The Bite #43

THE THING’S Frigid Fears, Behind-the-Scenes on DAY OF THE DEAD, and More!

January 29, 2019

In this Issue:

Horror History: Frigid Fears
Image of the Week: Bub Unbound
Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
The States of Horror: New York
Things We Love: Scary Survivors
Hey, That’s Us! – Shudder in the News

HORROR HISTORY: FRIGID FEARS

By Sam J. Miller

Winter is when the world is trying to kill us. When the air hurts our face. When getting to work feels fraught with fatal peril. When everything humans have built — roads, infrastructure, capitalism, indoor heating — seems fragile and dangerous.

So it’s no wonder that so many of the most iconic horror films are set against a white cold winter landscape. Bad enough that the monster inside is trying to kill you — so is all that snow outside.

Jack Torrance in The Shining. The shape-shifting alien in The Thing. The band of vampires in 30 Days of Night.

At the heart of Moby-Dick is a chapter called “The Whiteness of the Whale,” which attempts to explain why the white whale strikes such terror in the hearts of sailors. Beginning with a list of all the ways that the color white is used in Western culture to symbolize goodness, purity, cleanliness — Melville proceeds to completely invert the normal associations, and show that white is what we should truly fear. This inversion of Western superiority is the heart of his enterprise inMoby-Dick. “Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?” Whiteness of skin connotes the “marble pallor” of sickness, contagion, and death. White symbolizes nature’s utter apathy to our very existence.

Nowhere is that apathy more stark than in The Thing, where the bare white forbidding landscape of Antarctica watches unspeakable human suffering in silence. For the men trapped inside with the Things, there is no escape. Nowhere to run. An entire continent of snow is conspiring with the alien to exterminate them. You can kill the monster, but you can’t kill winter.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that he’s trapped inside with Annie Wilkes, Paul Sheldon in Misery has to contend with the bitter cruel cold snowy wasteland waiting for him on the other side of the window. And Oskar’s loneliness (and the appeal of his vampiric friend Eli) is made all the more stark against the bare snowy Swedish landscape of Let the Right One In.

Shape-shifting aliens aren’t real, as far as we know. But snow is. And it’s the perfect symbol of nature’s hostility, and an ideal setting for great horror.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Bub Unbound

Makeup FX legend Tom Savini recently shared this behind-the-scenes photo of him goofing around with Sherman Howard as everybody’s favorite self-aware zombie Bub on the set of 1985’s Day of the Dead.

TINY BITES

ARGENTO’S SUSPIRIA HATE, LOST BOYS TV & MORE

Dario Argento, director of 1977’s Suspiria, says last year’s remake “betrayed the spirit of the original film.”

Here’s why Stephen King thought Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining was “a Cadillac with no engine in it.”

H. P. Lovecraft’s classic 1927 story “The Colour Out of Space” is going to be adapted into a movie withMandy star Nicolas Cage.

Horror didn’t fare well with this year’s Oscar nominations (Toni Collette was robbed), but here are seven times the Academy Awards liked horror.

Guillermo del Toro’s plea to save the independent horror bookstore Dark Delicacies paid off.

Stranger Things and The Walking Dead were declared the “most in-demand” television shows on the planet at the National Association of Television Program Executives convention.

A live-action trailer for the Resident Evil 2 game remake pays homage to George Romero’s original 1998 game trailer.

Meanwhile, Netflix is rumored to be working on a TV series that will expand the Resident Evil universe.

We could soon be seeing a lot of Clive Barker on TV — both Nightbreed and Books of Blood are being turned into series.

An anthropology professor says one reasonFrankenstein will never die is because The Creature represents “people’s fear of capitalism.”

The CW ordered a pilot for a TV series based on The Lost Boys. It better be set in Santa Carla.

The upcoming documentary Master Of Dark Shadowswill celebrate the ’60s daytime horror soap opera, which gave us the great TV vampire Barnabas Collins.

How movies like Bird Box and Bandersnatchperpetuate the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Thirty-three horror experts weigh in on the most underrated genre performances ever.

Some audience members at the Goteborg Film Festival watched the premiere of the apocalyptic Swedish-language film Aniarafrom inside a sealed coffin. (Whut.)

THE STATES OF HORROR: NEW YORK

By Sam Zimmerman

Today, we head to New York, a state deep with horror mythos featuring all-time essentials, underground legends, and at least two suburban summer camp slashics.

Where do we even begin? There can be a whole entry on New York City alone. We’ve got the classic Upper West Side/Central Park unease of Rosemary’s Babyand the underrated mystic air of Audrey Rose. We’ve got the grime of William Lustig’s frightening Maniac and Abel Ferrara’s nasty Driller Killer. Both filmmakers are staples of the city, with Lustig’s Vigilante and Ferrara’s amazing vampire film The Addiction adding to their NY canon. The Addiction was part of a New York City ’90s vampire triptych with Michael Almereyda’s arthouse dracula daughter feature Nadja and Larry Fessenden’s incredible East Village breakthrough, Habit. That spirit carried on in Michael O’Shea’s 2016 Far Rockaway, Queens-set vampire drama, The Transfiguration. And Fessenden’s indie influence was later seen in Jim Mickle’s downtown creature feature, Mulberry Street. Mickle would later do a stellar job of remaking We Are What We Are up in the Catskills, NY.

Then we’ve got the Italian visions of New York. Argento placed one of three mothers, Mater Tenebrarum in New York in Inferno, while Fulci visited for The New York Ripper, Manhattan Baby and of course, the amazing final shot of Zombi 2, with the undead strolling across the Brooklyn Bridge. Speaking of Brooklyn, next time you’re there, stop in Brooklyn Heights to see the apartment building from Michael Winner’s ’70s gem, The Sentinel. And though many tired of the 2000s wave of J-horror remakes, Walter Salles did an incredible job utilizing the very specific odd vibe of Manhattan’s Roosevelt Island for 2005’s Dark Water.

Regarding New York Specifics, let’s talk Cropsey, an urban legend born out of NY summer camps along the Hudson Valley, which inspired two ’80s slashers in The Burning and Madman. The urban legend was so pervasive, it attached itself to a series of disappearances on Staten Island, chronicled in the unsettling true crime/horor doc, Cropsey. Of course, no mention of New York summer camp horror is complete without the legendary freakiness of Sleepaway Camp.

There’s of course much more to list off, but hopefully this goes to show just how versatile New York really is, from paranoid urban landscape, to suburban scarefest, to mountainous macabre.

THINGS WE LOVE: SCARY SURVIVORS

Photographer Federico Chiesa — with the help of makeup and special FX artist Carolina Trotta — has been imagining what ’80s film horror characters would be like if they survived and continued to age. And nothing’s more frightening than an iconic slasher using a walker.