JORDAN PEELE’S TWILIGHT ZONE, Z is for ZOMBIES, and More!
In this Issue:
- Horror History: 5 Horrifyingly Lost Horror Films
- Image of the Week: Spurning Stephen King
- Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
- The A to Z of Subgenres: Z is for Zombie
- Things We Love: Pies to Die For
HORROR HISTORY: 5 HORRIFYINGLY LOST HORROR FILMS
Lost horror movies … the idea of them has inspired horror stories as diverse as Ramsey Campbell’s novel Ancient Images and John Carpenter’s episode of Masters of Horror, “Cigarette Burns.” Film archivists claim “half of all American films made before 1950 and more than 90 percent of films made before 1929 are lost forever.” With this in mind, let’s eyeball five horror films now lost to the ages.
Ten years before Colin Clive gibbered “It’s aliiiiive!” over a newly animated Boris Karloff in 1931, there was the Italian film Il mostro di Frankenstein (The Monster of Frankenstein). It was heavily censored for its 1921 release, apparently because the government targeted horror as a genre due to its “fearful and darkly sensual traits.” All that remains are stills and promo materials.
1908’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was an adaptation of George F. Fish and Luella Forepaugh’s stage version of the Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, and the first film version of Hyde. Star Hobart Bosworth made the jump from stage to silents while his voice was shot from tuberculosis. Even though the production outfit, Selig Polyscope, made hundreds of films, only a few survived, and sadly, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde wasn’t one of them.
The first lycanthrope movie, 1913’s The Werewolf, was produced by Universal, who’d later make The Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man. It was about a Navajo woman turning into a wolf to inflict vengeance on white settlers. All prints were destroyed in a 1924 studio fire at Universal Studios.
The Yeti-like monster suit for the Japanese monster movie King Kong Appears in Edo (1938) was made by Fuminori Ôhashi, who’d later make the kaiju suits for effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya and director Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla. Between firebombings and U.S. occupation, this one didn’t survive WWII.
The most grail-like lost horror movie is Tod Browning’s London After Midnight (1927), starring Lon Chaney, Sr. in horror make-up that’s still iconic almost a century later. In 2002, film preservationist Rick Schmidlin reconstructed a 45-minute version using stills and the shooting script, but that’s just a postcard of the real film. Browning semi-remade it with Bela Lugosi as Mark of the Vampire in 1935.
But don’t despair. Thomas Edison’s 1910 production of Frankenstein was once thought lost, until it resurfaced in the mid-’70s. Now you can watch it on your phone. So there’s always hope …
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Spurning Stephen King
Three years before the 1974 release of Stephen King’s first novel Carrie, he received this conflicted rejection letter for Getting It On. The book was eventually published with the title Rage under the writer’s Richard Bachman pseudonym, but later allowed to fall out of print due to its associations with high school shootings.
TINY BITES
FREDDY KRUEGER RETURNS, CHILD’S PLAY SHADE & MORE
Rod Serling morphs into Jordan Peele in the first teaser trailer for the new Twilight Zone.
Horror author Grady Hendrix (he wrote the delightful Paperbacks from Hell) shares five freaky devil-worshipping pulp novels from the ’70s.
Robert Englund will briefly be back as Freddy Kruegerthis Halloween in an episode of The Goldbergs.
Here’s the first trailer for The Haunting of Hill HouseTV series,a modern reimagining of Shirley Jackson’s classic novel. (The trailer gets bonus points for turning the song “Our House” into something uncomfortably creepy.)
Judging by this tweet from Child’s Play‘s creator Don Mancini isn’t a fan of the new reboot that’s being made.
The new trailer for Apostle is so brutal it made evenus wince.
Everyone is falling in love with the Cheddar Goblinfrom Mandy. (Fun Fact: it was created by the Too Many Cooks guy.)
Season 2 of Lore has a new claustrophobic trailer.
If the Halloween reboot is a hit at the box office, Dimension says they might make new Hellraiser andScream movies.
Why Edgar Allan Poe’s stories (and the man himself) will never go out of fashion.
Blumhouse reinvents the slasher film in a bloody but fun trailer for Thriller.
“In this febrile cultural moment filled with fear of the Other, horror has achieved the status of true art.”
THE A TO Z OF SUBGENRES: Z IS FOR ZOMBIE
Ok. Here we are. The end of the alphabet road. And really, there’s only one subgenre that comes to mind when Z is on the brain(s).
How do you encapsulate Zombies in just a small space, considering the legacy and pop culture invasion? I guess like this:
Zombies have their roots in Haitian folklore, men and women made into mindless, undead slaves, depicted in books like The Magic Island and Wade Davis’ The Serpent and the Rainbow (later a Wes Craven film) and films like Bela Lugosi starrer White Zombie. The flesh eating Zombie as we know it arrived in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, a seminal work that forever changed the creature. Romero’s legacy lies in not only changing the face of the undead, but using them as potent political and social commentary. A lot of people just took the flesh eating; especially the Italians.
Italian zombie movies are among the gnarliest, gut-munchiest ones and largely contributed to the image of zombie movies being for ultra gore underground (them and shot-on-video and backyard gems like The Dead Next Door). But wouldn’t you know, Zombies were funny, too. Dan O’Bannon made them so in 1983’s punk horror comedy essential Return of the Living Dead and comedies like Shaun of the Deadand Juan of the Dead have carried that legacy to the present.
Probably the next major movement in Zombiedom was the early aughts with 28 Days Later (which for all intents, purposes and aesthetic is a zombie movie). That was mega popular, as was Max Brooks’ exhaustive The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z and of course, Robert Kirkman’s comic, The Walking Dead; now arguably the most well-known piece of zombie fiction thanks to an insanely watched television show. And well, now there are countless zombie stories in countless media with countless avenues, perceptions, insights and decapitations. There’s even a Scottish Christmas Zombie musical, and holy hell, it’s good.
And because you likely didn’t need me to guide you through this, I’m going to leave you with five simple zombie picks (non-iconic ones): Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (aka The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue), Night of the Comet, The Girl With all the Gifts, Anna and the Apocalypse, Make-Out With Violence.
So long to the A-Z of Subgenres, and thanks for hanging out.
Starting Next Week: The States of Horror!
THINGS WE LOVE: PIES TO DIE FOR
Ashley Newman, owner of the Etsy store It Came From Under My Bed, creates some of the most disgusting pies we’ve ever seen — and we mean that in a good way. Her People Pot Pies art objects aren’t actually edible, but even if they were, we think we’d be too grossed out to ever take a bite.