Friday, April 17th, 2009
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Horrorthon Posts
On Monday, we turned in the second draft of our young-adult supernatural thriller 7 Souls (“we” meaning myself and my writing partner Barney). I say “young-adult” because that’s the market, the characters etc. but it’s really aimed at any reader from any age group who’s into this kind of thing (cynically, anyone willing to surrender a swipe of their credit card in exchange for our unassuming little diversion). 7 Souls is now on schedule for Random House’s Spring 2010 list, but of course that could change.
Anyway, I’m, like, blinking in the sun like somebody who’s been trapped in a mine for 40 days or something. I want to go out among “humans” again; I must visit these “bars” and “gathering places” I have read about while locked away. Given that this is “Horrorthon” I thought I’d drop by with, like, way, WAY early news about an upcoming scary book, but mostly I wanted to drop by to say hello! I like what you’ve all done with the place, what with the groovy poetry-slam coffee house beatnik thing going on every week and the intense photo galleries the rest of the time. Someone’s going to say, “Why doesn’t Horrorthon have horror movie reviews?” the way that people say, “Why doesn’t MTV play music videos?” Except they’d be wrong, because you still have them.
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
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Horrorthon Posts
I don’t know if other ‘thonners ever follow the Onion News Network (The Onion’s recently-added video component), but it’s really surprisingly good. I’d stayed away from it for a long time, expecting “Mad TV”-style broad parody, but the style and precision (and the incredible detail) of the stuff is really amazing.
Anyway these two recent “news items” have a horror/sci-fi bent, so I thought you guys would enjoy them. As with all ONN items, you can freeze-frame on the embedded press clippings and totally read them.
Experts Agree Giant, Razor-Clawed Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat
Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?
Friday, February 6th, 2009
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Horrorthon Posts / Horrorthon Reviews
I don’t really have the goods for the whole Horrorthon routine on this one. In fact, everything about this post is completely half-assed: I haven’t really seen the movie in question; I haven’t read to see if anyone else here reviewed it; I’m not planning on saying very much anyway; It’s not quite worth uploading a picture.
But I just had to mention that I watched the first half of Romero’s Diary of the Dead last night on my friend Vinny’s enormous flatscreen. (We had just watched Lost, which was beyond awesome, and we were sitting around wondering what else was on his TiVo.)
I thought it was great! I keep giving Romero a hard time because I keep thinking that his whole personal zombie schtick is like a law of diminishing returns; they get worse and worse. His obvious belief that he’s got the universal metaphor and he’s going to keep applying it to each decade can get tiresome. And this new version seemed especially guilty of this; it’s blatantly post-Blair Witch, post-Cloverfield in a very overt way. It’s filled with the same “I can’t believe you’re videotaping this, you insensitive lout”/”Don’t you understand that I have to; the camera’s all I’ve got at this point” schtick that those other movies use as well (but, to be fair, there’s really no way around that if you’re going to make your movie entirely from “found” footage).
But anyway, my complaints melted away almost immediately after the movie began. Romero finds the groove immediately and never loses it, and you suddenly realize, as you’re watching, that there’s just Romero and everyone else (including, I am forced to admit, Zack Snyder, despite his obvious insane talent) is just faking it. Diary of the Dead isn’t necessarily better than Snyder’s excellent Dawn of the Dead, but it’s realer, somehow; more intense, more genuine, more immediate.
I’ll write a real review later, once I’ve seen the rest of the movie. If the second half is anywhere near as good as the first, I’ll be giving it lots of stars.
