In 1967 yakuza filmmaker Seijun Suzuki was fired from his job at Nikkatsu Company for being too weird. He made 40 films in 12 years for Nikkatsu, each allocated less than 40 days of production from start to finish. Steadily his movies got stranger and stranger. At one point in Tokyo Drifter (1966), the entire set […]
I have written before about how product marketing for video games and everything else appears to be driven by enormous, autonomous, self-propelling machines. Huge apparatuses, employing hundreds of people, designed to pounce on any work that catches the fancy of the public, capitalize upon it, and keep it at the forefront of public consciousness until […]
I read a pretty good blog piece about Alan Wake, Limbo, and Stephen King this evening. The point of the piece is that Limbo is better at horror than Alan Wake because Wake is big-budget, telegraphs its scares, and feels the need to explain everything. It’s a pretty good series of short articles, which I […]
You should watch this interesting analysis about the various physical impossibilities of the hotel in The Shining. There’s an argument to be made that these inconsistencies are the result of simple set design flaws, but even in that case the point of the analysis is that (intentional or not) the spatial anomolies present in the […]
¥980 is about $10 right now. That is to say, it’s not very much money. It’s particularly cheap for a DVD containing “over 120 minutes of astonishing horror footage.” And yet, that’s exactly what 本当にあった 恐怖の心霊・都市伝説DVD BOX (“Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX”) offers at that price. I was more than a […]
This is a bit off-topic for this blog, but I wanted to make comment about the film adaptation of 20th Century Boys (２０世紀少年) a pretty killer manga by Naoki Urasawa. The manga is about Kenji, a regular joe convenience store owner who realizes that a story he wrote as a child about the destruction of […]
Last year my network of horror-aficionado friends started talking about a hard-to-find Spanish film called REC. The few reviews available were stellar, and I was intrigued with the idea of a Blair Witch-style film about zombies (as I mentioned in my Cloverfield review, the handicam approach to horror seems to be pretty viable). But, as […]
Brandon over at insert credit posted about a horror short that he worked on which is part of a contest from a site called ChillerTV. There are a ton of entries (though so far, the one Brandon linked to is the best that I’ve seen), and at five minutes, it’s fun to see filmmakers try […]
Here’s a couple of videos I’ve come across lately: Some super alpha handicam vid of Sadness actually running. I think that this footage is legit; that black box on top of the guy’s TV is a Wii dev kit (I used to have the same kind on my desk), and the footage looks like prototype-level […]
A couple of weeks ago I was browsing the film section of my local Japanese bookstore when I came across a box set of four discs called Tales of Terror From Tokyo and All Over Japan. Now, to tell you the truth, the set looked like utter schlock. In addition to the awkward title and […]