Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Horror Drive-In3 Comments on Horror Drive-In: 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
BEFORE 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
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Antics on the Web, The Comic Vault1 Comment on Antics on the Web: Dick Cavett’s Horror Roundtable 
An 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
Cut (v): make (a movie) into a coherent whole by removing parts or placing them in a different order.
“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
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Horror Drive-In2 Comments on Horror Drive-In: The Greatest Reading Experience of My Life
Reading has always been one of my greatest pleasures, and recently I began to wonder about something: What has been the most pleasurable reading experience of my life?Continue Reading
What 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
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
Cut (v): make (a movie) into a coherent whole by removing parts or placing them in a different order.
Special Guest: Orrin Grey
The title story in Orrin Grey’s upcoming collection, Painted Monsters, is prefaced by maybe my favorite epigraph of all time:
“For you, the living, this mash was meant too…”
— Bobby “Boris” Pickett
And then I realize that title of the story and collection — which sounded so familiar on first hearing — is actually a reference to one of Boris Karloff’s lines in Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, one of the best horror films of all time, in my opinion.
When we think of the great many characters conjured by the imagination of Stephen King, we most likely think of Carrie White, Annie Wilkes, Jack Torrance or Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Few authors in history have known how to construct such a vast array of multidimensional villains and villainesses. As a result, what gets lost in King’s sea of personalities are his heroes — the most interesting of whom is arguably one Johnny Smith, the main man of The Dead Zone who awakens from a four-and-a-half year coma with a startling new mental capacity to see both people’s past and their future. It’s a power he doesn’t know quite how to control, and one that isn’t without its flaws. Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Horror Drive-In6 Comments on Horror Drive-In: Learning to NOT Act My Age
I’m really not that old. Older than many readers, sure, but, hell, fifty-four is not too old these days. Anyone with at least a few years over me can roar out an accusing, “You’re just a KID!”
Fifty-four isn’t that young either. I’ve been around the block more than a few times, and I’ve been an enthusiastic genre fan for as long as I can remember. I’ve seen the trends: Indian Burial Grounds, Evil Children, Vampires, Serial Killers, Vampires, Transgressive Fiction, Zombies, Gross-out shenanigans. I’ve enjoyed all of these tropes to varying degrees. At least until they became tired cliches. And sooner or later (usually sooner) they all do.Continue Reading
Author Bev VincentPosted on Categories Stephen King News from the Dead ZoneLeave a comment on Stephen King: News from the Dead Zone #182
Next week will be busy for Stephen King. On September 9, he will be appearing in Cambridge, MA in conversation with Lee Child to promote the new Jack Reacher novel, Make Me. The next day, he will be among the eleven individuals receiving the National Medal of Arts from President Obama in the East Wing of the White House. The citation says, “One of the most popular and prolific writers of our time, Mr. King combines his remarkable storytelling with his sharp analysis of human nature. ” Then, on the following day, September 11, he will be a guest on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show during its inaugural week.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Paper Cuts5 Comments on Paper Cuts: Found Footage and the Ever-Evolving Campfire Tale
Cut (v): make (a movie) into a coherent whole by removing parts or placing them in a different order.
Why are so many horror fans so damn conservative? And no, I don’t mean politically conservative, but that would probably be an interesting piece if someone else wanted to write it.
No, I mean why are they conservative when it comes to matters of genre? You’ll frequently hear the statement “everything Hollywood gives us is remakes and found footage these days!” accompanying crotchety diatribes about the “dismal” state of the genre. And to preempt anyone saying this is a straw man argument, I heard a permutation of this from multiple people last month at Scares That Care.
I understand the feelings of resentment towards remakes, on an ideological level. But I don’t share the opinion that remakes are the refuge of the creatively bankrupt.Continue Reading
“If the horror story is our rehearsal for death, then its strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imagination – just one more pipeline to the infinite.” – Stephen King, Danse Macabre
Wisdom can be found in the most unlikely of places, and it is often within the greatest darkness that we find the greatest light.
Alright, alright. I’ll admit they’re clichés – but like most clichés, they also happen to be true. Anyone with a modicum of introspection and a rear view mirror will tell you that it’s the tough times in life we seem to learn and grow from the most. It is the darkness that makes us reach for the light and propels us to examine the human spirit and reevaluate our place and priorities in the world.
If there is anything I learned from Stephen King’s first foray into non-fiction, Danse Macabre, it is that those of us who love a good fright flick or scary read are attracted to the darkness for a wide variety of reasons – many of which leave us with a greater awareness of our inner fears, a questioning of our own mortality, and an increased appreciation that all of our limbs are still intact – or at the very least that our ankles aren’t being hobbled today. Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Horror Drive-InLeave a comment on Horror Drive-In: Pros and Horror Cons
When I mention that I am going to a horror convention, I am invariably asked the same question: Are you going to wear a costume?
Once upon a time, back in more literate days, fantasy conventions mostly consisted of professionals in the field–writers, editors, artists, publishers, etc.–getting together to talk shop. Fans also came to meet and hang out with with the authors whose works they loved.
It’s not so much like that anymore. Oh, most cons have readers, and you’ll see self-published writers along with pros trying to sell their wares. However, the focus has largely shifted away from the written word.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories Paper Cuts1 Comment on Paper Cuts: Option This! Vol. 1
Welcome back, this is the second installment of Paper Cuts, a column about horror film from a horror reader’s (and writer’s) perspective. Huge thanks to everyone who shared the last post, read it, or sent me their thoughts, whether public or private. I was really overwhelmed by the response.Continue Reading
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