Okay, so I’m all jacked up on caffeine and thinking about how I haven’t made a blog post in God knows how long. It’s not because I don’t want to make posts. I do. God, how I do. The problem is, I haven’t been keeping up on my horror viewing or reading as well as I should. I’d like to place the blame somewhere (long hours at work, efforts to write fiction, Barack Hussein Obama), but instead, how about I just rattle through a bunch of random thoughts, ideas, and personal goings-on? After all, it’s October. Or, as I call it, Shocktober.
I don’t call it Shocktober. That’d be stupid.
Lately, I’ve been leafing my way slowly through Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow, a loose collection of short stories that inspired, among other authors, our old pal H. P. Lovecraft. Reasonable stuff so far, but it hasn’t knocked me out, although the play-that-drives-people-to-madness (titled, go figure, The King in Yellow) is a cool precursor to the Necronomicon and Tome of Eternal Darkness. I’m also nearing the end of 100 Hair-Raising Little Short Stories (ed. Al Sarrantonio, 1993), which makes for great bathroom material, since none of the stories go longer than ten pages. Is the short horror tale inherently superior to long-form horror? Who can say? Except me. And I say it is.
My television horror’s taken a backseat to a first-time viewing of The Wire, although one could argue that the first two seasons (what I’ve finished so far) contain plenty of true horror and what TV Tropes calls “fridge horror.” But that line of thinking makes Requiem for a Dream and Irreversible horror movies, and do we really want to go there? I don’t. I have enough trouble determining whether or not American Psycho is a horror film. Its centerpiece sequence involves a bloody naked man with a chainsaw chasing a terrified blonde whore, but people tell me the movie’s satire. It might be.
Anyway, the point is that I’m picking my way through Season Two of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Season Three of The X-Files, and Season Four of Dexter. Buffy’s evolving into a dark teenage soap opera, with all the main characters pairing up and leaving for what I assume is hot off-screen WB sex, but new villain Spike’s more fun than The Master from Season One. The X-Files waxes and wanes, but Season Three is the Year of Darin Morgan, who wrote the episodes that arguably defined the series, the same way that Swartzwelder defined The Simpsons. To wit, I can suffer “Tesos Bichos” if it gets me closer to “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space.’”
Dexter is Dexter. Compulsively watchable anti-hero surrounded by the most boring police procedural crap imaginable.
Movies? Oh God. Nothing. After the mediocre I Sell the Dead, the only thing I’ve come close to watching is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Frankenstein tale as revised and opera-tized by Kenneth Branagh back in 1994. As attractive as young Helena Bonham Carter in a corset can be (and, Gods, is young Helena Bonham Carter in a corset attractive!), the first twenty minutes proved so frenetic and overwrought and cornball that I turned off my Netflix online and went back to playing Metroid: Other M, and, to put things in perspective, Metroid: Other M is not a good game.
So that’s where I’m at, and that’s why I haven’t posted anything significant. I like to wait to post on this blog until I have something substantive to say about a specific film or book or game, or about the genre in general, and I don’t like repeating obvious news. Let’s face it, no one’s going to come to this blog hoping for updates and thoughts on something as meaningless as photographs of actors in that Thing sequel/remake (parkas and snow? the mind reels!). What I want to contribute is original thought and content and a more knowledgeable perspective on the horror genre.
I don’t know if this entry counts, but it’s what I’ve got right now.
Happy Shocktober.
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