Archive for October, 2009

You can Drag Me To Hell, but you can’t drag me to Twilight. Seriously, I will sleep on the couch if I have to, dear.

The content of the show and this website will focus on retro horror. It’s what I like best, and since I have a list of horror websites I check out I discovered that there’s no way to compete.

Besides, there’s a lot of overlap; how many sites and podcasts covered Zombieland this week alone? All of them, that’s how many. I like to get everyone’s take on something, but it gets dull after the fourth or fifth review, and so many of them come at you at once. That’s the downside to being hip, everyone ends up talking about the same things at the same time.

I’m not hip, never have been. Some people are leaders, others are followers. I’m neither, I’m busy looking for the perfect microbrewery.

So I’m going to poke around through history and dig up the obscure.

Did you know we technically have almost an entire century worth of genre movies available to us right now?

A film version of the story of Frankenstein was first made in 1910 as a silent picture. Film, or “moving pictures”, had only been created as a medium about a decade and a half earlier.

Although the film is only about 15 minutes long, and has all the limits of a silent era film, it still marks a kind of genesis of genre filmmaking. Even at this early stage in the development of the film medium, monsters, fantasy, good and evil, all had their birth in popular culture at the same time.

Today, this film is available on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcLxsOJK9bs

Could the people involved in this film even begin to imagine the technology we have today, various digital mediums from DVDs to downloadable movies? And yet, we enjoy an availability of entertainment unmatched in decades previous. Films from the silent era though the decades that followed, where we see the birth of technicolor, stero sound, video tapes and beyond are all ready to be discovered.

It’s 2009, almost 2010. That’s one hundred years of genre films.

In this sense the contemporary hardly exists at all. All of us, from 16 to 60 years old, will most likely have one thing in common: most of the films we will ever see were either made before our time or seen well after the time they were first released to theaters (those that made it into theaters).

It’s like the old saying, an old joke you haven’t heard yet is a new joke to you. Thanks to the technology of video, the past is just as accessible to us as the present.

So who needs to be topical? Who needs to be trendy or current? Why “live in the now”?

The past IS now.

Well, I seem to have mostly recovered from my illness. I was down for over two weeks which never happened to me before. I wasn’t a confident supporter of Obama’s socialized medicine, but now I wish I had some insurance or something. I can’t afford the doctor now, and I was stuck with using leeches.

I have a crapload of work to get caught up on. I’m doing some designing for my business as well as other work, so the zombie painting is going to progress slowly as I work on it an hour or two when I can. I designed a logo today for the first time in years, and it’s good to be making art again.

Speaking of the painting, I realized that the Ghoulzone t-shirt is a bit on the expensive side. Even I can’t pay for one, and that’s just sad. I’m looking into alternatives to see if I can get my t-shirts down below 20 bucks each, because I’d pay that for a good shirt. Most cheap shirts just have a one or two color text message or something simple on them, but my painted designs have to be full color, and that costs. But they’re going to be worth it.

In the Zazzle store I have mouse pads and art prints/posters and mugs which are quite reasonably priced, so the zombies and future horror paintings will be available in the Ghoulzone store in any case, so I’m sure you can find some affordable stuff there.

Now I’m off to enjoy eating some solid food for a change. I still have Irritable Bowel Syndrome though, but at least I’m used to that. I just need to eat some tree bark at every meal and I’m good to go.

See ya soon, still getting back to working on more content and podcast stuff.