I’m no longer using the T Van persona to blog. I still use the name when I call into podcasts but it’s just easier that way.

For the month of October, I’m currently blogging about horror films over at my personal blog.

Check out the 31 Days of Terror at:  http://markwilson.wordpress.com

In addition to my new blog, I can be found at:

Twitter – @markwilson12

FriendFeed – markwilson

Tumblr – markwilson12

It’s time to announce my retirement from the horror blogging game. I’ve had a lot of fun and I really love the genre but I just don’t have the energy to maintain a horror blog.

I would like to thank everyone who has supported this blog and left comments. I would also like to thank John Cozzoli for allowing me to join the League of Tana Tea Drinkers. You should be following the League of Tana Tea Drinkers. I’m amazed at the depth of knowledge displayed by my fellow members of the League.

I’ll probably pop up on the Pop Syndicate forums from time to time. I hope to see you there.

I won’t say this is a permanent goodbye because I’ve gone on hiatus in the past. Who knows what the future holds?

For the time being, I’ll be taking off my gas mask one last time.

I had a chance to finally sit down and watch El Orfanato (The Orphanage) last night. Colour me unimpressed. I didn’t know what to expect. I have been watching a number of Spanish language films lately and I just found The Orphanage to be a bit of a letdown. This is not really a very frightening film. There is one good jump scare in the movie but it’s rather tame by today’s standards.

This film is a slow burn. If you have attention deficit disorder, you’ll have a difficult time with it. I have to admit that I’m not a fan of ghost stories and I found El Orfanato to be just too slow for my liking.

IMDB’s plot summary is relatively concise:

The former orphan Laura raises her adopted son Simón with her husband Carlos in an old house and former orphanage where she was raised. Simón is HIV positive and tells Laura that he has five invisible friends, and she believes they are fruit of his imagination. Laura decides to reopen an orphanage for handicapped children in the location and during the opening party, Simón calls her to show the little cabin of his friend Tomás. The busy Laura does not gives much attention to her son; then she sees a mysterious masked boy and Simón vanishes. Laura feels the presence of other persons in the house and months later, the desperate Laura invites a team of parapsychologists to try to unravel the mystery.

Let me just say that I hated the kid who played Simón. I really had no emotional connection to him. He just seemed like a whiny little brat. Am I cold hearted bastard who hates children with HIV? No. I just hate bratty little punks. What can I say? I’m a dick.

I did like the look of the movie but that’s really not a recommendation. I thought it was well shot and the mask that Tomás wore was pretty creepy looking but that really doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. The set design of the picture was lavish but the story lacked characters that I could relate to or situations that I was invested in.

The good fellers over at Bloody Good Horror recently reviewed The Orphanage for an episode of their most excellent podcast. I would recommend listening to the gents talk about this film. Check out Episode 26 of The Bloody Good Horror Podcast for more information about The Orphanage. Or read John Shelton’s review of The Orphanage over at Bloody Good Horror. Boy, that’s some in-depth coverage for one movie.

This is a bit off topic but if I were to recommend a film that I’ve seen recently, I’d suggest that you watch another Guillermo Del Toro production (did I mention Guillermo Del Toro produced The Orphanage – I guess I just did). Check out Crónicas starring John Leguizamo. It’s not really a horror film but it is about a serial killer who kills children. It is creepy as hell. I love Leguizamo and you’ll be surprised to see him in his first Spanish language film.

Watch the trailer for Crónicas [in English but this is a predominantly Spanish film so if you have an aversion to subtitles, you're an idiot]:

A couple’s evening is interrupted when a strange visitor shows up at their doorstep.

This is a pretty decent short film and you should check it out.

As a member of The League of Tana Tea Drinkers, I’m pleased to present a guest post by Arbogast on Film. Arbogast tackles the Jewishness of Last House on the Left in the following post. Enjoy!

And be sure to visit Arbogast on Film at http://arbogastonfilm.blogspot.com.

My first reaction upon seeing photos of the cast of the 2008 remake of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT was “Funny, they don’t look Jewish.”

I consider Wes Craven’s LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) to be one of the great unintentional blood libels of the latter half of the 20th Century. I don’t think for a minute that Craven is anti-Semitic but rather that he, like all of us, carries with him learned associations that exist apart from his conscious mind. Just as David Lynch has in the past identified a sense of evil in effeminacy (BLUE VELVET) and ethnicity (WILD AT HEART), Wes Craven particularizes in LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT his perception of pure evil with a distinctly Hebraic flavor. Though none of the characters identify themselves explicitly as being Jewish, David Hess’ Krug is depicted as an obnoxious cigar-smoking “Jew Yorker” whose perpetual stubble, curly hair, olive-colored skin and outer borough accent code him as an obvious Heeb. Add to that, Krug has been convicted for the killing of a Catholic priest and two nuns.

Cast in the role of Krug’s accomplice, Weasel Podowski, Fred J. Lincoln wears the slate-colored hair and slack suit of a Lower East Side alter cocker while both Jeramie Rain (as Sadie, a common Jewish name that also brings to mind Manson killer Susan Atkins, aka Sadie Mae Glutz) and Marc Sheffler (as Krug’s schlemiel of a son, Junior) have “difficult” ethnic hair. Weasel’s rap sheet identifies him as a child molester, which fits the historical blood libel that slandered Jews as sacrificers of children. The quartet is shown to be “animal-like,” to inhabit a dirty tenement (a dwelling associated with foreigners) and, while transporting their kidnap victims from the city to the country, Krug and Sadie engage in rear-entry sex (coitus more ferarum, or “sex by way of the beasts”), a form of copulation frequently associated (however unfairly) with non-Christians.

The transition of the kidnappers/killers from the city to the country is a key element of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, illustrating an old white Anglo-Saxon fear of the contamination of suburbia’s assumed purity by ethnic types (as Fairfield County, the film’s location and setting, became a destination for upwardly mobile urban Jews post-World War II). The waspy surname of one of the victims and her parents, Collingwood, is eerily similar to Sadie’s imaged alias (Agatha Greenwood), suggesting that Krug & Company aspire in some part to assimilate even while they shred the very fabric of Christian society.

In the film’s most disturbing sequence, Krug, Weasel and Sadie kill their captives after stripping them and humiliating them sexually. When Phyllis tries to escape, she is run to ground, stabbed and then butchered in a scene that can’t help but evoke shechita, or Jewish ritual slaughter. Phyllis’ intestines are pulled out of her oozing abdominal cavity and examined, as a shochet would do to determine if a slaughtered animal were fit to be declared kosher. Obviously, Phyllis’ disemboweling is not genuinely kosher but does suggest that Krug & Co. are operating on auto pilot, as if by collective cultural memory, in the same way that their earlier torment of Phyllis and Mari echoed the treatment of Jews bound for concentration camps. The kidnappers seem to be maltreating their captives as a form of confused racial self-hatred, channeling ritualistic acts that both glorify and slander their ancestors.

Having killed Phylllis, Krug rapes Mari… but not before he uses a switchblade to carve his name into her sternum. This gesture reminded me of Rabbi Lowe scratching the word “EMET” into the forehead of The Golem. (With his helmet hair, Krug even resembles Paul Wegener’s iconic 1920 interpretation of THE GOLEM.) As EMET is the Hebrew word for “truth,” Krug’s mutilation of Mari might be said to be his way of sending a wake-up call to WASP society, announcing both his arrival and his intention to destroy their four-square, missionary position world. (In this regard, Krug also bears a resemblance to the character of Berger from the musical HAIR, who comes to his position of iconoclastic hippie king from a distinctly urban Jewish environment.) And can it be mere coincidence that Krug comes to his decision to shoot Mari after having overheard her reciting the Lord’s Prayer, as she wades into a woodland pond in a cleansing act of self baptism?

At this point it’s worth remembering that LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is a remake of sorts of Ingmar Bergman’s THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960), a Medieval morality tale set at a time when Christianity was waging war against Paganism for world and spiritual dominance. LAST HOUSE hews closely to the VIRGIN SPRING template by having its spree killers (who pose as salesmen, and in so doing aligning themselves with Jews via the merchant class) taken in by Mari’s parents, who feed them in a scene that mimics da Vinci’s The Last Supper (while leaving an empty chair in the foreground – for Elijah?). Over the course of the evening, the truth comes out and Mari’s parents turn on her killers. While the ensuing slaughter is strong stuff, the third act’s oddest/most brutal bit of business is Mrs. Collingwood’s oral castration of Weasel in a scene that seems to mock the Jewish rite of circumcision (thus explaining the chair left empty for Elijah). It should also be noted that she performs this act after first using Weasel’s leather belt to bind his hands in what could be construed as an allusion to the philactery, the calfskin box containing Hebraic scripture that some Jews wear strapped to their heads and wrapped around their left arms during weekday prayers.

Again, I hasten to add that I don’t believe ex-Baptist Wes Craven set out to slander the Jews with LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT but the Jewishness of the killers he created cannot be ignored. My feeling is that Craven was writing/casting/directing instinctively from a series of societal and cultural presets and prejudices. Certainly, living and working (first as a taxi driver and then as a young filmmaker) in New York, Craven would have had plenty of negative experiences with people of all ethnic persuasions. I half suspect Krug was modeled on a particularly noxious distributor who blew fetid cigar smoke in Craven’s face while cheating him out of profits. However it all came together, these textures (real or imagined) give the original LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT intriguing layers of meaning. You won’t find this kind of subtext in a New Millennium remake claiming to pay homage to 70s cinema while pissing all over a glorious, difficult and demanding decade that was never afraid to get blood on its hands.

The League of Tana Tea Drinkers proudly presents a roundtable discussion on torture porn. I participated in this discussion which is currently posted on Blogcritics. You’ll find my thoughts on the topic below.

Read the entire article here: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2008/05/19/173427.php

I hate the term torture porn. It’s just stupid. It’s a term that some douche came up with to make horror films seem more sensational than they really should be. The Saw franchise doesn’t deserve the attention that it receives. The first film was interesting but it went downhill from there. The same can be said about Hostel. I know that Eli Roth is considered a pariah amongst horror fans but I feel that beneath the gore of Hostel there was an interesting story. The torture wasn’t necessary in either of these films. Torture can be implied and be as scary, if not more scary, than the reality of what is shown on screen. However, I don’t have a problem with the scenes actually being depicted on screen. It may not be the best way to tell a story but these are, after all, horror films.

Should torture be depicted in television programs like 24 or Battlestar Galactica? These shows aren’t considered to be part of the horror genre. My answer is absolutely. Both 24 and Battlestar Galactica are using torture as a device. It’s not a very subtle device but it’s effect. Dystopian storytelling is usually not very subtly using political subtext to tell a story. 24 is doing so in a way in which Jack Bauer is an anti-hero to the nth degree. For fuck’s sake, he ripped a guy’s throat out with his teeth. BSG shows scenes of graphic torture and I don’t blink an eye. This is a television show that is set in space with fucking robots for villains. Do I even need to comment on the fact that scenes of torture in this context are ridiculous? Who gives a shit?

The debate over torture in media has been raging as a hot topic for the past 3 years. It really has become a stagnant topic. There are no clear winners or losers in this debate. It’s similar to horror fans who lament PG-13 rated films versus R-rated films. Who cares? It all boils down to one simple question: is the story any good? That’s the only thing that should matter. How the story is told is up to the creator of the product. Sure, studios and political correctness can get in the way but we don’t live in an ideal world. If we did, every director would have final cut, every author would have final edit, and every horror movie would be awesome. Unfortunately, that’s not our reality.

Are there films that cross the line with scenes of graphic torture? Of course. Anyone who has ever seen Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible can attest to the fact that a 9 minute rape scene is despicable and completely unnecessary. There are a number of things that I don’t want to see in movies: rape, child molestation, necrophilia, Sandra Bullock, etc, etc.. Almost every film ever made has something that someone will find objectionable. But I’m not a politically correct idiot with his head stuck up his ass either. The bottom line is this, if you’re shocked or disgusted by scenes of torture in media, you probably shouldn’t be watching movies like Saw or The Hills Have Eyes or reading books by Jack Ketchum. That’s just common sense.

Are snuff films real? Has anyone ever actually viewed a real snuff film? This is the question that lies at the heart of Paul von Stoetzel’s Snuff: A Documentary About Killing on Camera.

I’m not sure what to believe about snuff films. Even the mere idea of a snuff film makes me queasy. This was a difficult film to watch and Snuff opens with a warning that scenes of an extreme nature will be shown. Normally, this type of disclaimer is tacked on to the beginning of a film for legal purposes. In this case, the warning was warranted and legitimate. This film does not hold any punches.

This documentary leads you down a road of depravity and sickness but maintains a sense of composure and dignity along the way. Interviews with former police and FBI officers, cinephiles, and others involved in the film industry lead you through the alleged snuff films to the very possibility of the real deal. Footage intertwined with the interviews is disgusting and vile but it probably pales in comparison to the real deal.

The film explores many aspects of killing on camera, from the staged antics of Faces of Death, to a beheading video, to the real life footage captured by killers Leonard Lake and Charles Ng. I did find the footage of Lake and Ng to be particularly disturbing to watch.

The most interesting part of the film are the stories told by Mark L. Rosen, one of the producers of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He discusses his own account of witnessing a snuff film. Even if what he witnessed was staged, Rosen is convinced that it was the real deal. The emotion he shows on screen is real and it’s obvious that it’s haunted him for a very long time.

Paul von Stoetzel has produced a powerful documentary that examines many aspects of snuff films. It exceeded my expectations on almost every level. This documentary does not present snuff films in a sensational manner. It provides thoughtful insight into a rather disgusting topic. The running time is only 76 minutes but that’s all that is needed to deliver a knockout punch. Snuf: A Documentary About Killing on Camera is not a film for the faint of heart but it is one that deserves to be seen.

Release date is July 22, 2008. Distribution by Westlake Entertainment.

Related links:

Official site

Black Flag Pictures is producing a new film directed by Sv Bell called Crawler. It’s about a killer bulldozer on the loose so look out.

The plot synopsis of the film is simple: A group of construction workers fight for their lives as a 50 ton bulldozer appears to have a life of its own, and an insatiable hate for the living.

According to the YouTube page for the teaser trailer, the film is inspired by Theodore Sturgeon’s classic 1944 novel, Killdozer, but it really has nothing to do with the original story. It’s a mix between Christine, Poltergeist and CSI.

Watch the teaser trailer:

Related links:

• Official site
• Sv Bell
• Sv Bell’s Myspace
• Black Flag Pictures

Among the Dead is an upcoming short zombie movie written and directed by Michael Adam Kraus. Why should you care about yet another zombie movie? Simple. Kraus is looking at the world through the eyes of the zombie.

Kraus’s film company, Project Zee, is responsible for Among the Dead. There isn’t a lot of information available for the film just yet as Kraus is still in the midst of completing the editing. But he did have this to say about the film:

Unfortunately, the movie has not been completed yet as editing has been a huge pain. The planned release for it right now is late July, where we will be first premiering it at our local University of South Florida. After the premiere, we will send our baby off to film festivals around the world searching for distribution rights.

Project Zee’s website has a short video clip of the film which can downloaded. There is also a brief plot synopsis of the film. You can read the plot synopsis and download the video by clicking here.

Related links:

• Official site
• Homemade Zombies (via The University of South Florida’s The Oracle)
• Michael Kraus appears on the Zombie Survival Hour podcast

Do you love independent horror releases? Would you like to see a compilation of short indie horror flicks on one DVD? Then head on over to AAAAAH!! Indie Horror Hits and check out the collection of movies that will soon be headed to a DVD player near you.

So what is AAAAAH!! Indie Horror Hits all about? The project’s website states:

AAAAAH!! Indie Horror Hits was created by filmmakers for horror fans and filmmakers alike. We’ve made short horror films and we want discerning audiences to enjoy them long after their all-too-brief film festival runs.

Let’s face it. Most short horror films don’t have much – if any – life beyond a handful of genre festivals in a few scattered cities. For horror fans and filmmakers, that’s really scary.

We aim to resurrect the best of the best of these horror films and unleash them in compilations for viewers everywhere to enjoy over and over…

Miguel Gallego, of Crypt Club Productions Inc., is the man behind the project. Gallego is a filmmaker himself and one of his films, The Crypt Club, will be included on the compilation. The project has been in development for the past 2 years and Gallego told me:

It’s been a challenge getting good films, filmmakers, and legal paperwork coordinated. In fact, the last of the paperwork arrived last week. So now it’s full steam ahead. We have a hard deadline to get the DVD to market because we’ve booked a retailer table at Rue Morgue’s Festival of Fear in late August. Now that we have a green light to work with the selected films we’ll be authoring the DVD and creating a compilation trailer or two to put on-line to whet people’s lust for the project.

For the time being, there are 13 films scheduled for inclusion on Volume 1 of the DVD. One of the shorts, Trick or Treat! is available on YouTube. Check it out and then read more about the other short films.

Related links:

• AAAAAH!! Indie Horror Hits
• AAAAAH!! Indie Horror Hits on Facebook
• Crypt Club Productions
• Crypt Club Productions Myspace
• Crypt Club Productions Blog