Although I'd been teasing it for a few days, yesterday I finally fell down the Type O Negative well. It felt GREAT. I swear, I'm not one to say that any one band is 'my favorite band,' but if there's a band that fits 'me' best, it's most likley Type O. I miss them intensely.
I'll take this opportunity to mention that I've dropped the 'Isolation' title from the blog because between two outings to the Drive-In with Ray, the hotel we stayed in after Saturday's Lynch Triple feature (terrifying - imagine 100+ weather and a courtyard with a pool thronged with people, roving packs of maskless children, etc. Fucking petri dish), and visiting Butcher and his family, the isolation phase has been broken and, even if I remain isolated again going forward, that particular spell is broken. I'm still undecided if I will change the name of the blog again. We'll see.
31 Days of Halloween:
1) Tales of Halloween: Sweet Tooth/The Wolf Man (1941)
2) From Beyond/Monsterland: Port Fourchon, Louisiana/Tales of Halloween: The Night Billy Raised Hell/Tales of Halloween: Trick
3) Mulholland Drive/Creepshow (1982): The Crate
4) Waxwork
5) Synchronic/Bad Hair
6) Dolls
7) Lovecraft Country Ep. 8/Tales of Halloween: The Weak and the Wicken/Tales of Halloween: The Grim Grinning Ghost
Soon:
Chalk this one up to something I just heard mentioned on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast but never actually thought would be made. Via the mighty Bloody Disgusting, Tim Hunter - who is listed here as "a director of Breaking Bad" and, while that is accurate, a Director I have loved since I saw his 1986 flick River's Edge, which, like Smiley Face Killers, stares Crispin Glover, another total draw for me. Hunter has mostly done TV through the years, but its been a lot of the stuff I like. Back in high school, when I first saw River's Edge, his name was already known to me by way of the three stellar episodes of Twin Peaks Season Two he directed. From there, the list includes a lot, but specific to my viewing, Deadwood, AHS, and yes, Breaking Bad. Anyway, this trailer isn't blowing me away, but I'll definitely be checking this one out on VOD come December 8th, just to support it.
Playlist:
Death Individual Thought Patterns
Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me
Deftones - Ohms
Type O Negative - World Coming Down
Type O Negative - October Rust
Type O Negative - The Origin of the Feces
Type O Negative - Dead Again
The Ocean - Phanerozoic II
Kevin Ayers - The Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories
Card:
Perhaps a little bit of interior harmony as I (hopefully) head in to a mellower day at the Biorepository and have begun working on the book again, Writer's Block be damned. (It's not Writer's Block, it's exhaustion).
I'm not really a Van Halen fan, and as revolutionary as Eddie Van Halen's guitar style was at the time Van Halen's eponymous debut hit the world, he really just played 'Eruption' over and over for the rest of his career. That's not exactly true, but it's not exactly wrong, either. Doesn't matter: first rock album I ever owned was 1984, and I've loved it ever since. The singles are all gold, but the deep cuts are infinitely better, imo. I almost posted Drop Dead Legs here, but instead I went with Top Jimmy just because I think the intro guitar is some of the most under-stated playing EVH ever did, and that makes it even more awesome. If there's a stage in Heaven, Eddie's gonna take a turn.
31 Days of Halloween:
I've been flim-flamming between calling this segment "31 Days of Horror" and "31 Days of Halloween," but I think I'm going to finally settle on the latter, simply because my activities of the last few days have put me in situations where my entries for the day skew outside the realm of Horror. My definition Horror is definitely open to a lot of interpretation, but I feel like I'm really pushing the envelope including Mulholland Drive and Synchronic. So Halloween works a lot better this year.
Monday night, my Horror Vision co-host Ray and I hit our final night of Beyondfest 2020 programming at the Mission Tiki Drive-In with the West Coast Premiere of the looong-awaited new film from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Synchronic is everything I thought it would be and more, but it also surprised me. These guys are great filmmakers who will no doubt become Nolan-level in time, and I feel privileged to have now seen the film that I believe will bridge the 'Independent' era of their career with what comes next.
Also, Monday night was a double-feature, and Ray and I were also lucky enough to catch the premiere of Justin Simien's new film Bad Hair:
Bad Hair premieres on HULU on October 23rd, and it's a damn good time. If you look up in the right hand corner of this page, you'll see my little Spotify widget has updated with our quick-take, spoiler-free review of both these films.
Finally, last night K and I sat down to watch a flick she's been wanting me to see for a few months now, ever since it popped up on Prime. And what I realized once the film began is, even though I'd been seeing the VHS cover art since I was a little kid, I had completely missed or forgotten that Dolls is a Stuart Gordon film! This, of course, won me over immediately, as did the film, which is excellent in that 'the storm forced us to knock on the door of the creepy old mansion and now we're all being picked off one by one' way that keeps coming up lately, whether it be in Dolls, April Fool's Day, or Clue, all excellent films in my humble opinion. Also, I'm really making an attempt to watch some new stuff this year, instead of just filling the month with my standard October films. This and The Wolf Man were good starts in that direction.
1) The Wolf Man
2) From Beyond/Monsterland: Port Fourchon, Louisiana
3) Mulholland Drive/Creepshow (1982): The Crate
4) Waxwork
5) Synchronic/Bad Hair
6) Dolls
Playlist:
Deftones - Ohms
The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once
Mastodon - Leviathan
Ainoma - Necropolis
Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me
Van Halen - 1984
Mastodon - Medium Rarities
Fear Factory - Demanufacture
Card:
Cause and Effect: I've been unable to right for about a week, and my self-esteem is in the toilet. Go figure.
I'd never head of Night Club before when this track from their forthcoming album Die Die Lullaby showed up in my youtube feed. The aesthetic is obviously in my wheel house, so it caught my eye. After watching the video, I can say I dig the visuals but am unconvinced by the music. Still, might not be my thing exactly, but I was intrigued enough to google them, where I found Night Club did the music for a show I have never seen but K has been wanting to show me since we met, Moonbeam City. This put the band in my, "need to know more" category. In the meantime, if you're so inclined, pre-orders for the new album can be had HERE.
Love the close-up of the zombie hand clap, and the appropriation of the Brady Bunch squares.
31 Days of Horror:
Saturday night, K and I hit the Beyondfest David Lynch triple feature at the Mission Tiki Drive-in Movie Theatre. Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and Lost Highway, however, we only stayed for the first two, the second of which ended about 12:30 AM and precipitated us returning to our hotel - a freakish experience in COVID times, let me tell you - in time to catch the Hal Holbrook-starring segment "The Crate", from 1982's Creepshow on some cable network's month of Halloween flix.
1) The Wolf Man
2) From Beyond/Monsterland: Port Fourchon, Louisiana
3) Mulholland Drive/Creepshow (1982): The Crate
4) Waxwork
Playlist:
X - Los Angeles
Darkness Brings the Cold - Devil Swank, Vol. 1
Misfits - Collection II
Metallica - Master of Puppets
Styx - Pieces of Eight
The Runaways - Queens of Noise
Kevin Ayers - The Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories
Rupert Lally - Where the Dark Speaks
Card:
This could be a reference to the weird cycle I find myself in with writing at the moment - a cycle preventing me from doing much of it - or to the film I'm headed out to see tonight at Beyondfest's Mission Tiki Drive-In screening of Benson and Moorhead's Synchronic, which I'm thinking is a continuation of the world they began in Resolution and The Endless, and involved loops, reiterations, and cosmic comeuppance. Maybe it's both.
I think calling Rupert Lally's Where the Dark Speaks a 'Stephen King' tribute is both accurate and an understatement. In the notes for this record (which you can read in full HERE), Lally beautifully states, "Stephen King's books took me to places so vivid it seemed like I'd actually been there," and when you listen to the tracks on this record, the depths of Lally's travels into the Kingverse show. However, the record also completely stands on its own as a beautiful little slice of atmosphericic Heaven, perfect for October and the Halloween run-up.
But back to the King...
All the songs on Where the Dark Speaks are named after places from King novels - whether it's the Marsten House from Salem's Lot, the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, or, from a more recent novel, The Institute, from King's 2019 novel of the same name, these tracks submerge you in Lally's imagination's interpretation of King's work, and it's glorious!
Finally, look at that cover art, by Eric Adrian Lee - wow! Check out his website, too, for more glorious retro and wholly original visual landscapes.
New Meg Myers? Yes! Wow, Ms. Myers music just keeps getting more lush and interesting. This is obviously very produced, almost to the point that it sounds like a pop queen's record, except her song writing continues along a track that puts her as a natural heir to the lineage that Kate Bush began and Tori Amos continued. Image that: a pop Kate Bush. Actually, as luck would have it, we don't have to imagine it, because here it is.
Pre-order the new album out November 11th on Sumerian Records HERE.
News:
Being that I run a small business, really a micro business at this point, I'll always use this space to promote what The Horror Vision/THV Press is up to. Most recently, I've branched out into THV as a boutique record label. That's right. There is some new music on the horizon, but first up, I've finally taken steps to get the albums I did with Darkness Brings the Cold onto streaming platforms. First up, Darkness Brings the Cold - Devil Swank, Vol. 1 is now on all streaming platforms. Here's a link to Apple Musicand I've updated the widgets on the right hand side of this page with a Spotify widget.
Watch:
Thursday night was a HUGE event viewing night for K and I. We started with the Raised By Wolves Season One Finale. This is now one of my favorite shows going, as it is absolutely unlike anything I have ever seen before. Also, I once again have a teeny tiny sneaking suspicion this may end up tying into the Prometheus/Alien Universe. It doesn't matter if it does or not - hell, at this point, I'd overall probably rather it didn't. But either way, I love this show. Here's the opening credit sequence, with music by Ben Frost, who I am thrilled to see moving on from scoring Netflix's Dark to something as high profile as this.
After Raised By Wolves, we changed it up and did the South Park Pandemic Special. South Park is often hit or miss with me, and I'm not a die hard. Season 19 - the introduction of PC Principal was one of the most genius satires I've ever seen, and this special is right up near it. Maybe I just really needed to laugh, but there was one scene that I honestly believe made me laugh harder than I have ever laughed before. It felt GOOD.
Here's the opening musical number, I Love You Social Distancing, which I guess could kind of be a theme song for this blog:
31 Days of Halloween:
Also over the last two nights, we started our 31 Days of Halloween ritual, month-long viewing. This year, I thought I'd work in as many short films as I could, and as such, it occurred to me to finally take care of a little unfinished business.
I've watched The October Society's Tales of Halloween several times now and never taken to it, and just seems completely insane to me because I love pretty much every director who had a hand in making this anthology. So to kick the first two nights off this year, we began taking one or two shorts a night, as kind of a throwback to old school theater experiences, where cartoons or serialized pulp adventures would precede the feature. First up then was David Parker's Sweet Tooth on Thursday, with Adam Gierasch's Trick and my favorite thus far, Darren Lynn Bousman's The Night Billy Raised Hell.
Moving on to features, we capped Thursday with George Waggner's original, 1941 The Wolf Man. A perfect film to kick off this year's October viewing, especially with a full moon that night (and another coming on the 31st; oh 2020, what sights you have to show us).
Friday was a half day from work, and I continued the 31 Days with an afternoon viewing of Stuart Gordon's From Beyond. I had no idea this was coming to Shudder, so the moment I saw it in the Just Added section, I hit play. This one is even better than I remembered it - first and only viewing was quite some time ago - like maybe 20 years. From Beyond is a practical FX extravaganza, and Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, and Ted Sorel act their asses off!
Next, HULU premiered their new series Monsterland on Friday. I know I've talked about this in these pages ad nauseam, but now that it's here, I'm overjoyed. Monsterland is, of course, an adaptation of Nathan Ballingrud's first collection of short stories, North American Lake Monsters. I've been waiting for this one since I got to meet Babak Anvari, the Director of Annapurna Pictures' first adaptation of Mr. Ballingrud's novella The Visible Filth, 2019's Wounds, at Scream Fest last year.During my brief discourse with Mr. Anvari - super nice chap, btw - we geeked out over Ballingrud's writing and he excitedly mentioned this series was en route.
The first episode, Port Fourchon, Louisiana, adapts the first story in the book, You Go Where it Takes You. I really think Bloody Disgusting/Fangoria writer Megan Navarro drove the proverbial nail in the palm when she wrote of the show, "... cuts straight to the heart of the human condition and at its ugliest and most hopeless. It's not the monsters that provide the horror here, but humanity." (Full article HERE). This is definitely a downbeat, philosophically reflection on humanity and the corners we like to paint ourselves into.
Let's start the count:
1) The Wolf Man
2) From Beyond/Monsterland: Port Fourchon, Louisiana
Playlist:
Deftones - Ohms
Deftones - Diamond Eyes
Sepultura - Quadra
Type O Negative - Bloody Kisses (digipak)
The Sisters of Mercy - Floodland
Tangerine Dream - Sorcerer OST
Darkness Brings the Cold - Devil Swank, Vol. 1
Also, I spent a lot of time updating my All Hallows Playlist and adding it to Spotify. Here's a link:
If you've been reading these pages long enough, you probably know that David Lucarelli is the author of both The Children's Vampire Hunting Brigade and Tinseltown comic series. He's also a friend. A jack of all trades, David recently brought back his band Dame Fortune with a brand new track, and after listening to it oh, maybe a dozen times the other day, I have to say, it's got a shit ton of swagger, awesome lyrics, and the kind of 1987, Sunset-strip bravado that catapulted a lot of hard rock bands to instant stardom back in the days of my youth. It's usually hard to reach me with that kind of sound, but call me crazy, Am I a Warrior rocks, and it's exactly what I needed to hear right now.
Read
I picked up one new comic that was not on my list until I saw it on the shelves yesterday and I have to say, I have not spent $5.99 in a comic shop in quite some time that has brought me so much joy. What book is it I speak of?
This is a big, floppy, glossy volume of absolute joy that takes me back to how much I loved comics as a kid. The first (of three) stories inside is from the old Mirage TMNT, now colorized by Tom Smith's Scorpion Studios (new to me, but I love the name and they did a fantastic job). It tells the tale of Raphael's first encounter with Casey Jones. This is old school, and glorious because of it, and it set the stage for a fabulous reading experience, juxtaposed with two newer, IDW-era Raph stories (both also featuring Casey). Well worth a look.
Playlist:
Electric Wizard - Let Us Prey
Deftones - Ohms
Deftones - Diamond Eyes
Kensonlovers - Keep Rolling
Blood Incantation - Hidden History of the Human Race
Mannequin Pussy - Patience
Bob Mould - Blue Hearts
Card:
I don't feel nearly as grounded as drawing a three would suggest, however, per the Grimoire, "denotes upon appearance a situation to know yourself, what you want, and throw your self doubt away."
Thanks to Heaven is an Incubator for retweeting this and bringing such an eloquent, albeit chilling, crystallization of current events to light. My prediction: with all the Reality bending already in place, it will not matter whether trump is reelected (although let's not let that stop us from tossing him out the door); we're going to see an increasing escalation in violence from both sides and within the next ten years the 50 states as we know them will change. I'm not sure what that's going to look like exactly, but I (once again) point to Greg Rucka and Michael Lark's Lazarus or the USIDENT of Richard Kelley's Southland Tales as possible examples. "Oh, but that's just silly. Those are science fiction," you say? Friend, we're already living in Sci Fi land. When someone can stand up and say "Day" when it's clearly "Night" and a large part of the population will believe him despite the empirical evidence of their senses, I say all bets are off.
