Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/21.

David Gordon Green's next project will be "a horror thriller based on a comic book miniseries," notes Eric D Snider at Cinematical. "It's called Freaks of the Heartland, and it's a six-part story published in 2004 by Dark Horse Comics (Portland represent!) about a boy in a small town who must protect his younger brother from people who view him as a monster. There's a good chance the townsfolk are right about the monster thing, however, and it apparently applies to some other local children, too."

"Andy Fickman has made a deal with Roseblood Movie Company and Twisted Pictures to godfather four remakes from RKO's horror heyday, including three that were produced by horrormeister Val Lewton," reports Michael Fleming in Variety. "The remake properties are the Jacques Tourneur-directed I Walked With a Zombie (1943); the Robert Wise-directed Bela Lugosi-Boris Karloff starrer The Body Snatcher (1945); the Mark Robson-directed Karloff starrer Bedlam (1946); and the John Farrow-directed Lucille Ball-John Carradine starrer Five Came Back (1939)." Via Merrick, who's got clips from the originals at AICN.

"Halloween usually brings a crimson tide of horror movies on DVD, and this year is no exception." Featured in Dave Kehr's roundup for the New York Times are Albert Lewin's 1945 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, "a handsome, A-level production" and Terence Fisher's Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, "a 1961 revisionist version of Robert Louis Stevenson's tale." (For more, see Jeffrey M Anderson at Guru.) Then: "Though clearly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, [Seth Holt's] Scream of Fear is closer to Orson Welles in its baroque visual design and delight in style for style's sake." And finally, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre "lacks the moral and philosophical dimensions of George Romero's no less notorious Night of the Living Dead of 1968: the curious genius of Chainsaw lies in its relentless superficiality and literalism. It speeds by in a blur of unsettling, sometimes sickening images, and does not come to a conclusion so much as suddenly spit out the spectator, bringing the awful ride to an end. Still actively imitated today (the Saw films are only its most obvious descendants), this little drive-in movie has won its place in American culture. Deal with it."

"Tim Lucas's excellent Studies in the Horror Film: Videodrome (2008, Consortium Book/Millipede Press) is at last in print, and it's essential reading for any and all devotees of David Cronenberg and/or Videodrome in particular," announces Steve Bissette. "This is a brilliant dissection of the collaborative creative process at work." Tim Lucas notes that Bissette "has some strong opinions on the subject of what he sees as my ratification of 'pejorative terminology' - in this case, my identification of Videodrome as a conceptual granddaddy of the subgenre we know today as 'torture porn' - and I'd like to take a moment to respond to this."

At WNYC, Nathan Lee recommends The Strangers, "a lean, mean little home invasion thriller" and a prime example of the "domestic siege subgenre": "It's the horror genre par excellence for troubled economic times, and it's given us a some superb recent examples."

Mike Everleth reviews a slew of shorts that screened at the recent Spooky Movie Film Festival.

"Suzzanna, the Queen of Indonesian Horror, died on October 15 at the age of 66," notes David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back.

Online viewing tip. Erik Davis: "Cinematical reader Kirby sent in this pretty hilarious video called MACs vs PCs, which takes the popular rivalry to the streets in a short film that's a mix between West Side Story and The Evil Dead."

Online viewing tips. "20 ghosts in varying shades of real" at DC's.

Posted by dwhudson at October 21, 2008 11:57 AM