Meet the Horror Bloggers: Slasher Speak

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, author, and League of Tana Tea Drinker's member, Vince Liaguno of Slasher Speak gives us good reason why the standards of normalcy are overrated.

Let’s get one thing out the way: I love slasher films and am unapologetic about it. There is no hanging my head or lowering my voice when someone asks me what the last film I saw was and the answer includes the words bloody or massacre and is either preceded or followed by the name of a holiday or power tool. Buckets of blood, guts, and gore…mass murder, misogyny, and madness – it’s all good.

So, how’d I become such a sick ticket, you ask? Like most seeking out the origins of a quirky personal attribute, the answer always seems to hark back to that age-old question: nature or nurture? Was I born with a penchant for meat cleavers in skulls – or was my mind gradually warped by a healthy diet of coed carnage and repeated viewings of Kevin Bacon’s speedo woody? Was my mother overbearing? Did my father ignore me? Did I fill an emotional void with violence instead of Toll House cookies? Did I project my own teenage angst onto the hapless victims being systematically slaughtered onscreen – or, worse, onto the faceless killers themselves? Answer these questions and surely the reason for my debauched delirium will reveal itself, yes?

Yes, my mother frequently channeled Joan Crawford. No, my father did not ignore me. And, sadly, I ate all the Toll House cookies within reach.

Introspection is hard, especially when society tells you that there has to be a reason for something and everything. We like our reasons and rationales – they help us wrap things up with tidy little bows and perfectly creased corners. But after spending the better part of four decades gravitating toward the cinematic and literary dark side, I’ve concluded that there are no simple answers for what makes some of us comedy connoisseurs, others action-adventure aficionados, and still others horror hobbyists. As the late Michel Serrault sang in La Cage Aux Folles, “I am what I am.”

And what I am is a slasher fanatic. No apologies, no regrets.

Slashers have been good to me. They’ve given me inspiration for my first novel and the follow-up WIP. They’ve given me countless hours of enjoyment debating and dissecting their pros and cons, their strengths and weaknesses, with fellow fans and more than a few slasher detractors. They’ve given me friends some 20 years after their release (Hey, Jamie! Hey, Lesleh! Hey, Harley! Hey, Jodi!). They’re given me surges of adrenaline that remind me that I’m alive and jolts that have made me laugh out loud in a crowd in a celebration of the silly. They were testing grounds when I was growing up, each one a cinematic merit badge that spoke to my courage. Even those dreaded remakes are sources of nostalgia now, oddly comforting throwbacks to simpler times that youth blinded us to at the time.

Slashers were afternoon matinees with Dad and suburban midnights babysitting neighborhood kids. Slashers were the waning days of drive-in theaters, the advent of late night cable TV and the explosion of Mom-and-Pop video stores on every street corner. Slashers were movie posters with wickedly clever taglines that tickled the budding writer in me with their alliteration and rhyme beneath garish graphics that made my eyes open wide in ghoulish awe and disbelief. Slashers were grindhouse trailers that made my blood run cold and my heart pump just a little faster in anticipation of release dates that seemed light years away. Slashers were trips to the local bookstore in search of movie tie-ins that promised details of just what those inattentive camp counselors were doing when a little boy named Jason drowned or an explanation of why there were no other patients besides a beleaguered babysitter in a small-town hospital one Halloween night. Slashers were the fuel that stoked my childhood nightmares and the source material for my adult creativity.

It was only natural then that my extension into social networking would result in a blog aptly titled Slasher Speak, a phrase that speaks to my cumulative experience with and within the much-maligned sub-genre of horror that captured my heart and never let go. Here I reminisce, review, and revel in the slasher art form – but, much like time has a way of distorting those first slasher film experiences, the way unrelated memories external to those experiences have a way of creeping in and melding all together – so, too, do those other aspects of my life and work periodically make guest appearances on the Slasher Speak stage. Sure there are smatterings of queer politics or insights into my latest work-in-progress or even an occasional mention of some actress whose name escapes me at the moment, but at the heart of Slasher Speak is a fanatic fanboy who paints the town red with his cinematic bad taste.

Questions of deviancy be damned. The accepted standards of normalcy are so overrated, after all.

Slasher Speak: The Murderous Articulations of Author Vince Liaguno

Pick a Post 11

Beware! Once again, the archives have been unburied, and the hideous horrors unleashed! For your entertainment and edification pleasure, of course. Members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers dig six feet deep to find their past misdeeds...and reveal them to you, one favorite and notable post at a time!

Horrors Not Dead quenches our Thirst:

Thirst is the kind of film I don’t want to say anything about. I just want to
point it out, say, “Yep, this is the one”, and move on until more people have an opportunity to see it. It’s the first time all year long at a theater that I’ve felt at the mercy of a filmmaker.

Slasher Speak remembers His Name Was Jason:

Produced by Anthony Masi and Thommy Hutson and directed by Daniel Farrands, His Name Was Jason is a love letter to fans of the hockey-masked, machete-wielding Jason Voorhees and his myriad victims.

Groovy Age of Horror looks at Richard Sala's Delphine comic book:

Sala's comics are typically composed of wild, off-kilter riffs on pulpy, hardboiled, and Gothic horror tropes. Delphine is billed as a modern reimagining of Snow White (and, I'd add, Sleeping Beauty) from the prince's point of view, but that's a bit misleading if anyone comes to it expecting Sala to give the fairy tale source material his usual high-spirited treatment. He sets his pop-cultural influences aside this time to lead us down a grimmer path.

Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat looks on the inhumanity in District 9 with horror:

But when you see just how bad things get, in a sequence that's like some nightmare cross between Hostel, Brazil, Starship Troopers, and (at least to me--it's something in Wikus's voice) the baseball bat scene in Casino...the audience on 34th St. gasped in horror, the couple in front of me clung to each other, and I literally fought back tears. Even though you've still got most of the movie to go before you reach the final shootouts, I think that sequence is where my patience with the explosions and derring-do at the end was earned.

Fascination With Fear gives us 10 good reasons to watch True Blood:

If you're not watching True Blood by now, you're missing out.Either you don't have HBO (get it, you cheap sumbitch!), you're sick of the relentless vampire trend, or you have an odd aversion to anything that is virally popular right now. In any case, here are ten reasons to jump on the bandwagon and watch this insanely addictive, well-casted, campy vamp-fest.

Evil on Two Legs gives us the most disturbing horror movies ever made:

in truth, those behind the films we see, even those of graphic horror films, usually have the audience’s best interests at heart. they want you to enjoy their movie. like the creators of a rollercoaster, horror directors may want to make a scary ride… but not one so scary that it actually injures or traumatizes. but what if this were not true?

Uranium Cafe shares the love for She Demons:

In some ways 1958’s She Demons is like one of those exploitation-styled stories that would appear in the sweaty men’s action magazines of the sixties, where overly viral white guys rescued, or tried to anyway, captive white girls from the clutches of Nazis, Imperial Japanese soldiers, commies, pirates or wild animals of various sorts. The story is one of the most outlandish ideas ever and so it lands a place here at the Uranium Café.

Classic-Horror pays The Body Snatcher its metaphysical due:

Chilling, complex, and artfully told, The Body Snatcher is the kind of shivery cautionary tale relayed in front of fireplaces on cold
winter nights. Each character makes their own contributions to the tangled web of human failures, and we can't help but recoil in both fear and recognition. That kind of horror stays with you, lingers at the back of your brain. You'll never get rid of it, Toddy... Never.

Cinema Suicide chats it up with the perfect B-movie guest, Andrew W.K.:

Party rocker/motivational speaker, Andrew WK takes time to explain his thoughts on the topic of the b-movie.

And room for one more...

Moon is a Dead World examines Thicker Than Water:

Though the story seems pretty linear and frail, Messerer keeps it interesting through his clever depictions of the characters and their quirky personalities. A dinner scene involving the whole family comes to mind from the beginning of the movie; it's long and drawn out, and
has nothing to do with vampires, but it plants the seed in the audience's mind of who the characters are, and it gets us identifying with them.

Until next time, then...

Photo courtesy of Dr. Macro's High Resolution Scans.

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Gospel of the Living Dead

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, author and horror blogger Kim Paffenroth of Gospel of the Living Dead talks about zombies and religion, and how the two meet to provide enlightening revelation.

I think, like many people, my first interest in horror goes back to adolescence, when I was fascinated with some horror movies (especially Romero's zombies), and with some written expressions of horror (especially Lovecraft). I thought gross, bleeding, oozing things were cool. I think it's pretty typical at that age. Then my mother died a slow, lingering death from cancer, and that made my interest a little less "cool" and a lot more brooding and sullen. I put some of my feelings into bad fiction writing and bad poetry at that age, I suppose as a kind of catharsis or self-therapy. It worked, for what it was, I guess.

But when I went off to college, that phase just stopped. It didn't trail off, it just stopped the day I got off the bus in front of Campbell Hall. Something about the place (St John's College, Annapolis, MD) just awed me with the ideas of dead guys who knew so much more than I did; I should stop and read every word I could and not interrupt with my sophomoric attempts to put angst or pain or rebellion into words. (I know, I wouldn't have articulated the feeling that way at the time, but in hindsight, that's what I was feeling at all the ivy-covered walls and dusty books and rather arcane, 19th century-looking lab apparatuses.)

So for years, all I did was read. I didn’t write a thing other than assignments for class. I read philosophy, literature, history, political theory, science, music theory, and, especially, theology - either in terms of Scripture, or theologians, or literature with Christian themes. And I saw that theology - broadly construed under all the types of writing I just listed - resonated more with me. I really
do think all good writing gets at some of the same questions, but I also think people phrase it in different languages, if you will - whether it's art or music or poetry or philosophy or natural science or theology, our minds gravitate toward different phrasings of the ultimate questions.

And within Christian theology, it was pretty clear early on that it wasn't the nice stuff that attracted me - the logic of Aquinas, or the Light and Love of the Gospel of John, or the triumph and hope of Exodus. No, it was always the stuff that was such a downer - the terrifying side of God, the whirlwind, the abyss, the lonely quest for Him. No, I'd read over and over the same dark, God-centered books, rather than turn to the cheery stuff: the tortures of Job, the numbing ennui of Ecclesiastes or Pascal, the empty tomb of Mark, the self-loathing of Augustine, the horrors of Dante, the seductive majesty of Milton's Satan, the terrible dark corners of the human soul in Dostoevsky and Melville and Flannery O'Connor, the cries of despair in Wiesel or Beckett.

I continued to study those things after college, and I began my career as a college professor, trying to teach such texts, and write about them. And I didn't really think about horror as a genre (though I think it's clear I sought out the horrifying parts of Scripture and theology). I'd see some of the "standard" horror movies as they came out - The Omen, a couple of the Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, Blair Witch, Silence of the Lambs - but I hardly kept up on the genre. And, in hindsight, my favorite monster, the zombie, wasn't as visible in those years (1985-2000). He was laying low, too. But then I saw the ads for the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004) and something clicked. I saw the movie, then I watched the DVD, over and over, every night for weeks after everyone else went to bed. And how similar Romero's (and then Snyder's, and others) vision was to Dante became completely clear, and I wrote about it. I'd tied horror back to the classics of Western theology, or I'd shown how the two were expressing some of the same ideas, some of the same analysis of what is sick about human beings. That analysis culminated in my book Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth (Baylor, 2006), which won the 2006 Bram Stoker Award.

While I was working on that, the bug of fiction writing came back too, but now to someone with (hopefully) a lot more experience and maturity, a better "vocabulary" for talking about these things. I got the crazy idea that I might be able to write some of my own zombie fiction, rather than just analyze other people's, and I'd be able to make my zombies do and symbolize whatever I wanted them to.

I've had some success with that, and it's allowed me to present my ideas to a very different and diverse audience, which is what any writer hopes for, I think, whatever they're writing.

Gospel of the Living Dead: Kim Paffenroth's Page on His Zombie-related Fiction and Non-fiction

Pick a Post Sensation 10

Beware! The game's afoot. Once again, the archives have been unburied, and the hideous
horrors unleashed! For your entertainment and edification pleasure, of course.

Members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers dig six feet deep to find their past misdeeds...and reveal them to you, one favorite and notable post at a time!

Classic-Horror dares to delve deeply into Blood for Dracula:

With all the revolutions in the film industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of the older film monsters were starting to appear cliché, even trite. Dracula, long the enemy of Victorian standards, needed to be updated for a time when such standards had long passed. Leave it to pop artist/film producer Andy Warhol and director Paul
Morrissey to do this by flipping the rules around and making Dracula the pathetic victim of permissive social mores.

Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat reviews Duncan Jones's indie sci-fi thriller Moon:

I finally saw Duncan Jones's science-fiction character-piece-cum-thriller Moon, and was glad I braved the sweat-soaked journey down to the Landmark Sunshine to do so. Moon is very, very much a creature of its own influences, and owns up to this repeatedly--and wisely, I think. If you're going to do a suspense story about a man stranded in a cabin-fever outer-space environment with a soft-spoken computer for company, what's the sense of playing cat and mouse with Kubrick?

Theofantastique posits the oppositional reconstruction of vampire symbolism in 30 Days of Night:

After watching the film I came away with the general impression that this is a good vampire film with the potential to breathe new life into cultural treatments of the vampire icon, and it is the cultural reconstruction of the vampire through this film that I will touch on with this post.

Vault of Horror opens up with their defense of The Mist:

Far be it from a curmudgeon like me to say this, but I think it's entirely possible that we as horror fans run the risk of occasionally becoming a bit too cynical for our own good. Case in point: Why is it that a movie like Frank Darabont's The Mist, a solid, enjoyable horror flick, has been so roundly pummeled by the online horror community? This morning I'm taking a stand and saying it's damn fine little fright film.

Day of the Woman lists the top 10 horror films you must see, but not very often:

Having to think of films that aren't necessarily "great" films by any measure but are must sees has inspired me to give you fine womanizers A LIST! So I racked out my little brain and my 19 years of horror film obsession to think of 10 films I think every horror fanatic should see but not necessarily very often.

Cinema Suicide walks with The Walking Dead comic book series:

Kirkman writes fearlessly, axing characters when he feels that the story needs the emotional impact of major character deaths. But what he also gets right, where other zombie writers fail miserably, he makes the story about the human drama rather than an action book about killing monsters.

Groovy Age of Horror shares his beef with bad-arsed jadedness in horror:

To be fair, this is only a handful of pretty marginal examples, but I really feel like something's getting lost in contemporary horror, even in supernatural horror, and that is a sense of the supernatural as inherently uncanny. This unfortunate trend strikes me as pretty recent.

Uranium Cafe ponders Ron Ormand's strange The Monster and the Stripper:

As hard as it may be for the uninitiated neophyte to conceive there is a class of “cult”* film makers whose technical skill and dubious vision are on a lower rung of the film making ladder than even Ed Wood, Jr.

Dinner With Max Jenke writes up sleazy classic Vice Squad:

What's amazing about Vice Squad is that the film - and Hauser's performance - manage to surpass whatever expectations one may have. If you see one movie about a killer pimp in your lifetime, it absolutely has to be Vice Squad - otherwise you haven't seen sh*t.

Until next week, then...and this week's photo courtesy of Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans.

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Fascination With Fear

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Christine Hadden of Fascination With Fear talks about her ominous Saturday night alone, and the ensuing damage it wrought. Lucky for us.

My obsession with horror came at a very young age. As a small child, my grandfather (a Methodist minister, no less) introduced me to The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka - both of which actually have horrifying undertones for kids. (Gene Wilder was seriously demented in that freaky psychedelic boat sequence!) To that effect, a lot of the better Disney features can be brutal as well. Exposing a child to Bambi at too young an age--and I'm telling you from experience--you'll scar them for life. My grandpap and I would also stay up late watching Bill Cardille ("Chilly Billy") on Chiller Theater (a Pittsburgh legend). My parents bought me all those crazy Disney ghost story records, I watched all the old Godzilla movies on Saturday afternoons, and, truth be told, I read every last Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery, okay? After school I rushed home to watch the iconic (?) Lost In Space...so there's my sci-fi link.

I can't recall how old I was when my parents left me alone for the first time on a Saturday night to go out. Was I ten yet? I should have been but I'm really not sure. But I was forever damaged (and enchanted) after turning on a movie called The Exorcist. And what was that movie doing on regular TV, anyway? Must've been around Halloween.

From there it was Friday the 13th, When a Stranger Calls (which will frighten the pants off any babysitter, take it from me) and -always my favorite -Halloween. Then I moved on up to classics such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I Spit on Your Grave, and Last House on the Left - as well as those really corny, are-they-really-real cheese-fests like Faces of Death... Also checked out all the old Universal monster flicks, bad 50's sci-fi, Vincent Price gems...you name it, I've probably seen it.

I have an uncle the same age as me and we grew up like brother and sister - always infatuated with getting the latest gore-fest to go with our Friday night pizza. I swear I think I've seen it all.

But it was as a teenager where I discovered my truly intense passion for the genre. I saw everything I could get my hands on. I'm trying to remember what movie might have really scared me senseless... I'll admit A Nightmare on Elm Street knocked my socks off the first time I saw it (as did Johnny Depp, but that's another story...). But hey, I was around fifteen and pretty impressionable.

It's not just movies that got me going. I read Carrie at age ten, making me a Stephen King fan for all eternity. I still recall reading The Shining, late on a school night - with a flashlight under my covers. That hasn't changed, well, except the light under the covers thing. I still read horror late into the night - even though I know I have to get up in a few hours to go to work. Oh, and The Shining? Still the best example of horror I've read in my humble opinion.

In high school a group of us used to do our own Ghost Hunters. I live in rural Pennsylvania, where there are no shortage of back roads with dilapidated old houses to explore (can you say illegal?). Now when I think about it, ghosts were probably the least of our worries. We didn't even think about what else might be lurking - rats or other animals, drug dealers, rotten floor boards to fracture ankles on...

Anything concerning horror is interesting to me. I wouldn't exactly say it's an obsession with death or anything so morbid. But I am intrigued by serial killers, true-crime, devastating weather events, the occult, ghosts, monsters, urban legends....the list is endless.

I do admit to having a sub-genre fondness for vampires that I cannot explain. Well, maybe I can explain it a little. My grandmother (yes, the preacher's wife!) watched Dark Shadows faithfully...so I guess I always saw the vampire as a tragic hero of sorts. Add seeing Lugosi in Dracula and my reading of Salem's Lot, and I think you see my point. I watch all kinds of horror movies, but most of what I currently read is vampire fiction of one kind or another. The vampire fiction genre is a huge one, and there just isn't enough time in the day for me to get to much else. So yes, I've read everything from Let The Right One In to Twilight (and saw the movies as well)...and yes, True Blood is my favorite TV show. The book on my nightstand currently awaiting me is Del Toro's The Strain, which I hear is superb.

As far as movies, I pretty much like everything horror-related. And I've seen A LOT, desensitizing myself several times over with the goriest of the bunch. I'm a big Fulci fan and love stuff like Inside and Frontier(s). Gore is good, bring it on. But I also love psychological horror and would definitely say there just isn't enough of that to go around. Those last few minutes of The Blair Witch Project? I can safely say that was the last time I was actually scared. Sure, I can be startled - shocked, even.

In recent years, I'll admit The Ring threw me for a loop with that girl in the well thing, and The Grudge had me staring at my attic door a little hesitantly. And really, could there be a better serial killer than Hannibal Lecter - or a more shocking ending than the one The Sixth Sense gave us? But horror movies that truly made an impression on me (and I mean freakin' SCARED me, here) are far and few between. I would count Jaws, The Exorcist and the aforementioned Blair Witch as the only flicks that petrified me senseless--had my gut churning and my mind reeling. The other stuff is just pure fun and entertainment for me. But I keep hoping something is coming...eventually...to paralyze me with fear. It's what I live for.

As far as why I blog? Because I have an inherent need to write. I have no less than ten novels started on my hard-drive. Finding the time to attend to them is another story because I have this thing called a real job. But the stories are there...waiting.

And yes, eight out of the ten are about vampires. Go figure.

Fascination With Fear: My Obsession With All Things Horror Leads Me to Wonder About My Sanity

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Cinema Fromage

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, League of Tana Tea Drinkers' member Casey Criswell of Cinema Fromage shares his nerd love for cheesy horror. Bring the crackers.

Horror wasn't the driving force to my movie watching ways back in the day, but it was definitely a factor. I watched movies, period, and was happy to do so. When the VCR became an affordable venture and mom and pop video stores started to run rental deals to lure you away from the new chain stores cropping up, this led to countless hours spent wandering the stacks and being overcome by the wonderment of the gruesome scenes depicted in ink upon the old cardboard canvases that was the VHS box. More than anything, it was the artwork that lured me in every time. They say never judge a book by its cover but that is what I did. If the cover looked amazing, I had to see the movie.

My mother wasn't a horror aficionado by any means and dad tried to be when he could, but one thing they were fans of was keeping an open mind and letting their young son explore and to let him have a healthy imagination.

One of my earliest memories of horror was a night spent upon the floor of our living room, buried under a pile of stuffed animals. Occasionally working up the nerve to peak out through the cracks, I took in my first viewing of "Poltergeist" in spurts at the young age of around ten. Though I didn't sleep much for the following week for my near obsessive recollection of that film, the one thing that remained was the thrill and excitement of such a scare and over time, it grew addictive.

Dad was the true fan of fantasy and horror and with that comes my own fascination. Early memories tell the tales of he and I watching countless gore fests on weekends and taking in dusk till dawn "Friday the 13th" marathons at the local drive in. With nothing but fond memories of togetherness and fun, my love of the genre grew. Early on, horror movies meant hanging out with Dad. Over the years, this grew into hanging out with friends as the addition of said friends had similar tastes. The early days of excitement and news hunting began with Saturday nights spent pouring over "Fangoria" magazines in a friends basement, "Return of the Living Dead" playing on the TV, both of us wondering from time to time if that was just the water heater or was it, in fact, something else.

When the time came for me to decide to actually be a writer as opposed to talking about wanting to be one, I was faced with the one most important question such a person faces; what do I write about. Time and again I had read that it is best to write what you know. I took a catalog of what I knew at the time and what I thought people would care to read about. I still felt excitement at the mention of horror movies, the cheesier the better. I still loved sitting with old friends and talking about said movies as well. Though I wasn't an expert by any means, I knew what I liked and Cinema Fromage was born.

Not meant to be a expert's view, not meant to be scholarly or overly serious. Cinema Fromage is dedicated to one nerd's love of bad cinema and the hopes of pointing out that no matter how bad any particular movie is, there is always something there to enjoy.

Cinema Fromage: We Watch Crap So You Don't Have To

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Billy Loves Stu

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, League of Tana Tea Drinkers' member Michael Petrucelli of Billy Loves Stu looks for the gay and lesbian subtexts in horror movies as well as the 'straight' scares.

My love of horror began at a tender age. As a kid I was exposed to the classic Universal horror films Dracula, Frankenstein, etc) by my father. When these movies came on the television, he’d call me over and we’d watch together in the small living room of our row house in South Philadelphia. Often, my dad would add to the flavor of the films by talking like the characters, he did (and still does) a terrific Bela Lugosi as well as Boris Karloff. Later on, well after the movie had ended, he’d come into my room as I was preparing for bed, and freak me out by telling me that he was in the basement earlier and found machines that were probably once used to create a monster, or that he thought our next door neighbor was a vampire (our next door neighbor, Mr.Calabrese worked nights). Needless to say, I was mortified – and yet at the same time, I was fascinated. Many sleepless nights ensued (and I always kept my eyes peeled for Mr. Calabrese), but I never turned down an invitation to watch a scary movie with my dad.

There was this old movie theater a few blocks from where I grew up, you know, one of those palatial houses with marble arches and velvet curtains; and on the weekends, they’d show triple feature horror films, usually something from Hammer studios in England. Often, they would also incorporate a “spook show” between films (which was usually some poor usher made up like a low-rent werewolf walking up and down the aisles of the movie house) and give out prizes for those “brave enough” to make it through the afternoon of horrors. Over time, I accumulated dozens of cheesy door prizes that I displayed as proudly as some kids did with their baseball trophies.

Even though I loved horror films, that did not mean that I was not occasionally freaked out by something I saw on the screen; Vincent Price melting away to a pool of psychedelic colored goo in Tales of Terror, man-eating Jell-O raining down on a crowd in a movie theater in The Blob, and of course Godzilla: What is it about a giant lizard looming over Tokyo that would freak me out?

I was 14 years old when I saw The Exorcist for the first time. It was Christmas Night, 1973, and I went with several of my cousins (who were all much older than me), I don’t think any of us knew how intense an experience we were about to have … suffice to say, Linda Blair’s demonic aerobics, pea soup vomit, and masturbatory habits blew my little Catholic mind. I was literally shaking like a leaf when the film was over, and slept with my light on, as well as with a set of Rosary beads under my pillow for several weeks. Seriously, The Exorcist almost ended my affair with horror, it was such a strong and horrifying experience.

A similar event occurred a few months later when I saw Night of the Living Dead at a local drive-in. My best friend and I went to it with my friend’s older brother. Since we were younger, we had to sit in the back of my pal’s brother’s pick up truck, and when we watched the black and white ghouls chowing down on those hapless folks in that farm house, I think we both were sort of traumatized.

Funny thing being scared; you might swear it off but after a while the need comes back. I understand how drug addicts feel. One day you are convinced that you’ll never watch another horror film, and the next you are back on that roller coaster – with a vengeance!

I remained a horror geek all through high school and college, and even managed to get a showing of Night of the Living Dead for a fund raiser for our college’s pop culture magazine. We gave out a prize for the person who showed up with the best zombie make up; a pound of head cheese – man, that stuff stunk out loud.

In the early 80’s, when we first got cable television at my parent’s house, my kid sister and I would stay up late on Saturday nights and watch Saturday Night Dead which was a local program out of Philadelphia that featured horror hostess, Stella (The Man Eater from Manayunk as well as Chiller Theater, which was shown on a New York City station. Soon, we became fans of such little seen classics like Death Dream, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, and What’s the Matter with Helen? I am happy to report that my sister, besides being a suburban wife and mother, is still a devoted horror fan and she had done her best to instill the love of fright films to her daughter, my niece, who’s cell phone’s ring is the theme from Halloween.

As a gay man, when I watch horror, I sometimes read homosexual themes into the film – obviously vampire films (especially the Hammer movies like The Vampire Lovers – blatantly lesbian centric) are chock full of homoerotic goodness; but sometimes I see, or think I see – it’s all in the eye of the beholder – more subtle variations on the theme. Peter and Roger (the two National Guardsmen in George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) have, what I think, is a very homoerotic relationship. And then of course there is the sad case of Billy and Stu, the crazed teen killers from Scream, who obviously were freaked out by the fact that they were attracted to each other and subsequently became psycho killers. If only they’d consummated their relationship, Woodsboro would have avoided a massacre. Of course It makes sense since sexual frustration seems to be a running theme in most slasher films. Imagine if Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers ever got laid, that’d be the end for both of them; heck, they’d put down their machetes, yank off their masks, and start writing poetry.

My blog is nothing more than a silly attempt to draw attention to the gay overtones of some horror films, as well as giving my two cents on the scare genre in general. Obviously, there are some really talented bloggers out there, and frankly I am not one of them (ZC Note: Not true!) – but I hope that when someone stumbles across my little blog, they have a good time and maybe, just maybe, the next time they watch A Nightmare on Elm Street II – Freddy’s Revenge, they’ll understand that it’s something more than a low-rent sequel.

Billy Loves Stu: For Homos Who Love Horror and the Non-Homos Who Love Them

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Uranium Cafe

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, League of Tana Tea Drinkers' member Bill Courtney of the Uranium Cafe describes the influences, the places, and the challenges for keeping his love of horror and cult movies alive.

As a kid I was lucky enough to have a dad who was not the least bit interested in watching sports on TV over the weekends. He loved movies and comic books. This was in the 60’s and I grew up on a healthy diet of classic films, TV, and Marvel and DC comics. We had a b/w TV set with rabbit ears and basically three channels to choose programs from. Later, PBS would come along but who the hell ever really watched that. I grew up watching a variety of programs that included weekly showings of Sword and Sandal films, serial Westerns, and of course classic horror and sci-fi features.

A couple films I recall as being really shocking to me are actually pretty tame fare by today’s standards. One was The Mummy with Boris Karloff and in particular the scene where he suddenly rises up and peers into the camera. The other film, also with Karloff, was called Die, Monster, Die! And I recall being terrified to death, and dad telling me it was just a movie and it was all make believe. I would soon be saving up my lunch money from school and going to the local grocery stores and buying loads of comics and Warren Magazines. At the most I would save up two or three bucks but back then Famous Monsters of Filmland was .35 or .50 and I could get six or so comics for a dollar. Matinees were cheap and I remember watching more Spaghetti Westerns and B-horror movies than I can recall.

In my teenage years some situations in life changed and I sort of gave up obsessively collecting comics for the most part though I would continue to add to my collection up to the time I left the US for China five years ago. I gave up trying to sell the stuff as I had no patience for comic book dealers who offered me deals like $150 for my entire collection of a couple thousand comic books and film magazines, with some books going back to 1965 (some books alone were worth that price) and eventually would simply give it all away to someone close to me. I never regretted that.

Anyway, back to my formative teen years. I lived then in San Antonio Texas and watched the local creature feature type show called Project Terror. It showed a different style of horror film that I was not used to. I had been natured early on on a steady diet of Universal or AIP fare and these late night shows were strangely different. They had plenty of B-movie shockers like The Hideous Sun Demon or Them, but also mixed in some Hammer classics like Taste the Blood of Dracula or X-The Unknown to further my education. Once in a very blue moon some strange Japanese film like Attack of the Mushroom People would play.

I should mention too that my music tastes were leaning into strange areas as well. Most of the people I knew during my “party years” were pretty content to stick with the mainstream rock fare of the time, which suited me as well. I knew something was different about my wiring when at parties people would flip out if, after the Judas Priest or Lynyrd Skynyrd album was finished, I put on something like Yes’ Relayer or something by Hawkwind. I guess The Cramps or The Deadboys were definitely out of the question. And the fact that I had hair as long and full as Robert Plants, but listened to Elvis and Merle Haggard or Philip Glass as easily as Led Zeppelin or the Scorpions, made me something of a music eccentric in San Antonio. It is cool to either like Johnny Cash OR Black Sabbath there, but not both.

I got my first VCR in San Antonio and would stay a VHS man until I came to China, where there is basically no such thing and pirated DVDs sell for less than one Yankee dollar. I had picked up a damaged copy of Michael J. Weldon’s Psychotronic Video Guide for like one buck at a local bookstore and I think that that, along with my Radio Shack VCR (that would eventually get fried in an electrical spike) were factors in a sort of cult movie renaissance for me. I was soon seeking out films from the film guide, and for the first time in my life was watching all those odd exploitation films that were never shown on TV. I began taking in films at the one “art house’ theater in San Antonio. These films were basically foreign, ergo “art films”. In any case I developed an interest in foreign films at about this time, though ultimately I will always favor American and British cinema with their more linear storylines.

With no real planning and little savings and no job I would pack up everything and leave scorching San Antonio for overcast Seattle. There’s a doomed romance angle to that story, but we’ll let that part go. Sometimes life can play out like one of our weird movies.

Seattle is a beautiful city with a well educated and super liberal population I could never connect with. What I could connect with, though, were the comic stores, the book stores, and the small movies that sat maybe 20 or 30 people, where I saw films like Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! and Hercules in the Haunted World (ZC Note: One of my guilty pleasures!) on an actual screen. I also became a denizen of the legendary Scarecrow Video when it was ran by the late George, who was a great guy who helped me in finding all sorts of genuinely rare films to rent.

Seattle is certainly a movie lover’s paradise. I never attended any of the film festival shows there, but I saw plenty of movies. My step dad worked for Act III theaters and I would get a regular supply of movies passes. I became a metroplex rat for a long time, often seeing three films on one pass. The time came for something new and extreme and I moved to China where I live, working as an ESL teacher and sharing my days with my fantastic wife, since 2004, without so much as a holiday back to the States. There are no comic books here and I have been to the movies once to see Kung Fu Panda. But there are loads of pirated DVDs to watch, though the selection is usually either the most recent blockbuster or "classics" like Gone With the Wind or Breakfast at Tiffany's. I learned about bittorrents and Rapidshare and soon I was back to psychotronic film fare and reading Warren Magazines and Marvel Comics books again in digital format. I am in the process of making plans to print some of these things out in bound books (cheap here to do) because I cannot stand reading Vampirella or Robert Crumb stories in JPEGs format.

And so, that brings the story to my site, The Uranium Café, and why I do it. The site is named after the restaurant near Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atom bomb was developed and tested. I drove near that area once and saw a sign and thought ‘what a cool ass name’. Blogging from China is a nightmare and there have been times I wanted to toss it all out and forget it because of problems with bad connections and government controls. But I have stuck it out and the site is now a little over a year old. I think I may be the only expat-blogger in China doing a horror/cult movie blog that focuses on, primarily, Western cult cinema from the 50’s to late 70’s. I think being in such an ethnocentric culture as China pushed me to do something that kept me connected with something from my own world. And what better things to stay connected with than Ted V. Mikels’ films and Jim Steranko comics.

The Uranium Cafe

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, League of Tana Tea Drinkers' member Tenebrous Kate of Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire tells us about her love for the unusual. Hop aboard!

Between my Halloween-themed birthday parties, early interest in the creepiest fairy tales, and exposure to my Dad's incredible impersonation of Bela Lugosi's Dracula, I was pretty much fated from infancy to be some flavor of spooky. My youthful dreams of earning a living as a vampire hunter were squashed (I read pretty much every book filed under the Parapsychology & Occult section of my local library), so by the time I was fourteen, I began delving into the wild world of horror cinema in earnest.

Applying the same sort of tenacity to my movie-viewing that I'd put into my childhood reading, I methodically worked my way through the "Horror" category at a number of video rental stores. Unlike a lot of my horror-loving colleagues, I entirely missed out on the slasher flick craze due to parental protectiveness and a notoriously weak stomach for on-screen depictions of blood-and-guts. After dipping a toe in the waters of explicit fright films with "Suspiria" (I'd read laudatory words about this movie most likely in an issue of "Cinefantastique" or "Video Watchdog"), my love affair with off-the-wall exploitation epics was born.

At some point during high school, I was banhammered from selecting films for movie nights with pals (I think it was "Rat Pfink and Boo Boo" that finally did it) and I found myself desperately in need of a community of like-minded geeks. Thank goodness for the horror convention circuit and the internet, both of which gave me an appropriate outlet for my fandom. In the intervening years, I've formed good friendships and have had exploitation film articles published by my pals at "Ultra Violent Magazine."

As is the case with comedy, a viewer's reaction to horror is deeply personal, leading to the kind of impassioned opinions and debates that characterize the horror blogosphere. For me, a good piece of horror entertainment is immensely satisfying--blending strangeness, provocation, and vivid imagery with escapism and (dare I say it!) fun. I'm in touch with the fact that my appetite for sexually-charged, wildly-politically-incorrect, severely-bizarre horror is outside of the norm in a scene that's already outside of the norm. Acknowledging this, it only seems natural that I should employ my own voice when writing about that kind of material.

My blogging is a form of autobiography through my interactions with a very specific slice of the pop cultural pie. I find that having an interactive platform where I can discuss my joys, disappointments, and fascinations enhances my experience of horror entertainment--this is a pretty amazing side effect to a hobby I took up simply for fun!

Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire: Lurid, Weird, Fantastique

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Cinema Suicide

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, League of Tana Tea Drinkers' member Bryan White of Cinema Suicide tells us how he leveraged his love of horror into free stuff, a successful blog, and a lifelong passion.

My family picked up stakes when I was seven years old and moved us from Binghamton, New York, to the Lovecraftian seaside of Marblehead, Massachusetts. It took me no time at all to seek out the channels with the best cartoons and in the process of this Saturday morning exploration, I found something that Binghamton didn't have. At least not to my knowledge. This morbid discovery also managed to silently change my life in ways I wouldn't understand until I was well into my 20's.

The Creature Double Feature on WLVI was your classic afternoon monster matinee on TV. Bookended by an echoplex voice-over set to Emerson, Lake and Palmer, The Creature Double Feature introduced me to vampires with British accents, men in rubber monster suits stomping on models of Japanese cities and more pie plates decked out to look like flying saucers than you could possibly ever conceive of. It was all in good fun and just shocking enough to scare the crap out of a 7 year old; enough to keep me coming back week after week in hopes of seeing Karloff, Price, and Lee again.

It didn't end there, either. The magic of UHF television was that everything was broadcast with a devil may care attitude and tight budgets meant broadcasting only the cheapest crap. Dollar rental video stores a few years later, paired with way too much free time on my hands, meant nights spent cataloging the most brazen garbage the action and horror sections had to offer. I spent a solid majority of my life up to this point swimming in a sea of NTSC filth looking for new shocks, evangelizing movies most people have dismissed; but it wasn't until the internet came along that I found more people like me and even bigger repositories of information and fandom.

An incidental collection of bootlegs and factory prerecords led to bootleg trades and to accompany this, a website listing my haves and wants. A general necessity to write HTML led to actually working in the web development field, which led to a coworker asking me why I didn't, at least, have a personal blog, which eventually became Cinema Suicide.

Cinema Suicide led to lots of free stuff from people selling movies. It also led to becoming the go-to horror movie guy for New Hampshire Public Radio's show, Word of Mouth, a nod in the last round of Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards, and a ton of journalists asking me what I watch when Halloween rolls around. It's quite remarkable the things that knowing a lot of useless information can bring you.

But my love for the genre has nothing to do with marginal regional infamy or free stuff. Horror old and new gave me a place to go when I was the new kid in town, a mantle I wore more than few times, even if that place was the family den where we kept the television. I grew up every bit the spooky kid in my class and when I felt like no one understood me, I always had a place to go that was comfortable, even when it involved zombies tearing a bunch of bikers limb from limb and eating their intestines. Say what you will but some of my longest friendships have names like Dawn of the Dead, Vincent Price, and Roger Corman. I give back as much as they gave me by leveraging my questionable writing skills on their behalf in hopes that, even among waves of remakes and a genre in its death throes, I'll somehow influence someone to take another look at some movie that they dismissed because it looked cheesy.

And for the record, my favorite movie of all time is Escape From New York, a factoid that Adrienne Barbeau, herself, found hard to believe.

Cinema Suicide: A Celebration of Cheap Thrills