Boing Boing » horror

London's getting a blood-filled swimming pool strewn with floating body parts

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:00:23 +0000

Miss Cakehead writes, "This set of Zombie Swimming Pool Rules was comissioned from graphic designer Pictographik to promote the Resident Evil Revelations blood swimming pool, and was based on an the iconic traditional British swimming pool rules. The pop up 'blood' filled swimming pool opens in London next week to mark the release of Resident Evil Revelations. In addition to its bloody appearance the swimming pool will offer floats in the form of human torsos, feature brains and intestines as lane markers, have Zombie lifeguards on duty and even offer a diving board in the form of a 'freshly killed human corpse'."

Zombie Pool Rules (Thanks, Miss Cakehead!)

Haunted Mansion wallpaper and fabric

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 17 May 2013 02:19:50 +0000

Kristen sez, "The DoomBuggies website has released a version of the Haunted Mansion Corridor of Doors wallpaper in fabric, wallpaper and gift wrap, and according to the DoomBuggies facebook page, it's the same graphic that has been used by Disney. 'This is created from the same artwork that we created for Disney's official Haunted Mansion 40th Anniversary CD box set and CD insert,' according to Jeff Baham, the owner of DoomBuggies.com."

DoomBuggies Eye Fabric

What's the creepiest passage in literature?

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:21:18 +0000

At The Atlantic, Joe Fassler votes for an infamous passage from Cormac McCarthy's The Road:

He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light. Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.
Jesus, he whispered.
Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.

The key, he adds: "What is revealed is even more terrifying that what I could have imagined."

Enchanting Michael Jackson doll on Etsy

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:19:14 +0000

Only $240, and it's yours. Not sure if the smoking baby comes with him.

Awesome amateur horror makeup

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:15:26 +0000

Click above for full-on grodiness

Redditor ImNotJesus has a friend who does her own amateur horror makeup. She's pretty amazing -- check out the ultra-gross fool-the-eye gaping eye-socket wound above.

A good friend of mine does horror makeup regularly. What do you guys think? I'm going to surprise her with the support. [X-post from /r/horror] (i.imgur.com)

Lauren Beukes's Shining Girls: a serial killer thriller with a time-travel twist

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:40:22 +0000

Lauren Beukes's latest novel, The Shining Girls, ships in the UK today (the US edition is out on June 4). The Shining Girls is a departure from Beukes's earlier cyberpunk-inflected fiction, being a supernatural thriller that's one part Hannibal and one part House on Haunted Hill, tautly written and sharply plotted.

Shining Girls is the story of a serial killer named Harper Curtis, a savage psychopath who hunts the alleyways of a stinking Hooverville in Depression-era Chicago. Curtis is your basic remorseless nutcase who reels from one act of callous violence to another. Until he happens upon a boarded-up house where he seeks refuge from the people he's wronged and a chance to rest up and lick his wounds from an unsuccessful encounter. And that house isn't just a house, it's the House, an unexplained and inexplicable haunted place that slips through time back and forth between the Depression and the early 1990s. In this house is a room, filled with the trophies of murdered girls and their names, written on the wall in Curtis's own handwriting. Curtis learns that his destiny is to travel through the ages, killing the girls he's already killed, taking the trophies he's already taken.

One of Harper's victims is Kirby Mazrachi, but unlike the rest (and unbeknownst to Harper), Kirby survives his vicious attack. As Kirby matures, her obsession with the man who nearly killed her takes over her life, and she wrangles a job interning for the Chicago Sun-Times reporter who covered her attack all those years ago. She wheedles him into helping her pick up the details again, and slowly they begin to unravel the weird and awful truth.

Deftly told from many points of view and in many timezones, Shining Girls is a tremendous work of suspense fiction. What's more, it's a fabulous piece of both time-travel and serial killer fiction, using the intersection of those two themes to explore questions of free will, predestination, and causality in a mind-melting, heart-pounding mashup that delivers on its promise.

The Shining Girls

Goodnight Moon as a horror movie

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 20:47:49 +0000

David sez, "Did the children's book "Goodnight Moon" help put you to sleep as a little kid? Not anymore. Especially after watching its dark reimagining in this gritty movie trailer. I'm afraid the family-friendly search results for this children's book are going to be ruined as this video makes its rounds. Made by the Gritty Reboots team who most recently brought you Calvin and Hobbes as a dark Hollywood blockbuster."

Goodnight Moon: The Movie (Trailer) (Thanks, David!)

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: HP Lovecraft, much improved in graphic form.

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:50:49 +0000

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a recent graphic novel adaptation of the classic 1928 HP Lovecraft story of the same name, masterfully executed by INJ Culbard.

The dirty secret of the Cthulhu mythos is that their originator, HP Lovecraft, wasn't a very good writer. In addition to his unfortunate tendency to embrace his era's backwards ideas about race and gender, Lovecraft was also fond of elaborate, tedious description that obscured the action and dialog. Which is a pity, because Lovecraft did have one of the great dark imaginations of literature, a positive gift for conjuring up the most unspeakable, unnameable (and often unpronounceable) horrors of the genre, so much so that they persist to this day.

Enter INJ Culbard, whose work adapting various Sherlock Holmes stories into graphic novels for Self-Made Hero press I've reviewed here in the past. Culbard is a fine storyteller and artist, and makes truly excellent use of the medium to deliver a streamlined Lovecraft, one where the protracted, over-elaborated descriptions are converted to dark, angular drawings that manage to capture all the spookiness, without the dreariness.

This is really the best way to enjoy Lovecraft.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Nenetl of the Forgotten Spirits: indie horror comic

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 18:35:59 +0000

Vera Greentea and Laura Muller's "Nenetl of the Forgotten Spirits" is an indie comic (funded by a very successful Kickstarter) that spans four issues. The first issue, just out ($6), is a nice, deceptively gentle entree into what promises to be a proper kick-in-the-teeth bit of horror about the Mexican Day of the Dead.

Nenetl of the Forgotten Spirits is a spirited horror story about a ghost searching for her family during the festival of the Day of the Dead, while dodging ambitious exorcist apprentices. Vera Greentea (Recipes for the Dead, To Stop Dreaming of Goddesses) and talented artist Laura Müller (Mega Man Tribute, Subway to Sally Storybook) collaborate to create an autumn-friendly tale of skulls and hope. The first issue introduces the vivacious but forgotten ghost girl, Nena, as she explores the labyrinthine streets of Mexico during its most eerily evocative celebration and Bastian, the first of the exorcists speeding after her – completely for the wrong reason.

Nenetl of the Forgotten Spirits by Vera Greentea

James Herbert, esteemed British horror/SF author, RIP

David Pescovitz — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:29:58 +0000

Famed British horror/dystopian fiction author James Herbert has died at age 69. Herbert was the author of more than twenty scary, science fiction, and/or apocalyptic tales like the 1970s man-eating rodent classics The Rats and Lair, and also The Fog, about an insanity-inducing chemical weapon.

"James Herbert: Master of British horror fiction" (The Guardian)

James Herbert (Amazon)

Kim Newman's critically-acclaimed 1993 horror novel re-issued (excerpt)

Mark Frauenfelder — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:40:07 +0000

Titan Books has released a brand-new edition of Kim Newsman's critically-acclaimed 1993 adult horror novel, Jago.

Paul, a young academic composing a thesis about the end of the world, and his girlfriend Hazel, a potter, have come to the tiny English village of Alder for the summer. Their idea of a rural retreat gradually sours as the laws of nature begin to break down around them. The village, swollen by an annual rock festival of cataclysmic proportions, prepares to reap a harvest of horror.

When they first came to Alder, the big heat had already been on for over a month. In the daytime, the house, built to weather centuries of winters, was like a Casablanca gambling hell. Paul had tried working upstairs and almost come down with heat stroke. Luckily, there had been a wobbly rolltop desk on the verandah. Hazel helped him set it up surreally on the lawn, under the fairly constant shade of a survivor elm. He replaced the missing foot with a nonessential book – William LeQueux’s nigh-unreadable Great War in England in 1897 – and now had a decent workspace. The extension cord of his IBM electric snaked back into the house through the kitchen window. Papers flapped under makeshift weights, which was irritating, but even the slightest breeze was better than still heat. The typewriter hummed, but he didn’t even have a sheet of paper in the roller. This was one of his ‘thinking’ sessions, which meant he was stalled, letting his mind wander until his unconscious sorted out what he should do next and passed the message upstairs.

The converted cow sheds had big folding doors that opened to turn the studio into a cutaway diagram. Hazel was hunched over her wheel, working a lump of clay. She pushed her longish hair out of her eyes with a dry wrist, then got her wet fingers back to the emerging pot. Clay rose and fell, a mushroom cloud, a vinegar bottle. Throwing pots was hypnotic, almost erotic, to watch. Sometimes the process appealed more than the result.

Paul knew nothing about ceramics but could tell Hazel relied too often on what her tutors told her. In the shop attached to the studio, her pots were distinct from the Bleaches’, wax fruit among the real. But she was improving. Certainly, she had been the more productive of them so far this summer. She applied herself with enviable concentration, a strength he hadn’t expected.

He had been going out with her since Easter, and it was now mid-July. Paul supposed he loved her, although he was always uncomfortable with the ‘L’ word. She was named Hazel for hazel eyes, naturally. In fact, almost almond eyes. She had very slight epicanthic folds. Her father had been in the Navy. Maybe a seafaring ancestor once took a Chinese wife. Otherwise, he guessed she was just pretty. She was Paul’s first major affair since Sally the Psychotic – she had liked skunk music and torn up T-shirts for a rock-merchandising company – and they had arranged to spend the summer together before deciding whether she should move into his flat back in Brighton. He’d thought this a formality, but now the possibility of it not working out was starting to tickle the back of his mind. While the countryside was very obviously burning up, they were almost imperceptibly cooling off.

The crisis had been official since spring, and the harvest was set to be a disaster. The land was ailing. Around him, the grass was piss-yellow. Up in the orchard, the property was a post-holocaust wasteland. The apples had ripened early, but under shiny skins the fruit had been sour and hard. This morning, Hazel had had to get up at six to phone the Bleaches, on their lecture tour in Canada until September, and break the bad news. Their garden was suffering a slow, lingering death. Mike and Mirrie were understanding. The instructions were to do the best to limit the damage. Paul had only met the couple once, but liked them very much. Mike was external assessor for the polytechnic, and one of Hazel’s tutors recommended her as a working caretaker for the summer. The Bleaches were right not to shut up shop while they were away; agriculture might be down, but tourism was up. The shop was so busy some mornings that Paul had to fill in for Hazel with customers so she could get a few uninterrupted hours at the wheel.

The bell by the showroom steps jingled. He looked across the lawn. Hazel was sliding off the seat of her wheel, brushing off her apron. The visitors weren’t customers. They hadn’t gone into the shop. Hazel joined them on the steps. Paul realized immediately they were a pair of Jago’s peace-and-love zombies. In their Woodstock-era outfits and beatific living-dead expressions, they were unmistakable. He’d seen a few of the species around the village, but had never had to speak to any of them. Until now. He’d heard of Alder before this summer, of course. The Village Where god Lives. There’d been a piece on cults in the Independent, and an acid profile of Anthony Jago in The New Statesman. The Agapemone was well away from the village but could be seen from the moor, a prime sample of early Victorian megalomaniac architecture halfway up its own little hill.

‘Hi,’ said the broad-hipped woman, ‘my name’s Wendy, and he’s Derek. Welcome to Alder. We’d have been round before, but it’s been hectic.’

She had brought flowers, miraculously unshrivelled, and handed them into Hazel’s arms carefully, as if passing a baby. The Lord god evidently outranked the parish council when it came to water regulations. Paul had been yearning to violate the local authority’s sprinkler ban and give emergency aid to the lawn, but water laws were being enforced with the zeal eighteenth-century revenue men had employed sniffing out lace smugglers.

‘Hello, I’m Paul Forrestier.’ They’d come over to his desk. Hazel had provisionally put the flowers in a vase in the showroom, and was wiping clay-grey hands on her caked apron. ‘This is Hazel.’

‘Chapel,’ she added, smiling. Her name was Chapelet actually, but she didn’t like it.

‘Hi, thanks for the flowers.’

‘We’re from the Agapemone,’ said Wendy, ‘that means–’

‘Abode of Love,’ said Paul.

‘Right. I’m impressed. I heard you were a brain of some sort. Are you a greek scholar?’

‘No,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘English Lit. I read an article...’

‘Oh.’ Wendy dropped a hint of defensiveness. ‘Well, never mind. Don’t be put off. Jesus Christ didn’t get a good press either. We’re not really like the Manson family, honest.’

Wendy’s cheeriness was suddenly unconvincing. The New Statesman had compared Jago with Sun Myung Moon, L. Ron Hubbard and, tactfully, Jim Jones, but Paul let it pass. He didn’t want to go into a discussion of the tenets of the Acid gospel. He had Wendy and Derek pegged as old hippies, but Wendy’s conversational daintiness was almost conventional. She wore CND, Animal Rights and Legalize It patches on her embroidered waistcoat, and her grey-touched hair was frizzed and long. However, she’d have been as happy representing the Women’s Institute as a fringe cult which worshipped god in the flesh. Under multicoloured skirt and tie-dyed blouse, she was creeping chubbily into middle age.

‘Tony’s amazing,’ said the man, Derek. He was thin and worn, his Midlands-accented hesitance suggesting he did little of the talking. ‘He’s got the whole world sussed.’

‘Oh yes.’ Wendy took over again, digging leaflets out of her Rupert Bear shoulder bag. Hazel took one. ‘He’s helped us sort ourselves out. We used to be really screwed up.’

Paul cringed inwardly. He was afraid Wendy was going to ramble on about their Messiah.

‘He’s far out,’ said Derek, without apparent irony. If this went on much longer, Paul was going to have trouble keeping a straight face. Hazel sat in one of the garden chairs and picked through the handout. Wendy and Derek sat on the ground, cross-legged. Derek plucked a few straw-coloured blades of grass, and started braiding them. ‘The earth is dying,’ he said. Or was that ‘The Earth is dying’?

‘Yeah,’ said Paul. ‘Time for the big red sunset and the giant crabs.’ ‘The Time Machine, right?’

‘Yes.’ Paul was surprised. He would assume Derek was remembering the film, but Hollywood had left out the giant crabs. Hazel was excited, brighter than he had seen her since spring. ‘Can we go?’ The tiny overlap of her front teeth, which she hated and he quite liked, showed, as it did whenever she forgot not to smile broadly. She handed him a leaflet. It was for the summer festival. He did not realize how big it was going to be. Hazel pointed out the names of several groups he had never heard of. One of the headline acts was Loud Shit, a skunk band Sally had taken him to last year. He didn’t think they’d get involved in anything remotely religious, and grinned at the idea of how well they would go down with the Tory-voting farmers of Alder. The nearest they came to a love song was a number called ‘Fuck Off and Die’. He’d broken up with Sally shortly afterwards, when she’d had one of her breasts tattooed.

‘We were going to ask you...’

‘(Because you make pots)’

‘...if you’d like a stall to sell stuff from. We’ve got all sorts of crafts people. Weavers, woodturners, jewellers. And some really good theatre groups. And things for kids. We’ve been scheming for months. It’ll be even better than last year.’

Hazel went ‘umm’. She was unhappy with her recent work.

‘I’ve only had one gloss firing, and there was a hiccough with the glaze. Too many things came out dingy brown. I haven’t got much sellable stuff. A few things from last term.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be lovely.’

‘Most people will be stoned anyway,’ said Derek, nearly giggling. ‘They’ll make up their own colours.’

A pause. Wendy’s lips thinned momentarily. Derek would get a reasonable talking-to later, Paul was sure. He felt sorry for the man, intuiting that he’d been dragged by his girlfriend into Jago’s sect and was liable to be stuck with it. Until the Reverend gave the Beatles’ Double White one spin too many and called for a bloodbath, or, depressed by an income-tax investigation, decided it was time to try out the Kool-Aid and cyanide cocktail on his congregation.

‘But I’m firing again tonight. I think I know where I went wrong. I’m not used to this big kiln. If it turns out okay, I’ll have some pretty things. I hope. I’ve also got a couple of boxes of Mike and Mirrie Bleach’s pots. They’re supposed to replace the work that sells from the shop, but nobody will mind if they go during the festival.’

‘That’s great.’ Wendy clacked her beads. ‘We’ll put you down for a table. Come over to the Agapemone when you can, and pick a site. We don’t lock up or anything. We try to be really open, and anyone can come to one of our meals or Tony’s services. There’s no real mystery. We’d like to have you. Both.’

‘Thanks, I’m a bit busy with my thesis, but–’

‘We’d love to drop over,’ said Hazel. ‘There’s blow all else to do out here.’

Hazel took Paul’s hand. Hers was dry, and he felt slip-clay powder between their palms.

‘You must come. He’ll like you. And you’ll like Him. Tony.’

Paul had known whom Wendy meant. The Reverend Anthony William Jago. In photographs, he had eyes like Robert Powell as Jesus and the three-weeks-dead expression Paul associated with William S. Burroughs.

Post addressed to ‘The Lord god, Alder’ was apparently delivered to him.

‘We must be going,’ Wendy said. ‘So much to do, so little time to do it in.’

When Wendy and Derek had gone, Hazel got a different vase for the flowers and filled it with precious water. Then she went back to work, and Paul was left to his books.

Jago, by Kim Newman

Daniel Kraus's horror masterpiece Scowler audiobook

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 22:02:59 +0000

Yesterday, I reviewed Daniel Kraus's spectacular and terrifying horror novel Scowler. It turns out that Random House Audio has produced an audiobook version read by Kirby Heyborne (who also reads the audio edition of Little Brother), and they sell it as a DRM-free CDs direct from their site (a welcome alternative to Audible/iTunes, which requires DRM for audiobooks even when the publisher and writer object).

Kickstarting a Victorian ghost movie starring puppets, with in-camera effects

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:29:40 +0000

Special effects artist Kevin McTurk has a fully subscribed kickstarter for The Mill at Calder's End, a Victorian ghost movie starring 30" puppets guided by pairs or trios of puppeteers all in black. The effects will be done in-camera,

The Mill at Calder's End is a gothic ghost story in the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft that will be told with 30 inch tall bunraku puppets and old fashioned in-camera special effects. Featuring the voices of Jason Flemyng (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, X-Men: First Class) and horror legend Barbara Steele (Black Sunday, The Pit and the Pendulum) , this film celebrates two of my great loves: the art of puppetry and gothic horror.
From my experience working as a special effects artist in Hollywood for over twenty years and now collaborating with some of the most talented creature effects artists, concept artists, and puppeteers in the industry, The Mill at Calder's End will be unlike any puppet film you have ever seen before.
The Mill at Calder's End is a passion project that is heavily influenced by the classic Hammer horror films of the 1960s and the films of Mario Bava (most notably, his gothic masterpiece Black Sunday). I have also always had a great love of puppetry and traditional in-camera special effects. The work of Jim Henson (The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and his Storyteller television series) is a great inspiration to me and I am hoping to bring his sense of wonderment and artistry to The Mill at Calder's End.

The Mill at Calder's End - A Ghost Story Puppet Film by Kevin McTurk — Kickstarter (Thanks, Kevin!)

Scowler: nightmare-fuel horror novel about a monstrous father

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:02:33 +0000

Daniel Kraus's previous book, Rotters, was an outstandingly gross and delightful young adult novel about a kid who discovers that his dad is a grave-robber, and part of an ancient, mystic fraternity of corpse-stealers. It was full of squishy, spectacularly described scenes of decomposition and decay, taut suspense, and perfect gross-out moments. When I picked up his new book Scowler, I expected the same.

Very quickly, though, I realized that I was reading a book squarely aimed at adults, a book that did all the stuff that Rotters had done, but turned the dial up to 11. Where the horror in Rotters was the delicious, peek-between-your-fingers variety, Scowler is built around scenes of such terrifying grisliness and cruelty that it'll keep you up at night for weeks afterwards -- the kind of nightmare fuel you get in novels like The Wasp Factory, say. But this isn't gross-out horror: the terror comes as much from piano-wire taut tension and spectacular characters as from viscera.

Indeed, it's the two characters at the center of Scowler that give it its punch. The first is Ry, a gangly, awkward farm-boy who lives with his mother and little sister on a dying farm that is on the brink of bankruptcy. The second is Ry's father, Marvin, who has been in prison ever since he nearly murdered Ry, eight years before, when the boy was only 11, in a horrific encounter that has left Ry emotionally and physically scarred. The novel opens with many ticking bombs: an impending meteor shower, the imminent abandonment of the farm, the stretched-to-breaking relationship between Ry and his mother.

Quickly, the novel goes into overdrive. As we learn more about Ry's past, we discover the sort of monster his father was, and before long, there's the threat that the monster might return -- or that Ry might become the monster. Marvin is one of the great monsters of literature, a figure of immense, credible terror and savagery. Ry's own fear that he might become his father is just as credible, and Kraus's masterful raising-of-stakes makes this into the sort of diaster you can't possibly look away from.

Scowler

Update: Random House Audio has produced an audiobook version read by Kirby Heyborne (who also reads the audio edition of Little Brother), and they sell it as a DRM-free CDs direct from their site (a welcome alternative to Audible/iTunes, which requires DRM for audiobooks even when the publisher and writer object).

Horror/sf play by a four-year-old

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 20:23:11 +0000

Rachel Bublitz's four year old Audrey wrote her first play:

Characters: Scare People, F, very tall, wears a mask, growls, 18 years old. She goes to scare people school. She is an octopus monster with wings.
Audrey, F, 11 years old. Wears monkey pajamas.
Synopsis: Audrey tries to get Scare People out of her house.

AUDREY SCARE PEOPLE PLAY (Thanks, Ashley!)

Real Genius in the style of M. Night Shyamalan

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 02:47:03 +0000

You know what's better than the nerd-classic 1985 teen comedy Real Genius? How about the Real Genius trailer recut in the style of M. Night Shyamalan, by YouTuber dondrapersayswhat (creator of the Breakfast Club/Avengers mashup and this this insanely great Baby Got Back mashup?

Real Genius by M. Night Shyamalan: Trailer Recut (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Poltergeist soundtrack reissued on vinyl

David Pescovitz — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 23:06:02 +0000

Poltergeist (1982) was the first movie I ever rented on videotape and it's, well, haunted me ever since. Jerry Goldsmith composed the score, including the sweetly nightmarish "Carol Anne's Theme" you can hear at right. He was nominated for an Academy Award but lost out to John Williams for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I'm thrilled that Mondo has just reissued the Poltergeist soundtrack on vinyl, in a spooky sleeve illustrated and designed by We Buy Your Kids. This remastered recording is pressed on two slabs of 180 gram vinyl. If you're lucky, one of those records may be a super-limited "ghastly" clear vinyl pressing! "Poltergeist Original Soundtrack 2X LP"

Video of the Castle Magpie wearable theater/costume in action

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:47:14 +0000

Jamin sez,"Back in October, Cory was kind enough to post a link to my Halloween costume [Ed: this was a wearable puppet theater/playset that was so fantastically fantastic it beggars description.] At long last, here's video of the costume in action. Thanks so much for taking a look. I hope you enjoy it."

This is my Halloween costume for 2012. It took six months to plan and another six months to build. Everything is controlled from inside the costume. The kids are moved via magnets under the floors. The ropes on the front are pulled from behind to open and close the doors, revealing the rooms inside. The magpie and the ship's sails in the great hall are both hiding inside or behind furniture until they're activated. The lightning is a simple led and the kids on the spiral stair rotate around a dowel set into a heavy paper tube with a spiral cut into it for a guide. I plan on doing an extensive process post soonish.

Castle Magpie (via Jamin!)

Two-faced Cthulhu mask

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 03:03:21 +0000

The wonderful Ukrainian horror/fetish/steampunk mask maker Bob Basset has produced a two-faced Cthulhu mask; on one side, the betentacled visage; on the other, a lecterine horror.

Call of Cthulhu. One mask 2 faces.

Universal's classic monster flicks in Blu-ray box set

David Pescovitz — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:07:50 +0000

From Bela Lugosiin Dracula to Lon Chaney, Jr.'s The Wolf Man to Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, the classic Universal monster films of the 1920s-1960s defined horror cinema for a generation and elevated those creepy characters to timeless archetypes of scaredom. Universal has just re-issued eight of those classic films on Blu-ray in a box set: Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection. The set includes restored versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Phantom of the Opera, and Creature from the Black Lagoon, plus bonus featurettes, mini-documentaries about the special effects and the historical contexts of the films, and a 48-page book. The trailer above got me itching to watch all of the films. One after another. Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection

Edible horror installation in London

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:45:27 +0000

Last night I finally got to see one of Evil Miss Cakehead's edible horror installations in person. The Helpers is a grotesque, edible pop-up shop in Bethnal Green Road near Brick Lane, which opened last night. It features dismembered bodies, murder weapons, cigarette butts, car batteries with wires, blood-spattered knives, bags of vomit, Chinese takeout meals, and even a television -- all made of cake, all edible, and all delicious. There really are no words for the dissonance presented by such a scene. But it's pretty special.

So last night we opened The Helpers – a experiential experience serving cocktails and cake all themed around the movie of the same name – a stunt for Koch Media. The creations were incredible and (never thought I would say this) we pushed the limits so far we are all looking forward to some pretty cake projects for Valentine’s Day and beyond. You can see all the cakes over on Miss Cakehead’s Facebook page, and them featured on This Morning here. Just bear in mind they were for a horror film so they are made to the brief set by our client Koch Media. We have not just lost our minds and started making really dark cakes. In fact the chocolate gun was so disturbing and realistic we gave it as an extra present to someone who has always been massively supportive of our work (I had to get it out of there!). Huge thanks to Original Content London for creating an awesome and very disturbing set.

The Helpers – Horror Movie Edible Installation

Interview-by-postcard that HP Lovecraft filled in with a sewing needle dipped in ink and a magnifying glass

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 18:55:44 +0000

Update: The joke's on me. Nick Mamatas sez, "Thanks for the ink, but I should tell you that my piece in The Revelator is fiction. The 'from the vaults' feature of the magazine is always a fiction that purports to be a true story or interview connected with the largely imaginary history of The Revelator itself."

Nick Mamatas (author of such wonderful books as Sensation) formerly lived in Battleboro, VT, once home to amateur press enthusiast Arthur H. Goodenough, who was a correspondent of HP "Cthulhu" Lovecraft's. Nick discovered a postcard containing an interview between Goodenough and Lovecraft, entirely conducted on a single postcard. Goodenough kicked it off by sending Lovecraft a postcard with some questions, and Lovecraft answered them in minute writing in the whitespace on the card, using a sewing-needle dipped in ink, then posted it back to Goodenough. Seriously.

Lovecraft was acquainted with Goodenough, and Lovecraft’s visits to Goodenough in Vermont in 1927 and 1928 are the basis of his wonderful novelette “The Whisperer in Darkness.” After the story was published in Weird Tales, Goodenough sent Lovecraft a congratulatory card, and also asked the author a couple of questions. Rather than responding with a card or letter of his own, Lovecraft wrote the answers in a tiny hand and then apparently gave the card to Vrest Orton — a bookman and eventual founder of The Vermont County Store — who returned the card to Goodenough personally during a trip to the Green Mountain State. Then Goodenough sent the card back to Lovecraft again, with follow-up questions written in a nearly microscopic hand. I suppose he knew the local postmaster, and was able to get the card back into the mail system without a problem. Amazingly, Lovecraft managed to fit the answers to the questions on the postcard in an even smaller hand. Sherwood told me that he’d guessed that Lovecraft used a magnifying glass and a sewing needle dipped in ink. Here’s an odd thing; Sherwood had found the postcard at an estate sale. It had been protected from the elements because it had been used as a bookmark in a 1935 number of The Revelator, and that number was a special issue dedicated to the “gothic tales” of Isak Dinesen.
I bought the card and kept it with me for years — I moved to Boston, and then to California. Only recently have I been able to spare the time to closely examine and transcribe the postcard. It took a few weeks. Lovecraft’s handwriting was difficult to read in the best of times, as I learned in 2007 when writer Brian Evenson took me and my friend Geoffrey Goodwin to the library at Brown University to check out some of Lovecraft’s papers. If anything, Goodenough’s penmanship is even worse, especially in the last unanswered round of questions. There are a few ink splatters on the postcard as well, but only one seems purposeful, as I make note of below. I took the card to work and abused my photocopy and scanner privileges to blow up sections of the card, then turn them into a series of PDFs. I then zoomed in on the PDFs as much as I could, to turn the tiny letters into great abstract shapes, to better see what we would call “kerning” if the text had been typset. To decipher this postcard, I not only had to read between the lines, as it were, but I had to make sure I was properly reading between the letters.

Mamatas and a friendly googler who specializes in fonts managed to transcribe the card, and the link below contains the whole interview.

Brattleboro Days, Yuggoth Nights (via JWZ)

Trailer for Warren Ellis's Gun Machine: narrated by Wil Wheaton and drawn by Ben Templesmith

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 17:13:55 +0000

On New Year's Day, I posted a review of Warren Ellis's new novel Gun Machine, a taut, supernatural hard-boiled cop novel set in NYC. Now there's an accompanying trailer, narrated by Wil Wheaton and drawn by the incomparable Ben Templesmith, a real happy mutant trifecta.

(Thanks, Warren!)

Mastaba Snoopy: Choose-your-own-adventure based on a horrific alien intelligence that loves Peanuts

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:39 +0000

Mastaba Snoopy is surreal and wonderful dystopian science fiction choose-your-own adventure whose premise is that an all-powerful alien has mistaken a Peanuts book for a guide to human interaction, and enslaved humanity according to its principles. It's built on Twee and Tiddlywiki:

1. An Unknown Alien Being acquires a child's forgotten book and mistakenly beliefs that it depicts proper protocol for interaction with the human world.
2. It grows and converts all life into more of itself, like a living strangelet - emotionless spacial cancer. It can shapeshift or divide at will and learns quickly. Each mass it breaks off possesses its own intelligence.
3. The new being filters everything it perceives through the lens of Peanuts comics. It mimics characters, but with no understanding of how they fit together. A computer-generated collage. It doesn't understand human rules - but it does understands the laws of Peanuts.
4. After many years, the Milky Way and surrounding galaxies have been entirely overtaken by this single entity. Suddenly deprived of food, the organism begins to STAGNATE.
5. The organism transforms into a distorted parody of the former planet Earth, a foul, expansive hellworld - filtered, again, through Peanuts.
End result: There exists an infinite, nonsensical world with all locations, living things, and social interaction based on half-remembered dreams.
Thousands of years to fester and the memory is going bad, the original book having been long since lost in the constant churning reshaping. This new, living world has been dying for millenia.
You are here to watch an alien rot.

Mastaba Snoopy (via Waxy)

(Image: Snoopy's World in New Town Plaza, Sha Tin, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from edwin11's photostream)

Bruce Sterling's written a paranormal romance, many hands interview him:

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:54:21 +0000

Bruce Sterling has written a new paranormal romance (!), Love is Strange, and in honor of its publication, many hands have been recruited to ask weighty questions of the wise fellow:

Cory Doctorow: Do you feel that the world is, on balance, improved by technology?
Well, if you ask that question from the point of view of almost anything in this world that's not a human being like you and me, the answer's almost certainly No. You might get a few Yea votes from the likes of albino rabbits and gene-spliced tobacco plants. Ask any living thing that's been around in the world since before the Greeks made up the word "technology," like say a bristlecone pine or a coral reef. You would hear an awful tale of woe.

Love is Strange

Bruce Sterling: The Complete Interview, 2013 « 40kBooks

Awesomely weird tales of sex-ghosts

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 17:20:20 +0000

This interview with "author, photographer, and ossuary expert" Paul Koudounaris is a trove of weird stories about the things people get up to with their local mummies, haunted skulls, and other "miracle-performing" remains:

They’re not all like that. One of the more outlandish stories is about a guy who got to be called “pene grande,” which means “big dick.” He was a mummy famed in life for having a big penis. People would go down to the Palermo Catacombs and treat him as the patron saint of big cocks. Finally a newlywed woman came to see him because she was married to a guy who was not well-endowed. She took a cloth and rubbed it on the mummy’s dick, and then rubbed it on her husband’s dick. The next time she had sex with her husband, his penis seemed larger and fuller and she was about to orgasm except that at that moment she looked up and saw it was actually the ghost on top of her. Everyone thought she was crazy, but then it happened again the next time she had sex. They had to set up an exorcism for this ghost.
...They had a blacksmith make a tight-fitting sheath made of metal, and once the husband got erect the ghost came out and got caught in the codpiece. They threw holy water at him.
...That expelled the ghost from the guy’s body. So forever he had a small penis, but he was free of the ghost. As for the ghost, he gained a great following among older ladies, and eventually so many were coming to see him that they had to lock the mummy in a back room, which is where he remains to this day.
...There is an old and very weird story about a ghost of a guy who had lived in the monastery there — apparently the "devil got into him" and he masturbated and had a heart attack at the moment of ejaculation. That's why, they claim, he has that look on his face. Anyway, people said his ghost would visit boys who masturbated and scare them into stopping. One boy didn't really believe this, though, and dared the ghost to appear while he was masturbating. When the ghost showed up, he apparently grabbed the boy by the cock and squeezed him so hard that the boy passed out, and while he wasn't exactly castrated, he was rendered sterile for life.
...There’s a really bizarre story from the 20th century, about a guy who had severe diarrhea and chronic flatulence. He stole a skull and started saying prayers to St. Roch and St. Sebastian, the patron saints of plague and suffering, and also shitting on the skull daily. He had a theory that by crapping on the skull he could switch intestines with the body the skull had been attached to. The ghost kept warning him, quit shitting on my skull. But he kept at it and he succeeded in transferring his intestinal problems to the ghost. The problem was that the ghost had died of testicular cancer, and in return he gave that to the guy. That’s how he died. One of the dangers of necromancy is you don’t really know who’s on the other side or what they’re going to give you in return.

Bones, Ghosts, and Paul Koudounaris [Molly Langmuir/The Hairpin] (via JWZ)

NSFC: Cyriak's horrific Christmas animation

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 23:02:26 +0000

"The Spirit of Christmas," a video from UK animator Cyriak, is not really like anything I've ever seen. It's definitely not for the faint hearted or weak of stomach. Don't watch it if, for example, you have an aversion to prehensile, tentacle-like red noses.

The Spirit of Christmas (via JWZ)

Using Kickstarter to fund an unthemed, all original horror anthology edited by legendary Ellen Datlow

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 02:10:16 +0000

Bret sez, "Ellen Datlow is using Kickstarter to fund an unthemed, all original anthology of terror and supernatural fiction called Fearful Symmetries for Toronto-based ChiZine Publications. Ellen has won multiple World Fantasy, Locus, Hugo, Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and Shirley Jackson Awards for her editing, and was recently honored with the Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association. She's been working in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror fields for over 30 years. Ellen says, "The business of publishing is rapidly changing. It's always been hard to sell non-themed anthologies, but in today's publishing climate, it's especially difficult. This project is close to my heart, which is why I've decided to appeal to the public through Kickstarter in order to fund it." Ellen also plans to have an open reading period for Fearful Symmetries to give a chance to new talent. The money she and CZP are asking for will go toward paying professional rates to the contributors and the production team. Of course, her feline companions and she have to eat, too. Ellen and CZP are really excited about Fearful Symmetries and hope you'll support its publication!"

Fearful Symmetries: An Anthology of Horror

Ghost Fink: Ghosbusters in a Rat Fink car

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 23:00:30 +0000

Brian Ewing (creator of the Anatomical Frankenstein print) has just posted another fab illustration: Slimer from Ghosbusters riding in an Rat Fink-style rat-racer. It's called "Rat Fink" -- there's a limited run of 100 screen prints at $50 each.

Ghost Fink (Thanks, Brian!)

Dark Lord: an evil overlord trapped in a kid's body

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:44:36 +0000

Jamie Thomson's Dark Lord: The Early Years gets right down to business: an unnamed narrator suffers a million agonies, while calling out for his hellion lieutenants to aid him, and we quickly learn that this is the Dark Lord, feared and tyrannical ruler of a distant kingdom, and that he has been transported to a suburban parking lot in our world. And that he's been put in the body of a child. Before you can ponder this conundrum for too long, he's in the custody of child services, in hospital, and is being treated as a delusional car-accident victim whose fantasy of being a mighty and merciless sorcerer/warrior are the desperate gambit of his amnesiac psyche. The well-meaning child psychologists deliberately mishear his name ("Dark Lord") and dub him "Dirk Lloyd," and place him with a foster family while they sort things out. And we're off to the races.

Dark Lord plays out this scenario with perfect deadpan humor (the book just won the Roald Dahl Humour Award). Dirk's foster brother and schoolmates are at first bemused by his insistence on his true identity and his penchant for tenting his fingers and bellowing mwa-ha-ha, but Dirk is a tactical genius who knows how to humiliate bullies with a few well-chosen words, how to make himself a king among jocks with shrewd assessments of kids' weaknesses; how to break teachers' grip on their classes with cutting remarks. His friends play along with his "Dark Lord" game, let themselves be called his "court in exile," but no one really believes that Dirk is really an interdimensional Darth Vader.

But Dirk is (probably) not delusional. At least, the author is very careful not to collapse the possibility one way or another, until just the right moment. This is wickedly funny, brilliantly told stuff, and you'll never have more fun cheering for evil.

Brits may already be familiar with this book -- it was published more than a year ago in the UK under the slightly different title Dark Lord: The Teenage Years (there's also a UK sequel that came out last March called Dark Lord: A Fiend in Need -- presumably a US publication will follow).

Dark Lord: The Early Years