zc

League of Tana Tea Drinkers

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Dinner With Max Jenke

dinner with max jenke 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, Jeff Allard invites us to Dinner With Max Jenke and reminds us how easy it is to be a horror fan these days.

Writing about horror has been a constant in my life for, well, long enough to scare me. In the early ‘90s, inspired by the Lester Bangs of horror journalism, Chas. Balun (Horror Holocaust, The Gore Score, Deep Red magazine, GoreZone’s “Piece O’ Mind” column), I thought it’d be a great idea to start self-publishing my own fanzine and with some expert help from a friend who did layout and design work at the newspaper I wrote for at the time, the first issue of Gravedigger’s Union made it into the world back in 1993 – a year that now seems ancient to me.

Looking back on that issue, which included a tribute to Night of the Living Dead – then celebrating its mere 25th (!) anniversary – I have to marvel at one thing: how much free time I clearly had on my hands back then! But I’m very glad I had the time and money to devote to publishing Gravedigger’s Union as the four issues that eventually saw print over the next four years (the mag that started as an intended quarterly became an annual event!) before being forced by financial realities to throw in the towel (seeking out advertisers might’ve been a smart move but I opted not to) remain a nice little personal snapshot of a different age of fandom.

LOTT D Horror Round Up

Dummy 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!

Classic Horror looks at a solid example of Italian Giallo, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage:

As a giallo, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is an exemplary combination of all the things associated with this particular breed of Italian mystery-thriller. It features violence that is heavy on the crimson, stylized camera work, and sex and sexuality as major parts of the plot. One could argue that Bird is the film that defined these as characteristic of the subgenre, but in reality, it merely accentuates and clarifies an existing format.

TheoFantastique hits the road searching for post-millenial road horror:

The characteristics of this subgenre of film involve “the centralisation of a group of generally young protagonists; the journey of this group into an unknown and hostile location, and its resulting encounter with a murderous, perverse and often interrelated clan of killers, preceding vile and gory consequence.”

Dinner With Max Jenke pigs out on appreciation for Mother’s Day poster art:

As a kid, when I first saw this poster reproduced in a newspaper advertisement (which in smudgy black and white newsprint only made it look cooler), at the height of the slasher fad, I was in thrall with its ghastliness. Even with as many outstanding posters as the early ’80s boasted (hello, Happy Birthday to Me!), Mother’s Day knocked everything else on its ass.

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Evil On Two Legs

Corey 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, Corey at Evil On Two Legstalks about what makes his blog unique and fun to read as well as write.

 

I’ve always loved horror. My earliest memory is of the first day of pre-school and finding the 2-XL robot hidden behind the nap mats and Legos. One of the multiple choice 8-track quiz tapes dealt with vampires, werewolves and other classic monsters. I don’t believe I ever put in the tapes on sports or history, but I must have played the monster one a 1000 times.

As soon as I could read I was lost in the public library searching out books on UFOs, Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster and horror story collections like “The Headless Roommate and Other Tales” and “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.” Early exposure to the films Halloween, An American Werewolf in London and The Prowler set me up for what’s become a life-long love of the horror film genre. My happiest memories of childhood involve roaming the endless horror aisles of oversized VHS boxes at Encore Video (a local mom & pop video store), looking for something that sounded scary but whose name and cover would be acceptable to my parents… and dreaming of the day when I could have my own video card and would finally be able to rent some of the titles that featured really graphic cover art and enticing names like Faces of Death, I Spit On Your Grave and Slumber Party Massacre.

masked corey There are thousands of sites and blogs where you can find film reviews, so when I started my own site I decided I wanted it to try to do something a little different. When I was a kid we’d argue for hours about who would win in a fight between Jason and Freddy or we’d try to rationalize exactly how Michael is walking around killing people in part 4 after clearly having his eyes shot out in part 2. Those are the kinds of things I wanted to write about. Our site also features less original things like lists of the week’s horror DVD releases and the occasional, highly biased review of the latest slasher remake; but I’m most proud of our site when it features articles that do things like analyze the fashion sense of the teens in the first Friday the 13th or pit Eli from Let the Right One In against Edward from Twilight to decide who would be crowned vampire of the year.

I created a horror blog because I needed a place to vent my love of the genre, to exercise my creativity, and as a fun project to work on with my best friends turned co-writers (Jon & Cara). My site has grown to mean far more to me than that, though, because of the people I have met thanks to it. Through email, Twitter, comments, and in person at conventions, I’ve come to meet some of the nicest people in the horror community and, through their encouragement and advice, to come to feel a part of it myself. I know that my co-writers feel the same.

I think we’ll be writing about horror for a long time to come.

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Slasher Speak

Vince liaguno 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, author, and League of Tana Tea Drinker's member, Vince Liaguno of Slasher Speak gives us good reason why the standards of normalcy are overrated.

Let’s get one thing out the way: I love slasher films and am unapologetic about it. There is no hanging my head or lowering my voice when someone asks me what the last film I saw was and the answer includes the words bloody or massacre and is either preceded or followed by the name of a holiday or power tool. Buckets of blood, guts, and gore…mass murder, misogyny, and madness – it’s all good.

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Gospel of the Living Dead

Kim Paffenroth Zombie 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, author and horror blogger Kim Paffenroth of Gospel of the Living Dead talks about zombies and religion, and how the two meet to provide enlightening revelation.

I think, like many people, my first interest in horror goes back to adolescence, when I was fascinated with some horror movies (especially Romero's zombies), and with some written expressions of horror (especially
Lovecraft). I thought gross, bleeding, oozing things were cool. I think it's pretty typical at that age. Then my mother died a slow, lingering death from cancer, and that made my interest a little less "cool" and a lot more brooding and sullen. I put some of my feelings into bad fiction writing and bad poetry at that age, I suppose as a kind of catharsis or self-therapy. It worked, for what it was, I guess.

But when I went off to college, that phase just stopped. It didn't trail off, it just stopped the day I got off the bus in front of Campbell Hall. Something about the place (St John's College, Annapolis, MD) just awed me with the ideas of dead guys who knew so much more than I did; I should stop and read every word I could and not interrupt with
my sophomoric attempts to put angst or pain or rebellion into words. (I know, I wouldn't have articulated the feeling that way at the time, but in hindsight, that's what I was feeling at all the ivy-covered walls and dusty books and rather arcane, 19th century-looking lab apparatuses.)

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Fascination With Fear

Chris at crystal lake 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, Christine Hadden of Fascination With Fear talks about her ominous Saturday night alone, and the ensuing damage it wrought. Lucky for us.

 

My obsession with horror came at a very young age. As a small child, my grandfather (a Methodist minister, no less) introduced me to The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka – both of which actually have horrifying undertones for kids. (Gene Wilder was seriously demented in that freaky psychedelic boat sequence!) To that effect, a lot of the better Disney features can be brutal as well. Exposing a child to Bambi at too young an age–and I’m telling you from experience–you’ll scar them for life. My grandpap and I would also stay up late watching Bill Cardille (“Chilly Billy”) on Chiller Theater (a Pittsburgh legend). My parents bought me all those crazy Disney ghost story records, I watched all the old Godzilla movies on Saturday afternoons, and, truth be told, I read every last Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery, okay? After school I rushed home to watch the iconic (?) Lost In Space…so there’s my sci-fi link.

I can’t recall how old I was when my parents left me alone for the first time on a Saturday night to go out. Was I ten yet? I should have been but I’m really not sure. But I was forever damaged (and enchanted) after turning on a movie called The Exorcist. And what was that movie doing on regular TV, anyway? Must’ve been around Halloween.

LOTT D Horror Post Roundup

Sherlock Holmes Beware! The game’s afoot. 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!

 

Classic-Horror dares to delve deeply into Blood for Dracula:

With all the revolutions in the film industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of the older film monsters were starting to appear cliché, even trite. Dracula, long the enemy of Victorian standards, needed to be updated for a time when such standards had long passed. Leave it to pop artist/film producer Andy Warhol and director Paul Morrissey to do this by flipping the rules around and making Dracula the pathetic victim of permissive social mores.

Theofantastique posits the oppositional reconstruction of vampire symbolism in 30 Days of Night:

After watching the film I came away with the general impression that this is a good vampire film with the potential to breathe new life into cultural treatments of the vampire icon, and it is the cultural reconstruction of the vampire through this film that I will touch on with this post.

Vault of Horror opens up with their defense of The Mist:

Far be it from a curmudgeon like me to say this, but I think it’s entirely possible that we as horror fans run the risk of occasionally becoming a bit too cynical for our own good. Case in point: Why is it that a movie like Frank Darabont’s The Mist, a solid, enjoyable horror flick, has been so roundly pummeled by the online horror community? This morning I’m taking a stand and saying it’s damn fine little fright film.

Groovy Age of Horror shares his beef with bad-arsed jadedness in horror:

To be fair, this is only a handful of pretty marginal examples, but I really feel like something’s getting lost in contemporary horror, even in supernatural horror, and that is a sense of the supernatural as inherently uncanny. This unfortunate trend strikes me as pretty recent.

Dinner With Max Jenke writes up sleazy classic Vice Squad:

What’s amazing about Vice Squad is that the film – and Hauser’s performance – manage to surpass whatever expectations one may have. If you see one movie about a killer pimp in your lifetime, it absolutely has to be Vice Squad – otherwise you haven’t seen sh*t.

Until next week, then…and this week’s photo courtesy of Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans.

Meet the Horror Bloggers: Cinema Fromage

Casey criswell 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, League of Tana Tea Drinkers’ member Casey Criswell of Cinema Fromage shares his nerd love for cheesy horror. Bring the crackers.

 

Horror wasn’t the driving force to my movie watching ways back in the day, but it was definitely a factor. I watched movies, period, and was happy to do so. When the VCR became an affordable venture and mom and pop video stores started to run rental deals to lure you away from the new chain stores cropping up, this led to countless hours spent wandering the stacks and being overcome by the wonderment of the
gruesome scenes depicted in ink upon the old cardboard canvases that was the VHS box. More than anything, it was the artwork that lured me in every time. They say never judge a book by its cover but that is what I did. If the cover looked amazing, I had to see the movie.

Meet the Horror Bloggers:
Billy Loves Stu

Pax Romano 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, League of Tana Tea Drinkers’ member Michael Petrucelli of Billy Loves Stu looks for the gay and lesbian subtexts in horror movies as well as the ‘straight’ scares.

 

My love of horror began at a tender age. As a kid I was exposed to the classic Universal horror films Dracula, Frankenstein, etc) by my father. When these movies came on the television, he’d call me over and we’d watch together in the small living room of our row house in South Philadelphia. Often, my dad would add to the flavor of the films by talking like the characters, he did (and still does) a terrific Bela Lugosi as well as Boris Karloff. Later on, well after the movie had ended, he’d come into my room as I was preparing for bed, and freak me out by telling me that he was in the basement earlier and found machines that were probably once used to create a monster, or that he thought our next door neighbor was a vampire (our next door neighbor, Mr.Calabrese worked nights). Needless to say, I was mortified – and yet at the same time, I was fascinated. Many sleepless nights ensued (and I always kept my eyes peeled for Mr. Calabrese), but I never turned down an invitation to watch a scary movie with my dad.

There was this old movie theater a few blocks from where I grew up, you know, one of
those palatial houses with marble arches and velvet curtains; and on the weekends, they’d show triple feature horror films, usually something from Hammer studios in England. Often, they would also incorporate a “spook show” between films (which was usually some poor usher made up like a low-rent werewolf walking up and down the aisles of the movie house) and give out prizes for those “brave enough” to make it through the afternoon of horrors. Over time, I accumulated dozens of cheesy door prizes that I displayed as
proudly as some kids did with their baseball trophies.

Meet the Horror Bloggers:
Uranium Cafe

Bill Courtney 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, League of Tana Tea Drinkers’ member Bill Courtney of the Uranium Cafe describes the influences, the places, and the challenges for keeping his love of horror and cult movies alive.

 

As a kid I was lucky enough to have a dad who was not the least bit interested in watching sports on TV over the weekends. He loved movies and comic books. This was in the 60’s and I grew up on a healthy diet of classic films, TV, and Marvel and DC comics. We had a b/w TV set with rabbit ears and basically three channels to choose programs from. Later, PBS would come along but who the hell ever really watched that. I grew up watching a variety of programs that included weekly showings of Sword and Sandal films, serial Westerns, and of course classic horror and sci-fi features.

A couple films I recall as being really shocking to me are actually pretty tame fare by today’s standards. One was The Mummy with Boris Karloff and in particular the scene where he suddenly rises up and peers into the camera. The other film, also with Karloff, was called Die, Monster, Die! And I recall being terrified to death, and dad telling me it was just a movie and it was all make believe. I would soon be saving up my lunch money from school and going to the local grocery stores and buying loads of comics and Warren Magazines. At the most I would save up two or three bucks but back then Famous Monsters of Filmland was .35 or .50 and I could get six or so comics for a dollar. Matinees were cheap and I remember watching more Spaghetti Westerns and B-horror movies than I can recall.

Meet the Horror Bloggers:
Love Train for the
Tenebrous Empire

Tenebrous Kate 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, League of Tana Tea Drinkers’ member Tenebrous Kate of Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire tells us about her love for the unusual. Hop aboard!

Between my Halloween-themed birthday parties, early interest in the creepiest fairy tales, and exposure to my Dad’s incredible impersonation of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, I was pretty much fated from infancy to be some flavor of spooky. My youthful dreams of earning a living as a vampire hunter were squashed (I read pretty much every book filed under the Parapsychology & Occult section of my local library), so by the time I was fourteen, I began delving into the wild world of horror cinema in earnest.

Applying the same sort of tenacity to my movie-viewing that I’d put into my childhood reading, I methodically worked my way through the “Horror” category at a number of video rental stores. Unlike a lot of my horror-loving colleagues, I entirely missed out on the slasher flick craze due to parental protectiveness and a notoriously weak stomach for on-screen depictions of blood-and-guts. After dipping a toe in the waters of explicit fright films with “Suspiria” (I’d read laudatory words about this movie most likely in an issue of “Cinefantastique” or “Video Watchdog”), my love affair with off-the-wall exploitation epics was born.

Rat pfink At some point during high school, I was banhammered from selecting films for movie nights with pals (I think it was “Rat Pfink and Boo Boo” that finally did it) and I found myself desperately in need of a community of like-minded geeks. Thank goodness for the horror convention circuit and the internet, both of which gave me an appropriate outlet for my fandom. In the intervening years, I’ve formed good friendships and have had exploitation film articles published by my pals at “Ultra Violent Magazine.”

As is the case with comedy, a viewer’s reaction to horror is deeply personal, leading to the kind of impassioned opinions and debates that characterize the horror blogosphere. For me, a good piece of horror entertainment is immensely satisfying–blending strangeness, provocation, and vivid imagery with escapism and (dare I say it!) fun. I’m in touch with the fact that my appetite for sexually-charged, wildly-politically-incorrect, severely-bizarre horror is outside of the norm in a scene that’s already outside of the norm. Acknowledging this, it only seems natural that I should employ my own voice when writing about that kind of material. My blogging is a form of autobiography through my interactions with a very specific slice of the pop cultural pie. I find that having an interactive platform where I can discuss my joys, disappointments, and fascinations enhances my experience of horror entertainment–this is a pretty amazing side effect to a hobby I took up simply for fun!

Meet the Horror Bloggers:
Cinema Suicide

Bryan White 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, League of Tana Tea Drinkers’ member Bryan White of Cinema Suicide tells us how he leveraged his love of horror into free stuff, a successful blog, and a lifelong passion.

My family picked up stakes when I was seven years old and moved us from Binghamton, New York, to the Lovecraftian seaside of Marblehead, Massachusetts. It took me no time at all to seek out the channels with the best cartoons and in the process of this Saturday morning exploration, I found something that Binghamton didn’t have. At least not to my knowledge. This morbid discovery also managed to silently change my life in ways I wouldn’t understand until I was well into my 20’s.

The Creature Double Feature on WLVI was your classic afternoon monster matinee on TV. Bookended by an echoplex voice-over set to Emerson, Lake and Palmer, The Creature Double Feature introduced me to vampires with British accents, men in rubber monster suits stomping on models of Japanese cities and more pie plates decked out to look like flying saucers than you could possibly ever conceive of. It was all in good fun and just shocking enough to scare the crap out of a 7 year old; enough to keep me coming back week after week in hopes of seeing Karloff, Price, and Lee again.

Creature Double Feature 56 It didn’t end there, either. The magic of UHF television was that everything was broadcast with a devil may care attitude and tight budgets meant broadcasting only the cheapest crap. Dollar rental video stores a few years later, paired with way too much free time on my hands, meant nights spent cataloging the most brazen garbage the action and horror sections had to offer. I spent a solid majority of my life up to this point swimming in a sea of NTSC filth looking for new shocks, evangelizing movies most people have dismissed; but it wasn’t until the internet came along that I found more people like me and even bigger repositories of information and fandom.

An incidental collection of bootlegs and factory prerecords led to bootleg trades and to accompany this, a website listing my haves and wants. A general necessity to write HTML led to actually working in the web development field, which led to a coworker asking me why I didn’t, at least, have a personal blog, which eventually became Cinema Suicide.

Cinema Suicide led to lots of free stuff from people selling movies. It also led to becoming the go-to horror movie guy for New Hampshire Public Radio’s show, Word of Mouth, a nod in the last round of Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards, and a ton of journalists asking me what I watch when Halloween rolls around. It’s quite remarkable the things that knowing a lot of useless information can bring you.

But my love for the genre has nothing to do with marginal regional infamy or free stuff. Horror old and new gave me a place to go when I was the new kid in town, a mantle I wore more than few times, even if that place was the family den where we kept the television. I grew up every bit the spooky kid in my class and when I felt like no one understood me, I always had a place to go that was comfortable, even when it involved zombies tearing a bunch of bikers limb from limb and eating their intestines. Say what you will but some of my longest friendships have names like Dawn of the Dead, Vincent Price, and Roger Corman. I give back as much as they gave me by leveraging my questionable writing skills on their behalf in hopes that, even among waves of remakes and a genre in its death throes, I’ll somehow influence someone to take another look at some movie that they dismissed because it looked cheesy.

And for the record, my favorite movie of all time is Escape From New York, a factoid that Adrienne Barbeau, herself, found hard to believe.