Zombos' Closet of Horror Blog

Halloween Memories

At this wonderful time of year for horror fans, our nostalgia for costumed escapades long past, fiends seldom seen, and old scares lightened by candy corn chuckles by the warm glow of the jack o'lantern, renews our spirits at a time of year when we open our doors--of our own free will--to the terrors by night. And laugh.

Join in the memories as the League of Tana Tea Drinkers reminisces on those terrors that come dressed in polyester, gauze, and rubber, brazenly bellowing with all their devilish might, in syllables to chill the night, "Trick or Treat!"

What's Wrong With Today's Horror Movies?Part Two

In Part One of What's Wrong With Today's Horror Movies, the League of Tana Tea Drinkers hoisted a few crisp, wet ones while dwelling on the exigencies, intricacies, and commodities of postmodern (as well as classic and neo-classic) horror film fair, and it's looming quietus into something amounting to little more than the taste of grisly pablum. With salty pretzels well in hand, and a cold drink in the other, let us get back to the discussion.

Dinner With Max Jenke wants more on his plate...

This is a topic that lots of fans have an immediate answer to, with plenty of vitriol to share about how horror is a diluted product now - just watered-down thrills made for an undiscriminating audience. Tips for improvement run the whole gamut--horror movies should be R and not PG-13, there should be less of a focus on teenagers, and more original films instead of remakes and sequels.

But horror fans of every generation have typically made it a point to complain that the horror films of the present are inferior to whatever scare fare they grew up on. I imagine that even some ancient moviegoers who were raised in the silent days must have believed that the advent of sound was the death knell of true horror. Because, you know, movies are only scary when you have to imagine what a creaking door sounds like. And once black and white was replaced by color, I bet some fans never recovered from that because everybody knows that horror movies just don’t work as well unless they’re in black and white. The point being that every era has given horror fans something new to gripe about.

What's Wrong WithToday's Horror Movies?Part One

League of Tana Tea Drinkers

Are you a horror movie fan? Maybe you prefer a good slasher flick from the 1980s, or perhaps you are more into gore and dream of squirming in your theater seat every Halloween watching the umpteenth version of Saw? Maybe you pine away for the good old days when being scared by Boris, or Bela, or Price was fun, not nauseating. Maybe you are just fed up with it, and dread every new--strike that--every remade horror release from Hollywood? Even if it is not a remake, odds are it will be the same old dreck dressed up with new victims. So what is really wrong with today's horror movies? Have they traded in the carefully crafted hair-raising scares for easy gut-wrenching shocks? Has the Sargasso Sea of inept, Happy Meal-packaged DVD dreck finally sunk the horror craft? Whatever happened to using suggestion and suspense and atmosphere to tell a story anyway?

The League of Tana Tea Drinkers gather at the table for another round while they ponder this curious case of forgotten lore. Have one on us and join the conversation.

LOTT D Roundtable: The Allure of Evil

LOTT D Looks at Our Love for Evil
LOTT D

Why are we attracted to and mesmerized by evil people in horror cinema and novels? Gloomy Sunday's Gothic-romantic, Absinthe, kicks off this round of commentary from the League of Tana Tea Drinkers to explore this question. From Bela Lugosi to Freddy Kruger, the league pokes and prods as only it can do, to unearth the answers, the assumptions, and the contradictions.

Gloomy Sunday explores the bad boys of screen and novel...

Why are we attracted to villains? Why are we drawn towards characters we really should hate? Why do we sometimes find sex appeal in characters who are hideous or deformed? Is it we can relate better to people who have flaws, people who are more realistically human with their dark sides instead of the cookie cutter heroes and heroines we usually see in movies?  Or does it go deeper, to an instinctual level, left over from a more primitive time, when only the strong thrived and reproduced, drawing us to the powerfully wicked onscreen?

Pinhead from Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart and the later Hellraiser movies--although I only speak for the first two because after that they suck--is one of my favorite villains and one I think has strong sexual appeal despite his skin being the color of a dead fish, with nails protruding from his head, and a strange, but kinky, sadomasochistic leather outfit hinting at damnation. If you wanted to, you could compare the premise Hellraiser is based on to a metaphor for sexual freedom by looking at the puzzle box, which involves a quest for something much desired, yet secret, dark, and forbidden to have. If Pinhead quickly came into scene and dispatched his victims, we would not be so drawn to him. Instead, he shows human characteristics we can relate to. In Hellbound, Hellraiser II he does not kill Tiffany when she opens the box because he knows that "hands did not call us, desire did." He seems fair even though he is a killer, and he continually lets Kirsty slip through the damning cracks by allowing deals and bargains. Is it his power we are drawn to, the relief provided by his human flaws that we can relate to, or the subtext of sublime sexual naughtiness he is the front man for?

Evil Kids in Horror: No Sugar and Spice and Not Very Nice

Evil Kids in the Horror Genre: Why Do They Scare Us So Much?
LOTT D

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.

LOTT D Roundtable: Torture Porn in Horror Today

Cinema tends to reflect either the banality, the sanctity, or the immorality of our times, and patrons of movies promote the ones they like most by buying more theater tickets, more DVDs, and more Netflix rentals for them. The popularity of a movie will invariably foster more movies with similar storylines, similar characters and action themes, and as many sequels as an audience's attention span will allow. In a word, profit drives the creative ups and downs of cinema. From the independent to the mainstream, whether grindhouse or arthouse, the bottom line accounts for most of what we see and hear in the darkened theaters of Cannes, Sheboygan, and points in-between.

With movies affected by the vagaries of social and commercial forces, how do you explain the cross-genre use of torture porn in films like The Passion of the Christ, Saw, Hostel, Wolf Creek, Irreversible? Or even it's lesser use in television shows like Battlestar Galactica or 24? How do you justify the extended, agonizing, and too-graphic torture of a human being (or human-like being), who is humiliated and vivisected emotionally, spiritually, and physically? Is it a necessary component for high drama, or just a bottom-line feeder? And what does it say about us, the audience, promoting such movies like Saw every Halloween, forcing each sequel to become a more creative evisceration bloodbath?

The horror-blogging members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers give their take on torture porn. One word of advice: this is not a fluff piece of transient newsy gossip, or Twitter-sized comments of self-importance. Brew a nice cup of tana tea and butter your brain on both sides before you begin. Now get nice and comfortable. Ready? Let's begin.