A little something from the Trust Obey soundtrack to James O'Barr's graphic novel The Crow. This entire album is fantastic beyond words.
David Gordon Green's Halloween is pretty great. My post-viewing reaction, as well as the reactions of two of my cohosts on The Horror Vision podcast, can be heard on Apple Podcasts or our website. WARNING: This eleven minute mini-episode is FILLED with spoilers so beware.
31 Days of Horror:
10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle
10/15) Phantom of the Paradise
10/16) Candyman
10/17) Ghoulies
10/18) John Carpenter's Halloween
10/19) Halloween
Playlist from 10/19:
Tones on Tail - Everything
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Wasteland
Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit
Type O Negative - Dead Again
Not Waving - Good Luck
Beak> - L.A. Playback
Revolting Cocks - Beers, Steers, and Queers
Queens of the Stone Age - Villains
Card of the day:
A problem solved. Hoping this pertains to my writing work today, which is all about reading and editing and thus, is rife with problems, chief among them, DISTRACTION.
Getting into the heart of the season, so I broke out the Tones on Tail yesterday. One of my favorite musical purchases ever, Tones on Tail's Everything. The second disc is probably one of my 'desert island' picks.
In preparation for seeing the new Halloween tonight, K and I did the original film last night. This one will never not hold up. A perfect movie, horror or otherwise.
31 Days of Horror:
10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle
10/15) Phantom of the Paradise
10/16) Candyman
10/17) Ghoulies
10/18) John Carpenter's Halloween
Playlist from yesterday:
Tones on Tail - Everything
Ghost - Infestissumam
Ministry - The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Wasteland
Steve Moore - Mayhem OST
The Veils - Total Depravity
Card of the day:
Journey into the blackest depths of my soul? Doubting that. However, I definitely need to get a look down in subconscious and do some weed pulling. Lots of distraction of late on the writing front.
31 Days of Horror continued last night with Ghoulies, and it was AWESOME! Here's the trailer:
I hadn't seen this one since I was a kid and it first came out on cable. I didn't have cable, but the kid down the street did, and this was one of the movies I got to see at his house that I never would have been able to see at home. This was K's pick and I offer her much kudos for it; the only thing I remembered from that long ago viewing was walking around seeing it saying, "Hey dude, don't Bogart that joint!" even though at the time, I had no idea what a joint was.
31 Days of Horror:
10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle
10/15) Phantom of the Paradise
10/16) Candyman
10/17) Ghoulies
Playlist from 10/17:
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Wasteland
Explode Into Colors - Quilts EP
Sunn O))) - Kanon
Steve Moore - Mayhem OST
The Veils - Total Depravity
Cocksure - Be Rich
Man, feels like I just checked on the new Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats album a week or two ago and there was no pre-order up, then yesterday I realized Wasteland has indeed officially dropped. Of course ALL the nifty colored vinyl is gone over at Rise Above Records, so for now I'm just listening on Apple. Great record, and as you can hear above MAN! What an opening track!
31 Days of Horror continued last night with Candyman! Only the second time I'd seen this flick, it's a great example of a 90s horror flick that doesn't seem as dated as, say, Species. Leave that to Bernard Rose's direction, Clive Barker's oversight, and poverty anachronistic staying power. That's the world folks.
31 Days of Horror:
10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle
10/15) Phantom of the Paradise
10/16) Candyman
NCBD today and it's a great day because Gideon Falls returns!!!
Playlist from 10/16:
Second Still -
Windhand - Eternal Return
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Wasteland
Pretty excited for Halloween on Friday. For a series I never wanted more from (because the first two, taken together are perfect), this forthcoming sequel feels right. It won't be until I see it if that feeling proves correct, and I'm still not sure why two had to be negated, but either way, if there has to be a new Halloween movie, which of course there does because, you know, that's Hollywood, then this is the one I would have held out for. Now someone PLEASE really blow our minds and follow this with a sequel to Halloween III: Season of the Witch!!! File that under the 'never gunna happen' header.
You can order the new score, composed by the man himself, along with his son Cody and Daniel Davies, on Sacred Bones Records HERE.
31 Days of Horror continued last week with my first ever viewing of Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise. Loved it! I guess I'm kinda pushing the boundaries out of horror a bit here, although I'd maintain this film fits, if for no other reason than it's a re-imagining of the horror classic Phantom of the Opera. But yeah, should bring it back in, so tonight I'll be going Horror with a capital 'H.'
31 Days of Horror:
10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle
10/15) Phantom of the Paradise
Playlist from 10/15:
Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit
Astronoid - Air
High on Fire - Electric Messiah
Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower
Sunn O))) - The Grimm Robe Demos
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross - The Social Network OST
Them Are Us Too - Amends
Card of the day:
This worries me a skosh, but more as a warning or reflection of my current mood toward the book I'm working on than anything else. To me, the Knight of Disks is a card that always looks like a man who has arrived too late; the crop isn't quite up to par and something is barring him from continuing on his journey to the heart of the field to ascertain why. That felt a bit like writing yesterday - overwhelmed by the sprawl of the story. It's a good sprawl - I've cut it down considerably, trimmed the fat, that's what this re-organization of a book that took five years to write in the first place is all about. But yesterday, probably simply because I had three consecutive days off from working on it, I felt like it was beyond me to continue. That's nonsense of course, and when I draw two more cards for clarification I get Aeon and Swiftness, so that tells me I have to write everyday this week, rebuild momentum, and things will lock back into place.
Alien Sex Fiend - Not your father's Death Rock band. Well, then again, I suppose this very much could have been your father's Death Rock band. Never mind. Among the weirdest things I've ever heard.
31 Day of Horror continued yesterday, but I've already told you about The Apostle. Afterward, K and I plowed through the first five episodes of the Netflix/Mike Flanagan epic The Haunting of Hill House. I was a bit uncertain at first, but quickly came around. It has Flanagan's time weaving technique, the one that makes Occulus so unique. I dig it, probably not as much as I'd hoped I would, but for watching five episodes in a binge -something I haven't had the time to do in forever - it was good.
We wanted to make it through the first five because an article popped up last week HERE on Bloody Disgusting where Flanagan suggests people watch the first five, then go back and watch them again before continuing on to episodes 6-10. This is based on a revelation in ep. 5 that changes the way you will see things in the first half if you watch them again with that in mind. I don't feel this is necessary at all. Maybe some people will; I'm not usually the guy who figures out the twist ahead of time - I don't ever want to be - but I had this one in mind from about episode 3 or 4, so a re-watch wouldn't do anything for me. Now we just have to find the time to do the rest and a movie a day until the end of the month. It literally required me taking a mental health day from my weekend to do this much of the show - no grocery shopping, I skipped the HWA meeting, didn't even write. I needed it though, and so did K. 'Adulting' feels extra hard of late. Boo-hoo, right? Well, it's all relative.
31 Days of Horror:
10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle
Playlist from yesterday? There wasn't one. All visual content.
Card of the day:
Do I have some rationalizing to do? I do; skipping life for a day to watch TV makes me feel a bit weird, especially the HWA meeting and writing, so I've been rationalizing it since. As my good friend Missi said in a text yesterday, "Sometimes u need a break. It's not a crime."
I had not heard of Prospect previous to encountering the trailer on Bloody Disgusting earlier this weekend. Looks pretty good. I think Annihilation paved the way for more of this type of Sci Fi film getting major theatrical releases, and that's a good thing.
Zeal and Ardor absolutely killed it last night at the Roxy. Having seen them about a year ago at the Hi Hat, a smaller venue, this band proved it is going nowhere but forward. Very little talk between songs, except to express gratitude and joy at their 100th show and such an awesome turnout (if it wasn't sold out it was close), the ripped through pretty much everything you could ask them to. I was especially happy to hear Waste live, and they closed with a new song called Baphomet, which was fantastic. Also, like I may have mentioned a few months ago when I saw Windhand there, the Roxy really does a good job maintaining their beer taps. The Lagunitas Pils was exceptional.
Here's a video of Baphomet from Lowlands in August:
31 Days of Horror continued with the Director's Cut of Land of the Dead. I liked it about as much as I did the theatrical version back in 2005 on opening night, which is to say not very much at all. Recently, George A. Romero's widow announced he had left behind a lot of scripts. Now, not all of them are necessarily zombie movies. However, I've always been kind of bummed that George A. did such an amazingly cerebral take on horror - while creating a new monster/genre* with the zombie film, no less - devolved into the pretty straight up action film Land and then he re-booted the continuity with Diary and Survival of the Dead. I've not seen those last two, but as soon as I heard he was no longer continuing the original timeline, I was out.
Why?
I want to know what the world we were introduced to in Night of the Living Dead looks like 6 days down the line, 6 months down the line, 6 years down the line, etc. Romero deftly continues the evolution of that world in Dawn and Day, the former being, in my opinion, the best zombie film of all time, and the latter, despite some questionable acting and directing choices (Jamaican accent?), a great continuation of that evolution, for both the "monster" and the concept, but what's next? This is why I've always loved The Walking Dead comic series: the evolution of the world where this apocalypse has come to pass. Incidentally, I read once that Robert Kirkman's original title for The Walking Dead was Night of the Living Dead, or that the intention was to set it in Romero's universe (it's public domain).
31 Days of Horror:
10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle
And yes, at the time of writing this I've already watched today's movie, the just-dropped new film by Gareth Evans, Netflix's The Apostle. The articles I read about this describe it as somewhat Lovecraftian. Man, that is one over-used term these days! There is nothing Lovecraftian about this film. That said, I enjoyed The Apostle, however it has an odd pacing that feels a bit over-stuffed at times. My guess is this was originally supposed to be a series, then while filming the pilot someone decided to make it a film, and they shot enough to complete it. The film handles its multiple storylines well, however it just feels like the first season of a show streamlined into a 2 hour and 20-something minute movie. Not a bad thing, but makes for a little bit of cumbersome viewing. Cumbersome might be too harsh, so let's just say it doesn't flow the way a film like this seems it should.
Playlist from yesterday:
Joh Corigliano - Altered States OST
John Carpenter - Lost Themes II
Windhand - Eternal Return
Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit
Tom Vek - Luck
Card of the day:
Confirmation of the dark side? Entering the night, exploring the darker aspects... of myself? Or something I'm writing? No real frame of reference for this one today.
