Whether you’re a Joshua Hoffine fan or not (though I can think of no good reason why any horror fan would not dig him), and whether you’re a Lovecraft fan or not, you owe it to yourself to check out the artist’s blog post on his latest piece–hell, we can’t think of a reason not to call it a masterpiece– titled INNSMOUTH. The creation boasts the absolutely stellar work of J. Anthony Kosar and his talented team at Kosart Studios; just when I think their effects/prosthetic work cannot get any better, it does. Hoffine was also able to get Doug Jones to star in the piece (no, not as an eerily thin creature of some kind) as the hero. Mr. Hoffine’s talent, paired with the top-tier dedication to putting the most care, concern, and craftsmanship into his creations possible into every detail, is well on display here. He even takes you step-by-step through his entire process (with lots of great behind-the-scenes photos and backstory). The attribute of his art that shines through, however, that puts him on a level with the best horror artists among, say, Bernie Wrightson, is his true love of and devotion to the horror genre. True horror fans can see and feel the heart (no pun intended) and soul of a kindred horror fan as soon as you lay eyes on his art …and that’s not common to find, these days. Enjoy!
This is my new photograph called INNSMOUTH. This image is based on the story Shadow Over Innsmouth by legendary Horror author H.P. Lovecraft. This photograph stars actor Doug Jones (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) as the victim and features Special FX from frequent collaborator and Face/Off champion J. Anthony Kosar and his talented team at Kosart Studios.
In the 1931 story Shadow Over Innsmouth, the human victim is chased through the streets of the seaside town of Innsmouth by a teeming mob of monstrous fish people called the Deep Ones. The imagery of a sole individual being pursued by a city full of monsters is similar to Invasion of The Body Snatchers, I Am Legend, or any modern zombie movie, but exists first in Shadow Over Innsmouth. As with my previous zombie photograph LAST STAND, INNSMOUTH is populated by a horde of monsters…
Yes, this actually exists. Archie McPhee’s (based locally, and another store it is not wise for me to go into with a credit card, they expanded and there’s way too much cool shit) carries a variety of unusual Edgar Allan Poe-themed gifts, such as temporary tattoos and Poe lunch boxes. Check out the temporary tattoos if you have time, most of them are pretty clever and would only mean something to or be recognized by another devoted reader of Poe. Cool way to meet like-minded friends, huh? This one takes the cake, though!
The Edgar Allan Poe sweater is in stock now (which means if you live within reasonable driving distance of Seattle, you could definitely get one in time to give as a gift), costs $42.50, and is ‘One Size Fits Most’. It’s also unisex, which means ladies with curves could have a problem fitting into it, but we have yet to hear a female complain about it. Here’s the more detailed write-up direct from the Archie McPhee product page for this cool item:
Just say Poe to Halloween sweaters
This is a limited quantity, exclusive item! Some people prefer Halloween to any other holiday and this Edgar Allan Poe Sweater is for them. You could wear it as a Christmas sweater, but it’s designed to be worn on a brisk autumn evening as you contemplate your own mortality while sitting in a graveyard next to an abandoned church. Featuring an honest, but misguided attempt to accurately capture the likeness of Edgar Allan Poe, this sweater is sure to be a conversation piece with you and your friends as you play with a Ouija board and read poetry from your tear-stained journal. This one-size-fits-most sweater is sausage-casing-tight on a 2XL person and awkwardly loose on a medium frame. 100% acrylic. Buy it fast—these won’t last long!!
It may be limited edition, but the sweater is in stock. That’s a pretty awesome self-justification reason to pick one up– hey, they have them now, but once they’re gone, they’re gone! You might be able to find one on eBay after they go out of stock, but you know they’ll crank up the price, even if they’re used. Hey, you might as well grab the tattoos while you’re at it. The price is reasonable, and come on, check out this sample (click on it to go to the Archie McPhee’s purchase/detail page for the item). HOP FROG is on there, for Chrissakes!
Click image to go to Archie McPhee’s and get a better look! Maybe you will find your lost Lenore…
So, there you have it, give great gifts for horror fans to give and get. We ran this countdown admittedly a little closer to Christmas than we’d like, but we wanted to find extra cool stuff …and all of it ended up merited featuring in a post of its own, rather than lumping them all up in one novella-length post. In case you missed them, here are links to the other items.
The Journal/Sketchbook Made of Human Skin that looks like it was cooked up by an early Sam Raimi prop department, plus two other unique journals (there’s a good chance that if you go and find one of the Monster Skin ones gone, yours truly finally caved and purchased it for herself).
Aaand of course, the good old Poe Sweater. We hoped you’ve found these items entertaining, if a little late to buy (though you could still make it happen by paying extra shipping). We don’t get a cut of anything sold, and we are also not responsible for any wild spending sprees you go on while looking them up on the Archie McPhee site, Etsy.com, or ThinkGeek.com.
If you buy any of the recommended items, we’d love to see your photos of it! Especially anyone wearing the sweater.
All right, we’ve sort of danced around it till now and tried to keep negativity about the seventh and final season of True Blood to a minimum (unless you’ve read any of Mrs. Horror Boom’s comments on the A.V. Club/Disquis, where all tact goes out the window and there’s as much cursing as a Tarantino movie). In particular, our venom is spewed in the direction of new showrunner Brian “Bucky” Buckner,* whom even one of the most hot gracious, professional regular cast members have vented about (citing great character arcs, plotlines, and missing scenes that were cut as a casualty of the change in showrunners). However, let’s not get too detailed about that right now. We’re just explaining why the ten ways to kill time till the series finale airing tonight on HBO have the tone that they do. We do feel this way, but take it with a grain of salt as we included this post as comic relief,
Naturally, spoilers abound, so beware!
1. Wonder what seasons six and seven would have been like if Alan Ball hadn’t retired as showrunner after season five (“I don’t even have the words to tell you how much I love this show, but I’m just too old and tired and beat-up to keep up after five seasons,” he explained honestly and apologetically during the panel at SDCC 2012) and handed the reins over to “Bucky”.
2. Decide there’s no way in hell they could have been worse if Ball had stayed on; brood about characters he probably wouldn’t have killed off
3. Remember how there used to be True Blood finale parties up (until season 6 got going), held in friendly local bars and clubs; recall how sparse you found out they are for the series finale after you looked it up just for the hell of it.
4. Strongly resent the way Tara’s character (and the wonderful Rutina Wesley) was casually discarded in the pre-credit sequence on the premiere, killed off-screen. Remember how you were positive she wasn’t dead, then at least pretty positive there was going to be a great –of at least satisfying– pay-off down the line during the season to justify killing her off, with it only really seeming to bother Tara’s mother.
5. Remember what actually happened to Tara’s character instead to “resolve” the plotline, recall how the writer of the episode (in the EW.com ‘post-mortem’ to the episode where it was finally explained) actually sounded apologetic and couldn’t muster up much pride when asked to explain the resolution of the storyline. Start getting all pissed off again.
6. Start imagining how, if you ever ran into “Bucky”, you would probably assault him on sight. Remember that this is a felony and you shouldn’t even joke about it on your blog. Instead, imagine what you would say to his face (that would not get you into any legal trouble) and seeing that smug look wiped off.
7. Miss Joe Manganiello, remind yourself he’s still going to be around, then really miss his character Alcide. Wish they hadn’t killed him off so fast. Wish they hadn’t had to kill him off at all. Remember all the times Joe Manganiello said playing Alcide was a dream come true, but how he got frustrated towards the end because “the showrunner switch” took away a ton of planned scenes explaining his complicated back-story with his father and turned his character with one of the biggest hearts on the show into someone who was a total asshole, hit women, and didn’t have any more decent sex scenes.
8. Remember the good old days (well, years) when you eagerly anticipated every episode and the episodes delivered every time: at least A. one shocking thing, B. something that made you gasp or curse in shock C. something really dirty D. something really gory, and E. several good laughs. Then the episode would end with a cliff-hanger and half the time, a rockin’ song.
9. Strongly resent Brian Buckner some more. Get pissed off all over again, lower the bar further for your series finale expectations. Remind yourself this is not constructive and take a deep breath. Pray Pam and Eric will both survive the finale.
10. Despite all of the above, wonder if there’s somewhere you can go out and buy a bottle of “TruBlood” (yup, the show was so popular that by the end of S2, you could actually buy the stuff) in time to drink while you watch the series finale.
BONUS ACTIVITIES:
1. Hope desperately that (insert name of character you lust for the most) will get a nude scene/sex scene in the finale.
2. Wonder if you’ll ever meet (insert name of actor who plays character/s you lust after most here) and if so, if you’d be able to keep it together enough to even have a rudimentary conversation with them. Hope that if you do meet them, they aren’t even hotter in person to the point where you just snap and end up having to be dragged off them by security.
3. Remember when you defended True Blood to people who slammed the show, wonder exactly when it was you started having trouble defending it quite so strongly. Feel sorry for yourself.
4. Think that if nothing else, at least Buckner didn’t fuck up the awesome theme song, which you practically sprained your fingers in your haste to order from iTunes once you got the title and singer. If you ever got so excited you got up and danced to it when an episode aired, smile (even if you’ll never admit you did it).
5. Be happy and proud of yourself when remembering that when the show was great, you never once took it for granted, and made sure you took in every detail and soaked up every bit of fun. And goddamn, when True Blood was fun, it was REALLY fun. It truly was.
“If you ever come back here again, it won’t be your tongue I rip out, it’ll be your lungs.”
We were hoping to post another breakdown of how the practical effects for another grisly werewolf transformation were done (hopefully by Greg Nicotero again), since the season 2 premiere featured another great one. Maybe Netflix will add one to their You Tube channel (we’ll keep our eyes, well, peeled) but in the meantime, there’s a great behind-the-scenes featurette that shows more gore than the red band trailer we posted before. Check it out below – this season is sick! We’re only halfway through and can confirm it might even be more twisted than Season 1…
…and of course, we’d be remiss not to put up a screencap gallery (click on an image to enlarge, but warning, at least one of the scenes these depict made us wince and curl our toes when watching the episode):
Take a wild guess as to where this is going…
If you think what’s he’s watching isn’t appropriate for the dinner table, you should see what he’s eating.
Yeah, that’s his tongue.
Creepy thing: this scene is a fantasy sequence
“You may feel some discomfort…” – Actual line from this scene on the show.
So far, this season is less of a slow burn than season one (sticking to ten episodes was a smart idea). You can check out all ten episodes on Netflix any time, because they all premiered today.
“It’s just fucked up, is what it is!” – Olivia, Season 2 of Hemlock Grove
According to the “warning” before the red band trailer, it’s intended for “Fearless Audiences Only” due to excessive bloodletting, fever dreams, and… what the hell, just give the trailer a watch to find out!
Looks like we’ll get answers to (or at least a continuation of) some of the cliff-hangers. Apparently, it’s possible to actually re-grow your severed tongue if you’re a blood relative of Roman’s family.
All ten episodes are available at once on July 11th. If you want to start watching after midnight on July 10th, check for it at 12:01. We were really, REALLY excite to binge out on Season 2 of “Orange is the New Black,” but when we tried to access it on Comcast at about 12:15, the network was down (or at least Comcast crashed) because so many fans had the same plan and HAD to watch it the second it was available. Hemlock Grove Season 2 isn’t wildly popular like OITNB, but we thought we’d give you heads-up just in case.
We’re gonna take a wild guess that this warning was Eli Roth’s idea.
This interesting post by Hettienne Park (Beverly Katz on NBC’s Hannibal, whose character came to a tragic, fatal, and grisly end recently) is not only worth a read, it has also been re-blogged all over the net (well, with most people who enjoy Hannibal and have blogs, anyway) so I thought I’d just jump on the bandwagon and pass it on as well. Hettienne Park wrote the articulate, thoughtful piece on her personal blog to respond to the anger from fans that her character was killed off. These people were ANGRY at Bryan Fuller, accusing him of killing off her character because she was a female of color and therefore expendable. Read Ms. Park’s very well-written side here! The debates in the Comments section get pretty intense ..and also worth a read if you have the time (there are pages and pages).
Great promo– also pretty disgusting (in a good way, of course). Take a look by clicking on ‘View original” in the lower left– it’s worth it. Will they just hurry up and start running Penny Dreadful, already?
Alas, we’ll have to wait for Penny Dreadful to premiere May 11 at 10 p.m. (ET) on Showtime.
Eric: Well, I’ll be goddamned. Ig: You and me both. *
We consider the fact that the movie adaptation of Horns (2013) sticks closely to the source material a good thing, since it may likely contains the above dialogue from the novel. We searched, but as of this writing/posting, still can’t find an official U.S. release date, which is really too goddamned (har) bad. On the very bright side: the makers of the film wisely recast the role of Ig with Daniel Radcliffe, since Shia LaBouf (who we do not respect enough to even consider checking the correct spelling of his name) was originally signed to play the lead. We were not exactly thrilled about the mis casting of Juno Temple as Merrin, then we read the news about what a close call they had with casting Ig and that put things in perspective pretty fast. We highly recommend that if you haven’t already, pick up and read the Joe Hill novel to pass the time while we all wait for a release date… but if you tear through it as fast as we did, it won’t kill much time. It’s an average-length novel, but a very fucking fast–and highly addictive– blast to read. When we hear about a US (or even a UK) release date–theatrical or otherwise, but let’s cross our fingers for a theatrical release instead of VOD–we’ll post it here (and we happily welcome anyone who does have that info to please enlighten us, by email or by posting in the comments).
Here’s a link to an informative piece from CinemaBlend, giving the news that at least the movie HAS been picked up for distribution, and talks some more about the adaptations. It’s also one of the few articles that show more than one publicity photo.
HORROR BOOM 