House, LLC has some very real fear-inducing moments, and nary a misstep afterward. But off the top of my head, that's all I can think of (always looking for suggestions). They say familiarity breeds contempt, but I've never agreed with that. However, perhaps at this point, I've had the maximum number of viewings one can have with a legitimately fear-producing film before it loses its power. Not to mention, if you add all the lampooning of key scenes from The Exorcist in comedy sketches and pop culture, I'm afraid I may lay this one to rest.

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Playlist from the last few days:

Type O Negative - Dead Again
Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me
The Obsessed - Lunar Womb
Boy Harsher - Careful
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Billy Idol - Greatest Hits
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Deth Crux - Pears of Anguish  EP
Fields of the Nephilim - The Nephilim
The Sisters of Mercy - Floodland
Ministry - Psalm 69
Black Pumas - Eponymous
The Dead Milkmen - The King in Yellow
The Misfits - American Psycho

Card of the Day:

Is this banging my head against the wall or the edict I should move beyond my frustrations and continue to work toward my goal? Number two, always. 

Dead Man's Bones - In The Room Where You Sleep

This is a pretty freakin' creepy song as it is, even without my now associating it with James Wan's The Conjuring.

A friend turned me onto these guys briefly several years ago but they never made it into my rotation. Going to have to change that I think.

The Actual Farmhouse from The Conjuring

I saw The Conjuring yesterday. Fantastic! I've been waiting almost twenty years for someone to make a movie out of the stories I read in Ed and Lorraine Warren's The Demonologist. Finally it's happened and we once again have James Wan to thank for doing such a great job. I'm writing a piece about the Warrens for Joup, in the meantime I will post whatever I dig up in the research here, starting with this retrospective of the farmhouse the movie is based on, the most recent owner Norma Sutcliffe interviewed by the eldest daughter of the Perron family - the family whose experiences the movie is based on.