Horror Studies intends to serve the international academic community in the humanities and specifically those scholars interested in horror. Exclusively examining horror, this journal will provide interested professionals with an opportunity to read outstanding scholarship from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including work conceived as interdisciplinary. By expanding the conversation to include specialists concerned with diverse historical periods, varied geography, and a wide variety of expressive media, this journal will inform and stimulate anyone interested in a wider and deeper understanding of horror.
- Here in LA, a skeletonized Oscar-esque statue suddenly appeared atop Runyon Canyon days before the awards show last week. For those who don’t know it, Runyon Canyon is a park in Hollywood that’s very popular with joggers, hikers and dog lovers (dogs can go unleashed and run up the canyon trails).
- No one knows who sculpted the giant Oscar, but clearly there’s a message behind it. Has plastic surgery taken over Hollywood? The world? Is there anything wrong with plastic surgery?
I don’t see it as much as a statement about plastic surgery in the industry, but as a requiem on how mainstream movies are mostly recycled, dead memes with no money going to real artists with new ideas.
- Hanks and Gary Goetzman will act as executive producers, and Hanks hopes the adaptation will air in 2013. He believes the public has been snookered into believing that Lee Harvey Oswald was framed. “We’re going to do the American public a service,” Hanks says. “A lot of conspiracy types are going to be upset. If we do it right, it’ll be perhaps one of the most controversial things that has ever been on TV.”
What can we expect? If he is already out to show alternative researchers they are wrong, then how can he do anything other than tow the company line? Hanks will probably pretend to be objective on the Warren Commission report’s findings to show he is a ‘tough investigator’, but there will be nothing ultimately that will make entrenched power structures/brokers look bad.
- (CNN) — James Cameron’s completely immersive spectacle “Avatar” may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.
- On the fan forum site “Avatar Forums,” a topic thread entitled “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible,” has received more than 1,000 posts from people experiencing depression and fans trying to help them cope. The topic became so popular last month that forum administrator Philippe Baghdassarian had to create a second thread so people could continue to post their confused feelings about the movie.
- A user named Mike wrote on the fan Web site “Naviblue” that he contemplated suicide after seeing the movie.
- “Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it,” Mike posted. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’ “
(Makes me think of the William Shatner SNL skit at a Star Trek Convention. He addresses the throngs and says “I know many of you have come out miles just to be here and I want to say..GET A LIFE. Will you people? For crying out loud, it’s just a TV show.”)
- The Zeros were a decade in which memes from the underground bubbled up into the mass media and took over the mainstream in a way I would never thought possible. Twenty years ago topics like secret societies and sacred symbolism were purely fringe stuff. Today, they’re kids’ stuff. Twenty years ago, superheroes and sci-fi were kid stuff- now they’re as popular with adults as with kids.
Of course, by the time a meme reaches the mainstream it’s often been drained of any meaning- certainly of any danger. But at the same time, the filtering power of the establishment media has been severely diminished, as the internet creates endlessly mutating microcultures, complete with their own secret languages and symbols.
All of which goes to show that the past ten years have been very interesting ones for those of us interested in looking under the skirt of consensus reality. So many strange memes are floating around out there and bouncing off the walls of pop culture, there’s always something to dig into and pick apart. So, let me tell you what flicks buttered my toast in this often remarkably-unpleasant decade, in ascending order…
- In our age of rational science the occult has never been more in demand: Angels and demons are popular, the Da Vinci code and lost symbols fascinate audiences worldwide and Hollywood is eager to turn out more movies with a paranormal theme. So why is it that so many of these stories seem flat, and fail to reach the level of insight into hidden structures of the world true esoteric adventures are supposed to promise?
- Perhaps the answer has to do with the failure of gifted directors to come to grips with the enormity of the unknown issues of human destiny, or to pose the fundamental questions their esoteric subject would demand. We go away charmed by artistic visions, dazzled by the pageantry of cardinals in red capes and titillated by women in black garters but the Illuminati only scare us because of the blood they spill, not the existential issues they should transcend. They behave like any other gang of thugs, even if they utter their rough curses in Latin rather than street slang, cockney or modern Italian…
One of the underground’s greatest directors on the true meaning of the Tarot cards. It is not divination, it is transformation…
- Fantastic tales about Ninja clans and other secret fighting societies are depressingly common in the martial arts world. These legends are used for marketing and entertainment purposes; repeated often, but rarely taken seriously.
- Benjamin Fulford wants to be taken seriously. Formerly the Asia-Pacific bureau chief at Forbes Magazine, Fulford spent years reporting on the highest and lowest echelons of Japanese society, from politicians to Yakuza gangsters. While many of his native colleagues were kidnapped or killed, in retaliation for their stories on the hidden structures of government, the Canada-born Fulford managed to escape their fate.
- Today, Benjamin Fulford has an incredible story to tell, grounded in personal experience, and supported by his university studies in economics and Asian history. Once threatened by a menacing ninja assassin from the shadow government, he now claims the support and protection of the Triads, in his mission to end the corrupt global plutocracy…
- Now that the comics industry has overtaken film, its outstanding writers are starting to step up to the biopic bar. Subversive brainiac Grant Morrison is up next, with a dedicated documentary due in time for next year’s Comic-Con International.
- “He has an uncanny ability to tell stories that are both accessible and progressively avant-garde,” explained indie director Patrick Meaney, whose untitled Grant Morrison documentary, previewed in the exclusive clips above and below, will analyze the writer’s storied run for Marvel and DC Comics on standout titles like The Invisibles, X-Men and Final Crisis as well as more esoteric series like The Filth and Flex Mentallo.
- There’s a lot of ground to cover. Morrison has lived a very full life, from playing in rock bands to experimenting as a transvestite to becoming, like Alan Moore, a chaos magician. There’s a lot of fertile ground in his personality alone, to say nothing of his sometimes autobiographical comics. In the process, Morrison has become a counterculture icon primed for mainstream crossover.
(AWESOME. Can’t wait to hear Morrison spin some more crazy yarns on his life and work as he is a nutcase! Huge fan. Check out his great speech at the NY Disinfo Con on his alien abduction, chaos magic, life and what it’s about.)
The Parallax View - The Amazing Montage. If you never seen this clip (or the swanky 70s movie) imagine yourself in that chair. It is a great weirdo moment in movie history!
- TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. — Two days before shipping off to war, Marine Pfc. Jesse Sheets sat inside a trailer in the Mojave Desert, his gaze fixed on a computer that flashed a rhythmic pulse of contrasting images.
- Smiling kids embracing a soldier. A dog sniffing blood oozing from a corpse. Movie star Cameron Diaz posing sideways in a midriff top. Troops cowering for safety during an ambush.
- A doctor tracked his stress levels and counted the number of times he blinked. Electrode wires dangled from his left eye and right pinky finger.
- Sheets is part of a military experiment to try to predict who’s most at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder. Understanding underlying triggers might help reduce the burden of those who return psychologically wounded — if they can get early help.
- New PTSD studies are using technology to try to get at the answer. Select Marine and Army units are undergoing a battery of physical and mental tests before deployment including genetic testing, brain imaging and stress exams. They are followed in war zones and upon return.
Make an animated sasquatch do whatever you want. (via)
