News about IT: CHAPTER 2, HELLBOY, and More!
In this Issue:
- Horror History: Hell Freezes Over
- Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
- The A to Z of Subgenres: C is for Cat Horror
- Things We Love: Poser from Waxwork Comics
HORROR HISTORY: HELL FREEZES OVER
By Joshua Lyon
Horror has a long background of using desolate snow-scapes to highlight helplessness. A few standouts include 30 Days of Night, Dead Snow, The Shining, and most recently AMC’s excellent new series The Terror. The fictional retelling of a failed 1845 Arctic expedition focuses on two ships that became trapped in ice, and while the true story is already scary enough (mutiny and cannibalism ensued), the show anchors much of its fear in the form of a mysterious creature hunting the stranded sailors. It’s a great example of how stories about exploring Earth’s polar regions are especially haunting, because so much can go wrong from the start.
Published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
begins in the North Pole with Victor Frankenstein being hauled onto a ship to tell his tale. At the end, the boat is stuck in ice, and once freed, the captain heeds Victor’s warning about obsessive ambition and turns back. (Metaphor begets metaphor when the alienated monster sets himself adrift on an iceberg.)
In 1936, H.P. Lovecraft introduced the most enduring portrayal of Antarctic exploration with At the Mountains of Madness, the origin story of his now-mythic Elder Things. That same year, a kid-friendly Arctic creepshow arrived in The Phantom Ship, a cartoon about a haunted galleon that’s, yep, trapped in ice. A different kind of ship is confined in frozen water in 1951’s The Thing from Another World, which 31 years later inspired John Carpenter’s canonical The Thing.
The themes at work—man versus nature and the torture of isolation—couldn’t ask for a better stage than the windswept snowfields and lonely mountains of our coldest climates. But even if examining symbolism in horror isn’t your thing, anyone can appreciate that red really pops against white.
TINY BITES
SOCKS, LISTS, AND CASTLE FREAK’S COMEBACK
New casting news for IT: Chapter 2 keeps floating to the surface.
Here’s a primer to Spanish horror with a list of 15 estupendo films you should definitely watch.
Come July we’ll get long-awaited collector’s edition Blu-rays of Stuart Gordon’s Dagon and John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness.
Milla Jovovich used her ridiculously popular Instagram account to unveil this poster featuring her character The Blood Queen from the upcoming Hellboy movie.
Horror and teen hormones go hand-in-hand, so here are 25 great coming-of-age scary movies.
The Bite definitely approves of these new socks from Creepy Co. featuring their “Chompers” vampire fang logo.
The Guardian goes deep on indie horror versus big budget films and concludes, “a legion of smart, subversive and downright scary horror movies has been packing them in.”
Discover (or rediscover) these 10 scariest made-for-TV films that traumatized kids in the ’70s and ’80s.
Castle Freak is back! The video store favorite is not only getting a remake, but the monster will appear in the upcoming Dollman Kills the Full Moon Universecomic series.
THE A TO Z OF SUBGENRES: C IS FOR CAT HORROR
Felines. Even when domesticated, they’re pretty much wild. Though more often relegated to purveyor of jump scares in horror, there are plenty of films that consider the cat something greater: omen, god, protector, predator, shapeshifter. That’s where the genre gets truly special.
Essentials: Cat People, Shadow of the Cat, Island of Lost Souls, Kuroneko, “Cat From Hell” (Tales from the Darkside: The Movie)
Personal Favorites: Eye of the Cat, Tomb of Ligeia, Hausu, Burning Bright, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key
Great Cat Attacks: Legend of Hell House, Re-Animator, Let the Right One In, Uninvited
THINGS WE LOVE: POSER FROM WAXWORK COMICS
By Joshua Lyon
Poser combines music and storytelling in a punk rock horror comic about a near-forgotten California urban legend who’s back to slaughter a group of rockers from Redondo Beach. It’s gloriously gory and comes with a companion soundtrack on color vinyl described as “Black Flag meets John Carpenter.”