Talking about: Great finds

--> Hey, Yikes. You around?

Oh, I'm around.

I haven't seen you in a while. What have you been up to?

Searching. . . searching. . .

Oh yeah? What are you looking for?

For the tormented, crazed, misbegotten and forgotten sons and daughters of the most demented creatures to ever walk this earth!

So some new pals to hang out with?

Exactly. I thought I might pick up some cheap household items, too.

Household. . . ? And where have you been looking exactly?

The most forbidden of pits. The places where only the forgotten damned can be found. Where creeping, broken-down, black hearted cast-aways are left to writhe in the darkness. . .

You're talking about garage sales.

I'm talking about garage sales.

How did that go? Find anything good?

Yeah! And I only had to spend about 10 bucks. Have a video!

Talking About: Motor City Nightmares: 2013!

Alright! This is important information for anyone in the Detroit area, or anyone willing to travel for something awesome. Coming up in just a couple of weeks

Don't tell them what. Tell them when. Just say the date. I want to tell them.

It's already in the title. They've already seen it if they're reading this post.

OKAY. Coming up this April 26th running through the 28th is:

Post the picture!

MOTOR CITY NIGHTMARES YYYYEEEAAAAHHHHHHH

Wow, you are really excited.

No kidding! All my pals are going to be there. Jason, Pluto, Pinhead, Captain Spaulding, Merle.

I still can't believe they got Michael Rooker from the Walking Dead. You left out quite a few people, though(not to mention their real names). Heather Langenkamp and Amanda Wyss from the original Nightmare on Elm Street will be there Friday and Saturday. Dee Wallace and PJ Soles are back, and a hell of a lot of others. And just for the record, none of those people are your pals, Yikes. I'm not sure you know the definition of the word pals.

Obviously you have never seen the end of Young Guns. There's also going to be live music and a film festival.

That's two rooms worth of film festival.

You suck at giving out information. Tell them the website.

Why did you have to say it like that? Anyone who wants more information, head over to motorcitynightmares.com It's taking place at the Sheraton in Novi, Michigan. I think it's safe to say Yikes and I will be taking a look around.

Threads of Fear: The Vampire

Threads of Fear! The first real update.

Exciting.

In order to make this laborious project a little more streamlined, we're starting out by focusing on a single classic monster: the vampire.

Bitey. Isn't that still kind of a broad topic though?

It is. There are probably thousands of vampire films, books, comics, games, poems, songs, even toys. Think of the modern vampire. What does it mean to you? Fangs, blood, romance, aristocracy? Is the vampire a tortured romantic soul, or a savage monster? This is one particular thread that has gone in a thousand different directions.

Just thinking of some of the most popular vampire movies from, say, the last few decades, you have Dracula, 30 days of night, Interview with the Vampire and even TV shows like True Blood and The Vampire Diaries.

There's that other series, too. The one about, I don't know, sunset or something? With the glitter?

I. . . don't remember anything about glitter?

That last one came out not too long ago. Breaking. . . something. I can't remember the title.

Breaking Bad? Great show, but this is strictly a horror blog. You've really got us off track, Yikes.

Nevermind.

Anyway, the diversity of the modern vampire is exactly what makes it a perfect start to this topic. But you're right, We need to get a little more specific if we're going to follow this thread.

How specific?

Let's start with one vampire, probably the best known: Dracula.

We talked about him before.

Yeah, we've addressed his. . . agenda, but now we can track his trail from modern times back to the origins of the character. These days, Dracula has been everywhere. Movies, books, games, you name it. He's been portrayed by a multitude of actors, enough that his face is blurred across dozens of different men. Even now, there's a new series about Dracula in development for NBC. Previously, we've had the Dracula 2000 series, the 1992 Coppola Bram Stoker's Dracula, which always makes me think of graham crackers.

It does what now?

In the early 90s, I had just discovered cinnamon graham crackers. I associate that with seeing tons of previews about the new Dracula movie, those behind the scenes things that HBO used to show a lot. Graham crackers. Bram Stoker. I dunno.

. . . Alright.

Anyway, who played the best Dracula is very debatable, but there are certainly some frontrunners. You have the Hammer films giving the classic monsters a huge resurgence, lead by Christopher Lee's portrayal of the count. That may be my favorite, and it's what I tend to think of when I think of Dracula. He gives you a great mix of classy gentleman and terrifying monster.

In a way, he's a great example of the vampire being more than a one-dimensional creature of the night. It's not a zombie. It's not just some creature crawling out of the mud to kill the living. There's intelligence there, a real cunning. Yet, he's still really just a killer. He has brides, sure, but they're subjects of his, not a great lost love. You can contrast that with Gary Oldman's performance in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where he is seeking not just blood, but his lost love. Regardless of whether or not you enjoy that direction, there's an evolution there.

All of those films, of course, may never have existed if not for the originals: The Universal classics. A number of different actors portrayed the vampire in those films, from Lon Chaney Jr., through John Carradine and of course back to the original, Bela Legosi.

So you take all these modern Draculas running all over the screen, and you trace them back to Legosi.

Well, Legosi may have been the first screen actor to play Dracula in name, but he is preceded by Max Schreck, playing a count Orlok in the first real movie adaption of the original Dracula novel.

Right, so the first actor to play Dracula didn't play Dracula at all. He played some other vampire named Sherlock?

No, it's Orlock. Sherlock is the detective. But Max Schreck was playing Dracula in spirit. The film makers just didn't have the rights to the novel, so characters were renamed. It's the same story.

But his name is Morlock?

Orlock. Morlocks are those monsters in The Time Machine.

Olrox?

That's a minor boss in Castlevania.

You know what, let's just call it Dracula.

The point is, if you're looking for the root of the vampire in film, it has to be here. And here, we do have something closer to a creature climbing out of the mud. Count Orlok is a frightful creature, hairless and ratlike with prominent fangs. The groundwork is laid for the romance as well-- he is distracted, enthralled with the beauty of a woman, and that is his weakness. Yet, there is never any doubt that the Nosferatu is a creature of nightmares.

The nightmares are what we're looking for.

Precisely, and there is a lot more history to go before we get to their source. Traveling back through time, at this point, we have to leave the world of film, and we find ourselves with the novel. We're entering the world of the written word. It's an interesting point in the past of the genre. The written word is the first time the things that scared us were really being recorded and preserved outside of our own fearful minds.

It's kinda like our journey left the pavement and went to a gravel road.

That's the best sign that we're getting somewhere. We'll pick up there, in the next Threads of Fear.

Orlock!

Dracula.

Introducing Threads of Fear

Something happens to our fear as we age. The acute terror of the monster in the dark becomes the dull, cold dread of reality. The heart-pounding terror of a demonic presence felt in your room fades with time, traded for late-night anxieties about job stability, bank overdrafts and the body's slow decay into old age.

So you're saying being old isn't cool? You're actually going to hate on senior citizens right now?

Our childhood fears of the supernatural never become real, so at some point we begin to fear reality. Somewhere along the line, I think we begin to miss that sharp fear, that simple black and white “Is it going to get me?” feeling. If you ask around, it seems that most people would actually prefer a zombie attack to cancer. Even something survivable, like knee cancer.

Nobody wants knee cancer.

So, often we turn to movies, books, games, looking for that old scare. We want to find that hovering demonic presence, the witch outside our window, the ghost in the hallway. Sometimes we even get lucky (and then maybe we regret it, laying in bed at night, afraid of what might come crawling out of the TV). In a horror story, we might find that thread that reaches the scared child inside of us.

What thread is that?

I think at the core of these things scary, there's a thread of our primal fears. If you could take fears like aging, loss of money, the car breaking down, and you distilled those fears down, I believe you would have to come back to the original fears. Fear of death, of being hunted, of the unknown.

That's logical, but where are you going with this?

Well, I was thinking about horror and about the evolving art form it is. There's a common thread that runs through every sub-genre of horror. Take something like Frankenstein. You can follow it from the 1931 film all the way through something like Re-Animator. Along the way, you'll find it winding its way through the works of Lovecraft and going on to inspire someone like Rob Zombie.

Before the movie is the novel, though.

Of course, and coming before that are the things that inspired Mary Shelley to write that tale on a stormy night in the early 1800s: Her own nightmares, scientific discoveries of the time and a collection of Germanic ghost stories.
The horror genre is like a bundle of roots buried in the past, which have spread out into thousand different branches, all twisting in different ways but can be traced back to similar origins.

You want to climb down the tree, I suppose. That could take lifetimes. For you, at least.

Well, I'm going to take it one at a time. We're going to start next time with an easy one that everyone can follow.

Next time? So I can get out of here now?

You can, but don't be late for next time when we present:

Threads of Fear: The Vampire!

Talking about: Motor City Nightmares

Motor City Nightmares 2012

I had a disturbing nightmare last night.  I was in a field, and dozens of bumble bees arose from the grass around me.  With nowhere to go, I could only accept my horrible fate of being stung to death.  

I blame Tony Todd.

Well, you did have an opportunity to meet him yesterday.

Holy crap! What happened to your neck? Do you have a neck?

I had a little accident at the con.

Did you get trampled or something?

Why would I get trampled?

Oh, you know, I mean. . . your stature?

I may be an uncommon individual, but there's nothing wrong with my stature. Let me tell you what happened.

Go 'head!

Well, we get to the con, and it's a cool place. Everyone seems nice, no one's pushy. There's a guy selling cool horror themed clocks right by where you get tickets.

Yeah, I got a cool Friday the 13th themed one. It's one of those few series that can actually fill an entire clock face with movie entries.

Well, you went to go do whatever you did. . .

I hit up the Dark Shadows promotional people. I won a mini poster.

I went straight to the people that would appreciate me: the other horror celebs.

Other?

So I talked to PJ Soles, you know, from Halloween and Carrie and all that. She was really friendly.

Please tell me you didn't piss off Norma from Carrie.  She was very nice when I met her.

Why would I cause trouble? I met up with Tony Todd next, and he wanted a photo together.

Of course, it was his idea. You didn't say something stupid about bees then?

It's not really in my nature to say stupid shit.  After that, I got to meet up with Michael Berryman. You'll probably remember him as one of the protagonists defending his land in the original The Hills Have Eyes.

Uh. When is the last time you watched Hills Have Eyes?

A few days ago. Why?

Just, uh, different interpretations. Go on.

Well, he's really chummy, and he wanted a photo, too. I don't usually do a lot of picture posing, so it was fun.

Pretty cool. I'm not really sure I'm following how this is going to lead to a sprained "neck," though.

Believe me, I'm getting to it.  If you could fight your way through the crowd back there, eventually you got to Kane Hodder.

Oh yeah! A big fan favorite, and he's always so nice at these things.

Yeah. . . well, I get up there, and Jason is one of my favorite stabbers, you know? He kind of inspired me to get into the business in the first place.

The stabbing business.

Absolutely! And here's the thing. I got more excited than usual, and I started talking about the Friday films, and I mentioned something about Freddy vs Jason being my favorite in the series.

Uhhh, that is a really good one, but I'm sure you pointed out the one glaring, obvious flaw in the movie, right?

Well. . .

I mean, you said "Oh yeah that's my favorite Friday flick, except for it only having the second best Jason," right?

I may have neglected to express my full thoughts on the film.

So you met a horror icon more stabby than yourself, but only actually got your "neck" wrung.  


Man, I don't even feel bad for you now. I suggest next time keeping the talk restricted to his book.

I thought maybe he'd sign my neck brace!

I think maybe next time we'll go on different days.