The Haunter in the Dark

I finally picked up The Devil's Blood's 2012 MASTERPIECE The Thousandfold Epicentre on vinyl. Ever since my friend Tori turned me on to this album later that same year, it has occupied a pretty prominent place in my inner jukebox. I can't go very long without cranking this album, so it's nice to be able to do so on vinyl now.

 

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Watch:

With Mickey Keating's new film Offseason dropping this week and some of my cohorts from The Horror Vision and I planning to get together for a viewing/reaction episode, I figured it was time I finally watched the Keating flicks I'd had on my list for some time now. Two nights ago I began with 2016's Carnage Park.

 

Great flick. This feels like Keating doing his own take on Rob Zombie-like material, and it works. A lot of that is the casting - Ashely Bell is a fantastic final girl. Her wardrobe in the film plays up her petite size and creates a glorious misnomer for a character that ends up a staunch survivor without the film ever having to go over the top and take her full-on Ripley. This helps keep the film's realistic tone, and makes the final sequences of the movie breathtaking in the tension they create. Rarely does a film use lack of light this well. Also, Pat Healy is really just one of my favorite actors. The guy never disappoints in his performances.

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Read:

I checked a few more Lovecraft stories off the list:

    • Celephais

    • The Unnamable

    • The Haunter in the Dark

I will tell you, there is a HUGE advantage to reading Lovecraft's works on Kindle. You won't get an awesome, old-school paperback cover like the one I've posted above, however, the Kindle's X-Ray feature allows you to axis all kinds of information you would not otherwise have at your disposal. For instance, reading The Haunter in the Dark was especially enjoyable due to the information I learned by highlighting elements of the text and either reading the X-Ray or built-in links to Wikipedia. I'm certain I'd read this one before, however, I never would have known that the story is essentially a sequel to a young Robert Bloch's story The Shambler from the Stars, or that the main character, Robert Blake (not that Robert Blake), was Bloch's creation. There are also elements in the story drawn from Clarke Ashton Smith, and it's this element of Lovecraft's work - that it has always essentially been an 'open source' material, that I find so fascinating.  

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Playlist:

Deftones - Ohms

Deftones - Gore

Godflesh - Pure

Iress - Prey

My Bloody Valentine - MBV

Poni Hoax - Eponymous

Dillinger Escape Plan - One of Us is the Killer

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Card:

Note: I generally don't recognize inverted cards.

Past = Knight of Discs. The Fire Element of Earth. Will applied to Malkuth, the Earthly concerns. This was my idea before yesterday that I was going to force my doctor to see things my way, to open me up and take the 1cmm 'shadow' my last CT scan showed out.

Present = 3 of Disks: Work. Staying in the Earthly realm. This is the reality of the situation.

Future = 7 of Swords: Futility. This is turning out to be a pretty poignant pull because as it turns out, the doctor 100% convinced me I was overreacting. 

It's pretty easy to have someone in the medical field you trust say to you, "It's probably nothing but we'd like to do a biopsy just to be sure" and then assume this is a half measure - especially when it doesn't work and your lung collapses - and that the actual the best possible way to proceed is to have them cut you open. I'm past that. I can't keep my life on hold for this. The new plan is a CT every four months (or so) to make sure the shadow isn't growing. I should state what my doc reminded me of yesterday: the fact that because of being stabbed in the lung when I was in High School, and because of the inflammation - which they originally mistook for lymphoma back in 2017 - my lungs are filled with shadows when it comes to CT scans. The tricky bit with my physiology as it is, lies in determining if new aberrations are just the inflammation growing/changing, or something more nefarious. For now, I'm content waiting this out because the odds are it is inflammation. And really, I want to move ASAP, not just because I'm sick of LA, but because I want to be far away in case we get in over our heads and Putin decides to turn LaLaLand into a smoking crater. 

Paranoia. It's what's for dinner in 2022. Deal with it.

Morphine

 

Taking a cue from Heaven is an Incubator and posting some Morphine. Love this band, love this track. It's been a minute since I pulled any of their albums out, and doing so now makes me realize that in the four years or so now that I've been using Apple Music, I've not taken advantage of it insofar as finally filling in the gaps I have with this band, one of the most unique and listenable bands from a decade where both those attributes seemed abundant. Not every band with a unique sound from that era has aged well; maybe it will pass, but there's a lot of music I considered unique then that feels dated because of it now. Not Morphine. It's a tired metaphor, but Mark Sandman, Dana Colley, Jerome Deupree and Billy Conway's music truly is like a fine wine - it only gets better with age.

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Watch:

Chalk this one up as another upcoming Horror flick I almost missed:

Amazon dropped the trailer for their upcoming University Horror flick Master last week, and it looks creepy A.F. This one lands next week on the 18th, in theatres and on Prime. 

And as long as we're talking about upcoming Horror movies, This is the best f*&king news I've heard in quite some time.

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NCBD:

Frank Castle in the Hand? Well, that's an original take. I'm cursing myself already for giving this one a shot, but I'm super curious so I'll at the very least be grabbing this first issue.

I'm not sure if I mentioned it here at some point recently or not, but when I heard Beta Ray Bill was in Thor 22, I had to pick it up. And seeing as how that issue is the third in the current God of Hammers storyline, I went back and tried to grab issues 19 and 20 as well, only they were long gone. Apparently, Mjölnir is now a sentient character - that's him/her/they on the cover of issue 21's second printing, which I'll be picking up tomorrow, along with the finale of the storyline, issue 23.

That's a long way to go for what seems to be a brief appearance by BRB, but the story's pretty good, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it all shakes out. 

Advance word has it that the penultimate issue of X Deaths of Wolverine is bloody and nasty and crazy. We'll see.

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Playlist:

The Police - Synchronicity

The Fixx - Walkabout

Helmet - Aftertaste

Blanck Mass - Animated Violence Mild

Boris - Pink

Zeal & Ardor - Eponymous

Deafheaven - New Bermuda

Nachtmystium - Addicts: Black Meddle, Part II

Various - Joe Begos' Bliss Spotify Playlist

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Card:

Another three-card pull.

Past = 5 of Wands: Strife. I have been extremely uneasy in my own skin, and part of that has been a reticence to commit to a short-term writing project. Lots of ideas, but I flit from one to another without any commitment.

Present = 0: The Fool. Fresh starts. In this case, over and over again. Usually The Fool is a welcome sight, an inclination that a new adventure or project is about to begin. Here, I believe it's akin to spinning my wheels.

Future = 8 of Cups: Indolence. The warning: What one and two have done so far is keep me in a kind of holding pattern that intermittently results in non-activity, or, in the classic definition of this card at face value, inactivity. I need to break this. So how about a final, clarifying card?

Again, my inclination is to take this literally - well, okay, as literal as "The Universe" can be, and read this as what comes next. In other words, the next project I work on, I stick to. I'm off tomorrow for a visit to the lung doctor, and other than hitting the Bug for NCBD, the plan is to write. I'm pretty sure I know what the winning project will be, but I guess you never know.

Legions of Winged Octopi

 

I've been in the mood for some of the older albums by long-time favorite The Ocean, aka The Ocean Collective. This would be my favorite track from Precambrian, released on Metal Blade way back in 2007.

I love almost every album by these guys, and chief songwriter Robin Staps is a genius for my money, but there's something about the sheer assault of Precambrian and its precursor Aeolian, that the band has yet to capture again (not that I'm saying they need to).

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Watch:

The long-unavailable in the States second film by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, Livid, hit Shudder last week and I was able to eek in a viewing over the weekend.

Wow. This one did not disappoint. Livid is, like Inside before it, further proof that Bustillo and Maury are just as interested in making beautiful movies as they are Horror movies. Comparisons to Argento are on the money and yet also a bit misleading, and while the dance academy from Suspiria is mentioned in Livid and thus, ties the film directly to Argento's "Three Witches" world, there are no continuity, character or place/plot overlaps. This means whatever tie was intended is more homage than actual DNA for Livid. But there is a definite tone here that feels at the very least inspired by, if not directly related to, Suspiria. The color pallette is quite different - Livid prefers grey to bold primary colours - however, there is a softness to the visual life of the film that smooths the horrific edges and helps make it feel like a fairytale, much like Argento's technique. Part of this may indeed be that both films deal with the world of Dance, and this makes them feel 'old world' and steeped in tradition, which is often the very element of the world fairytales seek to unmoor. 

 

There's also the element of what I call "Doll Discovery." Dolls play a big part in the visual fabric of the film, from a strange, anthropomorphic children's tea party to a penchant for extreme taxidermy. This also helps the viewer feel what the characters feel - namely that they've accidentally stepped into some "other" place, where time does not necessarily behave the way it does for most of us. 

I adore this film, and pretty much immediately set out to order it on Bluray. Now I really need to go back and give the filmmakers' other movies a spin, as I didn't connect with Among the Living upon first viewing, and I still haven't watched Deep House. 

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Dollar Bin:

New feature. Every Tuesday, I'm going to post a comic I found in a dollar bin. What with hardcovers, omnibuses, trade paperback collections and even digital, old floppies just don't have the draw they used to. The Comic Bug is known for buying large collections and then placing the bulk of the stuff out as Dollar Bins, and I've had a lot of good times going through them, finding stuff that would be garbage to many. So here's where I highlight some of my finds.

I don't really know much about ROM Spaceknight except it was a toy I never had as a kid, and there was a Marvel Comic I never read. Later in life though, ROM began to pop up in weird places to remind me he existed, and once in a while over the last decade or so, I find a single issue in a dollar bin and pick it up. ROM is a book that has come to represent a certain era of comics and SciFi to me, and because of that, it's always fun to read. 

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Playlist:

The Ocean - Precambrian

The Dillinger Escape Plan - Ire Works

Mr. Bungle - The Night They Came Home

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

Ennio Morricone - Il Grande Silenzio OST

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Card:

I wanted to do a three-card spread today, primarily because I haven't done much other than pull one daily card for quite some time. What I got feels very on the money, true to recent form.

Past = 4 of Swords: Truce. Focus and concentration undercut by a certain restless energy. I love this card. The "restless" aspect is not always one of the most clear-cut elements of this card. In fact, I would normally ignore it based on how the other images - all balanced and proportional, right down to the swords that meet perfectly in the middle of a beautifully centered cross and the 49 petaled flower in its own heart. But mixed with the next two cards, that hectic background cannot be ignored.

Present = Knight of Wands. This card is pretty simple. Energy and Passion. 

Future = Prince of Disks. More focused energy, but proportionate. Those concentric circles in the background tell of using the second card's Will to help corral the energy of the first card into a culminating experience. 

Batman and the Dead Boys

 

From the Dead Boys 1978 album, We Have Come For Your Children. Classic album, classic song. Also, talk about close to the bone - this was released less than a year after Berkowitz was arrested in August of 1978, and the fact that by '77 the Dead Boys had moved from Ohio to New York, this is a New York punk band singing about Son of Sam pretty much while it was happening.

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Watch:

Saturday night, K and I were invited to what will probably be our last screening with the crew from the Comic Bug. Owner Jun rents out a theatre for all the major comic book movies and invites a small cadre of family, friends and favorite customers. I have always felt deeply honored to be among the latter. What did we see? Why, Matt Reeves' The Batman, of course.

I would almost definitely not have seen this if not for this invite. I just feel so burned out on Batman in general. When I saw the trailer on the big screen a few months back, I had to admit the movie looked fantastic, but the thought of actually watching it held exactly zero joy for me, so I wrote it off. Was I wrong?

Well, there was more about The Batman that I liked than I disliked, so I'm glad I saw it. The film is visually arresting; it has a strong tone reinforced by a somewhat defining color palette that just works. Everything is dark AF, with lots of fluorescent red lighting thrown in to beautiful effect. There are also patches of neon throughout, and a certain embedded opulence that really serves to define the more upscale elements of Reeves' Gotham. Oh yeah, and I can honestly say this is the first Batmobile I didn't roll my eyes at (despite my adoration of Christopher Nolan's franchise, that one was pretty ridiculous).

Robert Pattison also turns in a fantastic performance. His is a perfected Batman and Bruce Wayne - despite the too-perfect bangs - that clearly had the benefit of observing and correcting what didn't work from Christian Bale's version, which I'm not knocking at all. But the newest version should learn from the previous, and Pattinson definitely owes at least a passing thanks to Bale. John Turturro was an absolutely inspired choice for Carmine Falcone, and it wasn't until after the movie when someone mentioned Colin Farrell had played the Penguin that I realized it. As tired as I find all of Batman's classic rogue's gallery, these reinventions are all great. Paul Dano went a bit overboard in some of his screen time as the Riddler - mostly in the declaration videos he baits the police with - but overall he's great, and I'm happy to report that there's not a "?" to be seen on his costume.

So what didn't I like? Well, it's just shy of three hours long, and absolutely shouldn't be. Oh, the story they ran with needs all of that time to work itself out (well, not ALL of it), but that's the thing. The story's not very good. Sure, parts of it are great, but it's written in a way that incorporated all kinds of elements it just didn't need. The script has some issues as well. There are three scenes with two people talking that go on way too long and border on irrelevant or not needed, as does some of the delivery of the lines in those scenes. Chewing the scenery, as they say.

My biggest problem? The third act. Well, felt more like the fucking tenth act by the time we got to it, and it takes the movie off the rails. What I LOVE about Reeves' The Batman is he gave us what he promised - a stripped-down, Detective story. Awesome, let's leave the semi-flips and city-wide destruction aside and see the detective side of Bats. Except - when you get to the final set-piece, it goes so big with its swathe of destruction that at times, it became laughable. 

Overall, if you brace yourself for a long three hours, this one is worth seeing on the big screen. And if you get the chance, do like I did and re-watch David Fincher's Se7en beforehand. There's a massive influence Fincher's seminal serial killer film had on Reeves' film, for the best.

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Playlist:

Firebreather - Dwell in the Fog

sElf - Breakfast with Girls

The Afghan Whigs - I'll Make You See God (single)

Sade - Apple Music Essentials

Allegaeon - Apoptosis

Beliefs - Habitat

Drab Majesty - Careless

The Ronettes - Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Now I Got Worry

The Ocean - Anthropocentric

Mark Lanegan - Bubblegum

Ghost - Impera (pre-release singles)

The Ocean - Mesoarchaean (single)

The Ocean - Heliocentric

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

Blanck Mass - In Ferneaux

Dead Boys - We Have Come For Your Children

Deafheaven - Infinite Granite

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Card:

Listening to inner dialogue, harmonizing renewal, which is funny consider "renewal" is a word used A LOT in The Batman. Anyway, I have felt pretty good of late, and my ideas are flowing again. 

Spizm - B4uDie

It's another Bandcamp Friday, and it's also the release date of Spizm's B4uDie record. I pre-ordered this a while back and posted the lead, titular single, and now that I've heard the whole thing, I strongly recommend you throw these guys some $$. Remember, artists keep ALL the money from sales on Bandcamp Friday, so what better way to support independent creators!

Here's a direct link to the Spizm Bandcamp.

 

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Watch:

There are some pretty Bold Horror Statements being used in the marketing for the new film You Won't Be Alone, which makes me skeptical. However...

Yeah, after watching about a quarter of this trailer, I knew I was in and turned it off lest I learn too much. Directed by Goran Stolevski - who I am completely unfamiliar with despite the fact that his name rings a bell - I think Focus Features is banking on the "Folk Horror Explosion" with this one. That's okay. I find despite the buzz, I'm rarely disappointed by films marketed under that banner. 

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Playlist:

Mark Lanegan - Bubblegum

Converge and Chelsea Wolfe - Bloodmoon: I

Judas Priest - British Steel

Ghost - Impera (pre-release singles)

Ghost - Infestissumam

Neil Young - Greatest Hits

Greg Puciato - Lowered (single)

Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God

Hall and Oats - Greatest Hits

Mutterlein - Orphans of the Black Sun

Jim Willaims - Possessor OST

Killing Joke - Night Time

Motley Crue - Shout at the Devil

Ministry - Filth Pig

Tom Vek - Luck

Grinderman - Eponymous

Spizm - B4uDie

The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

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Card:

I'm really having trouble digging past the surface and listening to the inner voice that tells me how to write. I've kind of pushed myself into a frustration corner and can't see past it.

Mark Lanegan and Chelsea Wolfe - Flatlands

 

I had to get one more Lanegan track in, because I don't think I'd ever realized he had a collaborattion with Chelsea Wolfe before.  

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NCBD:

Here's my haul for another NCBD:

Again with the fantastic cover for Moon Knight. 

I might have missed picking up issue #3 of Newburn, so I'll have to remedy that as well.

James Tynion IV's The Nice House On The Lake returns after a small hiatus. This one has a lot that feels like it's being lost to me reading it as it drops, but I may make 

Hands down, the best cover of any X-Book since Powers/House. This is currently the only of the X-titles that I'm reading that still feels like Hickman's run, and this cover proves that 100%. 

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Playlist:

The Gutter Twins - Adorata

Wham! - Everything She Wants (single)

George Michael - Faith

The Veils - Total Depravity

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads

Zombi - Digitalis

Author & Punisher - Women & Children

Yeruselem - The Sublime

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Card:

Sevens are Netzach, and thus related to Strength. Which I feel like I've been pretty keen on exhibiting of late. Also, in Thoth, I tend to see this card as an indication that one idea will stand out among others, and prove itself useful if followed. Which helps with the current state of my writing, which is a big mess of peaks and valleys at the moment. Too many ideas, is kind of what I was thinking an hour or so before I pulled this one, so I'll take the advice.

Mark Lanegan's Strange Religion (Anthony Bourdain Outro)

 

And thanks to my good friend Seth for the link to this one. What a beautiful way to end Mark Lanegan week.   

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Watch:

I know it's waaaay early, but I'm going on record: So far, Hellbender - or stylized as H6llb6nd6r - is the movie to beat for my favorite movie of the year:

 

This is another film by the Adams family - Tobey Poser, her husband John Adams and their two daughters Lulu and Zelda - who released The Deeper You Dig in 2019 and have been gaining an increasing amount of notoriety as a family of ridiculously talented individuals. Even the music they did for the movie is fantastic and begs for a proper release. 

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Playlist:

The Afghan Whigs - In Spades

The Cure - Faith

The Cure - Carnage Visors

QOTSA - Lullabies to Paralyze

Mark Lanegan Band - Blues Funeral 

Walking Papers - The Light Below

Black Road - Witch of the Future

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality

Silent - Modern Hate

Ritual Howls - Into the Water

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Card:

Again? I need some time to process this. Or maybe that's the point. While I keep trying to figure certain things out, the Wheel keeps spinning, and the situation changes.