"This is a honeycomb world. It hides a hollow heart.

The truth of nature, wrote the philosopher Democritus, lies in deep mines and caves. The stability of what is seen and felt beneath our feet is an illusion, for this life is not as it seems. Below the surface, there are cracks and fissures and pockets of stale, trapped air; stalagmites and helactites and unmapped dark rivers that flow ever downward. It is a place of caverns and stone waterfalls, a labyrinth of crystal tumors and frozen columns where history becomes future, then becomes now.

For in total blackness, time has no meaning...

But sometimes that choice is made for us: A piece of the present simply falls away, and ... (more…)

Todd Grimson's STAINLESS begins with an interesting one-two punch: Chapter One is all curt poetry, a sensually entropic present tense blur-dream of L.A. minutaie which plays like a lost page from LESS THAN ZERO. A man--his name is Keith--is sitting in the garden, waiting for someone--her name is Justine. Wondering if she'll go out tonight. Vaguely remembering his hands, which are wrapped in bandages. Really, he doesn't want to do anything, but if there's some reason to go somewhere that's okay too. He'll live. That's the stupid part.

Here, as a contrast, are the first paragraphs of Chapter Two:

Justine is a vampire, and Keith is the human she keeps around to take care of things during ... (more…)

The early 1970s were, to put it mildly, a pretty strange time--not least because that was when a coalition of bright sparks down at Marvel Comics decided it was a good idea to try and make the Antichrist into a super-hero. The result? Daimon Hellstrom: Son of Satan!

First introduced by Gary Friedrich in GHOST RIDER #1, Daimon broke out on his own in MARVEL SPOTLIGHT #12, where his origin was established: He was (oddly enough) the firstborn child of a mortal woman, Victoria Wingate, and the Devil--though this last part would later be ret-conned several times over, eventually revealing Daimon's firey Dad to be less Lucifer himself than "a" demon ruling "a" Hell-like dimension: Maybe the oddly-... (more…)

Down in the Hellishly uterine red-lit bowels of a casino located on the barren volcanic Spanish island of Ubanca, we join an arcane and sinister confrontation already in progress: Two men wearing spotless sand-colored suits face off, across a floor spread with plastic; the taller of the two wears a black bag covering his face. A revolver is loaded with five bullets, the barrel spun. The smaller of the two sticks it to the taller's face, pulls the trigger...only to register the click of an empty chamber.

Moments later, in another room, we hear the sound of the gun going off--and moments after that, the plastic is being wrapped around the smaller man's body. Both will be removed. Both ... (more…)

There's a glorious moment which comes about 45 pages into the most recent reprint of Richard Matheson's HELL HOUSE (Tor, original copyright 1971). One of the four investigators who've stupidly agreed to try and "clean out" the titular stately ghost-filled manor--aka "the Mount Everest of haunted houses"--picks up a neatly typed list of psychic phenomena that've been observed on-site over the years, only to find it goes a li'l something like this:


Apparitions; Apports; Asports; Automatic drawing; Automatic painting; Automatic speaking; Automatic writing; Autoscopy: Bilocation...Dream prophecies; Etcoplasm; Eidolons; Electric phenomena; Elongation; Emanations...Ghosts; Glossolalia; ... (more…)

What I've always loved most about the early works of Robert R. McCammon--those books which first introduced me to him, back in the day--is their sheer ridiculous chutzpah, their gloriously overweening ambition. As McCammon himself notes, in the Afterword to Pocket Books' 1988 re-issue of his 1978 first novel, BAAL: "BAAL is about power, written at a time when I had none. I was twenty-five years old...and working in a department store in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama...You always hear this said to young writers: 'Write what you know.' I wanted to write about things I didn't know, so I consciously set BAAL in locations as far from the South as possible: Boston, the Middle East, and ... (more…)

Truism of the day: The very fact that you can't get hold of something always makes it attractive, no matter its content, theme or--potentially--execution. That's what we really mean, whenever we call a film "transgressive" (quite possibly the most over-used critical term of the new Millennium, short as it's been thus far). Frankly, I'd been planning to write about another film entirely this month...but then I walked into Toronto's own Suspect Video, and asked--off-hand, appropos of nothing much--"you wouldn't happen to have a copy of Claire Denis' TROUBLE EVERY DAY, would you?"

They did. On video, copied from a PAL original. Slightly pixilated and soft around the edges, as though it had ... (more…)

According to some of the sources I've used to research this article, "Cosia Ruim"--the original title of what's now being called the first successful Portugese horror movie--may mean less BAD BLOOD than BAD THING. But BAD BLOOD is what the guys at Tartan Video have chosen to market it under...and while it may be a bit misleading (much like the DVD cover art, which promises a spookily levitating little girl who never--say to say--actually shows up in the film itself), let me be very clear: BAD BLOOD is a damn good thing to run across under any name, especially if you like your horror subtle, smart and exotic.

Right from the credit sequence on--a parade of vaguely disturbing details ... (more…)

"She was unbinding her turban...

He watched, not breathing, a presentiment of something horrible stirring in his brain, inexplicably... The red folds loosened and--he knew then that he had not dreamed--again a scarlet lock swung down against her cheek... a hair, was it? A lock of hair?... thick as a thick worm it fell, plumply, against that smooth cheek... more scarlet than blood and thick as a crawling worm... and like a worm it crawled."

The preceding moment of breathless, eccentric Golden Age horror comes courtesy of C.L. Moore, one of the first women to be regularly published in Weird Tales magazine, and a true pioneer of interstellar creep. The story I clipped it from, "Shambleau" ... (more…)

According to some of the sources I've used to research this article, "Cosia Ruim"--the original title of what's now being called the first successful Portugese horror movie--may mean less BAD BLOOD than BAD THING. But BAD BLOOD is what the guys at Tartan Video have chosen to market it under...and while it may be a bit misleading (much like the DVD cover art, which promises a spookily levitating little girl who never--say to say--actually shows up in the film itself), let me be very clear: BAD BLOOD is a damn good thing to run across under any name, especially if you like your horror subtle, smart and exotic.

Right from the credit sequence on--a parade of vaguely disturbing details ... (more…)