Wow. Taking another page from a recent post by Heaven Is An Incubator, I dove into Sexores, a Quito, Ecuador two-piece that skews toward Darkwave but always ends up injecting a healthy dose of sheer beauty into its albums. Really great band and their new Mar del Sur EP is a great place to start with them. If you dig, head over to their Bandcamp and throw down some support.
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
23) The Birds/30 Coins Ssn 1 Ep 1
24) 30 Coins Ssn 1 Ep 2/The Church
NCBD:
Here are my picks for this week's NCBD:
This series has been a mixed bag, but I'm curious where it's going to go.
Street-level crime at its finest. Newburn puts me in mind of Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder novels, and as each individual storyline plays out, I'm really feeling the first edges of something epic. How long will Newburn's position as a fixer for all the New York crime families, the Yakuza, and the NYPD last? More importantly, who will the inevitable fall take down with him when it happens? These are the questions that keep me anticipating this book.
Looks like the current New Mexico arc of SIKTC ends with issue #35, so whatever the outcome, it probably starts here.
I have a Chicago trip coming up early next month, so I'll be stopping by Amazing Fantasy Books and Comics for the books in the pull I set up there. Ribbon Queen issues Three and four will be waiting for me. This book is a very welcome return to the crazy violent Horror Fiction Garth Ennis flexes every couple years, and it's made me want to jump back into a re-read of
Who's that running around disguised as Captain Krakoa in Uncanny Avengers? Pretty sure issue two answered that with a flashback, but we'll see. Really glad I took a chance on this one.
In just four issues, Robert Kirkman once again has my most anticipated book each month. Last month's Void Rivals #4 raised the bar for the series yet again, with some major revelations that, when all is said and done, I'm pretty sure will constitute the very tip of a proverbial iceberg.
Having just read issue fourteen late last week, I'm pretty pumped for this one. I still think I need a full series re-read to bolster the stakes, however, Boss and Rosenberg's fucked up little world is always a fun romp with or without all the context.
Playlist:
Wytch Finger - The Dance EP
Fvnerals - Let the Earth Be Silent
Spotlights - Seance EP
Sexores - Mar del Sur EP
Trevor Something - Trevor Something Does Not Exist
Trevor Something - Deep Wave Data Dark Web Daemons
Bauhaus - Burning from the Inside
Joy Division - Substance 1977-1980
Chasms - On The Legs Of Love Purified
Feuerbahn - The Fire Dance EP
Chelsea Wolfe - She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She (pre-release singles)
A few days ago, Heaven Is An Incubator posted some old-school Skinny Puppy. Hearing it put me in the mood to dig out 1984's Remission, and it's kinda been stuck in my headphones since, so let's start the day with "Sleeping Beast."
31 Days of Halloween:
K and I went to see Hitchcock's The Birds on the big screen last night. The film still holds up, although here are a couple of observations I don't know that I made previously about the film:
• I'm guessing Cary Grant must have been Hitch's first choice for Leading Man Mitch Brenner because Rod Taylor feels like a stand-in. Not to say Taylor is bad; on the contrary, I rather think he does a smash-up job. There's just something about his physicality that makes me think Hitch originally had Grant in mind for the role.
• There's almost a full hour of lead-in. This isn't bad, and in fact, I was mostly engrossed; however, the weird practical joke Tippo Hedren's Melanie Daniels plays on Mitch unfolds rather slowly and then gives way to the Brenner family's very odd dynamic, none of which is ever mentioned. Why is one of Lydia's children in his 30s and the other looks to be about 10? I kept thinking I was forgetting some odd revelation, like Cathy is really Mitch's daughter and the mother passed away, or something like that. When that didn't happen, I was left wondering. What I have arrived at after sleeping on the film is I think there are a lot of little things in this one that make the overall tone expectant and slightly off, which adds to the overall tension.
• Not every scene of the titular birds attacking 'works' as well as I remembered they did - and I just rewatched this a couple of years ago - but the final sequence with Melanie and the Brenners barricaded in the house is fabulous and more than a little frightening.
• Suzanne Pleschette worked as a small-town school teacher before recovering from her bird attack and moving to the big city, where she married a successful psychologist.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
††† dropped the title track from their new album! You can snatch this up directly from the band HERE. I'll admit the way ††† have been releasing songs, I was a bit confused as to what was the EP and now the full-length. Either way, it's good to have Chino's "other" band cranking music out, as their nine year hiatus left me wanting a lot more.
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
Read:
While I'm still dabbling away at the last ten percent of Clive Barker's The Scarlet Gospels (I hate to say this, but it's awful beyond what I ever could have imagined), I couldn't help but begin reading Weird Walk's new, collected tome.
If you are not familiar with Weird Walk, it's a British zine whose contributors walk the countryside in an effort to reconnect with the natural world of their ancestors. The ideology behind this often has to do with a hauntological approach to innoculating the failings of the present with the knowledge of our past. To quote the book's preamble:
"In Britain today we live in thrall to timetabels and technology, our lives increasingly scheduled and surveiled. Much of the population live in towns and cities (83 percent as of 2019), disconnected from the rural lives of our ancestors...The accepted notion in our modern present is that any kind of magical thinking... belongs to an older age...We are conditioned to push back against any sense of innocent bewilderment with nature and it's mysteries... If ubran and suburban surroundings reinforce this desacralised thinking, it follows that a shift to more pastoral realms might be a first step towards opening the door to re-enchantment."
As I said, the initial format of Weird Walk is an almost pamphlet-like paper zine. Seeing the content recreated in this gorgeous hardcover brick feels like a massive accomplishment for intellectual thought; the kind of victory that, in 2023, feels far too scarce.
Playlist:
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult - I See Good Spirits and I See Bad
During my recent travels I had to rely on the Mini-Thoth deck my good friend Missi gave me. It'd been a minute since I'd used this one; I carry it with me daily, however, my daily Pulls usually occur at my desk, and I have my Bound Tarot and full-size Thoth there, so I hardly ever pull the travel deck out of my backpack. Using it again, I realized I have a bit of a disconnect from the cards, so I'm trying to remember to use it at least once a week.
Lots of big themes at play today. We have Change, Will and - in this case at least - I'm reading Trump IV as Exploration. This fits. My parents are in town, and we're looking for a house for them now that theirs is sold. The deadline is coming up fast, so there's definitely a feeling that our shoulder is against the grindstone (moved by Will alone). My Father is expressing doubts they can pull this off, but I have no doubts whatsoever - here's our path forward. Heed the cards.
From the forthcoming album TANGK, available February 16th on Partisan Records. Pre-order HERE.
I really dig both this track and this video, which is a rarity all around. Idles has such a fantastic way of revving up the chaos but somehow keeping it streamlined and a touch poppy.
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
Watch:
A trailer finally dropped for William Brent Bell's new film, Lord of Misrule. Check it out:
I can't say I've seen Mr. Bell's other films - not out of any kind of boycott, more just a lackadaisical oversight - but when I saw this mentioned as a Folk Horror film a few months ago, I made a mental note to be on the lookout for more information. I watched about half the trailer, and I'm in, so the release date of December 8th can't come fast enough.
Playlist:
The Damned - Evil Spirits
The Cramps - RockinnReelinInAucklandNewZealandXXX
The Misfits - Collection II
King Woman - Celestial Blues
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult - Confessions of a Knife
Adam Egypt Mortimer - The Obelisk
Soul Blind - Feel It All Around
Bauhaus - Burning From the Inside
Card:
Back to the old trusty Thoth deck for today's Pull:
Absolutely no time this morning to decipher this, so I'm merely posting for posterity's sake, but from a glance, looks to be another "lust of result will fuck you up" Pull.
From their 1983 live album, Smell of Female, here are the immortal Cramps with a song I think a lot of Horror fans can relate to.
I'd never heard this live album before, but like most of those I have heard from The Cramps, it's fantastic. There are some hysterical introductions and asides from Lux, and Ivy's guitar seems particularly "trash heap" in its stringing and tuning, which of course, adds to the band's overall sound this particular night in 1983, arguably smack dab in the middle of their prime.
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
NCBD:
My picks for NCBD; watch for this week's episode of Drinking with Comics tomorrow where I'll talk a bit more in-depth about each of these:
Coming out of that Wolverine Crossover, I'm not entirely sure where we are in Benjamin Percy's Ghost Rider. That's not the book's fault; I actually think this issue might be the start of a new arc that gives us a little more information on Talia Warroad and her upbringing in the Cult of Mephisto. Could be very cool to explore the MCU's version of a "Satanic Cult," only based around Mephisto. I'd love to see a character like Frank Castle's old nemesis The Reverend pop up here, but that's doubtful. Still, if they could tap into a tone comparable to those old Mike Baron Punisher stories, that'd be fantastic, but I'm basing this on absolutely nothing outside my own agenda.
I'm digging that we get to see so much Corinthian for sure, however, I feel like I need to go back and re-read all of Nightmare Country and Nightmare Country: Glass House in order to move forward. The Thessaly one-shot that carried the story between Part 3 and 4 threw me a bit. Time to recalibrate. Tynion's doing an incredible job of giving us a new story worthy of having "Sandman Presents" on the cover, with a tone that definitely falls right in line with the first two trades of the original Sandman series.
Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Tenement is picking up speed, and every issue gets darker, weirder and, well, better! Can't wait to see where we're going today.
LOVE this cover. I'm an issue or two behind on TMNT, so here's another one that it's time to catch up on.
Playlist:
Joy Division - Closer
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult - Confessions of a Knife
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult - I See Good Spirits and I See Bad Spirits
Ministry - The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste
The Cramps - Smell of Female (Live)
Red Lorry Yellow Lorry - Talk About the Weather
Trust Obey - Fear and Bullets (half 1994 Edition and half 1998 Edition)
Bauhaus - Burning From the Inside
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Queen of Cups - the watery aspect of water - High Emotional Understanding
• Three of Wands - Inner aspirations
• XII: The Hanged Man - Sacrifice
Sacrifice for your Art. There's really no other way to read this. Seeing this, I'm going to make a point to spend extra time working on the book this weekend. I'm in what is probably the second-to-last pass on Black Gloves and Broken Hearts, and it sounds like it's time to turn up the productivity levels a bit more than I already have.
From their 1990 MASTERPIECE, Confessions of a Knife. I've probably posted this one half a dozen times here before, and I'll probably do so again. Doesn't matter - classic track from a classic album, and a staple of my October listening.
31 Days of Halloween:
I totally missed the fact that Creepshow was returning to Shudder for a fourth season this October, so when I saw it drop this past Friday, 10/13, though I was busy watching Never Hike Alone 2, I made a note to try to get to at least one episode over the weekend. Sunday night I did, and in typical Creepshow fashion, the first episode was pretty damn great. The opening segment "Twenty Minutes with Cassandra," written by Jamie Flanagan and directed by Greg Nicotero is everything about this show that is great. I loved that they leaned into humorous but not comedic territory, and what I mean by that is the humor comes from the characters in relation to the situation, not simply the characters or the situation. This one stars Samantha Sloyan and Ruth Codd, both of whom I knew from Mike Flanagan's previous work (Writer Jamie is his brother). The second segment "Smile" was also good; however, "Cassandra" really stole the show here. I'm hoping the rest of the season will stand as strong.
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
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult - Confessions of a Knife
Misfits - American Psycho
Type O Negative - Dead Again
Sleep Token - Sundowning
The Damned - Evil Spirits
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• Four of Swords
• I: The Magician
• IV: The Emperor
Lots of Fours in my vocabulary of late, which tends to indicate Stability first and foremost. I read this one as a reminder to keep one eye on the structure of the life we've built out over the previous year. I harbor a lot of plans, as does K, and often pretty easy to look right past what you have. The Skill and Wisdom of the Magus (Magician) tempered by the structure of linear thinking (my read on The Emperor in this particular instance) is a great structure for moving forward.
