10 Reasons Why Phantasm is a Great Horror Film (although the list could go on)

There’s no mistaking that it’s a horror flick.

It’s fun.

The movie has all the things that a teen to twenty year old (or that inner teen to twenty year old—especially male—in all of us) wants to see: graveyards, fast cars, hot women, creepy old guys, zombie dwarfs...

Originality. All I have to say is: yellow blood.

For some reason, a severed finger becomes…well you watch it and see.

Mirrors that explode in just the right instance.

You can tell they had fun making it.

It keeps moving and so many horror movies don’t.

The characters don’t do anything uber stupid.

And how can we forget the silver ball with razor hooks and a drill that seems to turn on even its own kind!

All that said, Phantasm is not for everyone and I usually don’t recommend it to friends who look for fulfilling stories. But if you have a penchant for the eerie and can leave your high brow in your library, you’ll dig this if you haven’t already seen the iconic underground masterpiece.

Gusto

For our Halloween Edition: Witch Moon?

This moon!

Photo by Richard Fogg

For our Halloween Edition: Misty Morn

Or is that Misty Mourn?

Photo by Richard Fogg

Jinxed! (It's not good to be an iynx.)

Shades of Linda Blair!

The origin of the word jinx isn’t clear, but there’s speculation that it might come from iynx, a wryneck bird that’s able to twist its head around 180 degrees while hissing like a snake. Historically, the poor bird has also been used for divination and magic. Steaming entrails, I assume. It’s not good to be an iynx.

As a writer, I often emulate an iynx. My head spins regularly, plus I'm rather good at hissing. Fortunately, my entrails have thus far remained where they belong, though in honor of Halloween we could pause to discuss evisceration in more detail. But I digress...

I sometime wonder whether I’ve jinxed myself by doing or not doing certain things, though I hope I’ll never act like certain baseball players whose actions often amuse and sometimes irritate me. Let’s see, before I touch the keyboard I need to spit, adjust my right sleeve, wipe my forehead, tug on the brim of my baseball cap, wipe my forehead again, tug the brim one more time, then inhale and exhale slowly. Whew! Now it's safe to start writing! Right? Maybe not.

But I do have a few superstitions. (Don’t worry, no steaming entrails.) One of my superstitions is that if I'm in query mode, I want to have at least eight queries out.  For me, eight is luckier than three or seven. Does that make me feel as if I'm in control? Yes. Isn’t that good, especially when there's so much we can't control in this crazy business?

How about you? Do superstitions influence your writing day?

by Janet Fogg

Janet is the author of Soliloquy, an award-winning historical romance, Trail Winds, five etiological tales, and co-author of the military history best seller, Fogg in the Cockpit.

Why Gore is NOT Horror

 

 

When I spotted it, I gasped just a little bit. And it's a nice segue.

With St. Hallows Eve nipping at our heels, I felt like getting a crushing boulder off my chest. After I tell chums that I love horror films, they’re always surprised at how few of them I watch.

World War Z was playing in our living room the other night. I heard two things, ‘virus’ and ‘shoot them in the head’, and wouldn’t you know it, the cliché’s kept stacking up from there on out, pushing me to go read a historical fiction instead. Golly, how original!

A few weeks before in a moment of repose, I had the time to plop down and catch an old Vincent Price American International creature feature entitled Madhouse. Although Price was a class act, admittedly, the sloppy plot summoned laughs, but the fun of it took me back to childhood. My roomie said, “We need to get Dave a bunch of 70s horror flicks. It seems like they’re the only ones he will watch.”

My response: “The way I figure, the old ones have an excuse to be bad. The new ones should know better by now.”

Yet Hollywood keeps spilling blood and all they can think to do in most cases is add more blood—or  make it more realistic—and it simply doesn’t pack the jolt of a good fright. Think about The Exorcist, Misery, and Silence of the lambs. Sure, there’s a little crimson in them, but do you even remember it? Rather, do you recall Regan’s head twisting a full 180, Lecter’s relentless see-through stare at Clarice, Annie’s bug-eyed rant as to why Paul Sheldon shouldn’t use profanity in his novel?

If you saw these films, I bet those images caused the chills to resurface.

Here’s why:

Whereas gory films can be effective (Hostel comes to mind, although I still maintain that if they would have set it up for the audience to imagine what was going on in the chambers rather than spell it out, it would have been way more petrifying), pain and or bleeding fails to freak us out too much because they’re readily a part of our lives anyway. The two would be better classified as drama. Every kid has stubbed their toe, scraped a knee, felt the sting, and saw the ruby meat under the casing. Big deal. It’s not common to panic during a surgery which is going to entail lots of blood. To be respectful, I realize that there are some out there who get squeamish at the sight of an open wound, but that nausea is NOT horror.

The real reason something scares us is the belief that something can strip away any control that we might have. That’s what all the three aforementioned masterpieces have in common. Pazuzu has Regan. Lecter has Clarice. Annie has Paul.

As for serial killer flicks, human depravity is unfortunately nothing new. In fact, unless done with creativity, rather than scary, they’re just pathetically depressing.

 

Gusto

Your Macabre Menu for Halloween Cinema - Courtesy of Gusto

Yeah, I’m a writer and probably should be plugging scary books, but let’s face it, if you haunt this holiday at all, you’re probably going to zombie out to a movie. If you REALLY want a couple of guaranteed goose-bump reads, I plug Borealis by Ron Malfi (interviewed him on here last Halloween—check it out) and Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. BTW, Tattoo Rampage by yours truly has some creepy parts, so I'm told. Couldn’t help myself.

But on to the cinema!

The film that did the ‘video cam/mock documentary chiller’ most effectively and pretty much spawned all the ones you see now was The Blair Witch Project. With a budget that must have spilled out of a coffee can, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick created a masterpiece that earned the right to be mentioned along with The Exorcist. Watch The Blair Witch Project in the dark and you will feel it.

Tucker and Dale Versus Evil stars Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine. Whereas those names may not chime a bell in your memory, Tudyk is a chameleon actor, who has delivered amazing performances in anything from dramas to westerns, but he made his way up the ‘ladder’ through comedy. Also a veteran of comedy and extremely talented, Labine is who I like to call the Jack Black in a bear outfit. The reason Tucker and Dale is a must see is due to its most original reversal on the whole ‘twisted redneck in the boonies’ approach. I don’t like to recommend gory films, and this one is, but I have to praise it for the brilliant twist and humor.

A traditional, well plotted horror film with a director who knows how to scare rather than spray you with blood (in this case anyway) is Drag Me to Hell. Tragic in its ensnarement of the heroine, Drag Me to Hell has a main character who you will really care about thus making the surmounting dread that much more palpable as you realize she is in such a bad way.

This one has gotten so much praise that I hardly need to share it. The Cabin in the Woods not only breaks the mold, but pulverizes it. I wish more horror writers could do away with convention enough to dream up unique premises like this. I won’t tell you the premise, but even if you don’t like scary movies, you’ll respect it.

Ghosto Dave