Gory Scorch Cretins

Many thanks to Mr. Brown, who clued me in on the existence of Matt Cameron's Gory Scorch Cretins, a solo album with Melvins as his backing band! Apparently, this came about after a Soundgarden tribute where Buzz and the boys did "Spoonman." All of this is news to me, and I've gotta say I was a little confused when I first saw the cover and title; was this a Melvins tribute? Nope. All original stuff, and they're all great. Furthermore, Cameron - long one of my favorite drummers - makes a fantastic singer! Every track on this is great; I chose this one because it reminds me a bit of Urge Overkill, and for some reason, when I played this for the first time yesterday, that really hit the spot as a final track on the album. 

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Watch:

After picking at it since September - primarily because the show disappeared from the platform I was watching it on and then reappeared on another  - I finally finished the second season of Bryan Fuller's Hannibal yesterday.

I watched the last six or so episodes in a fairly tight burst, and this one is really masterfully done. This isn't something most of the world doesn't already know; I'm ten years late to the game on this one, but man, it burns knowing there won't ever be a season four. 

One of the charms of the show is, of course, watching Hannibal in the kitchen, so I jumped at the chance to post the video above; special thanks to Moonshine Omega - their YouTube channel is an interesting collection of Food and Bevy-related videos from shows we love (there's a cool one of all drinks and food in Jessica Jones Season One!)

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Play:

Having just finished Torture Star/Puppet Combo's Night at the Gates of Hell, I am SUPER happy to get wind of a new game coming our way from them:

As usual, the 80s VHS/Video Nasties influence is a large part of the draw, however, I've really come to prefer Torture Star's games, so I am psyched to be getting another for Switch.

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Playlist:

Disappears - Pre Language

A Place to Bury Strangers - Exploding Head

Fear - Live for the Record

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

Baroness - Stone

Mastodon - Emperor of Sand

Matt Cameron - Gory Scorch Cretins

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Card:

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

• Six of Swords

• XVIII: The Moon

• Six of Cups

The intellectual benefits of balancing the mental and moral components of a conflict lead to emotional revelation. 

No idea what the hell this means at the moment, but as with most of my pulls on this trip (yes, I'm still in L.A.), I'm really just recording all this as data archives for later analyzation. 

Happy Birthday David Bowie!!!

Earth misses You, Starman.

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Watch:

Thanks to some friends, I finally saw David Ayer's 2012 End of Watch.

This one had been on my list for a long time. I remember not really caring about it when it hit theatres, but over the intervening years, several people have told me End of Watch is fantastic. They are correct. I'm still thinking about this flick two days later. Great performances from Peña and Gyllenhaal, and a very realistic portrayal of L.A. 

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Play:

I finally beat Torture Star's Night At the Gates of Hell! I'd been stuck on the final series of stages, an awesome jungle last stand totally inspired by Lucio Fulci's Zombie, but haven't had a heck of a lot of time to play. Fixed that on my flight into L.A. on Friday. I actually beat the game as the plane was landing - that was pretty weird. 

The super cool thing about this game was, upon beating it, two more games opened up in the main menu. The first I moved on to is Evil in the House of Dr. Fleshenstein. Thanks to Mild Goth Daddy you can see some of this one here:

Really digging this game to, even if once again, I'm a bit stumped. I love the environments of Puppet Combo/Torture Star games so much, though, that I don't mind just being immersed in the game, even if I am repeating the same levels over a multitude of times. 

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Playlist:

Drive Like Yehu - Yank Crime

Twin Tribes - Ceremony

Your Black Star - Sound From the Ground

Chris Brokaw - Puritan

Baroness - Stone

Deftones - Saturday Night Wrist

Burial - Untrue

Boards of Canada - Music Has The Right to Children

Fear - Live For the Record

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Card:

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

No time to actually interpret this today. I have a feeling it will be like that for a while, but I'm going to try and go back later and look at this. 

One For the Ages

 

One of the folks I follow on a certain social media app is Vinylchucks. I love this man's posts because, although our tastes don't completely align, he is very well-spoken and reminds me about a lot of music that I tend to forget. 

Case in point - I was always a HUGE fan of U2's War and, to a steadily decreasing degree their subsequent 80s records, but where 1991's Achtung Baby was the death knell for many old-school fans of the band, I thought it was a masterful cocoon from which an entirely new band emerged. Unfortunately, I don't really care for anything else that 'new' band did (subsequent records have their moments for me, but they are sparse, to say the least), but nothing can ever take away what this record and perhaps most specifically this song did for a fifteen-year-old stoner slowly getting into a much wider musical world.

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Watch:

If you didn't know it, a new Bobby Fingers video went up last week. As usual, it brings me joy on a level nothing else on the internet could ever hope to match.

As a Patron, I was able to view this three days ahead of the wide release, along with a secondary Patron-only video that shows him making the eyes for this absolute monstrosity!  This is the most talented person online right now, folks, and I'm proud to have contributed funds to the making of this.

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Play:

With the very sparse time I have in my life for gaming, I'm still hovering at what I think is the final stage of Torture Star/Puppet Combo's Night At the Gates of Hell. I love this game, and I'm learning that the games Torture Star for the Puppet Combo banner are my favorite. Add to this my immovable position at 80% through the Pilgrimage of the first Blasphemous game, and I don't really have time for anything new on Switch. That's fine because I'd rather wait until the new Horror Metroidvania The Last Faith goes on sale before I buy it anyway. 

But oh yes, I will be buying it.

This definitely looks like they 'skinned' Blasphemous, but I don't care. Talk about some stellar imagery! My cohost on The Horror Vision, Butcher, was one of the original backers of the Kickstarter campaign for this, so he's already playing. Butcher reports the game play is taking some getting used to, as it is closer to Castlevania than Blasphemous, but like me, he's a sucker for this type of game and its nightmarish, Horror imagery.

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Playlist:

Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun

Helmet - Left

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Blood Lust

Turquoise Moon - The Sunset City

The Reverend Horton Heat - Whole New Life

The Smiths - Louder Than Bombs

Deftones - Ohms

Red Lorry Yellow Lorry - Talk About the Weather

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Slaughter On First Avenue

Chelsea Wolfe - Abyss

Allegaeon - Apoptosis

††† - Good Night, God Bless, I Love U, Delete

André 3000 - New Blue Sun

Rodney Crowell - Triage

Aerosmith - Same Old Song and Dance (single)

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Six of Swords - Balancing Relationships

• Five of Pentacles - Earthly Conflict

• Ten of Pentacles - Ending an Earthly Concern

There are a few interpretations today's cards indicate, but chief among them is an ending to the big issue in my life at the moment - moving my parents from Chicago down to Tennessee by us. I have earnest money to drop off this week on their behalf; however, a last-minute delay in closing their house's sale has everyone in the family on edge. While I remain optimistic, this is really messing with my folks, as the purchase of the house they found down here is contingent on the sale of their house (contingent on a final inspection for radon and termites, as well, but let's cross one bridge at a time, eh?). The spread above makes me think I need to trust in my optimism. 

Tonight At the Gates of Hell, Jessica

 

From Dan O'Bannon's classic Return of the Living Dead. SSQ is a band I know nothing about but damned if this song doesn't fit its scene in the movie like a glove. Or lack thereof. Interesting note, singer Stacey Q. is the artist behind the 1986 hit single "Two of Hearts," which was in heavy rotation on popular radio when I was ten years old and subsequently floats to the surface of my brain a couple times a month (at least) ever since. That's the power of radio, ladies and gentlemen.

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31 Days of Halloween:

John D. Hancock's 1971 Let's Scare Jessica to Death is a film I've been meaning to watch for years, and I finally got around to it yesterday afternoon. Here's a trailer for the remastered version Scream Factory put out a few years ago:

I didn't love this film the way some of my Letterbxd compatriots do, however, it's a fairly strong entry into the "urban flight" subgenre of the late 60s/early 70s. It's interesting to note that what I'm referring to as "urban flight" really prefigures the 70s error of Folk Horror. This was a direct reaction to a major societal shift in America at that time, where white people who lived in urban areas did what many white people do and overreacted to the influx of minority populations, fleeing "Back to nature" in more rural areas of the country. In the vernacular of the day, this was often referred to as "White Flight," or perhaps more generously, Urban Flight. There's an absolutely killer article by Devin Faraci about this disguised as an analysis of Michael Winner's 1974 film Death Wish in the back of Brubaker and Phillips's Kill or Be Killed, issue number one. Unfortunately, the extras in Brubaker/Phillips's monthlies generally do not get included in the collected editions, so if you're interested, you'd have to hunt this down in a back-issue bin. 

Perhaps as fitting dessert for being racist little shits, 70s Folk Horror often (but not always) arises from transplanting said fleeing urbanites to a rural setting that ultimately has something evil to hide. The evil almost always ties into some kind of Pagan or Naturalism, so I'm not really sure what the message is there other than "be afraid of everything." That said,  this formula worked for a while. More prevalent in novels that were then sometimes adapted to film, the best example of this Urban Flight/Folk Horror that I know of is Tom Tryon's Harvest Home, published in 1973 and was adapted into a 1973 tv miniseries in 1978. I have not yet felt the urge to track down the adaptation, seeing as I felt the novel was so good, to see it reworked for television felt... cheap to me. I might be wrong; maybe it's a banger. But I doubt it.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death definitely uses this same idea, however, I enjoyed the fact that this film is considerably more ambiguous about its rules and even sets up a correlation to a classic monster I did not see coming. Some of the narrative inner monologue we hear grows a bit tiresome, even if there is a question of its veracity, but I'm nitpicking here. The two things about this one I loved the most were A) Orville Stoeber's score, which predates Carl Zittrer's similar score for Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things by ten months and had to have been an influence on it. Children Shouldn't Play's score is one of my all-time favorite scores, so it should be no surprise to hear that the music was what finally roped me into watching this one. B) Speaking of influencing other films I love, Jessica also predates Gary Sherman's Dead and Buried by a decade, and there is no doubt Sherman drew from Jessica in the creation of his Seaside Horror classic. 

Alright, enough of the impromptu history lesson; here's the current tally for my 31 Days of Halloween:

1) When Evil Lurks/VHS 85/Adam Chaplin

2) Tales From the Crypt Ssn 1, Ep 6 "Collection Complete"

3) VHS

4) All You Need is Death

5) Slashers (2001)

6) The Beyond/Phenomena

7) The Convent

8) Evil Dead 2

9) The Autopsy of Jane Doe

10) Totally Killer

11) Ritual (Joko Anwar)/The Final Terror/Grave Robbers

12) Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (w/Joe Bob)

13) Never Hike Alone/Never Hike in the Snow/Never Hike Alone 2

14) Puppetman

15) Creepshow Season 4 Episode 1

16) Return of the Living Dead

17) Don't Look Now

18) When Evil Lurks

19) Barbarian

20) Demons 2/All Hallows Eve

21) May

22) Let's Scare Jessica To Death

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Play:

Puppet Combo/Torture Star's Night at the Gates of Hell hit Switch a few months back, and other than the initial release, I don't think I've posted anything else because I haven't had a lot of time to play the game. Last night, I dug in for about two hours and really immersed myself in it. Verdict?

This might be my favorite of the 80s Horror-themed games these folks have released so far (nothing's coming close to No One Lives Under the Lighthouse).

The game goes all-in on 80s Horror tropes by even including nudity! I mean, that was not something I'd ever expected to see in a game, but topless women are indeed one of the major ingredients in 80s Horror, so hats off for taking it that far (while it's possible that, since before buying a Switch in 2022 I had not played a video game since the original Nintendo, I am just being naive and nudity filtered into the gaming experience a long time ago, but I doubt it). Also, the violence and gore are cranked to ten, which makes sense - the creators have stated this game is a love letter to the films of Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei, so again, to fully expand on the quantifiable criteria of those films, you can't really half-ass the gore. And as usual with Puppet Combo/Torture Star, the sound is exquisite and a major part of the scares in this one. Like Nun Massacre, Night at the Gates of Hell conjures an anxiety that I haven't felt in Horror since I was a kid watching many of the films I love for the first time.

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Playlist:

Halloween Spotify Playlist

Rein - Reincarnated

Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom

Twin Temple - God is Dead

Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

Orville Peck - Bronco

Billy Joel - The Stranger

Tear for Fears - Songs From the Big Chair

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - Lawless OST

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Card:

I'm going to Missi's Raven Deck for a single card this morning; just want a big picture at the moment:

Trump XIV is Art in the Crowley/Harris deck, and that's generally how I think of it. However, here I'd have to say the message is clear and has way more to do with the actual act of "Tempering," as in expectations. After a wonderful but exhausting weekend with my sister, her husband and my parents in town looking for houses, I think we're all caught up in the panic of moving on short notice (they have to be out by November 15th) and not seeing things for how they actually are. My parents especially need to temper their expectations of how this is going to change their lives, but also, I also think the rest of us have to work with them on that while adjusting our own sense of how this is going to go. I have no doubt they will find 'the right' house, however, it's going to take more time than they currently have. This means accepting the idea of putting their things in storage and having them move in with us for a bit, so they can actually see houses here without having to drive down for the weekend and then leave again. 

Druids - Shadow Work

 

 From Druids' 2022 Shadow Work, an album I just discovered and which is blowing me away. Released via The Ocean's Pelagic Records, these guys fit that aesthetic like a glove, although I'd say they're a bit closer in sound to super stoner group Shrinebuilder than the Post-Metal of The Ocean. Either way, this entire record is fabulous, so it was tough to choose a track to post. Luckily, Pelagic has a full stream up. You can order this one direct from the label's website HERE.

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NCBD:

Another short but sweet NCBD. Here are my picks:

Black Tape's fourth and final issue! I still haven't read three, so sometime soon I'll sit down and burn through the entire arc. Love that Shout At the Devil homage cover!

Still one of my favorite reads every month now that the status quo has resumed, Boss and Rosenberg's What's the Furthest Place From Here has to be the single most intriguing 'world' I've come across in a comic in a long time. 

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Play:

Here's a hilarious little commercial Puppet Combo made for their summer sale, which began yesterday!

 

I can't play any of this stuff on my computer, otherwise, the "Buy All" for $25 would be a total no-brainer! The direct link to the sale on Puppet Combo/Torture Star's website is HERE.

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Playlist:

The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro

Spotlights - Alchemy for the Dead

Druids - Spirit Compass (single)

Druids - Shadow Work

Final Light - Eponymous

Nun Gun - Mondo Decay

Ganser - Just Look At That Sky

Ganser live Audiotree Session

          

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Eight of Pentacles (Disks) - Transformation of Earthly materials/goals

• 14 Temperance - Art in Thoth, this often denotes a mixing of two or more different ethos to create the desired result. In this case, I'd read it as branching out from a safe routine/style.

• 17 The Star - Totality and fulfillment. 

I think this is a direct reference to something I just started working on. I'm taking an old collaborative project from 2018 and stripping it of the ideas that were created jointly with someone else, trying to extract the prose and rework it into a High School Giallo I've been thinking about for at least as long. There's a lot of good prose that I wrote in this - the other party was involved conceptually and with story, but not with any of the actual writing. There's a good 100k words - a lot of it was the product of what I since learned was overzealous 'word stuffing,' but a lot of it is good. So why waste it? Why not transform that Art into a lucrative project?

 

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Lighthouse Horror as a Subgenre

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First, some appropriate music to set the tone:

 

As I originally mentioned in an earlier post today, seeing the trailer for Torture Star/Marevo Collective's upcoming (May 18th!) new game No One Lives Under the Lighthouse, I felt compelled to talk a bit more about Lighthouse Horror as a burgeoning Subgenre. Yeah, I know it's pretty easy to get carried away with subgenres, but I feel like this is becoming as legitimate a 'thing' and there's a wealth of great entries that people interested should know about. 

First: What a spectacular setting, right?  I mean, an abandoned lighthouse island with rocky crags and descending spiral staircases lends itself so well to Horror that I just feel this is made to be. No or limited electricity, an ever-present "man vs. nature" throughline, pervading darkness and let's not forget the isolation - Oh! the isolation! Such tasty morsels for a Horror story to lean into. 

Lighthouse Horror is interesting because there's a fairly small and finite number of permutations to get the ball rolling. Either someone is being shipped out to a lighthouse because the operator has gone missing/mad/died, or the characters are rotating in for their shift and something horrific transpires. The isolation is a large part of the Horror, and keeping this in mind, the setting is perhaps optimum for slow-burn formulas, especially where the characters' psychological state becomes increasingly unmoored, slowly sinking them into madness. 

Being that the entire purpose of the lighthouse as a structure is to keep away the darkness and act as a beacon to those traveling through it, the subgenre is also ready-made for metaphors, and Lovecraftian sea monsters slot into these tales nicely as well, whether you consider them metaphors or not.

The argument for adding Lighthouse Horror as a subgenre begins, as far as I can tell, in 2017. That's the year Cold Skin by Xavier Gens came out. This takes a Lovecraftian route with its use of a lighthouse location to tell a Horror tale, and it fits like a glove! 

From there, of course, Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse came out just two years later in 2019. This takes the more psychological route with the location, although there are folks that argue there are some Lovecraftian moments sprinkled throughout, just in a decidedly more subtle. The "Can I Play With Madness" themes of this film prove pretty aggressive by the end, and as I've said on this page before, I can't think of a better example of the admittedly overused logline, "A slow descent into Madness."

More recently, Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino kicked off their Bone Orchard Mythos with The Passage, a graphic novel that takes place entirely on a lighthouse island and contains some genuinely haunting images. There are overarching monstrous themes in the Boneyard Mythos - which is still developing in subsequent series - and while I'd say the aspirations are Lovecraft-level, this is 100% Lemire and Sorrentino's own thing, which is refreshing. There are some images in The Passage that rank as the most effective I've seen in a Horror Graphic Novel since Pornsak Pichetshote's Infidel and some very smart uses of a drone to deliver them.

What route will No One Lives Under the Lighthouse take? With first-person games a perfect vehicle to elicit very real paranoic responses from their players, this might be the closest some get to a real lighthouse Horror experience ourselves (let's hope so!) 

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Ghost of Vroom!

New music from Mike Doughty's Ghost of Vroom! If you're a Soul Coughing fan like I am, this is the closest thing to that sound Doughty's done since their breakup back in, well, a loooong time ago. The new album, Ghost of Vroom 3 is out later this year, although no hard date has been announced.

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Watch:

Rewatched Kevin Phillips' Super Dark Times on Shudder last night. Man, this one is heavy.

I'm not going to post a trailer because I think it's best to go in cold on this one. Yes, that's my recommendation for every movie, however, we can't always control that. This one is from 2017, so if you haven't seen it you may already have an idea what it's about. If not, just watch it. Damn.

What I will say is A) Kevin Phillips NAILS high school. I mean, he just crushed it - so many little non-sequitur moments that surround the characters and mean nothing other than to reinforce where our minds are at this age. Anger, Angst and Rebellion. "No I don't need your fucking help, lady!" one background character screams at one point, and it's just spot fucking on. B) This deals with a trauma that an event in my life in high school shares some DNA with. Phillips nails the state of mind that followed it. Again, he CRUSHED it.

 

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Play:

Ask and ye shall receive: new Puppet Combo-like game No One Lives Under the Lighthouse by Torture Star and Marevo Collective hits a bunch of platforms - Switch included - this month!

 

Spooky AF! There are some images in this trailer that seared into my brain the moment they appeared on screen (@1:22 - WTF???). What a spectacular setting; an abandoned lighthouse island with rocky crags and descending spiral staircases lends itself so well to this aesthetic. I can't wait to play this game!

NOTE: if you read this post earlier and remembered it being longer, fret not! You are correct - I've expanded my "Lighthouse Horror as a burgeoning subgenre thoughts in a separate post HERE.

No One Lives Under the Lighthouse is out May 18th!

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Playlist:

Sleep - The Sciences

Windhand - Eternal Return

Earth - Live at Third Man Records

Dorthia Cottrell - Death Folk Country

The Sword - Warp Riders

Bongripper - Satan (single)

Crowbar - Planets Collide (single)

Gaupa - Myriad

Witchfinder - Hazy Rites

Witchfinder - Forgotten Mansion

            

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• 20 Judgement is Aeon in Crowley and Harris's Thoth deck. Regardless of which you go with, this is a card of Redemption. It also suggests a pivotal sequence and the holography of cause/effect.

• Seven of Pentacles is a card that denotes Victory/Completion of Earthly matters

• Queen of Pentacles, in this particular case, is offering the advice that I actually stop thinking with my emotions on Earthly matters and begin applying a more staunch lens of discernment.

In other words - I'm spending too much money on vinyl. 

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