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Please help! I need the name of an unmade horror movie that Dean Winchester would kill to see: the horror version of The Magnificent Ambersons or the Nic Cage Superman. That is, it should be an actual missed opportunity in the annals of moviemaking. Help me out and I’ll write you a drabble of your choosing.
Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts: Hill’s short story collection is highly impressive, better than his novel Heart-Shaped Box and showing a similar love for the horror genre. I took short notes on all the stories. Best New Horror: Horror editor receives the manuscript of a lifetime, enough to revitalize his interest in horror. What happens next is utterly predictable and perhaps, therefore, fresh, though I didn’t find the story as impressive as others have. 20th Century Ghost: Ghost love story in a haunted theater. Pop Art: An amazing story about a boy and his childhood friend, a kid with an often-deadly birth defect: he’s inflatable. He’s a blow-up doll, but he’s also a real kid born to real parents. It’s bold and it works, and here I began to think that Hill is in many ways fannish in his sensibility: he respects the classic tropes for the work they do. You Will Hear the Locust Sing: And you know Hill is willing to take risks when you see a story about a boy who wakes up having been turned into a giant bug. (One might psychologize the challenge to his forebears; Hill is the son of Stephen King.) Here, the transformation proceeds by way of nuclear testing, and there’s plenty of physical horror to go around.
Abraham's Boys: What would happen if Van Helsing had kids and moved to America, where the vampires did not follow? The kids might grow up terrified of their father’s obsessions. Creepy and brutal; think Winchesters gone even wronger than usual. Better Than Home: Horror style, but no horror elements: the story is about a disturbed young boy and his father, a famous baseball coach whose oddities are more accepted because he’s adult and famous. The Black Phone: Another awesome old-school, or how old-school should have been, tale about a kidnapped boy and his fight against his kidnapper. Dean Koontz without all the moralizing. In the Rundown: The most disturbing of the stories to me; another troubled narrator, typical for Hill, has a bad day, ending with a terrifying encounter with death that is both senseless and understandable—and you’re left uncertain at the end whether anyone will ever believe the truth. The Cape: Nasty narrator discovers he can fly. It doesn’t help. He’s no Nathan Petrelli, that’s for sure. Last Breath: Creepy, straight-down-the-middle horror about a museum of silence, where people’s last breaths are stored. Dead-Wood: Mini-piece about the ghosts of trees (and others). The Widow's Breakfast: A Depression-era hobo finds kindness from a widow, then glimpses a deeper cruelty; another horror-style story without horror elements. Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead: Hopeful story (at least from some angles) about a washed-up comic with a role as a zombie in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, who runs into his high school sweetheart. All horror and all light. My Father's Mask: Owes a lot to The Masque of the Red Death in tone. An awesome story about a 13-year-old boy whose parents’ irresponsibility goes deeper than he knows; the lyrical/hallucinatory tone is perfect for the story.
Voluntary Committal: This novella features Hill’s default troubled teen narrator, one who does more damage than he really means to and fails to take responsibility for it. Here, the narrator has a younger brother who is not quite of this world, and a dangerously delinquent friend. The question is who will suffer more for the interactions between them.
Overall, I'm quite impressed and will buy whatever he does next.
Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts: Hill’s short story collection is highly impressive, better than his novel Heart-Shaped Box and showing a similar love for the horror genre. I took short notes on all the stories. Best New Horror: Horror editor receives the manuscript of a lifetime, enough to revitalize his interest in horror. What happens next is utterly predictable and perhaps, therefore, fresh, though I didn’t find the story as impressive as others have. 20th Century Ghost: Ghost love story in a haunted theater. Pop Art: An amazing story about a boy and his childhood friend, a kid with an often-deadly birth defect: he’s inflatable. He’s a blow-up doll, but he’s also a real kid born to real parents. It’s bold and it works, and here I began to think that Hill is in many ways fannish in his sensibility: he respects the classic tropes for the work they do. You Will Hear the Locust Sing: And you know Hill is willing to take risks when you see a story about a boy who wakes up having been turned into a giant bug. (One might psychologize the challenge to his forebears; Hill is the son of Stephen King.) Here, the transformation proceeds by way of nuclear testing, and there’s plenty of physical horror to go around.
Abraham's Boys: What would happen if Van Helsing had kids and moved to America, where the vampires did not follow? The kids might grow up terrified of their father’s obsessions. Creepy and brutal; think Winchesters gone even wronger than usual. Better Than Home: Horror style, but no horror elements: the story is about a disturbed young boy and his father, a famous baseball coach whose oddities are more accepted because he’s adult and famous. The Black Phone: Another awesome old-school, or how old-school should have been, tale about a kidnapped boy and his fight against his kidnapper. Dean Koontz without all the moralizing. In the Rundown: The most disturbing of the stories to me; another troubled narrator, typical for Hill, has a bad day, ending with a terrifying encounter with death that is both senseless and understandable—and you’re left uncertain at the end whether anyone will ever believe the truth. The Cape: Nasty narrator discovers he can fly. It doesn’t help. He’s no Nathan Petrelli, that’s for sure. Last Breath: Creepy, straight-down-the-middle horror about a museum of silence, where people’s last breaths are stored. Dead-Wood: Mini-piece about the ghosts of trees (and others). The Widow's Breakfast: A Depression-era hobo finds kindness from a widow, then glimpses a deeper cruelty; another horror-style story without horror elements. Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead: Hopeful story (at least from some angles) about a washed-up comic with a role as a zombie in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, who runs into his high school sweetheart. All horror and all light. My Father's Mask: Owes a lot to The Masque of the Red Death in tone. An awesome story about a 13-year-old boy whose parents’ irresponsibility goes deeper than he knows; the lyrical/hallucinatory tone is perfect for the story.
Voluntary Committal: This novella features Hill’s default troubled teen narrator, one who does more damage than he really means to and fails to take responsibility for it. Here, the narrator has a younger brother who is not quite of this world, and a dangerously delinquent friend. The question is who will suffer more for the interactions between them.
Overall, I'm quite impressed and will buy whatever he does next.
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I'm not that huge a Steven King fan, but I can't think of one...
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A sequel to The Thing would be awesome. I loved the fact that it would have started with the two characters just sitting on the ice after the end of the first one.
I bet that would have been great.
Although, there's talk they're remaking that film. Unlike Carpenter's inferior film The Fog, there is absolutely no reason to remake The Thing.
None at all.
Aside from the somewhat cheesy computer graphics and the sometimes too obviously stop-motion photography of some of the gorier moments, the film stands up pretty well...