Julia Ducournea's Alpha!!!

Writing this Tuesday at 11L12 AM CST. Starting my first morning on the Southside with Black Sabbath's Paranoid. This is a regular ritual when I return to the soil from whence I came - Sabbath helps me reconnect to this area; I literally feel the harmonization singing in my blood. 

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Watch:

Yesterday, my Horror Vision cohost Missi and I hit a local big-box to see Julia Ducournau's new film, Alpha. I walked in knowing NOTHING and, as usual, that was the best way to go in.

Alpha is an arduous journey that had me squirming and contorting in my seat for its entire run time. The subject matter was a surprise to me, as was the unrelenting twist of the mundane into horrific body horror beyond almost what I could stand. It's not a gory film or a disturbing film in any capacity I could have expected. My elevator pitch would be, "Requiem for a Dream done by David Cronenberg if he were French." That's a bit of a cop out, but most elevator pitches are. Suffice it to say, this will easily be one of the 'best' films I see this year. 

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NCBD:

I am out of town, and so I won't be bringing any of my books home to read this week. I will be swinging into Amazing Fanasy sometime this week, so there may be an addendum post, but here's all the great stuff I will have waiting for me upon my return to Clarksville:

I said this on a recent episode of Drinking with Comics, but it kind of blows my mind that for as long as I've been a devoted, weekly comic reader (since July of 1986), forty years on, most of my pull list are titles based on 80s childhood IPs that I love.  There have certainly been titles for all of these characters running most of those forty years, but it wasn't until Robert Kirkman (of course) acquired them that I actually started reading them. 

Continuing the longest-running continuity the Turtles have ever had! I know they zeroed out the count back in 2024, but I still look at this by the 'Legacy' number, which would be issue 177. And while there's definitely a modicum of status quo creeping back in (Splinter's alive (I think), the four brothers are back together as a team (I think!), all the Jenika and mutanttown characters have been moved to their own books (which I don't read), I'm still pretty pleased with how this is going.

On our way to issue 50! No lie - I'm going to have to reread a lot of these "history" issues, but that's fine. SIKTC remains a modern, non-childhood favorite. In fact, my childhood might not have made it out of this book's world alive!

Tim Seely, Ryan O'Nan, Paolo Armitano and crew's Pretty Hate Machine will be my first comic from Mad Cave Studios, and how could I not buy this? Look at that cover - gnarly! And then, what was the other eye catcher... oh yeah. The title! Naming comics of movies/novels off of popular music titles is a tricky gambit, but I will give this one a fair shake because... finger knives!

Speaking of needing a reread to reorient myself, year. That's this one, too. Regardless, can't wait to jump back in and reexperience all the steeping paranoia and terror that is The House At... series.

Last week's Baroness one-shot that kicked off the month-long Silent Missions "Event" exceeded my expectations by a mile. I've always loved the Crimson Guards - especially Larry Hama's CGs with their plastic surgery, swappable domestic identities - so I'm fully expecting this to be on par.

And we close this week with the latest issue of Larry Hama's long-running ARAH. Last issue was probably my favorite Joe comic in a long time, and that makes sense. I dig the more fantastical elements of the Energon Universe Joe book, but nothing beats that time-tested Hama realism. While I haven't read this book since circa 1991, coming back to it with issue 300 showed me that some more SciFi elements had snuck in here, too, and it's always great to get something that reminds me of why I loved this book as a kid.

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Playlist:

Black Sabbath - Paranoid

Black Sabbath - Technical Ecstasy

Blood Mother - The Night Fires (single)

Gylt - I Will Commit A Holy Crime: Tandem

Young Widows - Power Sucker

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Tender Prey

Jozef Van Wissem - Praise Shall Sound From Shore To Shore... (single)

Afghan Whigs - House of I (single)

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Card:

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

• VII: The Chariot

• Pince of Wands

• Princess of Wands

Fast action results in swift and positive results.

Gylt - I Will Commit A Holy Crime: Tandem

From their 2024 album, I Will Commit A Holy Crime: Tandem, which you can order from their Bandcamp HERE.

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Watch:

Holy smokes! How did I miss the trailer for Julia Ducournau's third movie, Alpha, when it dropped last month? Here it is, and I'm happy to say this follows Neon's trend of assembling trailers that show me enough to make me want to see the movie (I would see anything Ms. Ducournau without knowing anything other than her name is attached), but not in any way that tells me anything substantial about the film. Yay Neon!

This looks remarkable. Ducournau's voice is so strong it permeates every shot herein.

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Read:

With the year coming to a close and my reading all over the place, I didn't want to start another novel, per se, but this is the time of the year I read a lot, so I cracked out another of the Weird Tales I purchased back in May. 

This is the Thomas Ligotti issue, back from around the time Ligotti first exploded on the Weird/Horror literary scene. Opening story, "Netherscurial" is a great example of why Ligotti was heraled early on as a kind of wünderkind - so many familiar, Lovecraftian tropes, all turned on their ear and used to build something new and truly horrifying. 

"The problem is that such supernatural inventions are indeed quite difficult to imagine. So often they fail to materialize in the mind, to take on a mental texture, and thus remain unfelt as anything but an abstract monster of metaphysics? an elegant or awkward schematic that cannot rise from the paper to touch us. Of course, we do need to keep a certain distance from such specters as Nethescurial, but this is usually provided by the medium of words as such, which ensnare all kinds of fantastic creatures before they can tear us body and soul. (And yet the words of this particular manuscript seem rather weak in this regard, possibly because they are only the drab green scratchings of a human hand and not the heavy mesh of black type.) 

But we do want to get close enough to feel the foul breath of these beasts, or to see them as prehistoric leviathans circling about the tiny island on which we have taken refuge. Even if we are incapable of a sincere belief in ancient cults and their unheard of idols, even if these pseudonymous adventurers and archaeologists appear to be mere shadows on a wall, and even if strange houses on remote islands are of shaky construction, there may still be a power in these things that threatens us like a bad dream. And this power emanates not so much from within the tale as it does from somewhere behind it, someplace of infinite darkness and ubiquitous evil in which we may walk unaware."

The story is also peppered with truly epic and disturbing illustrations by Harry O. Morris.

You can read the full story on Ligotti's website HERE.

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Playlist:

Oliver Nelson - Stolen Moments (single)

Blut Aus Nord - Ethereal Horizons

Deftones - private music

Dreamkid - Daggers

Gylt - Desk Jockey (single)

Weird Studies - Episode 50: Demogorgon; On Stranger Things

Ministry - HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES

Steve Miller Band - Greatest Hits

Prince - Purple Rain

Billy Joel - Greatest Hits

Replacements - Tim

David Bowie - Low

Tim Curry - I Do the Rock (single)

Bakermat - The Ringmaster

Jungle - Volcano

Foo Fights Greatest Hits

Foo Fighters - Rumors

Hatebeak - Number of the Beak

Soul Coughing - "Ruby Vroom' Remixes

Talking Heads - Remain in Light

Soundgarden - Superunknown

Blue Meanies - Full Throttle

Southern Mysteries Podcast - Episode 179: The Mystery of Diamond Bessie

Southern Mysteries Podcast - Episode 178: Little Boy Lost

Southern Mysteries Podcast - Episode 176: The Mystery of the Surrency Poltergeist

Southern Mysteries Podcast - Episode 173: The Forgotten Eleven of New Orleans

Weird Studies - Episode 143: On UFOs

AVTT/PTTN - The Avett Brothers & Mike Patton

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Light House

 

I'd completely forgotten about Future Islands until Julia Ducournea's Titane put them back in my head by using "Light House", from their 2014 4AD release Singles.

 

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Play:

A couple years ago, I totally missed out on Mixtape Massacre. Now, the creators of that have a new game on Kickstarter, and by the looks of it, this one is a definite for me:

I'm really trying not to spend $$ on stuff like this, so there's a bit of a tug-o-war going on as I watch this. We'll see. Either way, I wanted to spread the word.

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Playlist:

Allegaeon - Into Embers (pre-release single)

Allegaeon - Apoptosis

Allegaeon -Proponent for Sentience

Megadeth - Rust in Peace

Converge and Chelsea Wolfe - Blood Moon I (pre-release singles)

The Besnard Lakes - A Coliseum Complex Museum

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - The Good Son

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - Abattoir Blues

Lower Dens - Escape From Evil

The Neverly Boys - The Dark Side of Everything

TVOTR - Return to Cookie Mountain

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Card:

Two days in a row, I receive positive reinforcement for a series of investments.