Dawsferatu's House of Horrors

 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 blac...

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...