Beckley and I just returned from visiting my family on the East Coast of Newfoundland. We had a restful and fun vacation, but the landscapes are stark, harsh, and magical. Horror-film worthy to say the least.

Don’t go in the Water!

The Howling

The Mist

The House that Sank into the Hill

Careful where you swim, my sweet

The House of Horrors

House on the Hill

The Fog

The Danger

I Know What You Did Last Summer

The Cellar

The Rocks

Incident at the Old Pig Farm *

*Special Thanks to Cara Kansala and Pam Dorey of Cara’s Joy who happily told me about the abandoned Pig Farm and showed me their zombie cats paintings.

I’m already half-planning the next trip: the icebergs and grey skies of Winter may be muses calling my name.

What’s a better gift for a girl who loves horror than these gems, given to me by my favourite sister-in-law, Melanie McDonald, a lawyer in Calgary with a sense of humour. The axe blades bang against my neck, nu NU nu nu…

Jewellery by [Syn]

Zombies in Condoland is mentioned in The Globe and Mail, as a highlight of the upcoming Nuit Blanche Toronto! How’s that for pressure?

More press in The National Post.

And CBC.

The website for my upcoming performance in Toronto is officially launched here! You can participate!

According to The Onion, blood poured from every direction in Iowa this April!

With The Strangers, which I have not seen, still on the top summer horror charts, I can’t help but wonder what it is about masks, mannekins, and dolls that make for such terrifying figures? Scary dolls like Chucky are impossibly hokey but there is a long history of masked horrors from The Phantom of the Opera to Friday the 13th (now a veritable franchise), and even Hannibal. The mask hides not only identity but also the true nature and often gruesome reality of these characters.

The Strangers‘ trailers suggest a very long ride to a climactic undisclosed ending with an armed three against an innocent two. It smells like another torture horror film in the vein of Saw, Hostel, and The Chain Saw Massacre remake.

Stacie Ponder, whose Final Girl blog is rich with horror reviews and resources, wonders what’s with these masks in her article on AMCTV.

Review of a video game (unplayed):

Petri Purho is a computer science student in Helsinki who writes a game every month. Bloody Zombies is one of them, where your goal is to rescue Barbara from the zombies. Conceptually, a very low resolution horror themed game is at both humourous (”is that an axe or are you happy to see me?”) and utterly ridiculous (”is that blood on your head or is that your hat?”). Exercise caution or you might find yourself executing the lovely Barbara instead of a hideous zombie. It is this precise combination of hilarity and absurdity that piques my interest.

From the Kloonigames website where Purho archives his efforts, Bloody Zombies is “the goriest game ever made in glorious 128 x 96 resolution! Fight zombies with your lawn mower! Solve levels with your opponents blood!”

Sadly Bloody is only available for PC and/or XBox. Download it if you have one of those systems. Other games include Planet of the Jellies and Crayon Physics - even their titles are delightful.

In related news, Guthrie Lonergan, a young artist from L.A., invites you to cover any Youtube video in blood - thus creating a horror film from any old clip. The screen shot above is one of my videos, Screen Kiss, raining blood.

[An aside: Screen Kiss is on Youtube without my consent, but that is another story.]

The Big Dog - begging to star in an upcoming horror film - is the latest Frankenstein Robot of Boston Dynamics. They also brought us DI Guy, (get it?) a human simulator that includes soldiers, vehicles and “men, women, and children with a wide range of cultural appearances” for your shooting pleasure. Among their major customers are the US Armed Forces, Ford, and Boeing.

Clockwise from top left: Freddy Krueger, LeatherFace, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees

I am looking at these masks for an upcoming performance video featuring the horror genre monster men with faces obscured by heavy scars or masks. Since they are masked, they could be anyone, and in fact the identity of Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th is used in the original by his mother and in one sequel by a local man inspired by his methods. Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and Hallowe’en - all iconic slashers - have lots in common besides the monstrous freaks that terrorize their protagonists. All feature hapless teenagers lopped off one by one, a triumphant female scream queen who outsmarts or at least outruns the badguy, and a behind the scenes mega sequel generator.

Though all are fictional stories, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was originally presented as a true story. Some horror theorists suggest the story, or at least the family butcher compound, was based on police findings at the home of Ed Gein, a serial killer from America’s Dairyland, Wisconsin. So gruesome were Gein’s heinous acts that they inspired not only the Leatherface butcher character but also Psycho’s Norman Bates and Silence of the Lamb’s Buffalo Bill. A few nights ago on The Chiller Channel I watched a made-for-TV style film, Ed Gein The Butcher of Plainfield, which is not for the feint of heart. The acting is flat, classifying this as a horror film is truly tasteless, and the director Hollywoodizes the physically unremarkable Gein - reinventing him as the towering husky Leatherface character. From Youtube, a real documentary:

Fog, mist, and haze, oh my!

It’s either my double Newfie ancestry or my fascination with horror plots - but I think I’m in love, or lust. Who needs an iPhone when you have a Falcon Fog machine??