Bryan's blog

I figure I should break up the snobby doom and gloom of recent posts and talk about something positive for once. Old and new, horror comics. Pimp your favorites. They don't even have to be strictly horror comics, horror themed arcs in other books are totally welcome!

I'll kick it off with a few of my favorites.

Locke & Key

So here's the deal. I'm a thoroughly modern web guy. I go to monthly meetings of creatives and developers and the most recent meeting produced an idea between myself an a Rails developer that we think has some legs.

Apparently, so does the council in charge of choosing the panels for the next South By Southwest show. If you're just joining us, South By Southwest is an annual showcase of music, movies and interactive design. It started as the Austin Battle of the Bands and somehow grew to become some kind of monstrous industry showcase.

One of The Film Fiend's recent posts, about a startling revelation he had recently got me to thinking.

I will tell anyone who will listen that sites like my own, Cinema Suicide, Bloody Good Horror and Lost Highway are the next wave of genre movie reporting. Turns out that other people, including personalities around here, share this opinion. Usually I'm just high on my own sense of self-importance but when my own arrogance crosses over with the thoughts of other people, I tend to find some validity there. You can't see me right now, but I'm patting myself on the back.

There's nothing horrifying about this post but there are parts of Rochester, NH that I would consider horrifying. For instance, the Cumberland Farms over on Knight Street. That place sounds like Thunderdome.

I do a lot of bitching about remakes even though I should know better. A while back I read a remark by George Romero concerning the remake of Dawn of the Dead that put everything into perspective for me. To paraphrase, since I'm too lazy to find the actual quote, he said that a remake of Dawn of the Dead in no way changes his original movie and that it will always be around, so what's the problem?

I'll come clean right off the bat. In the war of the slasher franchises, I was never really a Freddy fan. I'm actually very pro-hockey mask and I'll tell you what turned me off to Nightmare: The quips. I like the first Nightmare On Elm Street. By 1984, slashers were very tired. Halloween and Friday the 13th created an indie movie boom town of slasher movies and it didn't take long for the concept to run out of gas so it was nice to see Wes Craven come along and kick it in the ass with something genuinely original. The glove helped a lot, too. But the sequels were a huge turnoff for me.

I recently wrote up a review of "Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls", an Asylum mockbuster meant to cash in on the return of Indiana Jones when I was struck by the strangest thought:

Yeah! You like that title? Feel the fire!

I'm going to cut Stuart Gordon's episode, Eater, a little slack because it was better than the four previous episodes. Plus, I'm a fan. I even liked his Dreams in the Witch House adaptation for Masters of Horror. Like Masters of Horror, though, Fear Itself more or less lived up to my expectations and I have a few thoughts about how they might make it better.

So a few days ago, Casey hit Twitter with a call for bloggers over at Bloody Good Horror, a site I was only marginally familiar with through the Horror Hound association, admittedly, a magazine I am only marginally familiar with (through no fault of my own, it's hard enough to find Rue Morgue up in here) but here's the deal: I'm a closet narcissist in spite of my carefully planned outward humility and can't help myself. Give me a place to write and I'll probably write in it and what's more, I love to read my own writing much like I love to hear myself talk.