Tag: Horror

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Enough with the goddamn zombies already!

 

zombie-42

No, really! Enough with the zombies! I’m really sick of the all the books and movies about crusty, rotten, nonliving creatures of the apocalypse meandering around looking to eat “BRRAAAAIIINNNSSS”. I like the classics like everyone else (Night, Dawn, Day, Return of…)and I respect Romero for everything he has done with our industry. I even like the Walking Dead, but that is debatable about being a real “zombie horror” show/comic.  But please! Stop already with the damn zombies!

We complain about how Hollyweird cannot come up with any original ideas and then we turn around and write fucking zombie apocalypse books and movies with the same plot over and over again. The bad part is, hasn’t anyone picked up on this and am I the only one that is sick of it yet? If I wanted to be surrounded by a bunch of decomposing lots, I’d dig up my Grandpa and his friends. I don’t need to be forcefed this crap.

 I’m sure the same (shallow) think-tank in Hollywood that brought us remake upon crappy remake of our favorite classics is sitting around a table in a dark smoky room thinking up the next zombie some-shit-whatever. There is probably a single light bulb hanging over the table with eight corp(se) executives sitting around the table when the main guy stands up at the end.

“So the zombie shit is doing really well. We keep making it and they keep mindlessly putting their money down and eating this shit up without thinking about it. It’s kinda like life imitating art!” (Laughs all around) “So let’s do another zombie movie. Anyone got any ideas?”

 A nervous stiff (pun intended) in the back raises his hand in the swirl of smoke that rotates around the room.

 “How about an apocalypse?” the stiff suggests.

 “How about a fucking raise for you, Anderson! That’s what I’m talking about! Now, how did this shit happen?” the “BRRAAAAIIINNNSSS” asks.

 “What if we didn’t say?” another stiff interjects, looking around the room for his approval. “I mean, it could’ve just happened.”

 “Goddamn you guys are good! Damn good! I like it. I like where this is going. Now, what do they do when they come back? I mean they’re zombies; they can’t drive around can they? Or can they?” the boss enquires.

 Confused looks overcome the room.

 “Come on people! We have something going here! Someone look this up.” the leader of “yessirs” quips while loosening his tie from the heat.

 Several of the employees whip out their phones and open their “Google” apps while others download AMC’s The Walking Dead.

 “It’s going to be a long night folks. We’re gonna be here for awhile.” The boss says before hitting the intercom button the phone beside him. “Stacey, order us some pizzas and call my wife. Tell her I’ll be late tonight. Yeah, I know. Hang on I’ll check. Anderson, you’re allergic to olives right?”

 And that folks is how your favorite zombie movie is written. Do you even want me to diagram the process of how that new up and coming horror author’s zombie survival novel was written in a Starbucks over a venti skinny decaf mocha latte with extra whip over one afternoon?

 If any of the three of you read back a few articles, I wrote about “Giving the Phantom a new mask”. I will summarize it quickly as to not lose you with the details. When trying to write the next big thing, please attempt to be original. If you do not have an original idea, then give the old idea a new twist, thus “giving the Phantom a new mask”. I’ll help you out since I see smoke coming out of your ears from the overload.

 flying-zombie-laser-shark

Try this, “space zombies”, “dinosaur zombies”, “reanimated zombies coming back to life and living as real people zombies” (Think of the problematic possibilities with that one! I mean, do we really need Anna Nichole Smith back?)

 I’m going to grandfather in any book, movie, comic, etc that was made before 2010, and that in my opinion is being lenient. However if you are writing the next big zombie novel, please be damn sure that it is not a replica of something else out there and the only difference is the character’s names. If you send in your novel and want me to read it, here is a heads up – if it is about zombies, it is going to back of the line! The plot on a zombie apocalypse novel is rather thin. Here I’ll sum up the last six I’ve read…survive. Here is the plot on the last four zombie movies I’ve seen…survive. There’s not that much breathing room that you can have with this. They’re dead, you’re not, they’re hungry, you kind of are. Well, Taco Bell is open late and half of their food is raw so both the living and the dead can score. Moving on.

 Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to writing my next vampire novel. It is a love story about a lonely girl who is new in town, falls in love with a loner who happens to be a vampire. Their relationship is a struggle since he feels that he cannot give her the love she deserves since he is undead. From there the plot just kind of thins out. I’m going to sell it to “young adult” females and housewives. (I can hear the cash register ringing now!)

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No Reflection

For starters, I don’t really read many horror short stories.  I find that most of them follow the same general formula: build up for a little bit, then drop the quasi-twist hammer.  It’s something that finds its roots in Tales From the Crypt, The Twilight Zone, and O. Henry.  It doesn’t necessarily mean all horror fiction is bad, but it’s usually not my cup of tea.

Still, I dug into John Caliburn’s No Reflection, because I’m a sucker for short story collections.  As Fremont stated, it’s a decent first book.  It’s not without its problems, but there are some pretty good moments in here.

I liked “Delusional”, partially for a nod to Cthulhu, but mainly because it made me think of Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II.  I was waiting for the problem to be solved by curing a case of Carpathian Kitten Loss, but, alas, that was not how this story ended.  Still, it was a decent premise and a solid ending, even if Vigo never reared his ugly mug.

I also liked “Rustling Sheets”.  The idea of a carnivorous monster with razor-sharp claws taking up residence in the lower bunk is not something I would be okay with.  Unless he feels like sharing a little chipmunk meat in the middle of the night.  I could probably get down with that.  A man gets awfully hungry at night.

This was a pretty quick read, which helped.  But, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not without its problems.
Pretty much every story seemed to remind me of a similar story/movie.  Not that there’s really anything wrong with that (Koheleth famously stated “there is nothing new under the sun,” over 2000 years ago), but I didn’t feel like anything here separated itself from its influences.
It’s a bit strange to say about a book that barely cracked 100 pages, but these stories all could’ve been tightened up a little.  There’s nothing wrong with a two-page story if the story-telling is strong.  Some of these felt dragged out, which hurt the story as a whole (“Fear of the Shadows” definitely felt this way to me).
The writing could also be a bit stronger.  There were a lot of “or somethings” in here.  Too many of those tend to detract from the story.

All of that sounds like I hated this.  I did not hate this.  I didn’t love it, but it was enjoyable enough to keep me entertained.

This is a solid debut.  I’m curious to see what Caliburn does next.

No Reflection is currently available on Amazon.

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No Reflection & Other Short Stories

“No Reflection”, written by John Caliburn is a solid first entry into the horror genre. His first published collection, No Reflection has seven short stories and wraps up with a short poem. At the end of each story, the author has added a short explanation of his motivation behind the story. At times, the explanation was a disservice:”A Child’s Imagination” being the best example of this. This story is very reminiscent of “Where The Wild Things Are”, which is nice in a nostalgic kind of way. The plot was going somewhere interesting and then it ended in a very maudlin, unsatisfying kind of way. This being a horror collection, I suppose I shouldn’t be expecting a happy ending, but I would have liked to see Caliburn really delve into his inspiration for this story. He said that he wanted to explore the awful reality that children are, sometimes, the ones that commit murder. I couldn’t help but think of the film “Who Can Kill A Child?” and I really believe Caliburn is more than capable of reaching that level of terror, so, I felt a bit underwhelmed with the ending of “A Child’s Imagination”.

In the story “Delusional”, Caliburn uses H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos as a background device. I found this to be particularly interesting, but my partner Dusty will be the one going into detail about this particular story.

As a woman, I simply cannot let “The Magician’s Assistant” escape my critical eye. It’s a great little story with a wonderfully gory coupe de grace, but the degree to which the female protaganist is reduced to negative, female cliches was too much to ignore. She see’s herself as a “Plain Jane Brunette”, her self esteem seems to be in direct proportion to how her fiancee sees her, she’s paranoid, jealous and, worst of all, a typical “woman scorned”. Instead of simply asking her fiancee if he’s stepping out on her, she just smiles, keeps her mouth shut and, ultimately, let’s her insecurities and neurosis unfold in a homicidal rage. Typical woman, right? Even though it’s a short story, I still expect to see a woman who is a whole human being and not just a negative stereotype. Perhaps I’m being a bit too touchy, but it really took away from what was a nice “Tale From The Crypt” kind of ending.

Overall, this collection of stories shows great promise of future endeavors. The themes that Caliburn was exploring are ones that all of us can relate to;the inability to foresee your poor choices and the consequences that they incur, the responsibility that children believe they carry in their parents’ happiness, the monster in our room that no one else can see, fear of the dark and the inability to escape our punishments for our bad deeds. I enjoyed these stories, however, I wish there had been a bit more depth and character development. That being said, I look forward to Caliburn’s future works.

http://www.amazon.com/Reflection-other-Horror-Stories-ebook/dp/B00FUVIVWS/

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I Watch Way Too Much Horror or The Devil Built My House on Indian Burial Ground

There is an old saying “Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life?” This has been on my mind recently. I’m afraid that if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword and apparently I may have just fallen on my sword.  I’ve been dabbling in horror for so long I think the lines of fantasy and real life are beginning to blur, and not in a sexy Robin Thicke kind of way.

So if you haven’t noticed I’ve been away for awhile and it is because I moved residence. The Rasputin family unit needed a bigger place to rip and tear so we packed up our hot rodded hearse and moved like the Beverly Hellbillys we are and moved the hell out of our old crypt. Far from the big city, there are woods at the end of the street, you can see all the stars at night, you can hear the frogs chirp; it is the dream home location. The house is a lot bigger. It is room for the fleet of cars, the Harley, the things that we couldn’t afford when we were first starting out, all the bells and whistles of a modern home. It is also the way most haunted house movies start out. Did I mention we are the “last house on the left”?

From the start, it was explained to us that the house would be built in 3 months.  Five months later with no good reason for the delay we had our home. When we picked out our plot of land I jokingly asked the developer if he was sure there wasn’t a cemetery underneath. He didn’t look at me but responded with “A chemical dump. Local cleaners dumped their waste here”. We knew it was a joke since we were familiar with the area. Either that or they had to take extra time laying an extra foot of dirt on the top layer of the graves.

The house was not quite complete on the day of closing. It lacked small jobs here and there but it wasn’t anything large (that we knew at the time). We wouldn’t know what to look for anyway. (Were the walls up? Does the air condition work? Does the ceiling leak? These are our concerns.) No sooner had we closed when we started to move in and the terror began. Countless bad luck injuries to us, mechanical defects, lighting problems with the wiring, the construction either being wrong or not finished at all, the security alarm not being installed then not working, plumbing installed wrong, muddy ground that five days after the rain still wouldn’t dry, an endless supply of flies (hadn’t seen one of those all year until now), moving boxes going missing from right in front of us, the dogs whimpering all night long, and then the obligatory strange noises. You can understand why Mrs. Rasputin and I nicknamed our new place “Hell House”.

Now every new house has strange noises that you must acquaint yourself with and the reasons that cause them. It may be the pipes, the house settling, animals that found their way into the attic, the mother-in-law chewing through the restraints in the garage, but last night I heard the oddest of them all. A couple of minutes after 2 AM I woke to the sound of my pit/lab mix, Lizzie Borden, whimpering (something she never does).  As I clear out the cobwebs from my head, I see her as she stops to look up at the ceiling just as the sound of a bouncing ball starts. The odd noise “bounced” four times in the same place. Above us is one of my daughter’s rooms, but she went to sleep with her sister in another room on the opposite side of the house. Feeling much sympathy for Jack Torrance at this point I naturally start up the stairs to investigate.

Of course they are nocturnal, they’re my kids. However I am not nocturnal in the least and I enjoy my slumber. I reach for the doorknob, turn on the lights, and enter the room to find to my surprise …nothing. The room has not been touched since we played with the kids hours ago. After checking on the girls in the other room, I find them both asleep on the other side of the second floor.

I lay back down and after a few minutes Lizzie starts whimpering again. I look at her and she has focused her attention back to the ceiling. Again she stops just before the bouncing sounds return.

Okay, this is bullshit. I start back up the stairs at a faster pace than before because I’m going to catch my kids in the act. I turn the knob and sling the door open to find only the moonlight shining through the window of the little princess’ room just as I had left it minutes ago. I turn on the lights and take another look around. That’s a negative Ghost Rider the pattern is full.

I once again return to bed when Lizzie begins to whimper for a third time. Just as the previous times, she is staring at the ceiling with her ears back and drawing her mouth to a scowl. She stops just in time to hear a heavy box being dragged across the floor of the same room above me. I made my way back up the stairs to find no such object in the darkened room that could have caused such noise. Only I tried to turn on the light, but it wouldn’t come on. “Fuck! Now I need to change the light bulb out tomorrow.” Checking on the children, they were both still asleep in the same position where I left them.

Returning to bed my wife had awoken and inquired about my late night adventures. I told her the story and she related that the same thing happened to her last night at the same time! We were both puzzled until she first said what both of us were thinking but neither wanted to; “Do you think it is a ghost?” 

I’ll spare you the rest of that conversation but I can tell you that at 2:23 in the morning your head does have a tendency to get carried away very easily. Mrs. Rasputin doesn’t believe in ghosts despite all the sleepless nights we’ve stayed at the Stanley Hotel, the R.M.S. Queen Mary, the Lizzie Borden B&B, Le Richelieu, Hotel Galvez, and countless hotels in Salem Mass. So for her to even consider it possible means a lot. Then she dropped the bombshell on me. “Oh, yeah. We need to change out her light bulb tomorrow. The third time I tried to turn it on it wouldn’t come on. ”

After seeing Amityville, The Black Hope Horror (true story that happened here in Houston, check it out), Poltergeist, the Haunting in Connecticut, and Insidious I was certain that we had a ghost problem.  Everything checked out. Unexplained noises, check. Lighting problems, check. Dog growling at the wall, check. Flies, check.  Two adults accusing the other one is crazy, check. I was missing a menacing tree trying to eat us and unholy voice telling us to “get out”. Well, there’s always tonight.

Look, I’ve gone ghost hunting before for fun. But when the ghosts come to me, in my house, I have to say “Screw that”.

I’ve seen this shit too many times to not recognize the signs. I consider myself a pro at dealing with the spiritually enriched dwellings (I think that is the PC term they prefer these days). I have to go through the motions of having a priest over to bless it, scream “What do you want from me?” at the top of my lungs in the rain, and then throw the TV out on the street. I’ve got this. My whole problem with watching all this horror stuff is that I start believing it, thinking that it is real, and it is happening to me.  Now that I know how I’ll react when I see something too much, I’m thinking about watching more porn.

*Update – Since I’ve written this article my dog has growled at a closet door, empty bedroom doors are locked but unlock themselves only seconds later, and my large red ball belonging to my daughter came bouncing down the hall towards us…from a dead end hallway.  

Until next time, rest in pieces.

Renfield Rasputin was biting heads off bats before Ozzy ever made it cool.

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Wherewolves book review by Charity Langley

Wherewolves Review

 

This is the blurb found on Amazon for the book:

 

“KEPT ME ON THE EDGE OF MY SEAT. GETS YOUR PULSE POUNDING.” -Author and award winning investigative journalist, Victor Malarek Using a fun, explosive style, full of new slang and fresh dialogue, WHEREWOLVES is the story of a group of high school seniors, most of them “military brats”, who are headed for an army-type survival weekend. “5 stars. It reminded me a bit of Lord of the Flies versus Silver Bullet but only way cooler.” “Chillingly terrifying.” The underdogs, Jeffrey and Doris, do not want to go as they fear for their safety among the disdain and cruelty of the popular students. Sergeant Tim O’Sullivan, their teacher, as well as their dysfunctional parents pressure them into going, but it is an unforgivable act by their peers that propels the pair to go. Likewise, Elie, a student resented because of his Arab roots, is even more determined to prove himself this weekend. In the background, a news report cautions of a wanted couple with alleged super-human strength supposedly brought on by a new drug on the streets. In the woods, the students hike, hunt, camp, and soon act in unity as the forest brings them closer together. But does it? O’Sullivan leaves them alone for the night. The students bond, chant, tell campfire tales, and quickly lose their fears and inhibitions. HOO-AH! Though sexual tensions are high, it soon turns to violence and everything quickly turns sour. When the kids start disappearing one after the other, the remaining begin to unwittingly “act like the natives” carving spears, ready to face whatever is out there. What has gotten into them? Amid blood-curdling growls and gruesome deaths, the story’s underlying layers are revealed. We see how misconceptions, prejudice, greed, fear, and hatred bring out the worst and best in them. What is out there? Can it really be werewolves? “This is one horror novel that will have you thinking long after you’ve finished reading.” Based on the screenplay, WHEREWOLVES, by John Vamvas and Olga Montes “SPARKLING DIALOGUE…THE WRITING IS SENSATIONAL.” -Emmy and Peabody Award winning writer, William Mastrosimone

 

I am reviewing the work I read. The screenplay version might be awesome, but the novel version is a train wreck.

 

I’m going to start off with what I liked:

 

The chapter titles were inventive.

 

The line: “Give me C.C.R., Warren Zevon—her daddy‘s music—or even fucking Duran Duran.” was a great addition to the story. (For those of you who may not get the joke as quickly as I did, see the bottom of this review.) Scott McCalla was also a fun tongue-in-cheek addition.

 

Now with that out of the way, I’d like to admit that there probably is a decent story hidden somewhere in the mess of this half-transitioned screenplay-to-novel disaster.

 

The person, or persons, who edited this for novel format failed miserably. The random use of onomatopoeia had me feeling as though I was reading an old comic book. Stage direction type lines like: “Cora tears open the bag: chicken wings and fries; some of the wings have been bitten into.” are also out of place and majorly distracting.

 

Description was another downfall for this novel. As I read, images from the movie Thankskilling played throughout my head because I couldn’t tell most of the kids apart. This is another place where transition from screenplay to novel absolutely failed.

You can movie a story forward through dialogue alone, but it’s difficult. With this many characters, you would need a mannerism, or particular language, almost every time someone spoke. In the screenplay, this wouldn’t matter because we can actually see the characters, but in a novel, where readers are forming images in their heads based on little squiggly lines on white paper, description is a necessity. The only standout characters in this novel were Dilly, O’Sullivan the teacher, and Doris, the rest were just faceless boys and girls.

 

The high-school cliquiness (for lack of a better word) went on forever. I understand that the authors were trying to help us understand the dynamic between each kid, but there was just so much of it all at once without any description that I kept having to reread sections just to understand what was going on between which groups. All the kids are military brats, many who lost parents to war. More could’ve been done to illustrate how individually affected they were by their parents deaths. Even through rereading, I didn’t realize that one of the characters suffered from such severe PTSD that she was mute until page 146 (digital version). As someone who spent seven years working in a public school system, mostly with special needs and at-risk kids, I’m also not understanding what made this character off limits. Kids are cruel, and they often band together against the weakest among them. So why was Dawn off limits? Did her brother stand up for her? Did the other kids know her before she stopped speaking?

 

The ending was decent, but I saw the major plot twist coming a mile away. Most avid readers will see it too. Based on this I’d have to say that as a screenplay this work might make a pretty average slasher flick, but a lot needs to be done to clean it up as a novel.

 

*CCR = Bad Moon Rising

Warren Zevon = Werewolves of London

Duran Duran = Hungry Like the Wolf