Dawsferatu's House of Horrors

I’ve been driving a lot recently, which means I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. Back episodes, mostly. Weird Studies, Slothcast, Tales from the Mall, and Bad Books for Bad People were all on heavy rotation for a while. Then I got on a Quentin Tarantino kick. He has two ridiculously long appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience and on The Empire Film podcast. They’re both good. I’m probably the last person who’s listened to them. During both interviews, Tarantino pitches the 1980s as a time of cultural stagnation and self censorship. “They won’t let you do that,” was the rule of the day. “They” being the studios (and the viewing public said studios supposedly represent) and “that” being anything overtly violent or sexual. That is, until he came out with Reservoir Dogs in 1992 and single handedly changed the landscape of American cinema. Without Reservoir Dogs , Tarantino argues, we wouldn’t have gotten Se7en or American Beauty . We also wouldn’t have gotten The Boondock Saints

Both Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels (and the adaptations thereof) use vampires as a stand-in for marginalized and/or oppressed groups. In I Am Legend , the vampires are the proletariat; in the Stackhouse books they are variously homosexuals, the X-Men, people of color, et cetera. But where in Matheson’s novella the vampires employ violent means to achieve their Revolutionary ends, Harris’ bloodsuckers take a somewhat subtler approach; opting instead to ingratiate themselves to mortals by appearing opposite Bill Maher on Real Time and opening integrated bars where the undead can mix and mingle with the living. Bill Maher, circa 2008   This evolution in vampiric praxis reflects a sea-change in American politics. When Matheson published I Am Legend in 1954, it likely seemed as if the only way any subversive ideology could gain a foothold in the United States was through violence. Thus, They came at sunset, muttering, snarling, screaming… H

Firefly is a fun show. There’s no denying that. “Wagon Train to the Stars” is a winning concept, as the dozens of Star Trek spin-offs and clones can attest. So long as there are televisions, there will be fat nerds to sit in front of them. I hear The Expanse is doing well. But it isn’t the mystery some people seem to think it is that Firefly got cancelled after just one season: characters routinely act contrary to what the audience is told about them; the set design, while charming, is pretty janky; and Joss Whedon’s dialogue fucking blows, to say nothing of his other proclivities. The list goes on. A cool concept only gets you so far. The Serenity   The problem is they didn’t do anything with the concept. The crew of the Serenity are essentially ex-Confederate guerillas… in SPACE . Firefly could’ve been The Outlaw Buck Rogers , but wound up being closer to Little House on the Planet than anything else. It’s the anti- Trek . The core conceit of the show is an indictment of Rodden

 1. “Your existence is a mistake!” That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes   That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes / Tes Yeux Mourants is a black-and-white existential horror film from visionary painter, actor, and filmmaker Onur Tukel. The film follows Andy (Max Casella) as his personal life descends into chaos against a backdrop of mind bending WiFi signal boosters and grim promises of a coming plague. It’s topical, but That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes manages to transcend its contrivances to deliver a story that’s as timeless as it is bleak. That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes opens--in color--on a happy couple in the process of furnishing their apartment. Andy jokes that his girlfriend (Nora Arnezender) is obsessed with her father Dennis (Alan Ceppos), a world-renowned photographer whose pictures cover nearly every wall of their shared residence. But by the opening credits, the couple’s relationship has soured and reality itself has seemingly begun to decay as well. Everything is black and whi

In an effort to make my corpus more legible to future biographers, I’ve decided to distill/recycle some of my Twitter threads into long(er) form blog posts. What follows is an attempt to do just that. Here’s hoping I was successful. Robert E. Howard’s Conan cycle is fantasy as only an American--and more specifically, a Texan --could conceive of it. Here are tales of degenerate wizards and brave warriors; of monsters and other, less nameable, things lurking in dank dungeons. The crenellated walls of Castle Camelot are as far from the decadent cities of Hyboria as the verdant forests of Wales are from the desolate oil fields of Texas, as are Arthur’s high minded notions of noble chivalry and Christian honor from the titular barbarian’s ethos of rugged individuality and brute strength. Indeed, Howard inaugurated an entirely new sub-genre with the Conan stories; Sword and Sorcery. Robert E. Howard Described by Fritz Leiber in the late 1960s as “an earthier sort of fantasy,” Sword and Sorce

“You are mad, boy, absolutely mad! Vidocq--Rocambole! You mix up legend and history, bracket murderers with detectives, and make no distinction between right and wrong! You would not hesitate to set the heroes of crime and the heroes of law and order on one and the same pedestal!” --President Bonnet chastising Charles Rambert in the opening pages of Fantȏmas New York City It is my contention that the urban fantasy novel ought not simply drop orcs, goblins, wizards, and the like into, say, New York City or Los Angeles and call it a day, but rather that it should work toward making the urban fantastic . The pulp literature of the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s is far closer to my vision of what urban fantasy could be than something like Shadowrun or even Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files . Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantȏmas , Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels, and Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories all elevate cops and criminals to the level of epic heroes-- this is what urba