Latest from the Chiaroscuro

The story goes like this, potentially apocryphal as all anecdata, but it's still a fun one: When Beyond the Black Rainbow writer-director Panos Cosmatos was a kid in the early 1980s, he spent a lot of time inside a store called the Video Attic, looking at VHS boxes of R-rated horror and science fiction films and daydreaming about their covers and plot descriptions on their backs.

Brian Moreland (Dead of Winter) delves into the Nazis' well-documented occult obsession with this horror-thriller set in the waning days of World War II during the battle of Hürtgen Forest. Costing both sides a combined total of well over 60,000 casualties, Hürtgen was something of a meat-grinder, a hellish slog through muddy woods near the Belgian-German border. Moreland takes his historical tale there but gives it a strong supernatural spin that will keep you flipping the pages.

Shane Stadler’s Exoskeleton is a harrowing debut novel that explores the ancient, albeit still used tactic of torture. Torture has historically been employed by those in or seeking power to bend the will of those they subjugate. In the hands of barbaric groups, it’s an exercise in mindless brutality. In so-called progressive societies, torture has been used as a tool of experimentation to achieve a purported higher purpose. No matter the justification, its ultimate purpose is inflicting terror.

Six parts whimsy mixed with a dash of humour and a healthy dollop of dreamlike disjointed light horror-fantasy, Eric Orchard’s comic book Marrowbones is an absolute delight.

I've read three books by Stephen Graham Jones this year. With many other authors, this would be the point in which recurring themes, beloved phrases, and preferred narrative structure turn a bit monotonous. Fortunately, Jones is obsessed with reinventing his prose with every book. For The Last Final Girl, his latest release with Lazy Fascist Press, Jones created a novel/screenplay hybrid that pulls the reader along at breakneck speed and offers glimpses of the action through almost every character, including the killer.

About this time [the deceased] can see that the share of food is being set aside, that the body is being stripped of its garments, that the place of the sleeping-rug is being swept; can hear all the weeping and wailing of his friends and relatives, and, although he can see them and can hear them calling upon him, they cannot hear him calling upon them, so he goeth away displeased.

—Bardo Thadol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead

She wanted it to happen while I fried latkes,
the smell of olive oil burnishing the air
and her body laid out on the couch
as if nodding off on a Sunday
with the crossword open across her chest.
It’s a Tibetan thing, she told me;
cooking for the dead, helping the spirit
recognize itself without
the butcher paper of skin.

She asked for it this way: kitchen heat
drowsing into her bones
like an invitation to sleep. No goodbye.
Telling me to set the egg-timer
for a nap, five or ten minutes,
she’d wait for the potatoes to bronze,
and when the chorus of monks
in the alarm urged, she’d rise
out of herself
like steam from a hot pan.

I’ve stoked the stove at midnight before,
shrined our apartment with her incense
of chopped garlic and onion
in the shimmer of oil. Cooking was the trick
she played on me, knowing
how I’d platter grief like an offering,
expecting her to nibble it away night to night.
But the dead grow bored of weeping;
she waited for the day
I laid out a plate of latkes
and found myself hungry
enough to take a bite.

Born in 1950, Michael McEachern McDowell was a remarkably prolific author and screenwriter—probably best-known, these days, for getting primary script credit on Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988)—who Stephen King once called “the finest writer of paperback originals in America today.” From 1979 to 1985, he produced a series of startlingly good Southern Gothic novels which, while certainly benefitting from that decade's post-Carrie horror boom, constantly provided a standard for other horror writers to look up to … and did so while simultaneously writing light mysterie

Orange melon blossoms
ripen and rot on
October wind and rain.
One eyed Jacks
wink their last

Fall leaves
speak drily of winter
as frost
clings in a decaying
embrace
on old hallow’s eve.

Autumn’s orange
turns sour
browns to black
brings in unearthly things
consuming from the inside out.

An empty shell
whispers of dead things,
long forgotten.
that haunt and chill.

Ah, FanTasia … the film festival that keeps me glued to a seat in the dark for nearly four weeks of the best weather Montreal has to offer. But I love this darkness where so much creative cinema is screened.

Every July, I approach Montreal's FanTasia Film Festival with trepidation. Will there be another spate of intriguing and worthwhile films? Can they deliver, yet again? Is this the year when I will walk away disappointed by the noir and gruesome fare offered to fanatical fans of horror and dark fantasy cinema, which are the films I love to review?

Considering that the overall giallo (Italian horror-mystery) template was set—at least in terms of international recognition—by intense stylists like Dario Argento and Mario Bava, it only makes sense that the work of Pupi Avati looks fairly staid by comparison. Although his filmography is a long and varied one, his direct contributions to the genre could be programmed and viewed as a two-evening mini-“festival.” Yet that festival would include not only a movie Guillermo del Toro chose to spotlight during his Guest Filmmaker appearance at the 2011 L.A.

Okay, this is the first column in a very long time, and a lot of you will think shoes are an odd way to start off, but let me explain. If you have ever had pain in your feet, dealt with bruises, blisters, etc.⎯you understand that when all of that stops, it's a major improvement on every aspect of your life. Besides, this is a metaphor, so  . . . deal with it.

Traditionally, science fiction and horror/dark fantasy have been assumed to make for uneasy bedfellows, which is odd, since both share a key intersectional taproot text in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—the ultimate "Things [People] Were Not Meant To Know/Hyperintellectualism Makes for Bad Parenting Methodology" fable underlying almost all Cronenbergian body horror on one side, all musings on Artificial Intelligence and Singularity mechanics on the other. When Frankenstein takes the wheel, H.P. Lovecraft starts trying on H.R.

Dan Wells' The Hollow City is something of an oddity. The novel should work, except it doesn't. The Hollow City follows in the tradition of the kind of stories The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Night Gallery used to run. And the construction of the story mimics the structure those programs commonly employed: an interesting premise that plays off the audience's uncertainty, keeps the audience guessing during the build-up, and then dumps the reveal in the audience's lap at the close.

When you imagine survival in the wake of a zombie apocalypse, is there musical accompaniment? Surely you've got the perfect song or album queued up in your head for fighting off bands of roving zombies. Now what if that music was the cause of the apocalypse in the first place? Instead of a bite, what if the zombie plague spread through sound itself? This is the intriguing concept explored by author Anthony J. Rapino in his unique zombie book Soundtrack to the End of the World.

You can't understand. Because you're reading the last chapter of something, without having read the first chapters  . . . Kids always think they're coming into a story at the beginning, when usually they're coming in at the end.
—Dodge, aka “Echo,” in IDW's Locke & Key 1: Welcome to Lovecraft, written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez.

Making a sharpish turn from one stream of horror culture (film) to another (graphic novels), I've decided to use my time this week to talk about my favourite current comic series, Locke & Key, which—with the release of its latest collected volume, number five (Clockworks)—claims to be finally moving into the home-stretch. Since the series began back in 2008, this means the culmination of a surprisingly streamlined five-year plan, when one takes the guiding narrative's dark, oblique, often spectacularly surreal complexities into consideration.

St Elmo lives not in rigging
But on night dark beaches
Limned in spirit light

Savour the salt taste
It is the memory of drowning
And the fish-pecked sailors
Returned