V/H/S/2, Occult, and Special Effects in Found Footage Movies

One of the things that I love about the horror genre is its unique relationship with low-budget filmmaking. Cheaply-made terror trashfests have been a dime a dozen for decades, but on the other hand I cannot imagine where horror films would be today without low-budget classics such as Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Thus, it makes sense that the subgenre of found footage films, films that deliberately look rough and amateurish, has made its home in horror. There are exceptions to the rule (such as Cloverfield, which relied on high-quality CGI effects and green screen composite shots), but the found footage subgenre has largely been populated by filmmakers of limited resources.

With that in mind, what happens when a filmmaker decides to make a found footage film due to budgetary limitations but also wants to include special effects? This post will look at that question through the approaches taken by two found footage titles, V/H/S/2 (2013) and Occult (2009). Both incorporated special effects outside of the usual blood-and-guts stuff, each with varying levels of success. Read on for my analysis, with minor spoilers for both films.

Like the original V/H/S film, V/H/S/2 is a combination of found footage and anthology storytelling; also like its predecessor, it demonstrates that found footage and anthologies don’t really mix. None of the stories presented in V/H/S/2 are enhanced by the found footage visual style, and they might have been scarier had they not been found footage films at all. (This especially applies the story titled "Phase I Clinical Trials", where the protagonist receives an ocular implant that records his everyday life. Because the protagonist has no choice to record everything he sees, this story should have worked as a found footage short. It doesn't.) Even the best story of the bunch, an unexpectedly poignant zombie tale called “A Ride in the Park”, doesn't feel like it had to be shot in a found footage style in order to be effective.

The eco-friendly, mountain biking zombies from "A Ride in the Park" in V/H/S/2.

For as gory as it is--and believe me, it is very gory in some areas--V/H/S/2 features two stories that attempt to include monsters as part of the narratives. "Safe Haven" involves a goat-headed demon, while "Slumber Party Alien Abduction" involves a group of gray-skinned space invaders; unfortunately, both types of monsters look like actors in monster suits. Furthermore, the directors of both stories felt compelled to shoot their parts in a gonzo, over-the-top style, as if the visual overload will compensate for the unconvincing monsters.

"Safe Haven" layers on as much violence and gore as possible and even though the demon has a single line a dialog that ends the story on a morbid, twisted note, the demon’s bouncing goat head on top of a human-proportioned body emphasizes just how hokey the whole story actually is. In contrast, "Slumber Party Alien Abduction" tries to compensate for its low-budget monsters by becoming much shakier than most found footage films. If the idea of shaking a camera as hard as possible to compensate for low-budget creature effects sounds like a bad idea to you, then you know what to expect in "Slumber Party Alien Abduction".

The uninvited guests from "Slumber Party Alien Abduction" in V/H/S/2.

Then again, V/H/S/2 doesn't completely fail when it comes to special effects. The zombie effects in "A Ride in the Park" are convincing, and there’s an eerie creature that appears towards the end of "Tape 49", the main story that ties all the other stories together. The creature skitters along the floor by doing a contorted form of spider walk, and it's one of the most convincing and chilling effect shots in the film. Of course, it also helps that the footage of the creature are fleeting, unfocused and poorly lit--enough to engage the imagination, but not enough to see through the effect.

In contrast to V/H/S/2, Occult (a.k.a. Okaruto) is a single-story found footage film that begins with a documentary team’s investigation of a sudden killing spree at a tourist resort a few years earlier. Their research takes them to one of the attack’s survivors, a homeless drifter who wanders from temp job to temp job. The crew’s interaction with the drifter becomes plagued by a series of increasingly strange events, and the drifter slowly reveals his belief that the attack was a sign from a supernatural force that he has been chosen to perform a special "ceremony" that will allow him to ascend to another dimension.

The director of Occult, Koji Shiraishi, is known for other found footage horror films, including the excellent Noroi (2005). In Occult, Shiraishi incorporates special effects into several of the scenes, including strange, nebulous shapes that appear in the sky whenever the drifter is present and a final shot that shows the fate of the drifter. Unfortunately, none of these effects are convincing, so why Shiraishi used them both during the film and in the film's final frames seems like a serious misstep on his part. After all, he did use special effects in Noroi but those were simple effects that succeeded in conveying an eerie, ghostly mood, so I don’t understand his difference in approach for Occult. Yet in spite of weak special effects, Occult works because of the strength of the story, its convincing characters, and its mood of dread that gradually increases throughout the movie.

Occult: Sky worms from another dimension?

It may sound like a cliché that good acting, direction and writing can save a film with weak special effects, but Occult shows that this rule also applies to found footage films. This also explains why an anthology format doesn't work for found footage: With so little time to build a narrative, characters and mood, it’s no wonder that most of the stories in V/H/S/2 went straight for explicit visual shocks even though the low-budget effects used to provide the shocks fail to deliver. Ultimately, found footage works best with stories that emphasize mystery, suspense, and the unknown, while visual effects are better left to filmmakers with bigger budgets.

The Thing 2011 Prequel: Body Horror from Another World

When I first heard about Universal's production of a prequel to John Carpenter's classic The Thing (1982), I wasn't sure what to think. I loved Carpenter's movie, and I kept up with many of its unofficial sequels, such as the three Dark Horse Comics miniseries and the 2002 video game by VU Games. In fact, if you love horror/sci-fi stuff like I do, it's impossible not to notice the lasting influence of The Thing--both in terms of Carpenter's direction and Rob Bottin's innovative creature effects work--in other movies (Isolation, Splinter), TV shows (Something is Out There, Threshold) and video games (Resident Evil, Dead Space). With so many pseudo-Things scurrying around out there, I was disappointed that we Thing fans never got a big-screen return trip to the freezing Antarctic to see more of what cinema's most terrifying shape-shifter could do. Yet with Hollywood's recent tendency to remake and reboot all sorts of horror and sci-fi titles and franchises, I couldn't help but approach news of the prequel with some trepidation, that a new version of the inherently messy and bleak Thing would be dumbed-down and sanitized for a new audience.

Fortunately, the 2011 prequel to The Thing proved to be much better than what I had imagined it could be. Sure, it doesn't reach the same level of intense fatalism as Carpenter's movie (very few movies do), but it still works as a fitting prologue to the grim fate that later befalls the crew of Outpost 31. Considering the amount of studio interference that plagued this film, which features explicit displays of gloriously grotesque body horror, such an accomplishment is worthy of appreciation. Read on for my complete review and a few thoughts as to why both Thing movies are among the most feral and ferocious body horror films ever to hit the silver screen--which may be why they both flopped in the first place.

As its prequel status suggests, The Thing depicts the events that lead up to the 1982 movie of the same name; like its predecessor, it is also based on the short story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell Jr. In the prequel, a team of Norwegian and American scientists discover an enormous alien spacecraft buried deep below the surface of Antarctica, as well as what appears to be one of its passengers. After they take the frozen alien back to their base camp, it thaws to reveal its true nature: a highly infectious creature that can assume the appearance of any organism, including humans.

I'll begin this review by saying that as horror movies go, Carpenter's The Thing is a very tough act to follow. His movie bombed at the box office and was trashed by critics when it debuted in 1982. The critics who panned it dismissed it as nothing more than exploitation-style horror that placed gory special effects ahead of plot and characters, so anyone who would do a continuation of Carpenter's film with the same amounts of gore and gloom was inevitably going to face at least some of the same critical backlash as he did. For example, Roger Ebert gave the 2011 The Thing the same number of stars as the 1982 The Thing, and he still concluded that the first adaptation of Campbell's story, 1951's The Thing From Another World, is superior that its subsequent adaptations. Let's face it: Gory horror is tough for some to find entertaining, but gory horror that's also drenched in bottomless despondency is an act of cinematic sacrilege for many.

Another problem with doing any kind of continuation of The Thing is rooted in the titular monster itself, because the creature is almost impossible to stop due to its ability to attack and survive on both macro- and micro-biological levels. Such invincibility puts writers into a corner, which leaves them with only three options for continuation:

1. Have a sequel where the protagonists discover an infallible solution to permanently vanquish the monster;

2. Have the monster leave the Antarctic and arrive in a densely populated area, and then focus the narrative on how the protagonists deal with the new, larger-scale Thing outbreak; or

3. Place the monster in another isolated area with a small number of people, which amounts to repeating the original story but in a different location and with different characters.

Obviously, Universal would reject the first option because it would kill the possibility of a franchise, and it would also balk at the hefty price tag that would inevitably come with the second option. (Case in point: This second option is also why we’ll never see an Alien sequel where the biomechanical parasites invade and conquer Earth.) This process of elimination leaves the third option, so The Thing prequel runs with it by filling in a narrative blank space in Carpenter's movie: the ruined Norwegian base scene. However, Carpenter left that scene in his movie deliberately vague for the purpose of stoking the audience's imagination of what the Thing could do to his protagonists. In other words, that scene served the purpose of providing viewers with examples what the Thing is capable of doing, just as how other horror movies show you the aftermaths of attacks and not the attacks themselves (such as in Jaws, Aliens and Se7en) to keep you guessing with nervous anticipation about what can happen next. Thus, basing a prequel on a narrative device designed to provoke the imagination is tricky, because the number of surprises available are limited.

I have to give the prequel's cast and crew credit: From what I saw, they clearly went into this project knowing the limitations with which they were faced and worked efficiently and effectively within them. They changed the aspects to the story that could be different from Carpenter's while at the same time remaining (mostly) faithful to the details that would fit within the narrative framework provided in the 1982 movie. This may sound unoriginal and derivative but considering that this is the third film inspired by a short story that itself was greatly influenced by the H.P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness, I’m not going to quibble about originality and focus instead on execution.

The two most notable changes from its predecessor are the film's character hierarchy and overall mood. In the first Thing, the characters were a group of weary, maladjusted men who seemed to be in the Antarctic because they didn't belong anywhere else; in contrast, the prequel's characters are a team of scientists who just made a revolutionary find and who largely defer to the overbearing authority of Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen), their leader. The prequel's mixed cast of male and female, American and Norwegian characters also works well, allowing the story to play around with interpersonal tensions and paranoia in ways that the previous film couldn’t. Indeed, there’s something morbidly ironic about how a completely amorphous organism can exploit differences in gender, nationality, language and professional status--details that are valued greatly as part of being human--to its advantage.

Following the new set of characters, the prequel’s tone is lighter (at least initially) than Carpenter’s film. Part of this is due to the film’s pacing: While the previous movie moved at a measured pace that allowed for its oppressive dread to permeate the story, the prequel moves along at a much faster rhythm. In fact, once the prequel Thing figures out how to imitate humans, it doesn't take long for it to tear through its available human prey. Such a pacing allows the new Thing movie to provide a series of intense shocks in short order, right on up until its hopelessly futile ending. Whereas the characters in Carpenter’s Thing come to embrace the immutable finality of their situation so that they can keep the threat from reaching others, the characters in the prequel frantically run through every solution they can think of to fight the alien menace until there’s nothing left but death itself. The two different portrayals of ice-cold despair complement each other better than you’d imagine.

I could end my review here, but I can’t really do justice to explaining why I enjoyed The Thing unless I go into its elements of body horror. The body horror in the Thing movies is what sets them apart from their most similar cinematic counterparts, the pod clones from the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies. The pod clones have a sense of structure and purpose; in each Body Snatcher film, the clones replace specific people for the greater purpose of replacing all of human society itself. In contrast, the Thing has no greater drive than the insatiable need to propagate its DNA through infection, assimilation and mutation, like a disease. Furthermore, the pod clones are very rational and they will clearly explain their plans for conquering the Earth when they are exposed to be imposters. In contrast, when a Thing is exposed as an imposter, its reaction is purely biological: It erupts into a contorted, asymmetrical arrangement of writhing appendages, toothy orifices, and vestigial parts. Anyone who has ever experienced a sudden and violent loss of control of his or her body--say, because of a grand mal seizure, a severe allergic reaction or an overpowering panic attack--can appreciate what the kind of body horror that The Thing movies are trying to portray.

It has been suggested by some that the horror behind the modern zombie movie is that it's a twisted parody on how many perceive the relationship between mind, soul and body. Religions place the mind and soul as the intangible, everlasting elements of humanity; the modern zombie movie reverses that notion, portraying thousands of reanimated bodies moving around on their own without a single mind or soul among them and quickly overrunning the living through acts of mob violence and raw cannibalism. The Thing takes that conceptual reversal a few steps forward by making its monster the literal manifestation of the biological imperative to survive by passing on DNA, and that the monster's imperative is not limited by any known biological process (such as cognition, digestion, and sexual reproduction) or structures (organs, bones, and skin tissue). Essentially, Carpenter's The Thing and its prequel takes biologist Richard Dawkins' idea of the "selfish gene" and pushes it to its most nightmarish extreme. This kind of body horror rarely appears in the movie theaters and I think that the Thing prequel did a great job at bring it back, however fleetingly. For an alternate reading of the body horror in The Thing prequel, click here to read Matthew Haigh’s interpretation on his blog site.

Invasion Tip: When sprouting an appendage to absorb another organism’s DNA, 

be sure that the appendage is capable of secreting large amounts of lube.

Body horror has never been a blockbuster subgenre at the movies. Even when it’s part of what would otherwise be considered as a monster movie, and it could very well be that the notion of losing control of one’s body on a deep, immeasurable level is simply too terrifying for many people. Other body horror-themed films of late, such as Slither (2006) and Splice (2009), also tanked at the box office, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that The Thing prequel tanked as well. But don’t let its failure at the theaters put you off from seeing this movie. If you loved Carpenter’s 1982 movie and appreciate body horror, you should give The Thing prequel a chance to crawl under your skin.

Five Monstrous Melodies for Merry Christmas Madness

Christmas is my second favorite holiday after Halloween. Where Halloween allows you to indulge in all things morbid and spooky, Christmas allows you to wallow in all things colorful, cheerful, and gaudy. Yet with Halloween being my first love, I feel the need to temper my Yuletide warmth with a few ghoulish chills--and what better way to do that than through music?

Here are five musical suggestions I have to keep the horror in even the happiest of holidays, complete with YouTube videos for each. Read on....

5. The Gremlins Theme, by Jerry Goldsmith

Gremlins is one of my favorite Christmas movies (click here to see my list top Christmas movies), so it's only natural to include the theme composed by veteran movie composer Goldsmith as part of my Christmas music recommendations. Not only does it capture the wild, madcap nature of Gremlins, but it's also festive enough in its own right that you could play it as background music at your office holiday party and no one would notice.

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4. "It's The Most Horrible Time of The Year", by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society

Oh, may the Old Ones bless the H.P. Lovecraft Historical society. They produced A Very Scary Solstice, an album of Christmas music that features lyrics tailored to fit snugly within Lovecraft's warped, bleak universe. My favorites on this album are the ones where the darkest of lyrics are set to the most cheerful of melodies; this one is my favorite, with "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fish-Men" ranking a close second.

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3. "Shouldn't Have Given Him a Gun For Christmas", by Wall of Voodoo

There are plenty of Christmas songs out there that involve fire arms in the wrong hands, but none of them are as deliciously deranged as this ditty by Wall of Voodoo. It's like a gory, 50s era public safety film about gun safety that you can dance to on Christmas eve.

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2. "Christmas At Ground Zero", by Weird Al Yankovic

Weird Al may be known for goofy parodies of popular rock songs, but he sure does love gallows humor. This is one of his most merrily morbid songs, about World War III starting on Christmas eve. Adding to the fatalistic festivities is the official video, which blends together atomic bomb footage with vintage Christmas movie clips.

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1. "Red Water", by Type O Negative

This is the only song on this list that doesn't feature an ounce of satirical humor--a rarity for off-center holiday songs--which is why this is one of my favorite Yuletide-themed tunes. Type O Negative was a fantastic band and this song is one of their best, about a man coping with severe personal losses and the tortured memories that come with them during the holiday season by seeking solace in the titular crimson liquid. Goddamn ye merry gentlemen, indeed.

The Narrative of Victor Karloch: Haunted Horrors in Miniature

A friend of mine just let me know about a movie project that sounds like a unique exercise in the genre of horror: The Narrative of Victor Karloch, by Spirit Cabinet.

According to the Spirit Cabinet site, "Victor Karloch is a Victorian ghost story puppet film and live stage performance (at selected theaters) produced by Heather Henson's Handmade Puppet Dreams Films and The Jim Henson Foundation. ... The film incorporates 30" tall bunraku-style rod puppets, shadow puppetry, traditional in-camera effects, and digital atmospheric effects to present a gothic tale narrated by Victor Karloch, an alchemist, ghost hunter, and scholar who has devoted his life to the exploration of the supernatural." Victor Karloch was written by Kevin McTurk, a special effects artist whose previous projects include Batman Returns, Jurassic Park, and King Kong, and it will feature the vocal talents of Christopher Lloyd, Chris Parnell, Lance Henriksen, and Doug Jones.

Judging from the preview trailer on the Spirit Cabinet site, Victor Karloch looks like it's going to be a rich visual treat for horror film fans. Since puppet films are so rare in the U.S. as it is, it's hard to think of a horror film that's performed completely by puppets and miniatures. Yet as the trailer shows, this particular production scale, along with the puppets' physical details and movements, add a distinct sense of dread and disorientation that most live-action horror films lack. Such an unusual approach to telling a cinematic horror tale reminds me of the 2005 film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's short story, "The Call of Cthulhu". That film, which was produced by Sean Branney and Andrew Leman and distributed by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, was produced in a way so that it would appear as if it were a monochrome silent film from 1926, the year when Lovecraft's story was first published. Between Victor Karloch and the Cthulhu adaptation, it seems that unusual tales are best told in unusual ways in order to maximize their impact on audiences.

Alien Terror Times Two: Prometheus and Aliens: Colonial Marines

It looks like next year is going to be a doozy for Alien fans:

* News of a Ridley Scott-directed Alien prequel, entitled Prometheus, has been in circulation since 2009. During the last few weeks, a plot summary of Prometheus appeared online and Scott himself made an appearance via teleconference at an SDCC panel devoted to Prometheus. Each of these instances gave Alien fans broad hints of what to expect from Scott's next contribution to the franchise. According to what has been released about the prequel so far, we'll learn much more about the origins of the derelict, biomechanical alien spacecraft that was first encountered on planet LV-426 by the Nostromo crew in Alien. Prometheus is slated for release in 2012.

* On the video game front, rumors of a first person shooter game called Aliens: Colonial Marines have also been in circulation for years. During the recent E3 conference that was held last month, Sega unveiled a few minutes of demo footage of Colonial Marines to provide an idea of what players will see in the next major Alien game. According to the press release and interviews with game developers, the game will be released in 2012 and will feature missions that take place in the adrift Sulaco spaceship, on LV-426, and in the derelict alien spacecraft itself.

What could these two upcoming releases mean for the future of the Alien franchise? Read on for a few ideas. WARNING: There are some minor spoilers ahead, most of which have to do with Prometheus. If you want to avoid knowing anything about the Alien prequel at this time, stop reading now.

The Alien franchise has been in a mostly dormant state for over a decade. If you consider the only true Alien canon to be the Alien movies, then the last Alien-only film was Alien Resurrection, which was released in 1997. There have been plenty of Alien comic books since then, as well as many Aliens vs. Predator comic books, movies and video games, but nothing that truly advanced the story that started in Alien has appeared in a long time. (Then again, depending on how you look at it, none of the Alien sequels continued the story of the titular Aliens themselves, just the story of Ellen Ripley.)

Many of the problems with the Alien franchise happened behind the scenes of Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. While I appreciate respective contributions of David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet to the Alien franchise, accounts of what took place during the productions of both of their films strongly indicate that neither Fincher nor Jeunet were permitted much creative freedom when dealing with 20th Century Fox, the owner of the Alien license.

The Aliens comic books by Dark Horse provided some solid Alien stories for fans who wanted more deep space horror but most of the comics were little more than minor variations on the plot of Aliens, with Colonial Marines encountering a large hive of Aliens. Even the three-part miniseries story arc of the Alien invasion of Earth--the story that early ads for Alien 3 promised but never delivered--turned out to be anti-climactic and forgettable.

The Alien video games did not fare much better. Most of the games, such as Rebellion's Aliens vs. Predator titles and arcade shooters such as Alien 3: The Gun and Aliens: Extermination were largely first person shooters that either took place between Aliens and Alien 3 or after Alien 3. These games faithfully re-created sounds and settings from all four Alien movies, they didn't do much to push the franchise into new narrative territory. (That said, Rebellion did pull off a pretty impressive feat in their third Aliens vs. Predator game by effectively portraying a sympathetic Alien character known as "Specimen 6".)

The arrival of Prometheus promises to facehug new life into the Alien franchise. Even though this film is billed as a prequel, it looks like the story of Prometheus will expand the scope of the Alien saga considerably. According to the plot summary that has been released, the prequel is about the crew of a spaceship named Prometheus that are sent (presumably by Weyland-Yutani) to find the home world of the "ancient astronauts" who were responsible for humanity's existence on Earth. Given that this is a prequel, it's safe to assume that the home world that is found is also the home world of the Aliens and the dead Space Jockey that was seen in Alien. Whether the Space Jockey was one of the original ancient astronauts or one of their biomechanical creations remains to be confirmed.

On the basis of this plot, a few intriguing notions come to mind:

* I've read for years since the release of Aliens that many people--Alien franchise fans, cast and crew alike--would love to see an Alien sequel take place on the Alien home world. We're finally getting that kind of a story, but it's happening in a prequel, not a sequel. Does this mean that Prometheus is setting the stage for a series of stories that complement the Alien saga but take place on a much larger scale?

* One of the best things about the original Alien is how it captured the essence of the movie's single word title. Between the performances by the cast, the visual disigns by H.R. Giger, Ron Cobb and Chris Foss, and the direction of Scott, the movie conveyed the feeling of what it would be like to encounter an unknown and truly alien life form for the first time, in all of its messy, disorienting and chest-bursting glory. Few other monster movies capture that kind of a feeling and without it, I doubt that the original Alien story as written by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon would've had nearly the same impact. With Scott and Giger both involved in Prometheus, I wonder if they'll be able to take audiences back into the dark, terrifying and biological unknown.

* Even though the concept of "ancient astronauts" is closely associated with Erik von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods and has been used by many other science fiction narratives (including Paul W.S. Anderson's Alien vs. Predator movie), Prometheus looks to be plunging headlong into H.P. Lovecraft territory of "ancient gods from beyond the stars". It's only fitting--Alien obviously used Lovecraft's single novella, At the Mountains of Madness, as a point of inspiration and it looks like we'll be seeing more of the same in Prometheus (maybe a nod to Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness" short story?). With Guillermo del Toro's film adaptation of Mountains of Madness has been postponed indefinitely due to budgetary issues (read: the studios are too cheap to finance it), Prometheus may be the only big-budget Lovecraftian insanity we'll be seeing on the big screen for a long time.

How the plot of Prometheus will affect the release of Sega's Aliens: Colonial Marines game is unknown, but there have been some hints of some link between the two projects. Some have speculated that the long delay of the development and release of Colonial Marines was imposed so that it could be revised to have some connection to Prometheus. I suspect that the game's mission involving the derelict alien spacecraft will feature a connection to the prequel. The ultimate fate of the derelict alien spacecraft was one of the great unanswered questions in the Alien saga, and it could be that the soldiers who investigate the wreckage in Colonial Marines discover new, bone-chilling secrets that previous human visitors to LV-426 did not.

For as much as the game play imitates the action sequences of Aliens (as well as the game play of other Alien games that feature colonial marines), preview footage from Colonial Marines indicates that this will probably be the most visually impressive Alien game to date. Furthermore, Colonial Marines will be released on the upcoming Nintendo Wii U console, a console that promises to add even more levels of interactivity into video gaming than the previous Wii system, interactivity that will be made possible by motion controls, high quality graphics, and a touchscreen display. With so much potential, it would be foolish for 20th Century Fox ignore the opportunity to provide some tie-in between Prometheus and Colonial Marines, so it's just of matter of determining what the exact connection will be and what it will mean for other Alien games (if anything).

Indeed, Alien fans have much to look forward to in the coming year. If you cannot wait that long, though, there is also the upcoming Aliens: Infestation game for the Nintendo DS, which is slated for release this fall. (You can watch a preview video for the game here.) While Infestation promises to include similar settings and situations as Colonial Marines, the DS game will only be a 2D, side-scrolling shooter game; thus, I don't think the DS game will be as intense as Colonial Marines and I doubt that it will have any connections to Prometheus, but it'll be something to pass the time until 2012 arrives.

Dr. Herbert West's Sing-Along Stage Show

In the grand scheme of the arts, I've always suspected that there was an unspoken affinity between the absurdly excessive blood splatter in gory horror films and the absurdly excessive spontaneity of song and dance in musicals. Judging from what noted horror film director Stuart Gordon has been doing these days, I'm obviously not alone.

Gordon is currently helming Re-Animator: The Musical, a musical stage show based on his own classic 1985 zombie film, which was in turn based on a short story by horror master H.P. Lovecraft. It's currently playing at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood, CA, and the production will run until March 27. If the reviews at sites such as Shock Till You Drop, CHUD and Daily Trojan are any indication, this show is a must-see if you're in the area and love tuneful, off-kilter theatrics. It's got a "splatter zone" where the audience is most likely to get hit by fake blood and other wet, squishy debris, and it's also got George Wendt as Dean Halsey, one of the unfortunate characters who is re-animated during the course of the show. (I'm wondering if Wendt exchanged any zombie acting tips with fellow Cheers alum Ted Danson, who also played a walking, rotting corpse in George Romero and Stephen King's Creepshow.) Click here to get your tickets today!

Scary Monsters and Super Creeps on Exhibit

Even though I am mostly an electronic media kind of guy, I do try to keep my eyes open for examples of the horrific in other visual mediums. Thus, I feel a bit red in the face over almost missing an art exhibit of this very kind right in my own backyard. Ending June 12, the Irvine Contemporary art museum in Washington, DC has been hosting "Don't Be Scared, You're Supposed to Be", an exhibit featuring the works of Aaron Johnson and Barnaby Whitfield. While Whitfield's work is disturbing enough in its own right, Johnson is clearly the master of the grotesque. As you can see from the example above, his skill with color, shape and form create images that--while far from photo-realistic--depict gory, malformed nightmares that are normally the sole domain of the subconscious mind. For visual horror fans, Johnson is definitely the artist to watch.

However, if you don't get a chance to make it to DC, never fear--there's plenty of madness happening in Brooklyn, New York this summer. Starting on June 11th and ending on July 23rd, the Observatory is hosting "A Love Craft: Art Inspired by Monsters, Madness and Mythos", an art exhibit in honor of the American horror master himself, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. It sounds like a beastly blast, so be sure to get your tentacled appendages over there before Cthulhu stops calling.