Fields of the Nephilim - Moonchild

A little Carl McCoy and crew to usher us into the weekend. Here in LA, a brief flirtation with Autumn-like weather two weeks ago proved a total tease, and we've been back to 80+ degree days, with slightly chilly nights. The smell of the fires that raged over the last week has added a slight tinge of Halloween atmosphere to the air, as the brain can easily mistake the odor for that of burning leaves. For the most part, though, we are on our own to create and sustain a proper Autumnal environment for the season. Hence my leaning heavily on all the "October" music in my collection.

**

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

**
I received my copy of Death Waltz Records/Mondo's Vinyl Halloween III: Season of the Witch score. Fantastic packaging. I wish they'd put equal care into their Prince of Darkness vinyl from a few months ago, but I'll take what I can get.

**

Playlist from 10/17:

Fields of the Nephilim - The Nephilim
John Carpenter and Alan Howarth - Halloween III: Season of the Witch OST
Ritual Howls - Their Body

Card of the day:

Time to change my routine a bit to promote fresh growth. I've felt a touch stagnant in the actual act of writing lately. Part of it is the scope of outlining the second and third Shadow Play books in depth is creating massive change in the story. This is a really good thing, as I feel these books are really coming alive. But the execution of concept is feeling a bit daunting at the moment, and the feeling is paralyzing me. I spent a good deal of time surrendering to an urge to clean and re-arrange the apartment yesterday in the middle of what was supposed to be a day off's writing session. I have no illusions here - I know this was an exercise of psychological displacement, i.e. I'm having trouble plotting one of the character groups' arcs, so I put writing aside and clean because it's something I can accomplish. This tomfoolery is dangerous if it gets out of control, so I need to figure out a way to sidestep this mania. I'm open to suggestions.

Babak Anvari's Adaptation of Nathan Ballingrud's Wounds @Screamfest!!!

Two films. Babak Anvari has made two feature-length films, and after seeing his second, Wounds, earlier this evening at the penultimate night of Screamfest 2019, I am floored by how exquisite a filmmaker he has become in so short a period of time.

I first read Nathan Ballingrud's The Visible Filth back in late 2015. I've read it at least three more times since. It is one of my favorite pieces of prose and was a very large inspiration in my completing my first book of short stories, A Collection of Desires. To say it is a very important work of fiction to me is an understatement. That means I went into viewing Wounds with extremely high expectations. The film met every one of those expectations. It lands on Hulu this Friday. Watch it. Then, go read The Visible Filth, which is now available in a collection of six stories, conveniently titled Wounds. (you can order signed copies from Malaprop's Bookstore in NC HERE or Amazon HERE)

Thanks to Screamfest for bringing this to the big screen, if only fleetingly; in a perfect world it would receive a much wider release. Also thanks to Screamfest, Tuesday night I saw the Soska Sisters' remake of David Cronenberg's 1977 film Rabid. This is another film I'd anticipated for a long time, and it did not disappoint. My quick-take review on Rabid is up as a short episode of The Horror Vision Horror Podcast, available in the usual places:

The Horror Vision on Apple

The Horror Vision on Spotify

The Horror Vision on Google Play

There will be a Wounds review up tomorrow as well.

**

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

**

Playlist from the last few days:

Bauhaus - The Sky's Gone Out
Talking Heads - Sand in the Vaseline (Disc One)
Allegaeon - Apoptosis
Ritual Howls - My Friends Bury Their Souls for the Devil to Find
Ritual Howls - Their Bodies
Flipper - Album - Generic Flipper
Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
Opeth - In Cauda Venenum

**

No card today, mainly because it's 2:29 AM and I am exhausted beyond reprieve. 

Bauhaus - Antonin Artaud

A little Bauhaus to start our day. LOVE this track, and Burning From the Inside will always hold a special place in my Bauhaus heart because it was the first of their albums I ever heard.

**

AHS 1984 is shaping up to be one fucking fantastic ride! We're not even halfway through the season and I'm left wondering just where the hell this is going. A lot like Roanoke, I feel like the story/setting/characters established in the first part of the season is soon going to shift into a totally different direction.



**

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

**

Playlist from 10/13:

Windhand - Eternal Return

Allegaeon - Apoptosis

White Lung - Eponymous

Zombi - Shape Shift

**

Card of the day:

Another reminder as I struggle to shift things around in my outline for Books Two and Three of Shadow Play: remember the grid!

New Swans Track!

New Swans! From the album Leaving Meaning, out October 25th; support a truly independent artist and pre-order a signed copy of the new album directly from Gira's Young God Records HERE.

Being that Swans founder/brainchild Michael Gira stated upon its release that 2016's The Glowing Man would be the final Swans album from my personal favorite incarnation of what is one of the longest-running, consistently changing bands ever, I am extremely curious to hear where this new album leads.

**

Friday night K and I saw Joker. I was on the fence with this one, but now that I've seen it there's no reason to even review my reservations. Joker is easily going to be in my top ten films of the year. Easily. If you have superhero/comic book franchise fatigue like I do, take it from me: don't let that keep you from seeing this one in the theaters. Nothing remotely 'comic book' about this film. The hype is real - annoying - but real. I'm the trailer below, but my advice is to not even watch that, just go see it. Wow. Phoenix is absolutely amazing. Makes me want to re-watch PTA's The Master, which I'll probably do in early November.

Oh, and I absolutely loved the juxtaposition/influence on Joker from Scorcese's King of Comedy, which I just watched again recently.



**

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

**

Playlist from the last few days:

Deftones - Koi No Yokan
1919 - The Complete Collection
Dr. John - Gris Gris
Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R
The Nukes - Why Things Burn
Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - F#A# (Infinity)
Various - Joker Soundtrack (Playlist)
Bauhaus - The Sky's Gone Out
Ritual Howls - Their Body
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Turn Pale - Kill the Lights

**

Card of the day:

Direct reference to an under-developed aspect of my outline for Shadow Play Book Two. Duly noted.

1919 - The Scream

Chalk this one up to another group I'd never even heard of from that beloved Post Punk era of the early 80s. Fantastic stuff.

**
The first issue of Batman's Grave, that Warren Ellis/Steve Hitch twelve-month series came out this week, and I'm doing everything I can to not go into The Comic Bug and buy it. My mantra? Wait for the trade. Wait for the trade. Ellis always reads better in trade. Always.

I know, I know. We've seen this shot a million times by a million artists. What's special about this one? The artist is working with Warren Ellis, that's what.

**

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

I didn't have it in me yesterday to watch more than the new episode of Creepshow before I passed out for the night.

**

Playlist for 10/10:

Sam Hain - November Coming Fire
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - In Summer EP
The Smiths - Meat is Murder
Mark Morrison - Return of the Mack (single)
Deftones - White Pony
Doomriders - Black Thunder
Pigface - A New High in Low (Low Disc)
Opeth - Deliverance
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Deth Crux - Pears of Anguish EP
1919 - The Complete Collection
Ain Soph - Rituals
Bauhaus - Burning From the Inside

**

Card of the day:

Very good to see the Four of Wands today, which I'm taking as a direct nod to the fact that if I keep at it, I'll finish the first pass on the outline of Book Two this weekend. There's bound to still be some tweaking needed afterward, but as long as I have all the points on the grid, I'll be able to use it as a map to start actually writing the prose. This is the first time I've ever outlined anything this heavily, but what a difference it has already made.

Doomriders - The Chase

The Playlist for Joe Begos' new film Bliss has turned out to be the gift that keeps on giving! I've spent the last twenty-four alternating between Deth Crux's Mutant Flesh album and Doomriders' Black Thunder. Both these records are start-to-finish fantastic, and I haven't even had time to dig into some of the other bands with killer tracks on it. Here's the embedded full playlist - if you dig it, follow some of these folks on BandinTown, Spotify, Bandcamp or Apple Music.



**

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)

Wow. When Masters of Horror aired back in the mid-'00s, I cursed not having cable. I looked forward to the inevitable DVD releases with a sort of frantic fan devotion. I mean, here was a series that assembled most of the greatest living horror auteurs, new and old, in one place. How could that be bad?

When all was said and done, I enjoyed the few I saw (Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, Coscarelli's Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, and Stuart Gordon's Lovecraft adaptation Dreams in the Witch House) but somehow never got around to the rest.

It's as if I knew.

Last year, I went back to the series for the first time in forever, primarily because at ~an hour each, MOH provides a great way to check a box for 31 Days of Horror on a work night. Yesterday, with a late start and an early wake-up time, I sought the series out again, opting to buy the first season digitally on Prime. Once acquired, K and I settled in for one of the episodes I had always anticipated but never got around to: Tobe Hooper's Dance of the Dead.

Dance is an adaptation of an old Richard Matheson short story of the same name that I first read in the early 90s; in fact, Matheson wrote the teleplay to adapt the story for Hooper, so everyone involved with this film is in my 'good book.' That makes it even stranger that I absolutely hated the finished product.

I didn't hate the way the story was adapted. No, what I disliked, and what I now wonder might hold true for more of the MOH series - and maybe even a lot of Mid-'00s, big-name Horror in general - is the aesthetic. I can't speak to that broader picture yet, but let's take a look at Dance of the Dead as a possible microcosm of the overall macrocosm of 2000s Horror.

Dance of the Dead suffers from an extremely dated adherence to mid-'00s culture: the guys in DOD all look like Bros, the attitude of everyone seems an extrapolation and acknowledgment of 'extreme' culture - something horror was DEFINITELY guilty of trafficking in; remember the Dimension: Extreme imprint? - and their messy hair, mountain dew attire, piercings, tattoos, etc. really just look embarrassing for the costume designer and producers. After a similar cultural rift, a lot of us look back on this same broad-stroke cluelessness on 80s youth culture as endearing (bandanas, shoulder-hoisted ghetto blasters, switchblades, etc), so maybe that will happen with the 2000s as well.

Though I doubt it. The schism is a little hard to explain, but if you were socially cognizant during the 00s, you'll know what I mean.

Along with the above, DoD sports an overly enthusiastic reliance on digital effects and awkward, heavily effected camera work that manifests as constant shaking-and-trailing of the picture frame, superimposed imagery, and a general frenetic editing pace that directly detracts from the film's visual exposition, in my opinion. During this period, I remember having a theory that everyone in Hollywood thought the entirety of youth culture suffered from ADD.

Finally, this befuddlement of youthful values and mores leads to a palpable and frankly ugly mean streak, especially when looking back from higher ground. Horror is horror, but in my experience, 'mean' generally doesn't hold up in the light of hindsight.

I fully intend to watch more of the first season of Masters of Horror, so I can only hope some of the other films contained therein prove me wrong.

**

Playlist from 10/09:

Tones of Tail - Everything
Various - Bliss Soundtrack Playlist
Bauhaus - In the Flat Field
Doomriders - Black Thunder
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
Twin Tribes - Shadows
Ritual Howls - Into the Water

**

No card today.

Playlist to Joe Begos' Bliss

From the soundtrack to Joe Begos' Bliss, a film that I absolutely had a blast with on the big screen at the Egyptian last Saturday night. Producer/Editor/Actor Josh Ethier posted a link to the Spotify playlist, and various tracks from that will probably be popping up here for the next few days because it is loaded with great stuff that really fleshed out the aesthetic of the film and helps re-live it.

**

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

Hell House, LLC was a very nice surprise. I really dug this one; while K liked it but feels most found footage movies feel like re-treads because the original Blair Witch did it already and did it better. I agree to a point, but there's something about the MO of a found footage flick that seems to lend itself to making genuinely scary moments - when handled correctly. Hell House, LLC has a couple of deep, sustained moments of, "What the fuck, ah!" horror, my favorite of which became hard to watch as one of the characters, when faced with inexplicable entities directly in front of their face, chose to pull the covers over their heads and, I guess, hope for it to go away.

I would post the trailer, but it really doesn't do it justice. My advice? If you're interested, turn off all the lights in your home and watch in the dark.

**

Playlist from 10/08:

Type  Negative - Life is Killing Me
Various - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me OST
Perturbator - New Model
Dr. John - Gris Gris
How to Destroy Angels - Welcome to Oblivion
Deth Crux - Mutant Flesh
A Place to Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
John Carpenter - Lost Theme II
John Carpenter - Prince of Darkness OST

**

Card of the day:

Change is a'coming. Isn't that always the case? I'm reading this more as the thirteen and reference to Thanatos Energy, Death Energy, which is to say transformative energy.