I just finished the art for a cool project, but I can’t show it to you ’till next month when it comes out. Now back to work on horror comics!
NEXT UPDATE: Friday!
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Watching zombie movies on Netflix out of the corner of my eye while drawing, and working on my new horror comic, which is close to completion.
If you’re in Seattle, come by and see me at the Mythos Art Club booth at the Ballard Seafood Fest this Sunday (July 14). I’ve been hanging out with the good folks at Mythos for a few months now, and you can see some of my work on their website.
NEXT UPDATE: Monday!
Is there any decent place online to find streaming video of zombie movies? Netflix’s selection… man, it sucks. I managed to find “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “Night of the Comet” on youtube, only to discover to my horror that “Night of the Comet” is total garbage, even worse than one of my previous least favorite ’80s horror flicks, “C.H.U.D.”.
But Netflix keeps losing its selection of old streaming movies, so I guess it’s time to go to… Scarecrow Video, Seattle’s best video store! Like a local bookstore still surviving after the age of Borders, Scarecrow is still around and still great. I last went there to rent the third season of “The Wire”, but I think I need to see their zombie selection.
NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday!
Trying to solve Netflix’s growing lack of streaming movies (although they certainly rule for TV shows), I rented a bunch of zombie movies from Scarecrow Video, Seattle’s awesomest video store. This week I’m checking out:
* REC (the acclaimed Spanish movie that, plotwise, seems like a more serious shakycam remake of Lamberto Bava’s “Demons”)
* Colin (the ultra-low-budget British “zombie movie from a zombie’s perspective”… I’m curious whether I like it anywhere near as much as the film “Dead Creatures”, one of my favorite zombie movies)
* Zombieland (the big-budget running-zombies horror-comedy… I had zero interest in this when it came out, but what the heck.)
* Biozombie (like Zombieland, I wasn’t particularly interested in this back in 1998, since I generally don’t like horror-comedies… though I love ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, and ‘Deadalive’ for that matter, just for its earnestness. But now it’s a semi-classic, and I feel I ought to see it.)
I feel all these movies have enough popularity to be considered seminal zombie movies, but frankly, there’s been SO MANY zombie films of questionable quality released in the last 10 years (post-28-Days-Later) that going to the video store and grabbing a random one is like sticking my hand in the garbage disposal. I want to wallow in this genre, but where do I draw the line? How do I find the good ones? What zombie (or weird-infection/collective-madness) movies or books would YOU recommend I see/read? I want to know!
NEXT UPDATE: Friday!
Continuing to binge on zombie films. One that I liked more than I expected (except perhaps for the gross white foam drooling out of the mouths of all the rabid ‘zombies’, but I guess zombies aren’t really s’posed to be pleasant to look at) was the German film “Rammbock: Berlin Undead.” Only 64 minutes long, it’s definitely got the qualities of a good short-ish film, or a great Masters of Horror episode. It’s well written and tightly constructed; the action starts virtually immediately. And it’s on Netflix Instant View!
Over at Anime News Network, I just wrote a big article on the ’80s classic Fist of the North Star.
NEXT UPDATE: Monday!
Hope you had a good weekend! I think everyone but me was at San Diego Comic-Con. I’m still here studying Arabic and working on the final polishes of my new horror comic.
NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday!
I hate to promote copyright piracy, but recently I’ve discovered that there’s a ton of old horror movies on youtube. It seems unfair that huge studios only have the time or interest for policing youtube for their most recent releases, while meanwhile you can see complete prints of various ’80s flicks, classic and otherwise.
Lately I’ve taken to half-watching them while I’m working (which may not be the best way to stay productive… maybe I’d better stick to Yog-Sothoth.com podcasts…). “Night of the Comet” was a lame postapocalyptic adventure-comedy, disappointingly un-scary and zero-budget, although the fact that the heroes were both women was noteworthy for an ’80s movie, even if they were Valley Girl types. “My Boyfriend’s Back” was bland despite a few good moments; I quickly realized I’d watched it sometime before but just blanked it out and forgot about it because it’s so meh. On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the sheer grossness and nightmare-delirium of “Demons”, “Demons 2” (definitely not as good as the first one especially with the awful puppetry– and what is up with the theme of heroic machismo running through both “Demons” movies? It’s like they’ve got a non-self-aware Bruce Campbell “Ash” thing going on), and “Zombi 3” (released in the US as “Zombie Flesh Eaters 2”, which I think is better than the Italian title).
I’d been hearing about “Zombi 3” (1986) ever since my ex-roommate Patrick Macias assured me he’d heard it wasn’t worth watching, and frankly, despite the novelty of being one of the first movies to sprint over to the US and rip off “Return of the Living Dead,” (1985) it’s pretty bad. Still, I don’t know why it was so bad that Lucio Fulci disowned it, compared to some other equally ludicrous and disjointed Fulci films; maybe he simply objected on the basis of his pride that another director finished it after he left the production, or maybe he disapproved of the high-action feel (as it lacks the slow scare sequences common in his most Fulci movies). And it DOES have 10 seconds’ worth of a flying zombie head.
I’ve been working on other non-zombie-related stuff too, of course! But more on that later!
NEXT UPDATE: Friday!
I rented a ton more zombie movies from the library as part of my micro-zombie-marathon. (That is, it’s a micro-marathon, I’m not watching movies about micro-zombies. Although… then they could crawl through dog doors and sneak into your house and bite you…) Next up are “The Dead” (2010 zombie movie filmed in Africa… I pray to God it won’t be as idiotic as the last horror movie set in Africa I watched, “Primeval”), “Undead” (zombies in Australia this time), “Wendigo” (not really zombies, but I love the wendigo) and John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness.” I watched “Prince of Darkness” way back when I was 19 and interning at a TV studio, but I watched the edited-for-TV-version that they had sitting in the studio vaults, so I imagine it’s a lot grosser in the filmed version. And hopefully better.
I’ll leave you for the weekend with this page and a link to the Masters of Horror intro theme.
NEXT UPDATE: Monday!
And so ends chapter 1. I’m going to be away on a trip to lovely Amman, Jordan in just a few days so I won’t have the greatest internet access for a few weeks… however, I’ll set up “The Stiff” to update while I’m away. Basically it’ll be just like before, except I won’t be able to tweet or write little reviews of zombie movies.
It’s been a busy summer for me, with “The Sleep of Reason”, “Anything That Loves”, and lots of other projects. When I get back from overseas I’ll hopefully have more to say about all of these. Also, I’m going to be a guest at Kumoricon in Portland, Oregon on August 31-September 2, so come on by if you’re within a few hundred miles! I’ll post more as the time approaches, but in brief, if you’re reading this, I’d love to see you there and say hi!
NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday!
Big news! I’ve already mentioned that I’m going to be a guest at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon in Los Angeles on September 27-29. But perhaps you live in some other part of the country, and you can’t make it out to the West Coast to see me, Gary Myers, Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna and a bunch of other guests AND Cthulhoid movies.
Now you don’t HAVE to physically be there! The HPL Film Festival is doing a Film Festival Kickstarter to raise money for this year’s slate of events, and they’re giving away awesome stuff including posters and T-shirts featuring my own Lovecraftian artwork! This is the only chance to get a poster of my HP Lovecraft Film Festival “Lovecraft the ticket-taker” image which you can see at the bottom of this page. They won’t be sold anywhere else. There are plenty of other artists contributing pieces to the Kickstarter, as well as other cool stuff, and if you can’t make it to the HPLFF this is your chance to astrally travel there and get some neat stuff as well. Please check it out!
In honor of the start of “The Stiff” chapter 2, I’m reprinting a series of blog posts about zombies that I wrote years ago on my now-deleted livejournal. I’m going to break it up into four parts, three for the original article and one for a little followup
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THE THEMES OF ZOMBIES
When I first got into horror, I didn’t realize that “zombies” constituted a subgenre (the same way as, say, vampires… and of course, there’s just as many cliches). I saw the early George Romero movies in high school, and later on Patrick Macias introduced me to ’70s-80s Eurotrash zombie horror. It’s been cool to see how Capcom’s RESIDENT EVIL series, created by horror fans who even hired George Romero to direct a Japanese RESIDENT EVIL commercial, helped revitalize zombies from their low point in the mid-90s. (Though both the RESIDENT EVIL movies kind of sucked.) Nowadays, there are so many zombie movies, there are many, many that I haven’t seen: ZOMBIE HONEYMOON, BIOZOMBIE (I saw bits and pieces of it at a party), TOKYO ZOMBIE, UNDEAD and I, ZOMBIE (the first film by the creator of the zombie movie DEAD CREATURES) to name just a few relatively recent ones.
About two years ago, with the release of the 2004 version of DAWN OF THE DEAD (a good movie, but not as awesome as it could have been), I got so interested in zombies that I actually sought out zombie-related horror novels. I say this with a little embarrassment, because I think that zombies are basically meant for film rather than books (or comics… *cough*)… that’s how Romero did it, and as one of the writers in Chaosium’s RPG supplement BLOOD BROTHERS 2 put it, “Basically, zombie films are about the difference between moving and unmoving matter, so they’re perfect for cinema.” But now that zombies are so popular, there are a bunch of zombie books out there… Stephen King’s CELL being the biggest and most recent example. And there’s the ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE (which is actually a really good book). The nice thing about books is that you don’t need a lot of compromises and you have an infinite special effects budget, so I thought I’d check out a bunch of zombie books in search of trashy entertainment. I haven’t read CELL, but I found a couple of books on Amazon: Walter Greatshell’s XOMBIES, Candace Caponegro’s THE BREEZE HORROR, Brian Keene’s THE RISING and CITY OF THE DEAD, and the second anthology in the BOOK OF THE DEAD zombie-short-story series from the ’90s. (I couldn’t find a non-overpriced copy of book one, so I still haven’t read it.)
This is my list of the “core elements” of a post-George-Romero zombie movie… by which I mean, modern “cannibal zombies”, not old-fashioned voodoo zombies or anything like that.
(1) Decay
(2) Infection
(3) Compulsion
(1) DECAY
“Decay” is the one element that zombie movies have in common with voodoo zombies and the traditional walking dead. Zombies are almost always rotting corpses; they’re disgusting and horrifying to look at. Unfortunately, if you focus on this element the story has the potential to turn into bad Heavy Metal artwork. There’s more to zombies than maggots and slime and decomposition and putrefied flesh and swollen, spilling intestines and bleeding sores (I feel like Gerry Bednob in THE FORTY YEAR OLD VIRGIN consoling Steve Carrell: “There’s more to life than @#$@# and $@#$#…”) If it’s too over-the-top, zombie gore is close to comedy, as Peter Jackson knew when he made his awesome movie DEADALIVE. (I think that’s the appeal of BIOZOMBIE too.)
Focusing on the gore, I think, is an even worse mistake for prose zombie fiction. It’s one thing to *show* a bunch of hideous, decomposing corpses eating people; it’s another thing to write about it. On the screen, even if the story sucks, you can ooh and ahh because of the cool special effects and sheer numbers of zombies. In prose, it gets old fast, as in Brian Keene’s THE RISING and its sequel, CITY OF THE DEAD. I can’t count how many descriptions these books have of “maggots crawling under the transparent flesh” of its zombie hordes… just part of a general pulp-schlock feel. In Keene’s books, every dead thing on the planet starts coming back to life — both people and animals — and they’re not just dumb cannibals, they’re vicious, sadistic jerks. (Emphasis on the “jerks”, unfortunately… the evil dead have terrible Freddy Krueger-esque jokey dialogue, proving the old adage “Better to say nothing and have people think zombies are stupid than to open your mouth and leave no doubt.”) It is quickly established that they are in fact demon spirits from some hell-like dimension which have been freed to possess all dead bodies until the entire world is dead like them. It’s not a bad idea, but the execution sucks. For some reason, Keene chooses to explain the origin of the zombies in the second chapter, instead of leaving the least mystery or suspense about it…. otherwise I wouldn’t give away such a spoiler. Secondly, since the demons all openly admit that they were confined to hell — excuse me, I mean “the Void” — by God — excuse me, I mean “the cruel one” — you’d think that people’s joy or awe at knowing that God exists (and he’s not on the zombies’ side) would slightly help make up for their horror at having the entire world inevitably destroyed by evil zombie-demons. Admittedly, the characters have other things to do, like run for their lives. The focus is on gore, gore, gore, action, gore, with the occasional snarky comments from the demon-zombies. Simply put — THE RISING and CITY OF THE DEAD read more like movie pitches (or comic pitches) than books, and by focusing on the decay and guts, they focus on the more superficial aspects of zombies.
NEXT UPDATE: Friday! Including more Deep Zombie Thoughts!