Cinema Suicide

15 Sep

The Top 10 Greatest Horror TV shows of all time

Posted by Bryan White | Saturday September 15, 2012 | TVEye

I recently submitted a top 10 list to Brian Solomon’s Vault of Horror blog as part of a sort of collaborative top 10 list of horror TV shows but the catch there is that we ordered these shows sorted by favorite and in the end, it’s going to be a single list and you’ll never get to see my actual submission nor did I get to extrapolate in exhausting detail why I happen to think that these shows are winners. I figured I’d throw it up here because I don’t think I’ve ever done any such thing. We used to have the TV Eye column but that covered what was happening in the world of television horror, science fiction and fantasy from week to week and didn’t actually represent what Tony Nunes or myself happened to think were actually good shows. So here it is, the official Cinema Suicide greatest horror TV shows of all time list in order of greatness!

10. Doctor Who
I’ve had this conversation with a more than few people. With the return of The Doctor several years back, Doctor Who found its way back into the hearts of nerds everywhere and it’s a beautiful thing. It has routinely found its way on to top ten science fiction lists with such regularity these days, making sure only to reference Eccleston, Tenant and Smith and eschewing the notion of the other eight doctors that it’s fairly safe to assume that Doctor Who in its present incarnation is a towering modern epic of science fiction proportions but I dare say, it’s also one of the finest horror shows ever produced. I mean that! Straight back to the William Hartnell Doctor. Doctor Who is manic and cheeky and fun and dominated with future tech and time travel and all that awesome shit but it’s also peppered with arcs and episodes absolutely steeped in terrifying shit. Right from the get go you had the horror of the Cybermen, these hollowed out shells of people stripped down and replaced with machine parts, their awful modulated voices emerging from open mouths, hardly moving to speak the words. It’s some severely creepy shit. During the Tom Baker era (my personal favorite) you had The Ark In Space, which finds The Doctor and his companions on board a satellite orbiting a dead Earth where an alien organism has infected the cryogenically frozen humans on board, turning one of them into something else with the intention of turning them all into something else. In recent times, Stephen Moffat has turned up the heat with episodes about werewolves, the “Are you my mummy?” ghost kid, The Family of Blood and god damn it, The Weeping Angels (in what is my favorite time travel related episode of anything). I maintain that Doctor Who cribbed some inspiration from Hammer’s previous scientist dealing with scary shit, Professor Quatermass.

9. American Horror Story
I would ordinarily have a really hard time putting a series on this list that as of this writing has only one complete season of TV and hasn’t even started its second (though, that’s right around the corner) but the first season of American Horror Story delivered so fully on its promise of spooks and scares that I just couldn’t leave it off the list. So effective was it that the mid-season ending left us on such a weird spot that I wasn’t sure where they could possibly take it from there but when the show resumed it went even further off the fuckin’ rails! It managed to buck TV horror conventions and in a day and age when a haunted house movie, typically an extremely restrained affair, shows you everything and leaves nothing to the deadly machinations of your own imagination, American Horror Story went there, damn it! They kept their shit in check and gave you some spooky twists and turns in the story. I knock points off for Dylan McDermott’s affair subplot dragging on a bit too long but side players, Denis O’Hare, Evan Peters and Jessica Lange had me glued to the set week after week. The forthcoming follow up season takes (most of) the same cast, winds the clock back to the 60′s and sets the show in a completely unrelated insane asylum. Who comes up with this? This is a bold, fucking insane idea and it’s pretty much what basic cable horror needs right now. And all of this came from one of the dudes who created Glee.

8. Fringe
Fringe has had enough time on TV these days to be a fully fermented product that in spite of fairly drippy ratings, manages to stay on the air in true TV cult land. If ever there was a show that was the spiritual successor to The X-Files, Fringe is it. In its beginnings it was an extremely entertaining show even as it struggled to figure out what it was in the midst of a streak of monster of the week episodes but somewhere in between all these mad science gone horribly wrong episodes, Fringe started to tell a story about black hat scientists working underground in accordance with a secret manuscript. Of course, these were the days of Lost and every motherfucking genre show on TV had to have some extraordinarily convoluted metaplot running behind the scenes of week to week mayhem but it eventually figured itself out and gave us lots and lots of human bodies rendered to protoplasm, cleaved in half by closing pan-dimensional gates, spontaneous human combustion and whatnot and it was all kept on course by a solid cast of players who made the trains run on time. Fringe cribbed conspiracy theory and black science mythology from some of my favorite conspiracy theory sources, The Philadelphia Experiment and The Montauk Project and once it figured out what it was doing, it ran absolutely wild with great ideas for weekly horror.

7. Twin Peaks
I had a hard time with this one seeing as how Twin Peaks isn’t exactly horror but it’s deeply unsettling and seriously weird in such a way that it puts its viewership on edge. Much of David Lynch’s work is like that. It’s hard to pin down to any one genre but everything he does is so uniformly strange and deliberately engineered to make viewers uncomfortable by genuine mystery that it sort of drifts into horror territory without ever realizing it. That is, until the show’s cancellation in the second season when the show’s narrative went completely bonkers, introducing the very idea of The Black Lodge, The Man From Another Place and so on. The mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder, clearly wrapped up in the film Fire Walk With Me, kept people hanging on and made the show one of the most off-beat noirs of all time but it was the addition of the usual David Lynch surrealism that made it so incredibly strange and compelling. Twin Peaks played itself out like taking in a production of Our Town during a particularly bad acid trip. It expanded on the themes of small town life’s facade and the corruption that lives just beneath the surface, ideas Lynch had taken for a ride with Blue Velvet only this time around, thanks to the Writer’s Guild going on strike and leaving TV networks hungry for content, Lynch had an easy in and provided prime time television with something so incredibly uncommercial and spooky that its cancellation midway through the second season came as little surprise to anyone.

6. Buffy The Vampire Slayer
For the longest time, because I thought the original movie was so incredibly stupid, I held a firm grudge against the Buffy TV show which looked supremely lame from the perspective of someone who had already judged the show based not on its merits but on some bullshit uninformed opinion. Then I caught an episode called Hush and my world changed. Hush aired during the fourth season and by this point it had established itself with a firm mythology that left my head spinning. Angel and Buffy had established their tragic romance. Riley and The Initiative had been introduced. Faith had already torn through Sunnydale. Willow had a werewolf boyfriend and there was all this other stuff happening that suggested an ongoing narrative arc that is like heroin to me. Growing up on the continuing adventures of comic book super heroes left me with a craving for a show that did more than tell a single story in an hour or half hour of TV. Buffy did just that by lifting the narrative mechanism that made The X-Files so much fun by giving each season an ongoing challenge from week to week but lifting things from time to time with an monster of the week. By the time the credits rolled after Hush, I had raided my sister’s complete collection of VHS episodes taped from TV, including the pilot, and was caught up in no time by binging on four or five episodes a night. By the time the show reached its series finale I was a walking encyclopedia of all things Buffy and Angel. I actually think Angel is the better show but you couldn’t have one without the other so I’ll include Angel by implication. I still pester Stephen Moffat and Russel Davies from time to time via Twitter to inspire them to actually produce the Ripper series that was proposed but never followed up with.

5. Dark Shadows
I’ve moaned about this in the past and pointed my finger at Hollywood numerous times about its contempt for the horror genre. It hates horror. The people who produce it are viewed as Hollywood pariahs and the people who consume it are viewed as degenerates whom you probably want to keep your children away from. Unfortunately, horror makes a lot of money and few things are as perfect an example of that than Dark Shadows. Dark Shadows began life as a marginally horror-flavored soap opera on ABC in 1966 but when ratings flagged and it was at risk of being cancelled, series creator Dan Curtis introduced the vampire Barnabas Collins, played by Jonathan Frid, and the show took off dramatically in a new direction. What was originally played down and kept to subtleties with the occasional ghost story all of a sudden involved the undead, werewolves, zombies and other horrors on a regular rotation. The dark Collins family secret of the tragic Barnabas took over the show and on a daily basis, this is a soap opera, after all, the show ran through a series of particularly ridiculous but extremely fun episodes, something in excess of 1,000. Unlike other horror TV shows and because it was an ongoing daily soap, Dark Shadows introduced the idea of the long narrative arc to genre television. Prior to Dark Shadows, this was unheard of and it helped the show sail deep into cult TV territory, constantly being rediscovered by new generations of fans and landing its own film adaptation (which I’m told is positively rancid) and dropping mad reference on Mad Men. You can also catch up with many episodes from the run on Netflix and for the truly dedicated, I’m told there’s an outrageously priced boxed set which has every episode from the run.

4. Kolchak: The Night Stalker
To most people, Darren McGavin is probably best known as the foul mouthed dad from A Christmas Story but for those of us with a yen for old school TV, we immediately recognize him as Chicago journalist, Karl Kolchak, a writer with a weird tendency to find his way into crimes involving the supernatural. It began as a super popular made for TV movie called The Night Stalker, adapted by Richard Matheson from a novel by Jeff Rice and turned out to be really popular. Popular enough to find its way to a weekly series. Week after week, Kolchak pursues all manner of beasts in expertly written episodes that were ground zero for the Monster of the Week concept. This would later translate to shows like The X-Files, Buffy and Supernatural. Kolchak wasn’t exactly scary as broadcast standards at the time wouldn’t really let it go there like the TV movies that preceded it did and the vibe is actually pretty appropriate for younger audiences but it’s a quirky show that’s a lot of fun and the very foundation for weekly horror to come. Previously, the only horror on TV came in the form of anthology serieses like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and One Step Beyond. Dark Shadows had established the idea of the ongoing horror arc but Kolchak was the galvanizing moment for the generation that grew up with it. Unfortunately, it aired during the same tragic Friday at 10pm slot that killed Star Trek and suffered miserable ratings and was gone after a single season. Lucky for you, however, you can see them all, minus the TV movies on Netflix.

3. Tales From The Crypt
My family had an intermittent subscription to HBO but it came and went depending on how much my parents were watching it. So when we had it, I would throw in a video tape around 10pm, set it to EP mode and record as much as the tape would allow throughout the night in order to catch those weird early morning blasts of this show. This is one of those shows that everyone remembers. It was minor cultural phenomenon. It spawned Cryptkeeper toys and a surge in sales of the EC reprints of the comic and how could a horror fan not want a piece of the action? It was spawned by some of Hollywood’s most fun directors, guys like Robert Zemeckis and Richard Donner. Week after week it featured a new tale directed by the last people you’d ever expect to turn up in such a place. I mean, Michael J. Fox and Arnold Schwarzenneger not to mention actual horror directors like Tom Holland and Tobe Hooper. They also had a group of killer writers. People like Frank Darabont, Richard Matheson and Fred Dekker. They captured the essence of those awesome comics perfectly with unsavory characters meeting ironic ends and the results could be somewhere between extremely funny and exceptionally horrifying. Everyone who ever watched the show has a favorite episode, too. I’m curious to know what yours is. Mine, an episode which actually haunted me a bit, is called Television Terror, which features Morton Downey Jr. trying to stir up ratings for his ridiculous TV show by locking himself in a haunted house that turns out to be actually haunted.

2. The Twilight Zone
I am related in a distant way to Rod Serling. True story, bro. But I’m not letting my relation color my judgement. If that had happened this would be in the first place spot, but that is reserved for another show. No. I realize that this might piss off a lot of people who hold dear to the idea that this is probably the greatest horror TV of all time but you must understand. It was a tough call. See, The Twilight Zone is the template for all horror and sci-fi TV to come in its wake. Week after week. Season after season. The Twilight Zone delivered some of the most clever short format anthology horror the world had ever seen. It had competition in the form of The Outer Limits and that show also had its merits but The Twilight Zone had Rod fucking Serling at the helm, that amazing theme song and a menu of extremely memorable episodes that everyone remembers. Burgess Meredith, henpecked and desperate to just crack a book and leave the world behind, finally left with that time after the bomb only to break his very much needed glasses. William Shatner in the grip of panic as a horrible monster on the wing of his airplane disassembles the engine. “The rest of the book! To Serve Man! It’s a cookbook!” This show was absolutely pivotal and even though I’ve seen them all, I still make time to catch the marathons on Syfy even though I can just catch them whenever on Netflix.

1. The X-Files
I suspect that the key to a classic horror TV series is the theme music. Four of these shows are also on my greatest horror and sci-fi TV theme songs list. For many of my generation, TV in the 90′s was defined by either Seinfeld or Friends. If it’s an indication as to what sort of person I am, I have probably seen a combined total of four episodes of both of those shows and I can’t tell you much about them except that one show featured a terminal romance between someone named Ross and someone named Rachel, Elaine was a pretty lousy dancer and that Jerry Seinfeld played a guy named Jerry. I think. However, if you have the time and the desire, I can sit you down sometime and explain in excruciating detail every last motherfucking piece of the X-Files puzzle. Every monster of the week. Every appearance of the Cigarette Smoking Man. I can tell you where Mulder got his nickname (Spooky) from. For me and my kind, we were all singularly dedicated to The X-Files. Some of those assholes also made a habit out of Xena: Warrior Princess but you have to cut them some slack. The Internet was still a new thing back then and readily available lesbian porn wasn’t quite the abundant resource that is, say, right now. The X-Files was a perfection of timing. The post-Reagan/Bush 90′s was a time when public suspicion of the government was at an all time high. The Cold War was pretty much a thing of the past, the potential nuclear war that would kill us all was a shadow of its former threat. What the fuck do you get paranoid about? Aliens. That’s what. Aliens from space. Not Mexico. It was brilliant science fiction. Scary as fuck when it wanted to be with episodes about The Fluke Man and Eugene Tooms, The X-Files could maintain that horror vibe even when it was funny as hell in what is my all-time favorite episode, Jose Chung’s From Outer Space. Like The Twilight Zone, it lured in legendary writers like Stephen King and William Gibson and had a weekly cast of outstanding guest stars like Brad Douriff, Bruce Campbell, Michael McKean, Peter Boyle and Steve Railsback. Ordinarily, the final Duchovny-less seasons would disqualify The X-Files from my top spot since I figure the number one show on this list was going to have to be flawless from start to finish but let’s face it. No show, not even the later seasons of The Twilight Zone manage to stay that fresh. Plus, the running mythology of the show, the alien contact coverup, the fate of Mulder’s sister, Scully’s cancer, The Roush company and The Syndicate. Even in its waning years, peaking with the ultimate fate of everyone’s favorite b-characters, The Lone Gunmen, The X-Files maintained a consistent pace fusing horror and science fiction in a way that was extremely versatile and entertaining to the last drop. The X-Files is a show that I dearly miss.

Honorable mentions:

Friday the 13th: The Series
A product of Friday the 13th in name only, I badly wanted to put this show on the list but it missed more than it hit and early episodes were far better than later episodes. The idea was very novel, cousins inherit their uncle’s antique shop only to discover that a Faustian deal left items sold from the shop cursed. Every week had them tracking down and recovering a cursed item whats power had typically been discovered by its present owner. Mayhem ensued. It was a good show but suffered a casting change somewhere in the middle of season one and lost a bit of its footing in further episodes. I guess it runs in syndication on some of those mythical all-horror channels that seem to run only on the rarest of American cable networks. I think it was a Canadian production that went to network syndication as soon as it was released and it ran on Sunday afternoons for me locally with a syndicated (and extremely gory) War of the Worlds show right after it that featured the guy from Predator who kept telling big vagina jokes to everyone.

Forever Knight
Forever Knight used to run late nights on some of the former UHF channels turned into Fox/UPN/WB affiliates somewhere in the 90′s before it found a wider audience in reruns on the Sci Fi channel. That is, after it had a brief run on network primetime. This was probably the first vampire TV show that I can think of that embraced the Anne Rice model of the vampire. Prior to Forever Knight, vampires were still the predatory villains of horror but Forever Knight was one of the first instances that I can think of that took that stereotype and turned the vampire into its own tragic hero with some pretty significant flaws. The show suffered from some rotten acting and cheesy writing at times but it spawned a fascinating mythology and a cult audience that was as hungry for new episodes as fans of Dark Shadows or The X-Files.

14 Sep

Kickstarter: The End, an anthology film featuring the work of yours truly

Posted by Bryan White | Friday September 14, 2012 | Whimsy

If you’ve been following this site for a while, and from the looks of things you haven’t, then you’ll know that a few years back I did some writing for a bunch of comics that a few people read and seemed to really enjoy. In spite of my outspoken opposition of all things zombie and low-budget I’ve done more than my fair share of zombie-related shit in the last couple of years. Most recently, I banged out a couple of drafts of an adaptation of my first comic from Zombie Bomb, This Night I’ll Eat Your Flesh. A while back I actually got working on an expanded script that was to be adapted for a weekly Zombie Bomb TV show pilot that never made it past the “hey, we ought to do this” phase. This time, though, I have an actual director. There’s also a producer and a budget and a bunch of people actually committed to make this shit happen. Like, for real.

The director, Michael Ficara – who directed my Grand Guignol play back in July – is at the helm and riding shotgun with him is a collection of Seacoast, New Hampshire-based directors hungry to end the world just to see what happens. The project is called The End: A Collective and highlights our species’ collective fascination with the big finish of the human race and, naturally, because we all love motherfucking zombies, there’s a short in there about zombies. Mine.

In case you didn’t read This Night I’ll Eat Your Flesh in Zombie Bomb volume 2, the general gist is a modern interpretation of Tales From The Crypt as three unsavory individuals bumrush an old lady in her home to steal her haul of pharmaceuticals only to find that she’s not what they thought she was and that she and her pills are actually staving off the rot and hunger of some similar folks. I dislike the usual zombie rigmarole so I tried to inject it with some original business to make it seem less like the usual point and shoot them in the head foolishness. Maybe I did right.

Anyway. The Kickstarter goal is a mere $4,300 (since a good deal of the budget has already been secured) but to really make this shit shine, they need just a little more. So do me a solid and throw a few bucks their way. It’s sure to be a good time and I can personally vouch for the talent rolling behind this. They know what they’re doing. So help them make this shit a reality, would you?

Kickstart this project now!

7 Aug

The Suicidal Book Club: START HERE – Alan Moore

Posted by Bryan White | Tuesday August 7, 2012 | Suicidal Book Club

Lately, I’ve been devouring fiction. Where for a long time in these parts, I moaned about my woeful sublight pace of reading (in fact, very, very slow) this year I kicked off a new reading paradigm informed by author, Joe Hill. Pick 10 books. Read them in that order. Marry yourself to the list. Every time you clear one, add a new one behind it to the bottom of the list. Since January 1, my reading habits have turned around to such a point that really all I want to do these days is a crack a book and put my feet up. Add to that that I’m slated to be on Casey Criswell’s podcast, ‘Dad and His Weird Friends‘ to talk about Warren Ellis’ crazy-ass novella, ‘Crooked Little Vein’, I’ve finally put my own inferiority complex aside and began writing the novel I’ve had kicking around in my head since The Sword released ‘Age of Winters’ and I’ve been driving the folks at Book Riot fucking insane with pleas to be a contributor to their upcoming project, Start Here, a manual for folks interested in reading an author that they’ve always wanted to get into but having no idea where to start. I sent them a long-winded credit dump illustrating why they want me in their book but when it came to offering expertise in a particular author, all I could do was say that I was sweet on Philip K. Dick, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller and Alan Moore. Now they have a contest to grab contributors and raise the profile of their Kickstarter campaign and once again, I am making it known that I really want to be a part of this with this: my official entry on the work of my favorite comic writer of all time, Alan Moore. So here it is folks. Brace yourselves. I’m entering Book Riot’s START HERE Write-In Giveaway!

Begin sample chapter!

Until the 1980′s, the comic book was a medium that couldn’t grow up. It began as something that kids read much to the dismay of their parents and then, through the years, remained much as it had since its inception: Goofy dudes running around in tights, fighting colorful villains in equally garish tights. Just add sidekick. Many factors in The United States came along to chain comics down as a juvenile medium, namely The Comic’s Code Authority, but Europe didn’t have this problem. As American comic book publishers gently pushed boundaries, European publishers had a regular schedule of gritty adult books and this liberal creative license in the UK allowed a man like Alan Moore to come up in the framework of the American superhero comic, while injecting it with his own form of mature and sophisticated storytelling that The US had never seen before. Moore’s entry into the pantheon of DC Comics brought with it a sea change in the way comics were both written and read. Moore has an entire galaxy of challenging and exciting work out there but if you really want to dive in, you’re probably going to want to put books like Promethea and The Lost Girls aside until you’ve found your true Alan Moore gateway drug.

Saga of the Swamp Thing
With his introduction to Swamp Thing, Moore was given free editorial rein to do whatever it is he wanted to do with the character. He grabbed this opportunity by the throat and ran wild with it, retconning the entire Swamp Thing canon. He took a corny horror comic and turned it into one of the most sophisticated literary horror comics to hit the presses. Its ripples can still be felt today and Moore’s work on the book from start to finish set the tone for further writers to take up the comic. Moore’s work, collected in trade paperbacks and a series of beautiful hardcovers, turns the book into a series of ironic horror shorts in the style of EC and Warren horror comics and bakes them into an ongoing narrative of spirituality, environmentalism and romance (no, really). The series peaks with the introduction of John Constantine, The Hellblazer, as he guides Swamp Thing through a series of paranormal encounters with ghosts, vampires and werewolves, culminating in an epic confrontation in Hell, the resolution being one of the most moving and amazing moments in the entire body of Alan Moore’s work.

V For Vendetta
Started in the British anthology comic, Warrior, V For Vendetta remained unfinished until the late 80’s when Moore had proven himself many times over as one of the most innovative writers in comics at the time. DC, his then-regular publisher colored the book and re-published the entire run, allowing Moore, after many years, to finally finish the story. V For Vendetta is set in a post-nuclear Great Britain where the vacuum of power allowed a fascist regime to take hold in England, placing the entire surviving population under its thumb and creating a corrupt ruling class. However, a nigh-unstoppable force rises to fight the fascists in the form of the ghost of their medical-experimentation past as a concentration camp escapee in a cape and Guy Fawkes mask assassinates key government officials and bombs government buildings with reckless abandon. Moore’s writing in this book is some his strongest and the setting is a reflection of his feelings about Margaret Thatcher’s England in the 80’s. It is impossible to read this and not find yourself in the shoes of V’s protege, Evey.

Watchmen
If you’re going to introduce someone to Alan Moore, Watchmen is a foregone conclusion. If the man were to be known for one book and one book only, it would be this one. In Watchmen, Moore pitches a story that deconstructs the entire notion of the superhero comic book and turns the medium on its ear as the line between hero and villain is blurred so significantly that you couldn’t even see it anymore. The result is a disturbing exploration of a real world where costumed crime fighters exist and how their status as vigilantes isolate them from the rest of us. It takes the typical model of the super hero as Greek god and brings them back down to Earth to become something more horribly recognizable and deeply flawed. In Watchmen, the world is approaching the brink of nuclear annihilation. Costumed heroes put the capes back on after a long absence to find the killer of one of their own and wind up uncovering a terrifying conspiracy with dire consequences. So impressive in scope is Watchmen that it would go on to become recognized as one of the most important comics of all time.

End sample chapter!

31 Jul

The Android’s Dungeon: Batman – a stealth horror character?

Posted by Bryan White | Tuesday July 31, 2012 | The Android's Dungeon

With The Dark Knight Rises dominating the box office and me neck-deep in Arkham City for Xbox 360, I’ve been thinking lately about an idea I’ve had rolling around in my head for some time in half-baked format:

Maybe it’s just because I don’t actually follow Batman beyond the odd one-shot or mini-series. Maybe it’s because my fondest memories of the Adam West Batman show involve Vincent Price. Maybe it’s because that when I do buy a Batman book, it’s because my natural status as a horror fan draws me toward the darker explorations of Batman in a horror context, but it seems to me that every time I look, I find something in the Batman canon that makes me think that even when he’s being written in the most straight-ahead fashion by whatever Schmoe DC has hired, it seems to me that Batman is injected with at least some degree of the horror genre. The medium doesn’t matter, either! Whether it’s Detective Comics, the movies and even that outstanding Batman: The Animated Series. Batman is always spooky.

The very foundation of Batman’s origin is rooted in horror. Superman’s origins not only involve the death of his parents but the death of his entire race but he flies through the space away from this tragedy into the arms of a loving pair of parental units so it renders his argument moot. Others, however, The Green Lantern, The Flash, Wonder Woman, any of the other members of The JLA, none of them feature a tragic back story involving the death of a child’s parents. Comic books have grown up since the golden age but the one thing you have to remember was that back in 1939 when Batman made a splash in the pages of Detective Comics #27, comics were largely a product directed at children. I’m sure there were handfuls of adults consuming comics on the sly but if the average comic book consumer of today were to be seen with boxes upon boxes of lovingly bagged and boarded comic books, they would have been marched off to the funny farm where they would have found an ice pick jammed through their ocular cavity, scrambling up the frontal lobe of their brain. It was fucking unheard of! Kids bought and read comics and their parents hated it! So how strange was it that as a child, Bruce Wayne witnessed the senseless murder of his parents? Disney did this a lot, too, in their feature cartoons using dead parents as a driving force behind a character. Take yourself back to 8 years old and put yourself there. It’s unpleasant to think about it now, even as a rational adult.

27 Jul

Grand Guignol Revival: The Conspiracy of Three, a gory play of love and betrayal in one act

Posted by Bryan White | Friday July 27, 2012 | News

I know, I know. It’s been fucking forever since I’ve updated this place. I have a shitload going on these days. A baby in the coming months, a script in production on an indie horror flick and I just wrapped up a run at The Player’s Ring theater in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with my co-production with John Herman of An Evening of Grand Guignol: Theatre of Terror.

John is a local creative dynamo and I’ve talked about him a bit in this place since he and I have worked together in the past on some shit and we’ve had a lot of fun. A little while back I did a sort of capsule review of Le Theatre du Grand Guignol, the famous Paris house of horrors which staged hundreds of sadistic and gory plays much to the delight of France’s bloodthirsty theater patrons. John has done a series of one-act plays in the past with his ‘Evening of Steampunk’ and ‘Evening of Apocalypse Theater’ productions at The Player’s Ring, both done for the benefit of charity. In the wake of my article on Grand Guignol, it occurred to me that we could probably pull off another one of these Evening of… shows in the style of the Grand Guignol. John pitched the show to The Player’s Ring who gave us the thumbs up, we presented it to the press and their patrons one evening and then he, our friend E. Christopher Clarke and myself got to work on our respective scripts.

The idea of this show was to recreate the style of the Grand Guignol and I feel that with a couple of creative liberties, we got it mostly right. Each one of us produced and directed (well, not me. Michael Ficara directed my script) our own works. Chris Clarke wrote a very unpleasant, heavily Poe-inspired tale called The Boot, which featured a woman passionately copulating with the soggy reanimated corpse of her husband’s father while her husband looked on, helplessly trapped under the spectral weight of his father’s severed foot. John Herman adapted a Grand Guignol original by Andre De Lorde, A Crime In A Madhouse, wherein a crazy woman is terrorized by a pair of loonies in a crazy house who believe that an owl lives in her head and the only way to let it out is to tear her eyes out and I wrote my own, The Conspiracy of Three, which I have attached here for your reading and should you feel so inclined, I’ve slapped a Creative Commons License on it so that you can use it to stage your own Grand Guignol evening at whatever venue happens to think it’s grand idea.

In The Conspiracy of Three, the adulterous wife of a drug-addled physician plots to murder her husband with her lover and take off to Barbados with his money. My original intent was to portray it very seriously but upon reading it and seeing it performed in rehearsals, it occurred to me that it was, in fact, completely ridiculous and the director ordered the cast to play it up with maximum camp. The results were hilarious and the audience ate up every minute of the show. Lovers, Henry and Claire were played as though they were in a 30′s farce with Claire practically drowning in melodrama and Henry acting as a living, breathing analog of Pepe Le Pew. Dr. Clouseau was portrayed as a completely oblivious fool with a sort of silver age of Hollywood forcefulness. Night after night, the audience laughed its ass off until things got bloody and then they started squirming in their seats (while laughing their asses off).

This was a very effects heavy show by comparison to the other two plays in the program and to achieve the effects, director Mike Ficara and I parted with cash money to buy some serious gear. We hired the services of The Shoggoth Assembly of Portland, Maine to create the prop razor, the prop eyeball and a silicone appliance to be worn by William O’Donnell for when Dr. Clouseau, played by Matthew Schofield, cuts him open and pulls back the skin to reveal the meat and bone beneath. When Claire, played by Constance Witman, has her throat slashed, I built a device that she wore beneath her costume that used a CO2 gun to pressurize a cannister made from 1.5″ PVC pipe (yes, it was kind of big) full of fake blood. The blood snaked up through some surgical tubing and out the notched end of the tube hidden just below her collar to achieve a sort of Kill Bill arterial spray effect that hit the audience sitting in our “splatter section”. Night after night, this thing worked like a charm and was a real crowd pleaser. I wish I had pictures but no one ever thought to take pics of the show as it was performed.

So yeah. This is what I’ve been up to of late. We had a lot of fun and made a few bucks in the process to donate to a number of local charities. If producing a play wasn’t such a titanic pain in the ass, I’d be all over it again right now. Seeing my show performed for a room full of people who were very clearly enjoying it had a very addictive effect. Next up for me is a short film production of the comic Rich Woodall and I did for Zombie Bomb, Volume 2: This Night I’ll Eat Your Flesh, as part of Mike Ficara’s anthology horror film, The End.

Feel free to download, read, redistribute and perform my play, The Conspiracy of Three, available under a Creative Commons License.

15 Apr

Everything you know is wrong. The Cabin In The Woods.

Posted by Bryan White | Sunday April 15, 2012 | Reviews

I’m about to break the dry spell. I haven’t written a review in a long, long time. What’s more, I haven’t covered a horror movie since last year at some point so it is with great joy that I break the trend with a movie I’m not likely to stop talking about for some time. See, horror movies suck. It’s true! Well, wait. New horror movies suck. Hollywood hates the genre but they love the money the by-the-numbers stuff rakes in at the box office so, like most movies in wide release today, they play the safe game and do nothing but release a parade of sequels to movies that were hugely successful only a couple of years prior. But every now and then something comes along that manages to slip through the cracks. Thanks to studio politics, someone owes someone a favor and the most offbeat, original genre picture, rated R, no less, manages to find its way to the megaplex where it spends a couple of weeks playing in front of a handful of savvy genre fans, drunks and people who thought they were seeing something else before it shuffles its way off to DVD where it finally finds it audience. Or, in the case of The Cabin In The Woods, your movie stars a cast member of this summer’s blockbuster season opener and happens to bear a producer credit from said blockbuster’s director. Though, I’m sure studio suits thought that they were priming the box office money pump with some goofy horror flick that has been gathering dust in the vault for a couple of years but in the process of trying to squeeze as much money out of the Avengers and Joss Whedon’s name, they inadvertently released a horror movie into the wild that is among the most original, funny and relentlessly awesome flicks I’ve seen in a very, very long time.

Now for the bad news. I have no idea how I’m going to discuss the endless list of good things about The Cabin In The Woods because the entire movie is a giant horror movie in-joke that hinges on a very basic premise that unfolds very early on, but the central gag is so important to the rest of the movie that talking about it all would spoil horror’s best idea in years. So please excuse me if I’m being vague, but I want you to like this movie as much as I liked it Continue Reading »

11 Apr

The greatest horror movie scenes. Ever.

Posted by Bryan White | Wednesday April 11, 2012 | Uncategorized,Whimsy

OK, so maybe they’re not the best scenes ever, but they’re certainly some of my favorites. Lately, I’ve been feeling burnt out and jaded. Nothing I see interests me. The horror genre is starting to slip away again and I don’t feel much like writing about how much I hate the horror movies that I’ve been seeing lately. I spend my nights reading and playing video games and there’s enough bloggery out there about Game of Thrones that me tossing in my two cents wouldn’t cause much of a ripple. Basically all I’ve been up to lately is playing Battlefield 3, watching Mad Men and reading until my eyes cross. So casting all that negativity aside and bucking the need to write about fresh new horror, here I go, turning my eye to the past; to better days. These are the movies I love so dearly. They either fostered my love of the genre or gave it longevity. I haven’t written anything horror-related in a while. So here you go. Let’s get nostalgic. Feel free to comment, too! I want to know what your favorite scenes are. Bonus points if you link to the clips on Youtube.

Poltergeist – The face rip
The first movie that I actually remember scaring the fuck out of me, actually scaring me, was Poltergeist. It was broadcast on TV one night back when the major networks actually aired movies as part of their nightly programming and being as it was a PG rated movie, it made it to air with no cuts. This meant going out to televisions all across the country with this famous scene intact. The year was 1985. I was almost ten years old and watched it with my mom. While most of the movie spooked me, much to my delight, this particular scene was just too much for me and I wound up covering my eyes through the worst of it. I don’t care who directed it, Hooper or Spielberg. Whichever of you two was responsible for this scene, congratulations.

Friday the 13th Part 7 – Sleeping bag smash
I am a life-long Jason Voorhees fan, as I have made abundantly clear in the past. I really don’t care for most of the 80′s slasher icons as the core three (Jason, Freddy and Michael ‘The Shape’ Myers) are the only ones worth mentioning and by the time that I was actually old enough to start watching these flicks, the genre was limping toward its inevitable doom having been bled completely dry by the time I was 7 years old. Even my favorite franchise, The Fridays, was a limping race horse as the sequels numbered higher than 5, but no matter how ridiculous the franchise got, each one had at least one good kill. Friday 7, as ridiculous as it is, at least tried to do something more than lumbering killer slaughters stoned camp counselors, what with it introducing Tina the pyshic. Plus it brought us the mighty Kane Hodder. So popular was this kill that they brought it back for the hologram kill in Jason X, a movie I like way more than any grown-ass man should. This is the uncut clip in workprint form, which shows far, far more tree smashes and gore than we got in the theatrical cut.

The Silence of the Lambs – The importance of putting the lotion in the basket
My favorite scene of all time comes from one of my favorite movies of all time. Silence of the Lambs is an amazing piece of film. It’s a sophisticated example of mainstream cinema saturated in the lowbrow conventions of exploitation film. It always seems like it’s raining. The color palette is drab and muted and the subject matter is torn straight from the pages of a dozen true crime books. Even though the film is dominated by the interplay between Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, the true monster of the movie is Ted Levine’s Buffalo Bill an amalgamation of America’s worst pathological murderers and this scene is clinically horrifying. There’s nothing explicit about it, either, which is why it’s so great. Most of my favorite scenes involve some sort of imaginative death scene, spectacular gore or in-your-face scares but there’s nothing in-your-face about this. It’s the subtle-to-forceful suggestion that his victim be properly moisturized so that her skin will be in good shape when he sews it into his woman suit. He uses the pronoun ‘it’ to deliberately dehumanize her and make it easier to kill and skin her. His cool demeanor, eventually blown sky high seals the deal. This scene is just plain disturbing for all the right reasons is one of many explanations for why The Silence of the Lambs is such a landmark horror movie.

The Sentinel – The truth is revealed
Director Michael Winner wasn’t really known for horror. His bag was actually action flicks and suspense with his best-known work being with Charles Bronson and the Death Wish franchise. It’s when a director a steps out of their comfort zone that they tend to shine and Winner really knocked it out of the park with a movie that I consider criminally underrated among horror movie fans, The Sentinel. This is an idea so strong that eventually Lucio Fulci would lift the concept and adapt it for his own landmark movie, The Beyond. Haunted house movies really get under my skin and this is one of the many that gave me actual chills. It’s mostly that idea of ‘there is something wrong here’ that gets to me. People and things being out of place. The scene below is the actual climax of the movie, so if you haven’t seen it, I don’t recommend watching it because the story is pretty cool and the resolution, what Cristina Raines is actually supposed to be doing in the apartment building, is fucking awesome.

That video, by the way, is the entire movie. I highly recommend it.

Zombie – Eye gouge
Speaking of Fulci, when I discovered the global horror fan club on the Internet all those years ago and connected with people over at the legendary (and probably the first message board dedicated to horror movies), Mortado’s Page of Filth, I finally connected the dots and realized that some of my favorite video store shelf goblins, those wonky cheapos I was drawn to after I’d exhausted all the recognizable American movies, were all directed by the same weirdo with a penchant for intense gore and scripts that made no fucking sense whatsoever. My favorite Fulci is actually The Beyond, but Zombie’s famous eye gouge is one of Fulci’s greatest moments of direction. Most of the time I got the feeling that he instructed his cast to stand around looking confused but this is a scene of pure directorial genius. It is so long. It is drawn out to an agonizing degree. See the girl. See the splinter. See the girl. See the splinter. It gets closer and closer. Slowly. You know exactly what’s going to happen and when it does, it happens in explicit, nasty detail. The splinter slowly enters the cornea as her head is pulled into it. Fulci had a thing for eyeball abuse. All of his noteworthy movies have something awful happening to eyes but this one takes the cake. The effect is great!

Shaun of the Dead – Killing Mum
Shaun of the Dead is a lot of fun and introduced Americans to the one-two-three punch of Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. It’s genuinely very funny, it appeals to everyone’s inner slacker and taps right into that zombie apocalypse survival plan you’ve secretly been working on for so long. Above all, it’s British and if there’s one thing Americans love, it’s British stuff. I’m guilty, too. British stuff really resonates with me. Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes, Benny Hill. I don’t know what it is but you folks in the UK really have quality genre fare down to a fucking science. Keep it up. This is a very funny, very ironic movie that is basically silly bullshit with zombies but if there’s one thing that struck an odd chord with me is that moment in the third act, having been holed up at The Winchester for a while, when all of a sudden, this comedy seamlessly transitions to an actual horror movie with a deadly serious confrontation revolving around Shaun’s mother having been bitten. All of a sudden, shit gets real. They do this again in Hot Fuzz and the effect is a very similar feeling to having the rug pulled out from under you.

Dawn of the Dead – The Man Comes Around
I went pretty soft on the Dawn of the Dead remake because it turned out a lot better than I thought it would. James Gunn’s script maintains the general vibe and it probably could have been called anything else and been a decent zombie horror movie. The original is pretty cartoony and the introduction of the mall shuttles as armored anti-zombie vehicles kept that rolling but the star of the movie to me wasn’t the story. It wasn’t Ving Rhames or Sarah Polley or that dude from Modern Family. It was the titles at the beginning of the movie. They took the art of the credit sequence and elevated it to a religious experience, melding AP newsreel footage of riots with staged news reports, White House press briefings and zombie attacks and the whole thing is set to a Johnny Cash song about Armageddon. I think Zack Snyder is a hack and his movies are universally terrible but Dawn of the Dead was a pretty good attempt and if you ask me, is far bleaker than Romero’s original.

Day of the Dead – I’m running this monkey farm!
Of the holy trinity, Day of the Dead is my favorite. It gets tremendous amounts of flack for being so chatty, with long periods of talking between bursts of action and violence. Personally, I love the talking. The dramatic bits are propelled forward at breakneck speed by Joe Pilato’s absolutely nutty and venomous Captain Rhodes. He spends all his time on screen yelling and freaking out and it. is. glorious. This scene in particular illustrates my point, precisely, and it’s my favorite piece of the entire movie. Here is Captain Rhodes in all his bug-eyed glory, yelling and screaming, coming up with some bug-fuck nonsense about being in charge and for all of Romero’s social critique, this is the moment in the movie where his point is made clear. Romero’s original script had to be scaled way back for budgetary reasoning and in the process of cutting out the expensive shit, most of his message gets lost in translation but the forceful interplay between Rhodes and Doctor Logan illustrates the intellectual vs. anti-intellectual butting of heads that was so present in 80′s America (and has resurfaced today).

I’ll cut it short here. I could go on and on but you get the idea. Let’s hear it. I want to know your favorites.

29 Mar

Municipal Waste returns with The Fatal Feast

Posted by Bryan White | Thursday March 29, 2012 | Horror Rock

Municipal Waste enjoy heavy rotation on my iPod. This group of thrash maniacs keep the party hardy vibe of thrash metal’s past alive with a healthy fixation on Reagan-era social issues, horrible death through exposure to nuclear radiation, horror flicks, beer and weed. It seems like just yesterday that they released Massive Aggressive, an – ahem – darker album whose lyrical themes had less to do with getting wasted and more to do with being torn apart by wolves mutated by the radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. April 10th marks their return with their latest album, The Fatal Feast, which manages to bridge the gap between the extraordinarily violent Massive Aggressive and the extraordinarily ridiculous The Art of Partying. Still, they’re not quite as silly as Gama Bomb, but they’re getting there and the latest video to kick off the album, a tale of cannibalism and a haunted space station ought to give you an idea of what they’re angling for.

The rest of the album, by the way, is pretty good.

22 Mar

Stardate, March 22, 2012. Happy Birthday, William Shatner!

Posted by Bryan White | Thursday March 22, 2012 | News

Hail Shatner! The world’s favorite Quebecois Starfleet captain, he who boldly went, turns 81 today and that hair piece is looking as good as ever. He brought us some of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone, Kingdom of the Spiders, The Devil’s Rain, that weird-ass horror flick in Esperanto, Incubus and a reputation for being a total dick to Ensign Sulu. What makes Shatner so special is his total embrace of that ridiculous quality that makes us love him so much. Who but Shatner would release more of those speech/singing albums? Shat’s the shit, y’all, and today we salute him with this, Cinema Suicide contributor, Larry Clow, reading his original composition, The Erotic Shatner, at William Shatner Beat Night (aka The Night I Shat Myself) back in 2010 at The Coat of Arms in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

22 Mar

Cronenberg is back, baby! Trailer for Cosmopolis (NSFWish).

Posted by Bryan White | | News

I’m a huge fan of old David Cronenberg. The shit he did in the 70′s and 80′s was freakin’ vital horror that twisted genre conventions and in many ways, carved out a creepy subgenre of its own where our own bodies become our worst enemy. Among my favorite horror movies of all time, Videodrome ranks pretty high. This period of Cronenberg had energy to it. It was daring and fucked up but going into the 90′s, that edge started to dull and even while he freaked out theater goers and pissed off film distributors with stuff like Crash, nothing that came after Crash felt quite as important or inspired. Going into the new millennium, I was pretty much resigned to the feeling that Dave was done and was going to coast to a quiet retirement as he mainstreamed with A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, two adequate flicks that didn’t inspire me to rant or rave about them and that’s the worst thing for a film to do when it enters my world. However, the French trailer for his upcoming feature, Cosmopolis, looks positively nuts and I am beyond interested. You could say that I’m ecstatic over what looks like David Cronenberg reclaiming his nihilism from Gaspar Noe.

Cosmopolis is adapted from a 2003 Don Delillo novel and I wish that I could say more about it but all I can do is parrot what I see on Wikipedia about this book. Cronenberg, however, proved himself a fan of J.G. Ballard whose novels always bear a nihilistic streak of nasty and from the sounds of it, Delillo walks a similar path. The general vibe of this trailer reminds me of the Ballard novel Cocaine Nights, which highlights a series of fast living types; too much money and free time on their hands, the only way to get their kicks is through extremely self destructive behavior.

I also don’t give a shit that it’s Robert Pattinson. Unfortunately for him, he hitched his wagon to Edward Cullen and that sort of shit will dog him for the rest of his career. It makes sense that he’d go way out on a limb to prove to the filmmaking community that he’s more than just the stand-in for 1 out of 3 teenage girls’ ultimate boyfriend fantasies.

Frankly, I have high hopes that Cosmopolis turns out to be a fever dream of mayhem and carnage in the way that only David Cronenberg can deliver.

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