Where Southern Hospitality Meets Mind Shredding Insanity
Hello everyone, as you know we’ve been fairly silent for about a week or two, last week this was due to an amazing event called KillerCon, this week we are dealing with a death in the family.
We will return to our normal content on Monday!
The intersection of horror and heavy music – beginning with Black Sabbath and continuing to this day – has produced some sonic gems, many of which can be and are appreciated widely outside of the niche markets for heavy metal and horror culture. Artists like Alice Cooper and KISS brought theatrical horror tropes to mainstream rock audiences, although there was much clutching of pearls and swooning about Satanic influences at the time. For anyone interested in this particular chapter of music and pop culture history, I’d recommend George Case’s engaging Here’s to My Sweet Satan: How the Occult Haunted Music, Movies and Pop Culture, 1966-1980, which outlines some of these horror trappings and predictable conservative religious responses thereto.
Continue reading The Heavy Horror Sound from Underground, Part 3
Misty Talley is impressing me with her sharksploitation films, folks. They are terrible, but terrible in the best way! She also directed Santa Jaws, which is another deliciously entertaining movie chock full of goofy ho-ho-horror. Zombie Shark is a blast and has enough gore and carnage to satiate my blood lust. Not to mention, I was introduced to my new favorite sharksploitation character…Zombie Shark Head!
Continue reading Zombie Shark (aka Shark Island): We be-headed for some carnage!
Continue reading Featured Author: J.M. StrikerIs it daybreak? Who could tell. The dark pervades, day and night, but no one has seen
the sky in ages. The windows stay covered, to keep the light in, what light there could be
with no electricity and few candles. If we had known the last time we saw the sun would
be the last time it would ever crawl across the sky, what would we have done differently?
At first, we waited for daybreak. We counted the hours, listening for the telltale notes
of birdsong. It’s been so long since anyone has heard anything resembling birdsong, now.The hum persists. That low and droning, nauseating sound. It hits that nerve in our
throats that makes us feel like turning inside out. But we hardly notice it, really. Once we
smother the windows and doors with blankets and pillows to keep it out, we can only just
notice it. We’ve almost perfected the process of washing and sanitizing those disposable
foam earplugs.The earplugs don’t keep the voice from reaching us, though. Believe me, we’ve tried.
J.M. Striker
It used to say innocuous things, like “burn an extra candle today, go ahead!”
But now, it’s telling us to go outside.
In a previous post, I talked about horror’s influence on popular music, starting with (for the purposes of my discussion) the blues in America and continuing through the development of rock and heavy metal. I argued at the conclusion of that piece that Rob Zombie, in my opinion, represented the zenith of the heavy horror sound from underground: the ultimate intersection of music and horror, in part due to his excellent musical projects and in part due to his also-excellent career as writer and director of horror cinema. As is so often the case, I regret nothing. I remain a huge fan of Zombie’s work (both in film and in metal) and think his body of work represents a potent distillation of many trends and tropes in horror that I love. With that said, I’ve had time to think about the subject since then, and I believe that the intersection of horror and “heavy” music – a phenomenon I call “the heavy horror sound from underground” – is a subject much broader than can be fairly summed up in one post. Therefore, this post is the second in what will be an ongoing series about heavy music and horror culture.
Continue reading The Heavy Horror Sound from Underground, Part 2
This movie is just plain dumb, with some of the worst fucking acting I’ve ever seen. I mean, ‘Tommy Wiseau School of Acting’ bad. Mind you, not as bad as The Bay (2012), more like on par with They (2002). If you’re making movies with a budget, there’s no excuse to have bad acting.
Continue reading Reed Alexander’s Horror Review of ‘The Forrest’ (2016)
Last year we put out our first Jewish book. “Of the Book” doing so, was so much fun for me. I got to read and edit Jewish stories by Jewish authors, which is something near and dear to my heart. Many of you know that I myself write Jewish speculative fiction, Blood & Mud came out earlier this year and Treif Magic is coming out soon as well. When I initially began shopping these stories around I came across a huge block in the road… no one was looking to publish Jewish speculative fiction.
Something had to be done.
One of the greatest things about being an editor and publisher is I get to make choices. Sometimes these choices are hugely beneficial to the company as a whole, we choose a book or a relationship to foster and we end up selling a ton of books.
Sometimes those decisions are personal, like publishing angry feminist murder poetry or horror poems about food, maybe it doesn’t rake in the dough, but I believe, FIRMLY believe, that the world is better for these books existing within it. These books just make me happy.
So I decided to create an imprint, Aggadah Try It, specifically for Jewish fiction. Jewish horror, Jewish fantasy, Jewish science-fiction. I don’t know what this decision is yet, but I do know that my life is personally better for being able to be a part of growing and fostering an under-represented portion of the writing community.
Continue reading Coming 2021 ‘The Green Children Help Out’ by Dr. Gillian Polack
Before I embarked on the epic journey of sharksploitation fuckery commonly known as “my Saturday”, I looked up some of the cast of Sand Sharks. I like to be prepared for my blog because I am like…professional. We have Corin Nemec who has been in some cinematic classics such as Mansquito and Rottentail, the latter which is about a half man, half rabbit monster. Then we have Brooke Hogan, the boob-forward daughter of Hulk, and star of 2-Headed Shark Attack. As I read the cast roster, I spied the name Edgar Allan Poe IV who shockingly is really related to you-know-who. I googled him faster than you can say “Nevermore” to find that the dude was in Cape Fear and My Girl. He’s an actual thespian. So maybe this movie will be amazing? LOL. Just kidding.
Continue reading Sand Sharks: A Rip-Off Riot
You may remember from my review of the original Doom (2005), that fans were unnecessarily critical of it for not really using any of the video game cannon. My response to this was, “So the fuck what?” It had all the right elements for a fun action/horror, and still had enough similarities with the video game franchise to call itself Doom. It also pioneered the FPS movie years before things like Hardcore Harry or Found Footage Hybrids like Chernobyl Diaries.
Continue reading Reed Alexander’s Horror Review of ‘Doom: Annihilation’ (2019)
Madness Heart Radio