// Category Archive for: Horror

Moon: A Glimpse at the Dark Side

By David Speranza

When Star Wars came out in 1977, I was among its more ardent fans, seeing it upwards of ten times before it left theaters. But as the years passed and my tastes matured, it became apparent that the coming of Star Wars had essentially meant the end of thoughtful, adult science fiction in movies.
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A Taste Of Terror: Graphic Novels And Horror Comics

By Laura Thomas

October has long been associated with horror movies, Halloween outings, scary music and more, but what about graphic novels? Horror comics are a popular genre of graphic novels that have been popular since the 1940s. They have managed to survive to this day, despite the Senate subcommittee hearings of the 1950s that saw the end of many other genres of comics. In the last ten years or so, horror comics have exploded in the market with one-off graphic novels and ongoing comic book series. So strong is their hold that many movies are being produced based on these graphic novels and comics, and they are often greeted with great success at the box office.
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District 9

By Michelle Patterson

A car windshield splattered and smeared with the guts of bugs and men and swirls of dust and haze appears in front of the camera, doubling as a means to lessen the intense sun of South Africa. The bloody spray of horror married with the vroom-vroom of the action film—all in the midst of a bleak near-future within the science-fiction genre. It adds to the grime of this particular dystopia.
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Highway To Hell: Supernatural

By Jemiah Jefferson

Sam and Dean Winchester are insanely attractive twentysomething brothers who roam the back roads and byways of the United States, acting as de facto supernatural investigators and monster hunters. When they were still kids, demonic forces killed their mother, launching their dad John into a nomadic life of arcane study, occasionally interspersed with some good-old-fashioned buckshot-and-salt, silver-bullet battles for immediate survival. John Winchester trained his sons from childhood to be superlative badasses like him, and continue his quest to defeat the demon who stole away their normal lives, and any other demonic bad guys they run across.

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Halloween 2, Written/Directed By Rob Zombie

By Danny R. Phillips

I am a fan of the horror genre, everything from Lon Chaney’s silent classic Phantom of The Opera to slasher gems like the first A Nightmare on Elm Street. Of all the on-screen killing machines director John Carpenter has created, the wordless, soulless Michael Myers is my all-time favorite. The first Halloween movie from 1978 is without question a classic of style, suspense, violence, and good writing. It stands in a class with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, House of Wax (the Vincent Price original, not the Paris Hilton piece of shit), Evil Dead, and Bride of Frankenstein.
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Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds, Dracula Boots

By Julie Finley

Kid Congo Powers (a.k.a. Brian Tristan) has been around. . . and around! If you know the name, you know his pedigree! If you are reading this, you probably dig at least one of the following: The Cramps, The Gun Club, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Congo Norvell, Knoxville Girls, Kid & Khan, Fur Bible, Botanica, Mark Eitzel, The Divine Horsemen, The Angels of Light, Die Haut, etc. (or possibly all of them). He’s sort of a renegade musician—he shows up in a lot of things—but in the past few years, he’s finally doing his own thing, where he’s the focus.
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A Call to Cover Arms: Sexism At Halloween

By Maureen

Sometimes I feel like the only person on Earth who still remembers that it’s kind of chilly in New York in late October. I think Miranda Hobbes said it best in Sex and the City: The Movie when she declared while shopping for a Halloween costume, “There’s only two options for women: witch, and sexy kitten.” I am even tempted to see Miranda’s point and raise her to a bet that the witch costume she saw was not any old witch, but a “sexy” witch.
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The Orchard Sisters

“After Martha Orchard was found dead on Christmas Eve,
1974, and before it was demolished in 1975,
hundreds of curiousity-seekers visited the house.”
Newspaper clipping courtesy of tufcookie
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Bloody Sheets, Bad Sweaters, and Broken Hearts: The Wisdom Of Crocodiles

By Jemiah Jefferson

Jude Law, tasty son-of-a-bitch.

Originally this was going to be a gushing review of a very beautiful, very sexy vampire film that I remember loving the hell out of, but hadn’t seen in a very long time—ten years or so. Within 30 minutes of rewatching, though, this became much more of an exercise in “the golden glow of memory masking the flaws of fact.” Filmmaking, vampire movies, and I were all in somewhat different eras in 1999; we’ve all come a long way, and The Wisdom Of Crocodiles hasn’t really kept up. Unjustly obscure, the film also suffers from having been titled Immortality for its US release, and the shitty production values used when slapping its American title on the screen makes it look like it’s just a very expensive episode of the new Outer Limits.
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The Darkest Of The Hillside Thickets: An Interview With Toren Atkinson

Interviewed by Megashaun

I first heard of The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets at last year’s Penny Arcade Expo. The band was there and had a booth set up because they were playing at one of the concerts during the convention. Around this time, their song, “Shhh…” was introduced as downloadable content for the video game Rock Band. Although initially drawn to them by the visual aesthetic of their album designs and the scruffy yet handsome appearance of the band’s members, I was pleased to find out upon listening to their album Cthulhu Strikes Back that the band has a great deal of musical talent and that their music has a lot more going for it than catchy hooks and bellowing vocals.

When I later listened to The Shadow Out of Tim, I was even more impressed. The album’s dark undertones are a perfect complement to its catchy, even poppy, foundation. It’s also just a little bit scary, but more importantly it kicks a lot of ass.

The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets are known for their energetic live shows. While I’ve sadly never had the opportunity to see them play live, I can tell just from looking at photos that the shows must be a great deal of fun. That, and Toren Atkinson, lead singer of the band, tells a good story about the origins of their live shtick.

Photo from thickets.net
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