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Tuesday, February 21, 2006
I’ve heard people make the claim that Internet friendships cannot compare to those in the real world. There’s a strong case for that. I’ve also heard people say that those you interact with on a though a computer are not, can not, be your real friends. And that is a load of bullshit.
I’ve also heard a lot of complaints about the various message boards in the small horror fiction pool. There is sometimes a bit of animosity between the camps, and I don’t quite understand that. Aren’t we all supposed to be if not friends, than associates for the same cause?
Shocklines is the probably biggest and most populated MB that is devoted to horror writing, and as such it probably takes more heat than most. I’ve heard some intelligently thought out criticisms of Shocklines and I can’t always deny that there is truth to some of the complaints. However, there is no way that Matt Schwartz, or anyone else, can manage a board that size and please everyone. An individual can go nuts trying to do so.
I love the Shocklines the Community and also The Shocklines Bookstore. I’ve went into great detail about the death of my brother, both here and elsewhere. For all the warts and imperfections of the SL community, I would never have been able to get to see him and make peace and say goodbye were it not for them. The love and sympathy and generosity that came forth was staggering. And not only did I get the help I needed to rent a car and get down to Florida, I received dozens of encouraging emails from the community. In my heart, I am equally indebted to all. In one sense, everyone says that they’ll do anything they can and an angry, heartbroken part of me would insist that there is NOTHING anyone on this Earth can do to provide the kind of help that I need. In another sense, all those letters helped me immeasurably.
Which brings me to John Paul Allen. Most of the horror fiction community knows about what happened, but there are some people from other quarters here, so I’ll tell it all. John is a writer. In my opinion, he’s a damned good writer. I first heard about his novel, Gifted Trust, and was interested to learn that the talented Nancy Collins edited the book. Reading a brief description of the plot enticed me to buy a copy. I thought that it was terrific and I have said so publicly many times in the last couple of years.
John was also an enthusiastic and witty member of the community. He would relate side-splitting tales of his unusual family situation, yet he always maintained an absolute love and devotion to his wife. It was touching the way he would say that she was his life. John once sent me a photo of Pam, as he was understandably proud of her.
Pam died a couple of weeks ago. It was sudden and unexpected. When John gave the news at Shocklines, I was stunned. Stunned and shocked and a bit heartbroken. Some might not understand how one could be heartbroken for people he has never met. Those individuals who think that have never known the kind of online community that Shocklines is.
“Pay it Forward” is a corny cliché, there is a universal human decency behind its words. People helped me beyond measure when Rick died. I sent John some money when his wife passed. A lot of the Shocklines people were doing the same thing. If that’s not an example of a great human community, I’m not sure what is.
It’s difficult to ask people to send money and receive nothing in return and I’m not about to ask anyone here to do that. However, the very good folks at Nocturne Press and Biting Dog Press are conspiring to do something else to help. They are collaborating on a short story chapbook from John, called Prader-Willi. ALL proceeds from Prader-Willi will go directly to John. Here’s an opportunity to check out a writer and get a beautifully made chapbook*, as well as help out a decent guy that is in need of a boost. I can’t promise that you’ll like John Paul Allen’s writing, or this story, but I think that you will.
If you’ve ever been at your darkest hour and someone lent a hand, maybe you can spend six lousy bucks and help out with this situation. I’m asking you to do it. Most of us can afford six dollars and if you can’t, I understand that too. God knows that I’ve gone weeks where I am counting my purchases of the cheapest items I can get at Wal-Mart, desperately afraid that the total will be more than the meager amount of cash at my disposal. But if you can swing it, I’d like to see you get this book.
Thanks for listening and I’ll get off my soapbox now.
http://noctpress.com/pm.htm
*I haven’t seen it yet, but judging from the publications I’ve seen so far from these people, it’s a sure bet that Prader-Willi will be gorgeous
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Saturday, February 18, 2006
I was born in the early 1960’s. It was different then and younger people might have a hard time imagining a time when there wasn’t push button entertainment at one’s disposal at all times. In those days, you took what you could get. That often meant the “Movie of the Week”, usually at 9:00 at night. If you were lucky, you might catch an afternoon matinee. Or, you could stay up and catch the late show. Most cities had horror movie hosts to introduce and give more or less funny comments about the film.
About the time I got into high school, premium cable channels were getting big. This was HOT STUFF. Now, for the first time (for most people), one could see women in various stages of undress and also scenes of violence and gore that never would have made it past the TV networks Standards and Practices board. It was an exciting time for me and a lot of other people.
Rolling along a few more years, I started hearing about movies on tape. If you had big bucks, you could get a machine that played movies on your own television. Of course, everyone now knows where that was going to go. An old friend of mine was a longtime employee of Erols and told me this story: Erols was the first pioneer of home video distribution. At first Erols sold tapes to people. Then, a friend of the company president asked to borrow a tape and when he returned it, he gave him a few bucks as gratitude for the loan. An idea was born…loan or more accurately, rent out tapes of movies and charge the viewer for it. From that simple beginning, the way we watched movies was forever changed. Even the way movies were made was affected by the phenomenon. It began to seem like a movie’s theatrical run was more of a promotion for the more lucrative home video market than anything else.
And brother did the business boom.
I remember when I bought my first VCR. What a happy day that was. This was in 1985, I think. I even remember the first movies I got with my brand new Erols video card: Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs and George Romero’s The Crazies. I was hooked, Jack. From that night on, I rented about two movies a night. What a time it was and the dreams of every true blue movie fan had come true. And better yet, you could make illegal copies of the tapes you borrowed to watch them over and over again. Many people obsessively taped just about every movie we rented. God, I must have spent enough to feed a small third world country’s population with what I spent on rentals and blank VHS tapes in those days.
Of course, people being the way they are, an ugly dark side came of the home video revolution. While some innocently taped movies to enjoy them again, others did so for profit. Bootlegging. It’s easy to assume that movie studios have more money than God and can afford the meager losses they took from the VHS pirates, but every thief from a homeless pickpocket to CEOs of huge corporations justify and rationalize their actions in the same manner. Bootlegging movies undermines the right and proper way that filmmakers get their product out to the movie lovers. I know that there are gray matters in the equation, but I believe that the system works by feeding the machine that gives us the movies.
I wonder how many hours I spent in video stores. I’d browse the aisles and look at just about every tape in the store. It was a great place to meet like-minded movie lovers. I became well known to the managers of various stores that I frequented and they would often let me take tapes home for free, sometimes before they were legally available for rent. I’d critique them and help out the staff in a lot of ways.
Remember when just about any store you’d go to had movie rentals? Mom and Pop grocery shops, convenience stores, music stores, just about everywhere. It was cool seeing movies like that all over the place. And product started piling up in them. All kinds of movies. If it had a catchy title or attractive packaging, people probably would take a chance on it. Oh man, I wince when I think of some of the turkeys that I brought home. Deadtime Tales. Redneck Zombies. Flesh Eating Mothers. Psychos in Love. Creepozoids. Some of them were incredibly inept, yet conveyed such charm that they became beloved favorites. I’m talking about stuff like Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Sorority Girls in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama and dozens more. The getting was good and would-be filmmakers were doing crackerjack business cranking out the cheese.
Of course, as will happen, dark clouds began to form. Blockbuster Video began attempting to monopolize the entire home video industry. Erols, once the biggest of them all, saw the portents and sold out to BB. The Mom and Pop places started cutting out their rental programs. They could not compete. Rumors of Blockbuster making demands of studios started brewing and the whole place started leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I tore up my Blockbuster card and patronized the few remaining small companies.
There was another format that home viewers used all this time. Laserdiscs. About the size of an old record album, laserdiscs promised better sound and visual quality and even provided extra features in addition to the movies. Alas, I never owned a played and only watched movies on them a few times in my life.
By the mid-to-late 1990’s, I had a wall of videotapes. Factory tapes, mind you. I had several shelves of my own recordings, which I watched with less frequency. Many of them never even got labeled and I never seemed to have the time or energy to go through them and identify them.
Of course, the industry was rumbling with something new about that time. People were weary of their creaky, cumbersome tape collections. Rewinding was a drag and excessive tracking could cause problems for the tapes. There was a new format for movies being talked about. Digital technology, but this time they were the size of compact discs. It quickly looked like DVD was going to be THE wave of the future. A marriage of compact discs and CD-ROMs in one comfortable package.
I bought my first DVD player in 1998. Few people had them in those days and my Sony player was a marvel. I still remember the first DVD that I bought. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Once more however, , an industry giant attempted to compromise the format. Remember Circuit City and their DIVX debacle? I never liked the concept of DIVX and I would talk people out of buying a DIVX player if I knew that they were considering it. It was a War for the future of home video and this time, the good guys won. The people said NO and DIVX was defeated. NOTE: This is not the same DIVX that is currently used in Internet video applications.
Unlike VHS, the DVD market was, for the most part, aimed directly at fans. VHS tapes were often priced ‘for rental’ and would cost sixty, seventy, eighty or even a hundred dollars and very few individuals would buy them. This was done to keep the movie rental market booming. Now, what real fan wanted to return a movie after a night or two when there were documentaries, commentaries, hidden features and every other imaginable extra content in the package? Especially when DVDs were so reasonably priced. Savvy fans knew to get a desired disc in the first week of release to get an even better bargain. Then there was the attraction of owning a lifetime copy of a movie when you bought it. Care for a disc and it will theoretically last long after our deaths.
If VHS made people crazy, DVD made them certifiable. In a couple of years, all or nearly all movie lovers had DVD players and they also had rapidly growing collections of movies. I had been replacing my tapes with DVDs. Eventually; I gave away all but a few of my tapes to the local library. DVD was here to stay.
Another great thing about DVD is the relative ease that a filmmaker has in getting his or her movie out and distributed. True independents are out there putting their movies out and doing their own distribution over the internet. DIY creation at its finest.
One complaint that a lot of people currently have is about movies they’ve already bought on DVD and come a year or so later, a bigger, better Special Edition or Director’s Cut is released. I’m kind of on the fence about it. Some obviously seem to be done for reasons of cynical greed, yet there are legitimate reasons for others. More people are getting surround sound systems and most of the older DVDs aren’t in that format.
So, by all appearances, it is nirvana for movie fans. Right? Right. But have we lost something along the way? Maybe.
In the old days, before all this push button convenience, I’d sit through just about any movie that happened to come on. Many of them I hated, but there were some that just seemed okay, but the story mounted and by the end I was really glad that I stuck with it. How often do you pop in a movie and get bored and turn it off? I do it a lot, I’m afraid to say. It seems that fewer people have patience to sit though something challenging. Then there are the extras. Back about 15 years ago, if there was a special on TV about the making of a movie, most particularly a horror movie, I’d tape it and watch it over and over again. Fascinated about an inside look at the creation of a movie. Now, I grow bored with seeing behind the scenes documentaries. Jaded. The magic of the movies is demystified about the sheer amount of information that has become available about them.
And the very worst thing of all about the home video explosion? I think it was a major factor in the demise of the drive in as we knew it. The thrill of the drive in was seeing sleazy movies that you couldn’t see elsewhere. Plus, you could drink and party all you wanted at them, as long as you and your friends kept fairly cool. When home video became the number one source of movie viewings, one of the first casualties was the Great American Drive In Theater. Sure, some are still around, but they are more of a curiosity; a nostalgia. A place to take the kids for a taste of what it used to be like.
As for me, I’m still as obsessed as ever with movies. Nothing has changed in that regard. My friends scratch their heads in befuddlement at my movie collection and I still spend much more than any sane individual ought to on movies. I haunt the bargain bin of DVDs at Wal Mart and I’m constantly searching the internet for deals on used movies. Every week I check Amazon.com to see what DVDs are coming out. If a new format for movies comes out, as I’ve heard rumors about, I suppose that I’ll be as addicted to it as I am with DVD and I was with VHS.
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Friday, February 10, 2006
Hello and welcome to Horror Drive-In. Yes, another horror related website. Just what the world needs, eh?
I hope to do something slightly different here. I want to focus on horror fiction, yes, but also film. With an emphasis on independent productions. It’s an exciting time for burgeoning filmmakers. Digital technology has made it possible for anyone with a computer and appropriate software to edit and get a movie on DVD. Sturgeon’s Law will apply, as always, but the gems that can be found are often worth the search.
Back after the so-called horror fiction boom went bust, a lot of readers were upset and many went to other genres. However, some did something different. When the mass market publishers turned their backs on us, they took matters into their own hands. Small press publishers began popping up. It was a shaky start for some and many bit the dust along the way. Yet, the ones that provided good service and used smart judgment in what they published have flourished.
Horror films are big again. Tickets are selling and seats in theaters are filling up. Yet the true fans of horror are largely disappointed (to say the least) by the majority of the films that were released. For the most part, they are too slickly produced and had generic actors in ridiculously contrived situations. The gore factor is usually compromised as well.
Wait…in the old days, when splatter fans rejoiced over movies like Friday the 13th and its many sequels and imitations, there were generic actors. Ridiculously contrived situations. Shitty effects. What’s the difference?
There is a big difference, I think. Big budgets ruined the charm (if you can call it that) of horror films. There’s something pleasing about watching a low budget horror movie. It takes me back to simpler days. Me and a car full of buds packed in with a case or two of beer at the drive in. I’m old enough to have been there for the tail end of the great drive in era in America. It was a magic time and it’s difficult to accurately describe it to younger folks. I spent many of the happiest hours of my late youth in outdoor theaters and I never had a bad time. Oh, we saw plenty of bad movies, but the spirit of the drive in made it all not only worthwhile, but almost…magic.
Yes, there are still drive in theaters and God bless every owner that struggles to keep them alive. They are the exception rather than the rule these days, and they are no longer the forbidden passion pits of old. Today’s drive ins generally bring in the family crowds. But they are there, hulking cathedrals that honor the gods of car chases. Buxom women. Deranged lunatics. Scaly monsters with zippers down the back. Juvenile delinquents. Dope, booze and bad girls. The Holy Communion is too-sweet soda pop and salty popcorn. Bad pizza and soggy cabbage rolls. Blistering hot dogs and overpriced candy. I miss it with all my heart.
Getting back to horror movies past and present, there has generally been one prevailing criticism about them. The writing. A decent script can make a modestly budgeted motion picture into a minor classic. As I said, there are a lot of indie filmmakers out there and while many of them have a good eye for photography and a feel for working their performers, they are not writers. Not really. One thing I hope to do is try to keep a balance of features about fiction writers and indie filmmakers and draw them both to the forum.. Hollywood has failed us. Just the way New York publishers failed us years ago. There are dozens of writers out there with a lot of good material and there are independent filmmakers out there looking for projects to make. There may not be a lot of money in these kinds of productions, but what writer doesn’t want to see his or her work on a screen? There have been some low budget movies made from horror novels and stories. King has his many dollar babies out there and there was a so-so, but well-intended movie made from F. Paul Wilson’s Midnight Mass. Lee’s Header. Kealan Patrick Burke and Harry Shannon are involved in small movie productions. At present I’ve seen no episodes of Masters of Horror, but the feedback I’ve gotten has been mixed, at best. At least some real writers from within the genre have been involved. Horror’s biggest hope at the movies is currently Richard Chizmar’s Chesapeake Films. It’s not enough. Maybe the genre can start to go off into a different direction with more low/no budget filmmakers doing projects from our favorite writers. The time is now. The future is here. What are we waiting for?
---Mark Sieber
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