In the last five years, I have come across and explored a very vibrant and active creative community on the Internet: The writers of creepypasta and r/nosleep. The are some masterpieces of horror being posted online and I truly believe the future of the genre rests in the online medium. In addition to the writing are the incredibly talented voice actors who choose some of the best horror stories and make high-quality readings of the work. This month I will post a lot of these readings with plans to make it a regular monthly or bi-weekly feature of the blog. I hope you find some great listens for this spooky month.
The Museum
The Showers (One of my all-time personal favorites)
NormalPornforNormalPeople.com
The Other Internet
NoEndHouse Part 1
Room Zero
The Disappearance of Ashley, Kansas (an audio version of found footage)
Growth in views from August to September was 33% (August: 249, September: 369)
Growth in visitors from August to September was 20% (August: 207, September: 260)
29% of views came from Google Plus
34% of views came from Google searches
4% of views from from Facebook
Posts
The top five most visited articles for September were:
Masks Actual Play: Junior Elite #2 – 57 views
Masks Actual Play: Junior Elite #0 & 1 – 32 views
Comic Book Review: The Vision Vol.1: A Little Worse Than Man – 20 views **
Comic Book Review: Omega Men by Tom King – 18 views **
Movie Review – A Tale of Tales – 16 views
** denotes post was published in previous months, though the views came exclusively from September.
Analysis
My Masks actual plays are by far the most popular thing posted in September, but isn’t too big of a surprise based on my knowledge of my core audience. This has caused me to look closely at some future games I’d like to run with actual play posting in mind (i.e. would they be fun to read, would I be able to write them in a way that would be fun to read). I definitely Masks is going to be my major go to game for the foreseeable future, but am also looking at running Lovecraftesque and doing more Games for Two reviews with more detailed play reports.
Tom King comics appear to have a very long lasting popularity as evidenced by The Vision and Omega Men continuing to be mainstays in the top 5. A review of his first volume of Batman is coming in January. Based on what I’ve read about sales number for DC Comics since the launch of their Rebirth direction, there is increased interest in those titles. My own interests are also pulling me towards a large number of quality looking Image comics titles and I plan on devoting some time and posts to review a series of collected volume Ones of these.
Two films jumped to the top of the charts this month, A Tale of Tales and I Am Not a Serial Killer. I think they garnered so many views because they are both current and not mainstream cinema. I will still be posting reviews of films like Ghostbusters and Star Trek Beyond when they become available, but will actively look for interesting non-mainstream cinema that plays with genre expectations.
Conclusion
Views will definitely make a jump in October due to an increased posting schedule. I have found a balance with work and home with some detailed scheduling so I think posting is stabilizing. In November, I have planned to delve deep into Gene Wilder’s films. I have some election related posts, and depending on the outcome, have a list of post-apocalyptic films ready to go. December will have a Xavier Dolan post series and I strongly hope this gets good views because he’s a filmmaker I’m incredibly excited about. Patreon pledges have increased with two new donors coming on board in September.
Hypothetical Film Festivals place five to six films together that share some thematic element.
Hypothetical Film Festival: Family Nightmares
Families can be terrifying things. They have histories shaded in darkness and can know your most intimate secrets. Sometimes it’s hard to decide whether being inside a family is more disturbing than viewing one from the outside.
Parents (1989, dir. Bob Balaban)
Bob Balaban is known to most of us a beloved character actor with a penchant for dry, Buster Keaton-esque reactions. You’ve seen him as the narrator in Moonrise Kingdom or multiple Christopher Guest mockumentaries. Less well known is his first foray into feature film directing, Parents. Starring Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt as the titular parents, the film focuses on their son’s slow burn discovery of a horrific secret they’ve been hiding from him. Set in the 1950s the film plays with the conventions of the nuclear family unit and is a genuinely dark and horrifying film. Balaban’s use of slow motion and twisted camera angles ease the movie into a deeply disturbing place.
Visitor Q (2002, dir. Takashi Miike)
There are few families on this list as fucked up as the Yamazakis. Father, mother, son, and daughter, they are one depraved, twisted mess after another. I won’t go into the details here, but suffice to say from the opening scene you should be unsettled. Director Miike drops Visitor Q into the mix, a stranger who seems intent on forcing this family to come back together but not giving up their utterly disturbing behaviors. Murder, drug use, incest, these are just a few of the messed up things that go down in this film. If you’ve ever seen a Miike film it won’t come as a surprise, but if you haven’t…well you are in for quite an experience.
Home Movie (2008, dir. Christopher Denham)
Pastor David Poe and his wife Clare have just moved, with their son and daughter, to a quaint home in the New England woods. Based on the director’s experience as a child filming his family’s life, Home Movie uses the found footage trope to explore multiple perspectives of parents dealing with children seemingly possessed by pure evil. Nothing supernatural ever happens, and it appears that we’re dealing with children who have suddenly become sociopathic. The sense of dread the film builds is very profound and primal, and the horror of what the children have been up to in secret is slowly laid out for the audience. The final chilling moments of the film descend into pure visceral horror and leave the viewer with lots of questions and lots of things to think about.
The Woman (2011, dir. Lucky McKee)
If you watch one film on this list, make it The Woman. It’s based on a novel by Jack Ketchum who if you know anything about him already know this is a very dark, disturbing film. An unnamed woman, the last of a clan of violent humans, somehow untouched by civilization and kept feral, ends up in the custody of Chris Cleek and his family. Chris is one of the scariest film villains I have ever witnessed on screen, so sure of his moral and divine right to control those around him. Pollyanna McIntosh plays The Woman and delivers such a raw, vicious performance that it will linger in your mind for years as it has with me. Where this film goes and the secrets it reveals about this family are more disturbing than any Texas Chainsaw Massacre you can dream up. What family members do to one another is often beyond even our worst nightmares.
Here Comes the Devil (2012, dir. Adrian Garcia Bogliano)
A family takes a trip near the outskirts of Tijuana and lose their preteen son and daughter in the hills. Hours later, the police deliver the two children home. The parents are so relieved and move on with their lives. However, something is very very wrong with the kids. They don’t eat anymore, they don’t sleep, and their babysitter sees something…something so terrible she cannot give it words, the night she watches them. But parents can’t abandon and give up on their children. Here Comes the Devil explores the lengths to which parents will go to protect their children and how they will destroy others rather than confront the evil sitting across the kitchen table from them.
The third book for our Book Club is here! Experimental Film by Gemma Files.
Lois Cairns is a former film critic turned professor with a son that has severe Autism. Her life feels like it’s out of her control. She feels unable to pursue her dreams of being a filmmaker or connect with her child. Then she receives an invitation to attend the unveiling of a seemingly lost piece of early 20th-century film. The malevolent force behind this piece of film begins to worm its way into her life threatening to tear it all apart.
Looking forward to this read and something that will hopefully be appropriately creepy for October.
The Hike wastes no time in jumping right into the journey down the path. Ben is a businessman on a trip to the hills of Pennsylvania. Before dinner with a client, he decides to take a hike behind the rural hotel. He quickly becomes lost and finds himself on a path, a path that he must stay on or die. Ben meets a series of strange and fantastic creatures and finds he is on a journey of redefining the perceptions of himself. The resolution of the story brings a huge revelation that reframes the context of the entire novel.
Author Drew Magary is an odd fellow. He wrote for the sports blog Deadspin and currently GQ, he authored a nonfiction book on what a terrible parent he is and won a Chopped amateur competition. This unique point of view makes the prose of The Hike stand out. It’s sparse in a very Hemingway-esque style at moments. This is an interesting counterpoint to the ridiculous encounters like a cursing crab, a giant control panel manipulating cricket, and a good-humored man-eating giantess.
Magary cites books and video games as his main influence for The Hike. Homer’s Odyssey is a primary reference throughout the structure of the novel, a man on a quest to get back to his wife. There’re threads of Grimm and other traditional folktales woven throughout, particularly with an elderly woman in a cottage in the middle of the forest who turns out to know much more than she first lets on. There’s also some outright horror, especially with the Doberman-masked madmen that pursue Ben throughout the story.
Magary stated in an interview that many of the elaborate and silly solutions to problems in the text are inspired by the illogical or irrational reasoning of many King’s Quest PC games. I remember the monster manual Ben comes across in the hotel, and it’s utterly ridiculous methods for killing the bizarre and strange creatures listed therein. In the same interview, he explains that impetus of the novel came from his similar experience of going out and getting so easily lost in the woods.
The novel felt fairly like some fun fluff and then when Ben learned about his fate from the crab and confronted the Producer I started to see a significant turn in what was happening in the subtext. The final scene where Ben sees his wife again after decades of being away, while only a few hours have passed in real world time, and also has the revelation about what happened to her years ago was the big change. The Hike is a story about how impossible it is to share the effects of trauma and life-changing experiences. Ben sees it in his wife’s eyes, realizing she lived through the same journey as him, but we are left in a place where we see they cannot connect on this. The journey was such a singularly personal one that even though they see it in each other’s eyes we know they will never be able to sit down and share anything about it.
Discussion Questions:
How do you successfully communicate personal trauma and life-altering experiences?
Ben goes through a major metamorphosis throughout the Hike. Is he the same person on a physical level at the end as he was when he started? What makes our physical form our self?
Set during the English Civil War, a deserter/alchemist joins up with a band of disparate soldiers to discover a treasure buried in a field. Psychedelic cosmic horror ensues.
Here Comes the Devil (2012, dir. Adrian Garcia Bogliano)
A couple loses their children in the hills, but they are returned safe and sound. But are these really their children. A violent, disturbing story of demonic possession and the lengths parents go to protect their children.
House of the Devil (2009, dir. Ti West)
A college student needing some extra cash takes up a job babysitting at a creepy old house in the woods. Filmed in a 1980s retro manner, Ti West manages to walk the line between respectful homage and originality.
Nightcrawler (2014, dir. 2014)
Less supernatural and more real life horror. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a hardworking man who finds his calling in is exploiting the tragedy of others for television ratings. A deeply disturbing character study.
Eddie (Pryor) is a con-man that got caught and must fulfill 100 hours of community service per his probation. He ends up as the caretaker of George (Wilder), a recent mental hospital patient and reformed pathological liar. It doesn’t take too long in the outside world, and George is back to his old habits due to a case of mistaken identity. He’s thought to be Abe Fielding, the heir to a brewery empire and Eddie sees this as an opportunity to make some bank. A villain pops up in the form of Fielding’s business manager (Stephen Lang), but the twists and conceits used to get to the finale are incredibly convoluted and messy.
Another You was made in the period where Richard Pryor was succumbing to the effects of Multiple Sclerosis. He had announced his diagnosis four years earlier but it was this film that showed the public just how badly he was losing the battle. The film tries to work around it but it’s obvious when we see him being steadied by other actors in scenes and the way he tremors through the picture. Gene Wilder had done one film after See No Evil and prior to this one, Funny About Love, that was a box office failure. This would be the final film appearance of both actors. They would make the occasional television appearance and Wilder would star in his short-lived sitcom, but feature films would never be a medium they returned to.
It’s no wonder they gave up on movies after this. Another You is an unmitigated disaster. Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon) had been hired to direct but quit after five weeks and Maurice Phillips was brought in as a replacement. Phillips and his editor showcase their complete ineptitude to construct a cohesive story. If reasonable minds had prevailed Pryor would have been left out of this because it becomes painful to watch him being forced through the picture despite his condition. It’s a nod to him that he just decides to say “fuck it” and do his own thing despite the movie happening around him. The picture is riddled with external car shots that have sloppy post-production ADR plastered over them expositing on plot points the director realized were unclear. The story is a complete mess that shifts its focus about three times and ends up in a confusing unfunny place, with relationship resolutions that are completely unearned by the script.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Richard Pryor became the focus of a myriad of television documentaries about his stand-up career. His actual appearances were limited to a few and in 2005 he passed away due to complications from a heart attack. Gene Wilder tried his hand at television sitcoms in his own, Something Wilder; that was cancelled after a single season. He was seen in the television film version of Alice in Wonderland, playing the Mock Turtle. He subsequently starred in and wrote a duo of mystery films for A&E focused on a theater director turned investigator. In more recent memory, Wilder had a two-episode stint on Will and Grace as Will’s unbalanced boss. Wilder passed away in 2016 from complications of Alzheimer’s
The films of Pryor and Wilder never got better than Silver Streak. The key was that Silver Streak was a tightly scripted movie. Their subsequent films gave them lots of space to ad lib and mug, and that needed to be much rarer and tightly edited in post to be genuinely funny. For people around my age, I think we look back through the fog of nostalgia at these two men’s work together because with a crisper, more recent viewing of it I see there were a lot of problems. Somewhere, in some parallel reality, they were able to partner on Blazing Saddles, and movie houses are showing it on repeat for their Wilder retrospectives.
Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet Volume 1 By Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze You can purchase this book here!
The current ongoing run of Black Panther focuses on nation building both in the fiction and as metatextual-ly with the previous presentations of this hero and his homeland. Black Panther (real name T’Challa) is the ruler of Wakanda, an African nation with technology that puts it beyond futuristic. In the last few years, Wakanda has taken a major beating mainly from an attack by Namor and the Atlanteans. The attack led to Black Panther losing the throne to his sister and making his life a single-minded pursuit of revenge against Namor. He eventually got his revenge, stranding Namor on a parallel Earth but was then swept up as one of the survivors of the collapse of reality in Secret Wars. Present day, reality has been restored and so has Panther’s place on the throne. His sister is kept in a life-death stasis after an encounter with the mad Titan Thanos.
This first volume collects issues 1 through 4 of writer Coates’ run. There are two parallel storylines in the book and by the end of this first volume, they have not yet come together, though it’s apparent the story arc is leading up to that. First T’Challa is dealing with resuming the mantle of the king and its responsibilities. Various uprisings are occurring across his nation among the working class. The disputes are legitimate but get exacerbated by a mysterious woman with the ability to amplify anxieties and anger and create raging mobs. An even more enigmatic shaman accompanies the woman and his ties to people amongst the Wakandan elite eventually come to light.
The other storyline follows two of the Midnight Angels, the female personal bodyguards of Black Panther. Aneka, a trainer in the Angels, is charged with the murder of a tribal chieftain. She claims it was necessary because he was abusing and exploiting his tribe’s women, but Queen Ramonda, the mother to Black Panther refuses to hear it. Aneka’s lover and fellow Angel, Ayo pleads the case but is not listened to. The first issue ends with Ayo finding a way to break Aneka out of prison and two begin a cleansing of Wakanda from men who would mistreat women.
The story sets up a lot of interesting pieces, and I am interested in following the series to find out what happens when Panther and the Midnight Angels finally clash. There is not a complete story here, though. Due to delays, the series has been very inconsistent in its release. That’s not an uncommon problem when a previously non-comics author takes on a monthly assignment. Jodi Picoult had issues keeping her Wonder Woman run coming out on time and director Richard Donner had a horrifically late Action Comics run in the mid-2000s. I think the monthly schedule is difficult for creators who are used to longer stretches of time to complete work (movies, novels).
The art is by comics veteran Brian Stelfreeze who I remember vividly from his Batman work in the mid-1990s. He is splendid at playing with light and shadow. While his pencil and ink work is spectacular, you should google his paintings for some beautiful art that exists between photo-realism and comic book stylization.
It’s funny that the least interesting part of this comic is Black Panther. Instead the supporting characters that build out Wakanda are the ones I want to follow. Ironically enough, Marvel has announced Black Panther: World of Wakanda, a new series co-written between Coates and author Roxane Gay which will focus on telling the stories of these side players.
Our issue begins with Black Hoodie the Delinquent getting a hijacked text message from her former mentor, the imprisoned super genius Vincent Vincenzo. He baits her into visiting him at AEGIS Supermax where he’s locked up in a floating cell suspended in the middle of spherical chamber outfitted with lethal security measures. Through the intercom, he taunts Hoodie over the disappearance of the Elite and her team’s inability to find out what happened to them. Hoodie doesn’t go for it and tells him she’s leaving. Vincent replies that when she decides she needs his help just to let him know, he’s only choosing to stay in the cell for now.
Phoenix and The Sphinx (The Joined)
Lily and Rose aka Phoenix and The Sphinx (The Joined) are called in for a meeting with their school guidance counselor Mr. Dritz. Dritz is a retired superhero formerly known as The Phantom Spider and one of the few people who knows Lily and Rose’s secret identities. He tells the girls he saw their powers go on the fritz during the battle with Nuada and warns he’ll go to the authorities if they continue putting their lives in danger, even threatening to contact DCS.Lily and Rose falsely promise but decide to call his bluff in the end.
Magnificent Lad (The Legacy)
Magnificent Lad (The Legacy) is still hoping he can find his parents and gets news from Xion that he’s picked up a transmission that matches Gravinian energy signatures coming from an old warehouse in Damnation, the old town district. Symba, the Magnificent Family’s robot butler, tells Mag Lad he’s still very uncomfortable with the family’s former foe Xion being allowed access to the laboratory. Mag Lad says that Symba should just keep a close eye on the man.
Silver Arm (The Innocent)
Xion stops by the Mag Family’s Interstellar Menagerie, a portion of their island dedicated to housing near extinct animals from across the cosmos. Silver Arm has voluntarily allowed himself to be housed there after his absorbed Nuada’s silver arm. Xion taunts the young hero telling him he could use his power to cripple his enemies and is weak by choosing to be imprisoned. Silver Arm spits his taunts right back and refuses to give into the power lust.
Kid Atomic (The Protege)
Kid Atomic visits his mentor, Doc Atomic, still in a state of dementia and PTSD from whatever happened at the Eon Institute. Doc has cracked open the ink pens he asked the medi-drones to bring him and has scrawled black hearts across the walls of the recovery room. Kid inquires what this means, and Doc can only reply “The black heart beats within” and finally just chants “Eon” repeatedly. Kid hops in the Warthog and rockets to Magnificent Island. He and Mag Lad share their individual and immediate concerns and decide to split the team. Kid will take Silver Arm, Phoenix, and The Sphinx to Eon under the guise of allowing the scientists there to run tests on Silver Arm. Mag Lad and Black Hoodie will check out the strange warehouse in Damnation.
Director Marissa Wolfman
At the Eon Institute, the split team is met with a flustered and irritated Director Marissa Wolfman, the manager of the scientific research facility. She’s accompanied by armed security and eventually concedes to letting the young heroes in only if they remain monitored at all times. Dr. Conway Claremont runs a battery of tests on Silver Arm, but The Sphinx sees tests had been run previously on a sample of the metal composing the mystic arm and is took on demonic properties almost killing those present. She shouts out a warning just as thorny tendrils shoot off Silver Arm’s body and bore into the scanning equipment. Summoning a supreme level of will Silver Arm attempts to regain control of his powers and suddenly finds his consciousness floating in a black void.
Dr. Conway Claremont
A beacon of light floats towards him the void and feminine entity makes herself known. Silver feels a motherly love he had always wanted but never had as a foster kid and reaches out to her. She tells him she can soothe the pain of his arm if he accepts her. Silver hesitates but gives in and finds himself back in the laboratory with full and complete control of his now increased powers. Kid Atomic feigns the team departing now that the tests are over but instead hacks the security system and finds one curiously locked down sector. The half team fights past Eon guards and finally discovers a large testing facility containing a curious doorway connected to monitoring equipment. The Sphinx reaches out with her powers and sees the battle between the Elite and unseen, dark forces that occurred days ago. Strange cosmic interference shows her multiple realities where heroes are killed by chthonic forces emerging from the doorway or fighting them off and many other possible realities.
Kid Atomic remotely calls in the Warthog to blow a hole in the ceiling, but Phoenix detects another presence in the room. Shimmering into view is Mr. Drizt wearing his old Phantom Spider stealth belt. He tells the kids that they are going to the authorities to resolve the many crimes they committed breaking into this facility. Phoenix decides to solve things by overloading Drizt’s mind with images of his future and they leave him convulsing on the ground, regaining his senses after they have safely left.
Director Marissa Wolfman watches on the security feed, looking incredibly annoyed and frustrated. Dr. Conway Claremont shows her that Kid Atomic had hacked the lab’s readouts on Silver Arm and that he had reversed the hack tunneling into Doc Atomic’s secret files. She relays this news to Institute’s mysterious and shadowy benefactor Mr. Truman.
Khinzir the Blood Pig
Across town, Mag Lad and Black Hoodie arrive at the warehouse and after Hoodies does some recon, they discover it’s housing an illegal metahuman pit fighting ring. Also, there’s some human trafficking going on as unwilling men and women are forced into the ring to fight the monstrous champion Khinzir, the Blood Pig. Mag Lad creates a distraction, busting in through the roof and drawing Khinzir’s rage while Hoodie sneaks into the management’s office to see where the Gravinian transmission is coming from.
Black Hoodie discovers Prospero, a decrepit, rotting old man that seems to the brains behind this operation. He summons a pair of infernal stone creatures using a device on his arm, but Black Hoodie uses her psi powers, channeled through a baseball to make short work of them. Prospero attempts an escape but is foiled. Hoodie questions him about what he knows in regards to the Elite’s disappearance. Prospero reveals that they were “given as a blood sacrifice” to aid in the coming of the “dark gods.” He mentions “Golgotha and Gehenna” and that more will die to hearken their visitation.
Prospero, Acolyte of the Dark Gods
Mag Lad tricks Khinzir into letting down his guard, and the behemothic villain is tossed into deep space, belaying his threat for now. Mag Lad finds Hoodie and she shows him that Prospero was wearing a scrap of his father’s costume. Prospero will only say it was given to him as a boon from the dark gods. Hoodie attempts to burn the man alive in his business, but Mag Lad holds her back and turns the villain over to authorities. The Halcyon Police say Prospero was just a crazy old man, ranting on the street about some crazy religious nonsense, and that he’d dropped off their radar a few months ago.
The two half team reunite and head to Magnificent Island to debrief. When they arrive, however, they find Symba having gone mad and Xion lying bloodied and unconscious on the laboratory floor. To be continued…
PopCult Reviews 