Okay, I got almost halfway through the most recent episode of Supernatural and then I had to turn it off. Without being spoilery, can someone who has seen the episode tell me ( mild spoilers )

And there's no possible way to segue into this, but to save myself posting twice...

( sephira's wacky first-time experience with creepy sleep paralysis )

It's become apparent that someone made a deal with God on my behalf (or maybe I did it when I was drunk) that I would get this television show designed entirely for me that is delivered to my house every week. I should be really happy about it all, but I'm actually kind of creeped out, and a bit intimidated.

On a tangential note, here is a great visual demonstration of how horror movie writers get around the 'everyone has a cell phone' problem.


ETA: SPN spoilers in teh comments.

Outside of three cities where it was set up by Allied forces after WWII, Japan doesn't have coroners, or any sort of automatic police involvement in deaths. Deaths that aren't obviously suspicious will only be investigated if the family pushes it. So, that Tim Burton movie where Johnny Depp wants to examine the corpse they found in a river, and the policeman says "If we find them in the river, it's drowning"? That's what most of Japan is like today! If you're found in a crashed car, you died by car crash. If you're old and you die at home, it's a heart attack.

Which has taught me two things:

• If you have an insatiable desire for murder, rural Japan is the place to go
• Most Japanese crime shows must be really boring. The smart female scientist would be all "Booth, this woman's fibula was crushed by a sharp blow, maybe delivered by an ancient cursed Samurai sword, like the one we found out about before when we interviewed the midget stripper" and the FBI guy would be like "Bones, you're forgetting that we found her at the bottom of an elevator shaft. It is clearly another one of those old fell-down-the-elevator-shaft deaths," and the episode would end.

Another thing I found out is that all corpses in Japan are cremated, by law. If you want to be interred instead, your family must apply for exemption on the basis of religious beliefs. Apparently this can be quite tricky. This means:

• Japan will be an ideal place to go during the inevitable worldwide zombie apocalypse. Keep away from hospitals, morgues and gaijin cemetaries and you should be completely fine. I don't think even 245 trioxin would be a problem. Also keep in mind that the rare zombie you do meet will be small in stature and probably very polite.

Until then, from Ace of Spades:

So, I was recommended a movie after begging around for Japanese horror movies to watch and kid myself I was studying. I went in knowing absolutely nothing about it apart from what I could deduce from its cover:

I assumed it would be the typical Japanese horror movie, which apart from the obvious cultural differences when it comes to the bad guys, is not too dissimilar to the typical Western horror movie (except maybe that Japanese ones tend to focus on characters that are twenty-somethings, rather than teenagers being played by twenty-somethings.)

It's not typical. It's... well. I don't have an adjective. I am lost for adjectives.

I guess all I can say is that it was my kind of movie. I don't like overly serious horror. In any 'dark' genre, I think the creator has to be careful to balance out that darkness somehow. Any hack with psychiatric issues can wallow in pain and angst; creating something more well-roundedly effective is what's rare. (I will probably write more about this later with reference to Tarantino movies.) In a genre as dark as horror (blood! death! screaming!), comedy can be a good way of doing this.

Which is why I like and appreciate, say, Return of the Living Dead over its alternate sequels, Day of the Dead or Dawn of the Dead. The mix of humor in ROTLD somehow heightens the emotion and gets the viewer more involved, rather than canceling out the horror element, as one might expect. The comedy often actually makes the horror part more scary - for me, anyway. The balance means that there's less of that uncomfortable distance that you can get with the 'I'm watching a psychopath's fantasy on screen'-style horror movie.

And Hausu was another great example of this, the comedy element being even stronger than in ROTLD. I didn't get that 'psychopath' feeling at all in Hausu. I got raw, innocent, artistic expression and it was damn interesting. (And there was at least one scene that pretty much scarred me for life. But in a good way.)

If you have even the slightest interest in Japanese horror, you should see this movie. If you are very interested in the horror genre, or in Japan in general, I strongly recommend that you see this movie. If I had a friend that was in a tragic car accident that wiped out all his memories of Japan and of anything vaguely related to Japan, and he asked me "Hey, what's the deal with Japan?" I would make him sit down and watch this movie. And at the end he would nod and say "I see."


(Note: If you do ever decide to watch Hausu, I recommend obtaining it without watching the trailer beforehand. I was going to link it here, but it's one of those annoying trailers that basically ruins all the good bits. The less you know about this movie going in, the better.)

A review of the Friday the 13th Series: "An idealistic counselor in the first movie is picked up on the road and starts nattering about how she's always wanted to work with children. "I hate it when people call 'em 'kids,'" she opines. Moments later she doesn't care what they're called because — her throat's been slit! I guess your smarmy semantic quibbles look kind of silly now, don't they, you vacuous little chit? Huh? Don't they?! Maybe it's just because I've worked as an educator for 15 years, but I can't really describe how satisfying that sequence is. School reformers and earnest do-gooders of all kinds — put them to the scythe, Jason!"

Two articles on death and country music.

A blog containing more than you ever wanted to know about oxytocin. I found this site while trying to find out about whether cats are influenced by estrogen levels.

It contains, among many other things, a link to this old LJ entry. I find that whenever I make a similar connection between my own obsessions and fannishness and romantic love, people assume I'm exaggerating or joking.

Finally, to make up for the lack of Jewish girl on Monday, there is this woman, who appeared on Bones and is a neuroscientist and is into natural childbirth! Can you get more awesome? No, you cannot.

The Near Dark section that was cut from the cracked article I wrote about horror movies. I don't know why it was cut. It might have been for length, or because no one in the world has actually seen this movie, or because it wasn't good enough. But I prefer to think that is because it was just too awesome.

So in honor of Country + Horror week, here it is. WITH EXTRA PASDAR.


( (I have no idea how legal it is for me to repost this here. If it turns out to be 'not that legal' I guess I will take it down) )

I remember I was showing Dead and Breakfast to someone I'd lured into my house, and about five minutes in he said 'This is totally your movie!'

'What do you mean?'

'It has country music and zombies!'



And I must admit, truly the combination is moving into epic strata of awesome.

So my point is... is True Blood any good? Because I downloaded the soundtrack and it has country music! And horror! But then I am torn, because on the other hand, vampires are kind of lame.

(Once I actually had a dream that I was watching Supernatural and they had a Calexico soundtrack. And I thought to myself in the dream 'No way, this is too awesome. I just cannot handle it.')

( Oh and BTW Sloth, you deserve this again. )

Okay, I finally figured out what really bothered me about that episode.

( spoilers )

The 5 Most Unintentionally Gay Horror Movies

Please visit/digg! There's a chance I'll get more money if you do, and this underground strychnine processing plant doesn't pay for itself.

Good. And it got the biggest opening weekend for a pure horror movie ever, as well. Because some people just like a bit of gore, nudity and lessons about premarital sex without:

a) suffering through twenty-minute torture-and-mutilation scenes because the director can't think of a plot to fill ninety minutes with, wants to be 'shocking', and/or has mom issues;

b) SOCIAL COMMENTARY that is delivered with all the subtlety and intelligence that you'd expect from a horror director, or;

c) Irony. Because if there's one thing the 18-35 demographic doesn't see enough of these days, it's irony.

Now I have some hope that maybe someone in horror-land has said "Hey guys, I just realized that irony is for pansies who are too scared to try creating anything remotely authentic. Let's just get back to like, nailing people to trees and stuff." And everyone else was like "AWESOME!"

Both of the Eli Roth movies I saw left me feeling like I'd been in the company of a sociopath for two hours. Not even in a 'Wow, that movie really affected me' way, more like 'Man, I need a shower.' (Oh, and it pisses me off that Saw was given to the world by Australia, as well. Thanks, guys. That totally cancels out plastic money AND bionic ears.)

And yeah, I know it seems weird to like gore but be disgusted by torture porn. I think it was Stephen King who was writing about how traditional slasher films work because they operate within a strict moral framework and follow a set of rules: the audience implicitly trusts that anybody who acts like a douchebag will die, that the deaths will be quick, and that the final girl will outsmart the killer (barring last-minute twists, which are never followed up). Deliberately screw with that framework, and usually you've just got 90 minutes of really disturbing movie.

Just once in a horror movie I want to see a seduction scene after which the two characters are like "Well, that was awesome!". And then they put on their clothes and go to work or something.

I really, really wanted to like Pan’s Labyrinth. But you know, I have a thing about movies that go overboard on the emotional manipulation, especially when there is politics or history involved. Any movie where one side is a loveable rag-tag bunch of misfits and the other is a gang of psychopathic ugly miscreants who all shoot pistols one-handed for some reason is just going to annoy me, which is a shame, because everything else about the movie was great and it all just felt wasted.

I mean, Star Wars had more emotional depth to its villains, and that's a kid's film. At least Darth Vader got the chance to redeem himself at the end. The bad guys in this were at about the same level as that Firefly episode where Fredric Lane was stealing babies from hookers.

Anyway:

Other Supposedly Immature Movies That Actually Had More Nuanced Villains Than Pan’s Labyrinth

300 – at least the mutant traitor guy had a backstory, and an excuse to turn evil (Gerard Butler was a bit of a dick to him)

The Incredibles - see above

The Neverending Story – the wolf dude, despite being the embodiment of evil, at least gets a chance to explain his point of view

Batman - and I don't just mean the newer Chris Nolan versions. Even Mr. Freeze was given a chance to show some compassion for his dead wife. I have blocked most of the other villains from my memory, but I am assuming the same applies to them

Hellboy II: The Golden Army - Main bad dude gets a lot more attention and sympathy than do the multiple henchmen that randomly die in horrific ways throughout the film.

Terminator II: Judgment Day - A machine, a terminator, can learn the value of human life, but not a single one of the bad guys in Pan's Labyrinth



I think I will stick to Swedish vampire movies for my foreign arty semi-horror needs from now on.

EDIT: dirigibletrance has pointed out in the comments that the double-handed pistol grip was not invented until the 1950's. Since my knowledge of military history comes entirely from trashy movies, I have no doubt that this is correct. I also have no doubt that the reason the fascists were shown hitting anything with this grip is that the friendly, freedom-loving communists heroically threw themselves into the paths of bullets in order to create a fair fight.

Hi, people that have friended me recently! I am not usually this absent from the internet. It's just that recently, I've been taking some time off for other things. Things like...

KITTENS.



( Well, one kitten. ) Me and my sister drove out into country today to get her, which was interesting, because apparently there are places in the world that look even more serial killer-y than Adelaide. Seriously, the whole trip was exactly like the start of one of those redneck horror movies. I feel bad saying this, because the people did end up selling us a kitten at a fair price and everything, so I won't go into details. But I'm just saying, it's lucky we didn't bring our boyfriends with us, because inevitably they both would have died gruesomely before we got back to the car. And then one of us would have had to die.

Luckily, my sister's better looking than me. Usually the the slightly plainer female gets to be the final girl, that's all I'm saying.

Anyway, I am trying to think of names. I'm tossing up between:

- Something really obscure and pretentious, possibly involving Scandinavian mythology or Tolkien villians

- Something from Battlestar Galactica, or

- 'Princess Sparkles'


Any suggestions?

If I was in an unoriginal horror movie this would involve some ancient secret curse or something! Because Aramaic is one of those supposedly creepy languages that gives horror an authentic Judeo-Christian flavor! Actually it's just a lot like Hebrew with really bad spelling!

But speaking of ancient horror, here's some awesome Assyrian curses!

( May Venus, the brightest among the stars, let your wives lie in the embrace of your enemy before your very eyes. )

"Young lady spends a frustratingly long time overcoming her natural feminine reluctance towards violent maiming."



Seriously, it always takes like 90 minutes to get to this point.Surely in this day and age women have watched enough horror to just man up and stab everyone straight away. Strange things start happening at sleepover/dance/in redneck village/wherever? JUST CUT EVERYONE'S HEADS OFF ALREADY. YES INCLUDING YOUR BOYFRIEND'S. HE'S GOING TO DIE ANYWAY. FOR GOD'S SAKE WOMAN.

"Even if our secret were to become known, and my father were to kill me for what I have done, still - after death itself - I could never cease to think of you. And I am now quite sure that you yourself would not be able to live very long without me..."