Tag: Columns

Paper Cuts: Binge Smarter: 4 Film Books Every Horror Fan Should Read (and Movies to Go With Them)

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PaperCuts-web

Paper (n): material manufactured in thin sheets from the pulp of wood or other fibrous substances, used for writing, drawing, or printing on
 
Cut (v): make (a movie) into a coherent whole by removing parts or placing them in a different order.

Binge Smarter: 4 Film Books Every Horror Fan Should Read (and Movies to Go With Them)

danseSo far this column has been about two things: horror fiction and horror film. And where they overlap. With various digressions where it has suited my mood.

But the name “Paper Cuts” is broad enough that it shouldn’t limit our book discussions purely to fiction titles. Right?

In that spirit, here are four nonfiction film books (some criticism, some history, some reference) that I think every horror film fan should read.Continue Reading

What I Learned From Stephen King: What Makes a Great Teacher

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories What I Learned from Stephen KingTags , , , 3 Comments on What I Learned From Stephen King: What Makes a Great Teacher

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What Makes a Great Teacher

1.

kingteach1With a title like What I Learned From Stephen King, I suppose at some point you and I are going to need to sit down and discuss the subject of teachers. I also suppose now would be as good a time as any.

Stephen King once said, “Good teachers can be trained, if they really want to learn. Great teachers, like Socrates, are born.” He should know. He taught writing to high school students at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine, plus spent a year teaching as a writer-in-residence at his alma mater, the University of Maine, in the late 1970s while still establishing himself as a writer. Continue Reading

Horror Drive-In: Dear Mr. Death

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Horror Drive-InTags , , , , 1 Comment on Horror Drive-In: Dear Mr. Death

HorrorDrive-In-web

Dear Mr. Death

Mark Justice
Mark Justice

Dear Mr. Death,

I understand that you have a job to do. I don’t like it, any more than I like the job done by the taxman. I guess both are necessary evils. We all have an appointment with you, sir, though I do regret that engagement. I am trying to accept the inevitability. Yet I feel that you have been working overtime too much of late.

You’ve taken famous people we’ve known all of our lives. Friends, family members. Your given duty, I realize, but perhaps you could take a holiday. An extended one.Continue Reading

Horror Drive-In: Retro Drive-In Snowstorm

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Horror Drive-InTags , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments on Horror Drive-In: Retro Drive-In Snowstorm

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Retro Drive-In Snowstorm

vhsTimes change. People change. Priorities change.

I was one of the most enthusiastic and money-stupid movie/home video fanatics you ever met. This lasted from the early days of VHS on through the DVD revolution and the decline of interest in physical media. I watched at least a movie a night, and often it was more than that. The memories are great, and I loved every every minute of it.

I always loved the movies, and I am old enough to remember times even before cable TV. I loved all kinds of motion pictures, and I enjoyed them at home on TV, in walk-in movie houses, but especially at drive-in movie theaters. There wasn’t, isn’t, and never will be a greater place to enjoy a movie than under the stars, with the biggest screen in all of history up there against the night sky.Continue Reading

Paper Cuts: Option This! Vol. 2

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Paper CutsTags , , , 1 Comment on Paper Cuts: Option This! Vol. 2

PaperCuts-web

Paper (n): material manufactured in thin sheets from the pulp of wood or other fibrous substances, used for writing, drawing, or printing on
 
Cut (v): make (a movie) into a coherent whole by removing parts or placing them in a different order.

Option This! Vol. 2

Hey y’all. Happy New Year!

Back in August I posted up a list of three literary works (two novels and a short story) that I think are ripe for film or television adaptation. You can click over to that article and check it out, along with a quick rationale behind why I like adaptations, for the most part.

This month’s article was originally going to be about something different, but that idea has now become so research intensive that it’s threatening to become a two-parter.

I was reminded to run another “Option This!” column last week when I saw a post on author Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Facebook page: Skullcrack City, one of the books I recommended that Hollywood jump on last time, is inching closer to actually becoming a movie.Continue Reading

Horror Drive-In: Why I Dislike 'Star Wars'

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Horror Drive-InTags , , , , , 8 Comments on Horror Drive-In: Why I Dislike 'Star Wars'

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Why I Dislike Star Wars

SWPosterI was sixteen years old when Star Wars came out. Sure I saw it. Who didn’t? But allow me to go even farther back in time than that.

Science Fiction was always important to me. I had the advantage of having older siblings. Three brothers, and they all read SF. I was introduced to the genre very early on, and in fact the very first real book I read was Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Space Suit – Will Travel. Despite its unsophisticated title, it is a smart novel that is at once a satire, a rousing adventure story, and a sober look at the mechanics of human life in low or zero gravity.

From Heinlein I went on to others, like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. These guys, and maybe a few others, were about the extent that my brothers delved into the genre. Me, I went on to read it voraciously.Continue Reading

What I Learned from Stephen King: 'Cujo' and Other Grown-Up Monsters

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories What I Learned from Stephen KingTags , , , , , 7 Comments on What I Learned from Stephen King: 'Cujo' and Other Grown-Up Monsters

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Cujo and Other Grown-Up Monsters

cujocoverConsidered to be one of his darkest works, Stephen King’s Cujo is not for the cowardly. It is relentless in its forward motion, coming at you “like a brick heaved through a window,” as King himself once described.

It’s frightening. It’s gruesome. It’s savage. It’s violent.

It’s also incredibly depressing. Continue Reading

Paper Cuts: The Paper Cuts 2015 Holiday Gift Guide

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The Paper Cuts 2015 Holiday Gift Guide

I’ve made no secret about using this column to bridge the gap between the sometimes-at-odds and sometimes-overlapping horror fiction and horror film fandoms.

But if there’s one thing that unifies all varieties of horror obsessives, it’s our love of crass consumerism and physical media.

In that spirit, I thought I’d make this month’s installment of Paper Cuts a kind of public service. You can email this article to family and loved ones, make the subject heading “I found this interesting” and BOOM! you’ve got some sweet gifts coming to you this holiday season.Continue Reading

Horror Drive-In: The Book is Usually Better

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Horror Drive-InTags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments on Horror Drive-In: The Book is Usually Better

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The Book is Usually Better

You hear it all the time: The book is always better than the movie adaptation. Oddly, I mostly hear it from non-readers. They wearily repeat the mantra they’ve heard from tiresome readers like us. “I know, I know, the book is always better.”

But is it? The source novel of any adaptation is certainly much, much, better in most instances. Nearly all of them, in fact.Continue Reading

What I Learned from Stephen King: 'The Long Walk' of Life

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories What I Learned from Stephen KingTags , , , , , 12 Comments on What I Learned from Stephen King: 'The Long Walk' of Life

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The Long Walk of Life

longwalkart1BEFORE THE WALK

I was having brunch with a friend of mine on a recent Sunday, a horror film actress in fact, who asked: Do you really think there’s anything spiritual about Stephen King’s books?

The question was served cold with a heaping side of skepticism, and it took me slightly off guard. It’s not the first time I have been asked the question since starting this column three short months ago, and I’m always somewhat alarmed by it.

When asked, the first thing that springs to my mind is self-doubt: What if I’m wrong? What if there really is nothing spiritual about Stephen King’s stories and I’m just grasping at straws here? What if I’ve doomed myself to write a monthly column about… nothing? The writer’s worst nightmare.  Continue Reading

Antics on the Web: Dick Cavett’s Horror Roundtable

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Antics on the Web, The Comic VaultTags , , , , , , , , 1 Comment on Antics on the Web: Dick Cavett’s Horror Roundtable

Antics on the Web: Dick Cavett’s Horror Roundtable
by Robert Brouhard

Cavett_RoundtableAn interview with Stephen King is always a must read, an interview with George A. Romero can be a ton of fun, an Ira Levin interview is always interesting, and a Peter Straub interview is always eye-opening. Now, an interview with ALL FOUR at the same time… scratch that… a full-on hour-long discussion between the four of them, WOW. Mind-blowing. As soon as I heard that Shout Factory TV was hosting a two-part Dick Cavett discussion with these four amazing people, I started clicking my way to see it. Continue Reading

Paper Cuts: Hustling at Horror Cons 101 or: Dispelling the Myth of the Non-Reading Horror Fan

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Paper CutsTags , , , , , Leave a comment on Paper Cuts: Hustling at Horror Cons 101 or: Dispelling the Myth of the Non-Reading Horror Fan

PaperCuts-web

Paper (n): material manufactured in thin sheets from the pulp of wood or other fibrous substances, used for writing, drawing, or printing on.
 

Cut (v): make (a movie) into a coherent whole by removing parts or placing them in a different order.

Hustling at Horror Cons 101 or: Dispelling the Myth of the Non-Reading Horror Fan

“This is a tough convention,” he says, eyeing our books, picking one up and testing the spine like he’s squeezing an avocado, going to make a little word guac. “It’s especially tough for books. Nobody here reads.”

I don’t know this guy.

Don’t even know him in the sense that I know what it is he does. He could be an indie film actor, a fellow writer, a grey-market DVD vendor. He could be anything that would allow him to be in Worcester, Massachusetts’s DCU Center a half hour before this year’s Rock and Shock convention opens.

Looking back on this interaction now, it’s hard to tell if he was trying to psych us out or if he actually believed that no one who attended the convention read books.Continue Reading

Antics on the Web: Free (Official!) Full-Length Horror Movies on YouTube? Yes Please!

Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Antics on the WebTags , , , , , , Leave a comment on Antics on the Web: Free (Official!) Full-Length Horror Movies on YouTube? Yes Please!

Antics on the Web: Free (Official!) Full-Length
Horror Movies on YouTube? Yes Please!
by Robert Brouhard

TexasChainsawMassacrePart2(onesheet)1.jpgWhat do The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The Loved Ones, The Sender, The Colossus of New York, Circle of Eight, Beneath, The Deadly Bees, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, In Dreams, Shanks, Ghost Team One, and Rumpelstiltskin all have in common? They are all available free on YouTube thanks to Paramount Pictures Corporation starting their own channel there called The Paramount Vault.

Many of these were on Netflix and other pay services before, but now anyone can watch them online (if it’s rated R, like Bound, you’ll have to have a YouTube account).Continue Reading

Stephen King: News from the Dead Zone #183 (Haven part 5a)

Author Bev VincentPosted on Categories Stephen King News from the Dead ZoneTags , , , , , 1 Comment on Stephen King: News from the Dead Zone #183 (Haven part 5a)

Haven is set to return on October 8th for its final season. You may not have time to catch up on the 13 episodes that make up Season 5A, so this is a synopsis of events that I hope you’ll find helpful. If you want to read my posts about the characters and previous seasons, you can start here and work your way back. I’ll be updating the Who’s Who with info from Season 5A in due course, and I’ll have a sneak peak of Season 5B for you soon: I’ve already seen the first two episodes. Stay tuned. The game is changing in many different ways.Continue Reading