Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/23.

Kathleen Murphy presents an "Alternative Horror Movies Consumer Guide" at MSN; also via MCN, Tom Lynch in Newcity: "Has the abundance of visual gore harmed the genre?... It's shocking, the lack of memorable horror films made since 2000; I've seen my share, and scanning a list of each one that hit theaters, I'm amazed how many of which I completely forgot existed."

For Vue Weekly, David Berry previews this weekend's Deadmonton Horror Film Festival.

"The Gay Bed & Breakfast of Terror delivers on its title, with less subtlety," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice.

"On the one hand, Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman is the everyday portrait of a woman living her life, watching wedding videos, going to the pool, meeting a lover, driving her young niece around, washing her hands, picking up flowers, and so on," writes David Phelps. "On the other, it's a horror-noir straddling two rival strands of the genres: the nice anti-hero with the dark secret buried in the past that threatens to be unearthed (Out of the Past; so many of Hitchcock's double entendres that the speaker means one way, and the guilty hears another); and, in a more supernatural vein, the paranoid anti-hero perceiving visions and intimations nobody else believes in, yet which will vindicate her when it's too late (Invasion of the Body Snatchers; The Exorcist; any number of Twilight Zone episodes, etc)." Also in the Auteurs' Notebook: Daniel Kasman and David Phelps's first question for Martel is, "Is your film a horror movie?"

In the Philadelphia City Paper, Shaun Brady talks with Edward Pettit about the upcoming local screenings of The Pit and the Pendulum and Tales of Terror.

"Ramzi Abed's The Devil's Muse, the thriller about an aspiring actress obsessed with the Black Dahlia and the serial killer who wants to mutilate and cut her in half, is having a week-long run in Los Angeles at the Engine Theater from Oct 23 - 29 as part of Halo 8's Films That Kill festival," notes Mike Everleth.

"There are plenty of opportunities to Get Your Cinematic Ghost On here in Chicago," and Dan Mucha rounds 'em up at Facets Features.

A list from Kevin Kelly at the SpoutBlog: "Teen Screams: High School Horror Stories."

At the Parallax View, Robert C Cumbow presents a "list of 13 movie scores that stand out as landmarks in the honorable tradition of writing music designed to scare the pants off the movie viewer."

"Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead?" asks Jesse Bering in Scientific American. "Shouldn't it be obvious that the mind is dead, too? And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won't feel like anything—and therein lies the problem."

Online gazing tip. At Twitch, Swarez points to a new poster for Death Takes a Holiday.

Online browsing tip. "Vintage Japanese movie-monster anatomical illustrations," via Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow.

Online viewing tip. Fred Ambroisine talks with producer Michele Yeh about Taiwan's first slasher movie, Invitation Only. Via Todd Brown at Twitch.

Posted by dwhudson at October 23, 2008 12:24 PM