So last week I posted about John Carpenter’s 70th birthday and his films like They Live and The Thing. Carpenter’s Halloween isn’t 70, but the film is celebrating its 40th birthday and the slash-terpiece will get re-booted by David Fincher this October. Despite sequels/prequels and remakes/reimaginings, nobody has been able to rekindle the magic of Carpenter’s original which is the keystone of the slasher genre.

That said, Fincher is one of my favorite contemporary directors, and he might be the other director that’s currently challenging Paul Thomas Anderson for the title of best American director of the 21st century. By my score, Anderson’s films — especially There Will Be Blood &mash; make him the best of his generation. That said, Fincher’s Zodiac is intense cinema, Fight Club is a movie pop classic alongside Pulp Fiction, and I still can’t believe that I love a movie about Facebook.

But, here’s the thing: David Fincher isn’t directing the new film, David Gordon Green is. I just wanted to imagine if Fincher did so I could write a bit about him and PTA. David Gordon Green isn’t in the running for best director of the 20th century, but he’s proved to be a real actor’s director working with Nicolas Cage, Al Pacino, Michael Shannon, Zooey Deschanel and James Franco. Green’s made lots of small, intense dramas, but he’s also done comedies and I could actually see all those experiences and the director’s facility with capturing strong performances serving his Halloween very, scary well.

We’ll have to wait until October to find out. Here’s a deep-dive documentary into Halloween…

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1982 was an amazing year for sci-fi, fantasy, and horror films: E.T., Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Creepshow, The Thing, Poltergeist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, and The Dark Crystal all debuted that year. Another 1982 movie that was full of fantastic elements as well as fantastic music was Pink Floyd — The Wall. One of the greatest rock films of all time, The Wall tells the story of a young boy who grows up in post-war Britain and becomes a famous rock star. Eventually lost love sends him on a downward spiral of self-loathing that conversely sees him rise to the position of a fascist demigod. It’s all one big sprawling metaphor for the interpersonal traumas that find us detaching from friends and family until we’re each living behind these walls of our own making in the prisons we’ve created for ourselves.

Celebrating the 35th anniversary of this landmark film, here’s Pink Floyd — The Wall…

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One last monstrous post before the the witches take over the night sky, the jack-o-lanterns cackle and the veil is pierced with mischief, mayhem, lunacy and eros. This year we celebrate the 90th birthday of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu” which appeared in Weird Tales in 1926. Here’s what a couple of bad ass writers have said about the tale…

The published story was regarded by Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan) as “a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature. Mr. Lovecraft holds a unique position in the literary world; he has grasped, to all intents, the worlds outside our paltry ken.”[12] Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon regarded the story as “ambitious and complex…a dense and subtle narrative in which the horror gradually builds to cosmic proportions”, adding “one of [Lovecraft's] bleakest fictional expressions of man’s insignificant place in the universe.”[13]

French novelist Michel Houellebecq, in his book H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, described the story as the first of Lovecraft’s “great texts”.[14]

An article I found on Flipboard this weekend addressed how H.P. Lovecraft’s aesthetic has become a major influence on contemporary Hollywood even if the author’s works have yet to be acceptable in tinsel town. Did you know H.P. was a big racist? Check this…

HP Lovecraft wrote some of the most bizarre, imaginative and influential horror stories in the English language. But he was also a dangerous bigot. Is that why Hollywood still fears him?

HP Lovecraft’s tentacles are all over the modern horror movie. The cult author’s squelchy, slithery yarns influenced HR Giger’s iconic Alien design, inspired John Carpenter’s nightmarish masterpiece, The Thing, and have been a consistent reference point for Guillermo Del Toro, from Pan’s Labyrinth to Hellboy.

But though Lovecraft, whose jazz age fiction posited a godless universe presided over by monstrous “Great Old Ones”, can justifiably be described as a giant of the genre, he is, in other ways, deafeningly absent from our screens. His work has been adapted on many occasions, from 1970’s Roger Corman-produced The Dunwich Horror to last year’s Russian-made The Haunter of the Dark.

Yet none of these films have penetrated the public consciousness. They are appreciated by a tiny circle of uber-fans even as they remain thoroughly obscure to a mainstream audience.

Racists demonstrate the worst combination of stupid and hateful, and Lovecraft was guilty of both. He was also a literary visionary even if it could be argued that he really wasn’t a great writer. Hate the racism, but love the art. If you’re reading this blog you’re probably smart enough to do both.

Here’s H.P. Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown. Happy Halloween!

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After I shared yesterday’s post about John Carpenter’s The Thing to my Facebook page my friend Brandon shouted out Rob Bottin, the boy genius who created The Thing‘s groundbreaking special effects make-up when he was only about 22 years old. If that film doesn’t convince you of Bottin’s flat out genius you need to see what he did for The Howling even before he worked with Carpenter. The Howling is one of the best werewolf films of all time, and since werewolves are my favorite movie monsters, you know I’m a huge fan of Bottin’s.

Here’s a YouTube playlist focusing just on Bottin’s werewolf creations as we continue with the petrifying posts for the Halloween season…

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Just opened up YouTube wondering out loud what kind of spooky, Halloween horror I should post for today’s blog before I saw the very first recommended video. Here’s the making of John Carpenter’s The Thing…

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