The Bite #36

CANDYMAN’S Birthday, GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S Un-produced Screenplays, and More!

December 11, 2018

In this Issue:

Horror History: Happy Birthday, Tony Todd!
Image of the Week: Fearsome Foursome
Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
The States of Horror: Maine + Maryland
Things We Love: Scary Smells
Hey, That’s Us! – Shudder in the News

HORROR HISTORY: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TONY TODD!

December 4th is the birthday of Tony Todd, the man with the voice, the look, the presence … the hook.  

Although Todd’s performance in 1992’s Candymanplaced him in the pantheon of horror icons, Todd is a versatile, classically-trained actor (originally from Washington D.C.) whose resume encompasses many more characters, ranging from heroes to villains to victims.

In the Final Destination series (beginning in 2000), he played William Bludworth, the mysterious mortician who seems to be a little too intimately acquainted with the rules of death. He provides one of the first movie’s best chills when he pulls an embalming needle from a corpse and laughs as two young observers cringe.

In the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, he takes on the lead role of Ben (played by Duane Jones in the 1968 original). Best scene: laughing hysterically as he listens to a radio announcer talking about the zombie outbreak.

For 1994’s The Crow, he plays Grange, the chillest of the henchmen who Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) takes on in his quest for revenge. While the rest of the bad guys are working themselves into frenzies, he’s the one who coolly notes, “So, kill the crow … and destroy the man.”

In Wishmaster (1997), he’s a tough guy with the name of Johnny Valentine who has an uncomfortable encounter with the title character that ends in a water tank. When he tells his opponent, “Mister, you never even met my type before,” we totally believe it.

He easily steals 2006’s Hatchet as Reverend Zombie, the Creole-accented tour guide whose tale of a haunted swamp tour gone wrong takes a deliciously funny left turn.

He was most recently seen in 2018’s Hell Fest, strutting his stuff as The Barker in a lethal Halloween theme park (he described his flamboyant part as “Mick Jagger meets Chuck Berry”).

No matter the part, Tony Todd always brings his own special magic to a movie. Say his name three times and wish him a very Happy Birthday!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Fearsome Foursome

Four horror movie icons — Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Vincent Price — show off their lighter sides when fooling around on the set of The Comedy of Terrors (1963).

TINY BITES

CANDYMAN‘S RETURN, BUFFY‘S REDESIGN& MORE

Guillermo del Toro tweeted all of his written but unproduced screenplays and it’s a devastating list. The loss of At the Mountains of Madness is particularly hard to take.

How The Fly changed David Cronenberg’s career forever.

Jordon Peele’s Candyman has a release date: June 12, 2020.

The discussion about Satanism and Sabrina continues as Wired debates whether Chilling Adventures of Sabrina makes Satanists look bad.

Jason Blum says he’d love to make a sequel to Cam.

And here’s the gory (but funny) first trailer for Blumhouse’s Happy Death Day 2U.

Blonde, Beautiful, and Dead, a book about the 110-year-old real-life murder that inspired Twin Peaks, has been optioned for a possible movie.

If audiobooks are your thing, check out the top 10 Stephen King audiobooks.

The first insane trailer for Adult Swim’s The Shivering Truth, a stop-motion series which promises “painfully riotous daymares, all dripping with the orange goo of dream logic,” delivers just that.

Buffy, Giles, Spike, and other Buffy the Vampire Slayer regulars have been updated with character designs for a new graphic novel that goes back to the beginning.

Vulture shares the 100 scares that shaped horror movies.

… and Vulture also contemplates the 30 most influential slasher films of all time.

THE STATES OF HORROR: MAINE + MARYLAND

By Sam Zimmerman

Today’s States of Horror take us to Stephen King territory and one of the more iconic forests in the genre.

Maine: The Many Tales of Stephen King

The influence the New England state of Maine — characterized by craggy coast, misted mountains, and vast forest — has had on Stephen King and subsequently countless readers and fans (and American horror itself) is likely unquantifiable. The writer has set many of his most iconic tales there, and thusly, film adaptations have followed. You can hear Kathy Bates and Fred Gwynne go all-in on the accent in Dolores Claiborne and Pet Sematary (actually filmed in Maine). You can see two iterations of the Losers Club take on small-town monster Pennywise (and his various forms) in either the 1990 miniseries or 2017’s blockbuster vision of It. Personally, I’d highly recommend revisiting Tobe Hooper’s haunting 1979 adaptation of Salem’s Lot, which saw the filmmaker relocate his Texan sensibilities to the Northeast to envision King’s frightening and Maine-rooted vampire story.

Maryland: The Blair Witch Project

Of course. The Blair Witch Project is intrinsically tied to Maryland, because few films have blurred the line between fiction and reality so well. Set in Burkittsville, a real small (as in: population under 200 small) town in Maryland’s Frederick County, and the surrounding woods, The Blair Witch Project rose to infamy thanks to its faux-doc style and brilliant marketing, which purported that three student filmmakers had actually gone missing investigating the legend of the Blair Witch. A stunning timeline on the film’s website chronicled the folklore and reported horrific incidents of the witch, also purported to be actually of the region. That The Blair Witch Project was not only a genuine phenomenon, but one of the most haunting horror films of its era, only helped. And so the real Burkittsvile attracted a lot of attention, plenty of it unwanted and misguided, as much of the film in fact used another town in Maryland for its “Burkittsville.” That fan attention was then partially documented and dramatized in the ambitious, odd and severely underrated 2000 sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. Bonus: The Blair Witch Project co-creator Eduardo Sánchez returned to Maryland for his stunning and overlooked possession horror Lovely Molly.

THINGS WE LOVE: SCARY SMELLS

We watch horror, listen to horror, and read horror, but we don’t usually smell horror. A24, the studio which gave us Hereditary and Tusk, rectifies that via a collaboration with Joya, a fragrance studio based in Brooklyn. Their six genre-themed candles are available in Thriller, Adventure, Western, Noir, and romance, but the one that intrigues us the most is, of course, Horror, which according to the manufacturer smells “leathery” and “dank” and “not unsettling … but not settling.” So light up and breathe deep!