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League of Tana Tea Drinkers

LOTT D: Roundup of Horror

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Lottdroundup Howdy Pardners! Tie up your horse and mosy on over to the chuckwagon. We’ve got steamin’ coffee and sizzlin’ beans, and a month’s worth of favorite posts from the notorious League of Tana Tea Drinkers horror ranch lined up and waitin’ for you…yeehaw! (This article originally appeared on March 2nd, 2009.)

And Now the Screaming Starts had trouble choosing a favorite, but here is its most visited post of the month, Sweet Little Thirteen. Perhaps the strangest phenomenon spawned by the Friday the 13th remilkshake is, unlike the treatment of the original, this flick has entered the pop culture sphere with a resounding shrug from the non-horror world.

The Vault of Horror explores what disturbs Karl Hungus in An Exploration of Fear. Greetings once again Vault dwellers, it is Karl Hungus here, so do not adjust your set, I am now in control of the transmission. It’s amazing how much excitement can be derived from exploring our own anxieties in this way, with a good Horror film, we come face to face with so many negative emotions, and come out thrilled at the end.

Dinner With Max Jenke shares the love for one of the lesser-loved Friday the 13th’s in Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning. This controversial attempt to continue Friday the 13th after 1984’s The Final Chapter didn’t win many fans at the time of its 1985 release. And in fact, it hasn’t won many more in the twenty-four years since then, either.

Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies was surprised by La Residencia (The House That Screamed). By this point in my movie-watching career, there are certain known quantities when it comes to watching Mad Movies. For instance, my tastes being what they are, I pretty much know going in to a movie by Paul Naschy, Jose Mojica Marins, or Jean Rollin that I’m going to find something to make my heart beat a little faster; similarly, I’m fairly confident that most Eurocine productions are going to leave me crankily unsatisfied.

Billy Loves Stu takes us on a 60’s romp with Nich&Katherine&Chad&Michelle, and Baghead. From its poster’s homage to that swinging 60’s romp, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, to its Blair Witch Project meets Body Double by way of Friday the 13th, Baghead is one beguiling and entertaining film.

Final Girl does something “a wee bit different” with a cheeky-monkey-hilarious comic strip review of Trilogy of Terror II. Don’t miss it!

Kindertrauma picks something it hopes is “not too weird” with Eden Lake. Maybe I’ve got a bit of that Stockholm syndrome because even though I got my ass handed to me, I can’t let go of the fact that EDEN LAKE, vicious as it may be, really is a good film.

So there you have it Buckaroos, until next time. Happy Trails to you!

LOTT D Roundtable:
Evil Kids in Horror Movies

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Thering01

Sugar and spice and everything nasty and not very nice; that’s the usual scenario when evil kids go out to play in the horror genre. But there’s something not quite right here. Children in real life rarely have power over adults (unless they are royalty or Disney-channel stars), while in the horror genre they wield enough power to make any and all adults quake in fear or drop dead. How can this be? What elements combine to turn all that sugar sour and comforting cinnamon spice into hot pepper? Why do they scare us so much, or traumatize us, or make us wish they would go away and play with their nastiness somewhere else? From zombie kids to Satan’s pride of joy, from juvenile serial killers to mutant offspring, the little evil ones bedevil us.

The following members of The League of Tana Tea Drinkers lend their thoughts on the subject for your edification pleasure. (This League of Tana Tea Drinkers article was originally posted on June 10, 2008)

 

Vault of Horror talks about the evil destruction of childhood:

For the longest time, horror films and the concept of childhood have had a complex relationship. This has much to do with the fact that one of the central themes of all horror entertainment—if not the central theme—is the corruption/destruction of good by evil.

Childhood as an ideal represents nothing as much as innocence in its purest form. And innocence itself is the ultimate distillation of “good”. Perhaps this is why both creators and audiences alike have often had something of a difficult time dealing with it within the horror medium. Because childhood represents the ultimate good, the corruption/destruction of that good is the most extreme form of evil that most of us can imagine. Very often it is simply too much to bear.

This is why, for as long as horror films have been around, the ultimate taboo, the one area most have avoided like the plague, has been the murder of children. True, there have been notable exceptions over the years, movies like Frankenstein (1931), The Blob (1988) and Sleepy Hollow (1999). But for the most part, filmmakers keep away from it, as exemplified most vividly in some of the Friday the 13th movies, in which Jason will literally walk past the beds of sleeping campers and keep his focus on the counselors. For most of us, violence against children is something we don’t really want to see in horror movies. It’s not fun or entertaining, and unfortunately, all too painful and real.

Which brings me to the original topic: Evil kids in the horror genre. Ruling out the literal destruction of the child, the closest most horror creators choose to come is the destruction of childhood. If horror is all about the corruption of good, then the corruption of the ultimate good, the innocence of childhood, is about as evil as it gets.

For this reason, the depiction of evil children stirs up deep feelings of dread and revulsion in many viewers. We innately perceive it as a gross affront to the natural order of things. Something within us senses this perversion, and recoils from it. Evil adults we can handle; most of us deal with them on an almost daily basis. But evil children? And by this I don’t mean the bratty kid on line at the grocery store who won’t shut up—I mean genuinely, truly evil children. An utterly alien concept.

Some of the genre’s finest works have mined this motherlode of subconscious terror: The Omen (1976), Halloween (1978), The Ring (2001), and most recently, The Orphanage (2007). It works to particular effect in William Friedkin’s masterpiece The Exorcist (1973), in which we literally witness the purest and most innocent little girl imaginable defiled and twisted by a wholly evil force into an obscene mockery of nature. Though flawed, Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1989) pulls off a powerful combination by presenting us with the ultimate taboo (death of a child), followed by the perversion of innocence, as the child returns in evil form.

In short, it is this underlying sense of profound and incomprehensible wrongness that causes us to fear the so-called “evil child” in horror movies. It is also the subconscious connection to the ultimate act of corruption—the literal corruption of the flesh itself, i.e. the death of the child. Sublimating this primordial horror in the form of corrupted childhood thus becomes a safer way to scare the crap out of us, without offending.

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LOTT D Roundtable:
Cute Monsters and Identification With the Terror

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Pepsi-dracula Groovy Age of Horror recently posed the question what do cute versions of monsters tell us about horror?  While it was directed  primarily toward the LOTT D, the question is an important one for anyone interested in horror and how this genre’s commercial, sociological, and philosophical impact on popular culture can be analyzed.

It is not so much a difficult question to answer, rather, it requires more than one simple answer. Given any of the multifaceted influences–with each directing a specific outcome–you care to look at, the possible depth of the answer will vary.

The more obvious influence of marketing adult-themed iconic imagery in such a way as to increase marketability to a broader audience is one possible and fairly easy answer. Examples of this include Frankenberry and Count Chocula cereals. The serious images of the Frankenstein Monster and Count Dracula are rendered harmless and  lovable to sell cereal to children (and adults like me who revel in the colorful pastiche of horror and nostalgia–and the sugar rush).

But is there a deeper Choc5 meaning possible here? Why use monsters at all when Rainbow Brite, charming leprechauns, and Trix-loving rabbits will suffice?

Marketing horror to teens and adults is also a rich vein of potential sales to tap into as well. From the more socially conscious vampires and werewolves of Twilight, to Teddy Scares, Living Dead Dolls, Skelanimals, and Voodooz Dolls, these products offer ‘safe’ horror monsters to identify with, play with, and collect (control).

Perhaps, like how an inoculation works against a virus, if you weaken the monster to the point it becomes empathizable or a safer and more manageable terror surrogate, you create a palliative horror-play used as a defense against real or imagined terrors.

This horror-play can be viewed as a reaction formation that dramatizes and forestalls the terrors by day and the horrors by night every child and every adult faces in ever increasing severity given our more stressful times.

At least this is one possible answer. What do you think?

Meet the Horror Bloggers:
The Drunken Severed Head

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Drunken Severed Head Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to
blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Max Cheney of the Drunken Severed Head proves he’s more than just a pretty face when it comes to horror.

I am a Siamese, or conjoined twin. My other half, separate–and certainly unequal–but seamlessly connected to my self via an e-thereal broad band, is a drunken severed head named Max. We share that first name–I am Max Cheney, Jr., and I love the weird and macabre.

My love for horror started when in 1964, when I was three. I was given the 5-inch high monster figures “Pop Top Horrors” to play with. Cast in Halloween-orange plastic, they were different from other solid figures, as they had detachable heads that could be popped on and off. I had great fun switching the heads! Making an impression on me that same year was being taken to see The Evil of Frankenstein
which featured a toy-like makeup design for its Frankenstein Monster. I learned from watching that film that being scared could be fun. Being born (prematurely) into a blended family, with parents whose marriage was always filled with problems, I was always an anxious kid. Finding a form of anxiety that was thrilling was a revelation!

The following year, I was watching the programs “Milton the Monster” and “The Munsters,” both featuring Frankensteinian monsters, and I adored both shows. As a present for my birthday in 1965, I was given a Herman Munster talking puppet. That set me for life as a fan of monsters, but of the classic Universal Frankenstein’s Monster especially.

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Meet the Horror Bloggers: Groovy Age of Horror

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Curt Purcell

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet
the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Curt Purcell of Groovy Age of Horror reveals the influences, from Lovecraft to Eurotrash, that keep him in the groove of horror.

I guess having kids makes some people start going back to church. When my dad went back, pre-millennialist dispensational eschatology sank such deep hooks into him that his idea of a bedtime Bible story was reading me the freakiest prophecies and visions from Daniel, Ezekiel, and the Book of Revelation. Whatever religious lessons he meant to impart were lost on young me, but the frightful, bizarre imagery sure made an impression.  My enduring fascination for the weird and fantastic probably traces back in large part to that.

Two of the first books I chose for myself from the library and struggled through mostly on my own were companion collections of Greek and Norse mythology. They probably should have been way above my reading comprehension level, but they were treasure-troves of grotesque creatures and uncanny figures, and I was determined to mine them for all they had to offer.

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Meet the Horror Bloggers: Reflections on Film and TV

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john kenneth muir

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet
the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, John Kenneth Muir of Reflections on Film/TV shares his adrenaline rush with horror, writing, and blogging.

It was a Saturday in 1975, and close to Halloween. As dusk approached, my parents
sat me down in front of the TV and, in particular, an episode of a new series called Space: 1999. The episode airing that night was titled “Dragon’s Domain” and it concerned a malevolent, tentacled Cyclops entrapping and devouring hapless astronauts in a Sargasso Sea of derelict spaceships. In an image I’ve never forgotten, this howling, spitting monster regurgitated the astronauts’ steaming, desiccated bones onto the spaceship deck. The episode was one part 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, and one part precursor to Alien (1979). But the direction of this five year old boy’s life was set in stone during those 50 minutes.

By the time I was in sixth grade, a viewing of Tobe Hooper’s intense The Funhouse (1981) at a girlfriend’s Friday night movie rental party – a big thing in those days — deepened my obsession with the horror genre. The film terrified me on a level I had never before experienced (or even imagined, frankly…), but I survived it. And afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about the nerve-tingling experience of being really frightened by a film, or about the specific details of Hooper’s grisly narrative. I wanted to know more, to understand more, and most importantly, to talk endlessly about the experience and what it had meant to me. Many of my friends thought I was nuts. It's just a scary movie, right?

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From Zombos’ Closet of Horror

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Ilozzoc

Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal. In this installment, Iloz Zoc (that’s my alter ego) lazily borrows heavily from previous interviews to conveniently provide excuses for my cheeky horror excesses.

I remember it all quite well.

I was old enough to hate the babysitter and young enough to play the guilt trip on my parents. So I admit I ruined their night out at the movies by sitting between them during Roger Corman’s The Terror. They were married so nothing naughty would have happened anyway; except for the effect on my impressionable young mind. This was my first time at the movies, and my first experience with horror. My most vivid memory, to this day, is watching the girl melt away into bubbling goo as Jack Nicholson looks on in terror and my parents taking it all in stride, like scenes with melting girls happened every time they went to the movies. The horror bug nipped me that night.

And so it began. I loved watching Shock Theater movies on television, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and my mother–a big horror and sci fi fan–took me to the best and worst movies, like Night of the Living Dead, Dr. Phibes, and Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. Speaking of that last movie, we actually went to see James Bond in From Russia With Love , but the theater, I don’t remember why, was showing that hokey movie instead. We stayed anyway.

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LOTT D Horror Round Up

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Beast from 20000 Fathoms Beware! Once again, the archives have been unburied, and the hideous horrors unleashed! For your entertainment and edification pleasure, of course. Members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers dig six feet deep to find their past misdeeds…and reveal them to you, one favorite and notable post at a time!

 

Slasher Speak shrinks in terror from The Invasion:

In this third retread of the 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, critics and audiences will likely be caught up in the backstage brouhaha that had director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s original cut deemed “too cerebral” for studio execs, the much-ballyhooed Wachowski brothers of Matrix fame being brought in for eleventh-hour rewrites, and up-and-coming action director James McTeigue V for Vendetta adding extra action sequences to the mix.

Vault of Horror shares their top movies of the 1960’s with us:

In the grand tradition of my previous decade-favorite lists, I’m moving right along to the era when your parents used the Vietnam War as an excuse to smoke dope and get on the pill! That’s right friends, it’s the 1960s–quite possible the most tumultuous age of horror. This is quite an interesting list if i do say so myself, a telling mix of traditional terrors and more modern-style flicks. This was, after all, the decade in which the Hays Code and studio system died, and all the rules went out the window.

Dinner With Max Jenke takes on Manhattan along with Jason in Friday the 13th Part VIII:

For horror fans, the decade of the ’80s did not end on a proud note. By 1989, the titans of terror – Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers – who had once ruled over the box office had all frittered away their popular appeal along with their street cred. Arguably the most grievous fall of the bunch was with Jason and Friday the 13th as the series disappeared up its own ass with Jason Takes Manhattan.

TheoFantastique sees The Lost Boys as the Brady Bunch, and lives to tell about it:

One of my favorite vampire films is a “cult” classic, Joel Schumacher’s 1987 film The Lost Boys. I was therefore pleased to find a paper presented by Jeremy Tirrell at the national convention of the Popular Culture Association that deals with the film titled “The Bloodsucking Brady Bunch: Reforming the Family Unit in the The Lost Boys. The paper is found on Tirrell’s “print archive” section of his website, and he considers it a “work in progress.

The Drunken Severed Head explores why monsters make good friends:

A friend of mine (I’ll call him “Bill”) lost his mother very recently, and I sent him my wishes for “many lasting solaces, great and small.” Knowing my friend, it’s likely one of the solaces he’ll turn will be his love of classic horror films.

Classic Horror teases us with Lisa and the Devil:

The story of Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil is the stuff from which cinema legends are made: brilliant auteur is given carte blanche to make his masterpiece, but the end result can’t find a distributor. To recoup costs, the film’s producer pressures the director to add scenes of demonic possession to cash-in on a popular American film (in this case, The Exorcist).

Meet the Horror Bloggers: The Moon is a Dead World

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Ryne Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this
ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Ryne Barber of The Moon is a Dead World talks about his dad’s involvement with his love for horror, and why the shadows on your ceiling are so important to dwell on.

You know when you’re lying in bed, looking at the shadows that a particular object is throwing off on your ceiling, and thinking up different ideas of what the shapes look like? Trying to decide what looks most similar? Attempting to define the experience that really hooked me to the horror genre is kind of like that.

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Meet the Horror Bloggers: Unspeakable Horror

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chad helder Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this
ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Chad Helder of Unspeakable Horror tells us how his unintentions paved the royal road to his horror writing career in poetry, fiction, and comic books.

The horror genre gained my fascination in the turbulent years of Junior High School. The first most important thing I remember was reading Poe in Ms. Shoemaker’s English class. I stayed after class one day to ask her if writing horror stories made Poe more mentally unstable, and she told me that writing horror stories probably helped him release his demons and made him more stable. I liked that answer, and I wrote a
couple of horror stories in Junior High, a story about a phantom hockey player and a story about an insane person with fog in his mind.

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LOTT D Horror Post Round Up

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Metaluna mutant Beware! Once again, the archives have been unburied, and the hideous horrors unleashed! For your entertainment and edification pleasure, of course. Members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers dig six feet deep to find their past misdeeds…and reveal them to you, one favorite and notable post at a time!

Drunken Severed Head bids a fond farewell to the King of Pop in Goodby, Michael:

Like millions of others, I still have warm memories of seeing the video for the song “Thriller” for the first time. The song replaced “Monster Mash” for the post-Boomer generations as THE anthem of Halloween, my favorite holiday.

Classic Horror kicks off the action with Ten Sadistic Ways to Die in a Horror Movie:

They said, “Hey, guys, we have somebody getting yanked apart by two semi trucks in our movie. What about listing off some other brutal and/or sadistic deaths?” These aren’t necessarily the ten most brutal or sadistic deaths in a horror movie, just the ones we thought were notable.

Groovy Age of Horror switches on Channel Evil No. 1:

Oakley has a unique style that can be classy and articulate at times, creating a scene that is very film noir with a dose of abstract planes. At other times, the art gets the best of him, spiraling out of control and derails writer Alan Grant’s interesting story.

Dinner With Max Jenke shows us what’s strong enough for a Ninja, but made for a woman:

As a trilogy, the Ninja films were unrelated to each other – with the only constant being actor Sho Kosugi, who played a different role in each one. And while Enter the Ninja (1981) and Revenge of the Ninja (1983) were straight-forward action films with crime elements, Domination brought the series to a supernatural conclusion.

TheoFantastique ponders angels, aliens, and the supernatural other:

…This connection between the angelic and the alien in horror films is even more interesting when we consider the influence of Christian demonology in shaping the thinking and symbolism in these areas.

Vault of Horror lists their top ten favorites for 1950’s horror:

The 1950s was an amazing time for terror, filled with giant critters, 3-D nightmares, drive-in grotesqueries and the birth of sci-fi horror. There are so many to choose from, but if you held me down at gunpoint, these would probably be my ten favorite…

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Classic Horror

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Nate Yapp Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.

In this installment, Nate Yapp of Classic Horror hits the wall, and climbs over it in classic style to continue his quest for horror.

Even without horror, I would still be a movie blogger of some kind. When I was seven, I read Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide from cover to cover, imagining each film in my head. Cinema is part of my basic identity. Horror came to give that identity a focus, not once but twice in my life.

While I was still seven (or possibly eight), I wandered into the living room just as the infamous sewer grate scene from Stephen King's It began. I was terrified. I did not like it. My mother, who grew up watching a local late-night horror program, decided that the best way to handle my almost crippling fear was to show me her horror films — Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Pit & the Pendulum and the like. I was hooked. For whatever reason, these resonated with me. I would search bookstores and libraries for tomes on my favorite monsters.

At age eight, I was proud owner of William K. Everson's Classics of the Horror Film and Alan Frank's Horror Movies (although many of the full-color pictures in the latter volume disturbed me). I even bought a copy of Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen, because Count Orlok loomed on the cover. A friend's parents were kind enough to tape AMC's Monsterfest for me and I pored over all of those movies. I could not get enough.

Until I eventually did.

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