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Justin Cronin on Bringing The Passage Trilogy to Television

Justin Cronin on Bringing The Passage Trilogy to Television

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Over at DGO, Patty Templeton interviews author Justin Cronin on bringing his bestselling horror trilogy to the small screen. Let’s listen in, shall we?

The Passage is a damn fine book. It’s a doorstopper of a read with deep characters and a full-tilt apocalyptic plot. The first in a completed trilogy, The Passage establishes a near-future world ravaged by a contagious virus that leaves its victims in a vampire-like state. From there, one world dies and another is born…

PT: THE PASSAGE TRILOGY IS COMING TO TV. WHAT EXCITES YOU MOST ABOUT THE PROJECT?

JC: I think TV is so good now. Film is a director’s medium and TV has become a writer’s medium. TV is natural for ensemble storytelling and for telling a big story. Television is also a very good way to bring people to the books. Television is around for a long time, assuming the show is successful enough to stay around. Movies come and go, now. Half the movies I want to see are gone from the theaters before I can see them. Whereas television is one of our great cultural pleasures. Good television is kind of like Dickens used to be. It’s episodic and we can all go down to the pier and await the next chapter of David Copperfield.

Read the complete interview at DGO!

Goth Chick News: Ellen Ripley Relives Her Tortured Past

Goth Chick News: Ellen Ripley Relives Her Tortured Past

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Consider for a moment your adult self, with all your current knowledge, experience and (theoretic) ability to know better, magically transported back in time to relive the trials and tribulations of your incredibly awkward and potentially misspent youth.

Would you do it?

Personally that’s a great big “no” with several colorful swear words preceding it. But this is the exact personal hell soon to be faced by Sigourney Weaver.

Sort of.

Ridley Scott isn’t ruling out a young Ellen Ripley entering the storyline in one of his planned Alien: Covenant sequels, via the magic of CGI de-aging.

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So You Want to Be a Movie Star – Really?

So You Want to Be a Movie Star – Really?

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Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford

So you want to be a movie star? Big house, swimming pool, fancy cars, lavish parties, gala premiers, fawning flunkies, fame, fortune, the envy and adulation of millions — all the accoutrements, privileges, and perquisites of a luxurious lifestyle undreamt of by lesser mortals? It’s quite a life, I hear.

But of course, there’s always the flip side (everything has a flip side), when the years start to mount up and more and more choice parts go to fresh young things with a little more rubber on their radials, and the waiting time between films grows longer… and longer… and you, a big talent, a serious thespian, a major star, finally find yourself slinking onto the sound stage to take up your role in a low-budget exploitation movie. You can’t even salvage a little dignity by hiding somewhere in the middle of the credits, can’t pretend that you’re doing a campy cameo as a favor for an old friend. Nope — honey, you’re the headliner, the main attraction, that’s your name up there in big, bold print, right up there for everyone to see on the posters of Strait-Jacket… and Berserk!… and… please, God, no… Trog.

Yup. It’s a hell of a life, being a movie star. Just ask Joan Crawford.

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Peplum Populist: Hercules, Samson & Ulysses

Peplum Populist: Hercules, Samson & Ulysses

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hercules-samson-ulysses-posterThe “versus film” has been with us for decades, even if “vs.” didn’t show up in early movie titles like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Audiences crave watching cinematic legends smash into each other in duels to the death — or duels to the mutual understanding. Alien vs. Predator, Freddy vs. Jason, Batman v[s]. Superman, King Kong vs. Godzilla (soon ready for a rematch), Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (this really happened), Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper (a number of occasions), and Dollman vs. The Demonic Toys. Bring up anything involving the SyFy Channel and sharks and you get hurt.

Italian sword-and-sandal (peplum) films couldn’t resist putting titans of the ancient world into the ring together, and there’s no finer example than 1963’s Hercules, Samson & Ulysses. The Italian title translates as “Hercules Challenges Samson,” in case you needed to know who goes up against whom and who is hanging around as the sidekick.

When it comes to peplum-as-pulp, Hercules, Samson & Ulysses is the real deal. Appearing at the point in the genre’s evolution when sword-and-sandal films either went stale or went silly, HS&U falls solidly on the positive silly side. It’s an outrageous actioner that knows exactly what its audience wants to see and delivers 100% on the promise of watching two legendary supermen batter each other in muscular absurdity. It may not be the best sword-and-sandal film, but it’s one of the most entertaining. This is the peplum film to watch if most of the genre’s other offerings don’t grab you.

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A Cybernetic Detective in a Futuristic Japan: Ghost in the Shell

A Cybernetic Detective in a Futuristic Japan: Ghost in the Shell

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I prepared myself before going to see Ghost in the Shell, expecting an overly simplistic story full of action that vaguely resembled the 1995 anime release of the same title. Fortunately, my expectations were wrong.

Just to set some background: the franchise began with a manga titled The Ghost in the Shell, written in 1989 by Masamune Shirow (a pen name for Masanori Ota). It was later adapted as 1995 film with the same name (directed by Mamoru Oshii) and a subsequent anime series (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, one of my all-time favorite anime series).

The 1995 film is a really intriguing story, taking a closer look at humanity and robotics in a gritty, futuristic Japan. It took me a couple of viewings to understand everything; the story comes fast, as do the fantastic action sequences. It inspired the Wachowskis with The Matrix film series, and you can see some direct correlations between certain scenes.

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Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster: The Godzilla Movie to Rise Again in 2019

Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster: The Godzilla Movie to Rise Again in 2019

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It’s been a month since Kong: Skull Island came out and grossed over half a billion dollars globally, so I feel safe in 1) discussing the post-credits stinger without a spoiler freak-out, and 2) predicting we’ll indeed see Legendary Picture’s planned Godzilla vs. King Kong film in a few years. Warner Bros. isn’t leaving franchise money on the table, especially with their DC pictures in a shaky place.

But the movie arriving before the Radioactive Terror and the Eighth Wonder smash heads is promised in Skull Island’s post-credits stinger. Godzilla: King of the Monsters, to be directed by Michael Dougherty and slated for release in March 2019, is the third installment in the Legendary Pictures Kaijuverse. Kong: Skull Island contains numerous references that it occurs in the same universe as the 2014 Godzilla, such as the presence of the monster-researching Monarch Organization and mention of the Pacific atomic test originally targeted at killing Godzilla.

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Goth Chick News: Netflix Gives Hill House Yet Another Life (Yay!)

Goth Chick News: Netflix Gives Hill House Yet Another Life (Yay!)

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I discovered Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, considered one of the best ghost stories of the 20th century, in fourth grade. Not because it was on the approved reading list for nine-year-olds – on the contrary, I didn’t run into it academically until high school – but because I came across it during a summer reading program at my public library. Thankfully, librarians then were far less politically correct than they apparently are today, and they didn’t discourage browsing of selections that were not strictly “age appropriate.”

Since I fell in love with all things Shirley, I discovered Hill House had two theatrical adaptations, both call The Haunting; one in 1963 by Robert Wise, and one in 1999 (my guilty pleasure) directed by Jan de Bont and starring Liam Neeson, Owen Wilson, Cathrine Zeta-Jones, and The Conjuring‘s Lili Taylor. Both telling the tale of a group of people spending a summer in a mansion rich in haunted history and tales of the paranormal, who soon realize the stories are not just old wives tales as they begin to experience the supernatural and malevolent phenomena for themselves.

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There’s Something Magic About a House: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

There’s Something Magic About a House: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

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There is something magic about a house, or there should be. There are hints of this in James Stoddard’s The High House, in which the house is a universe unto itself, or in the Professor’s home in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which the house is a gateway to universes. We realize in some way that every house holds secrets, that every house is in some sense a castle, and that the portals of every house open either into a wider world without or an inner world within.

This ineffable something about houses motivates Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, which despite the title isn’t really about a castle but rather a house and the family that gets collected inside it. My kids and I are big fans of Studio Ghibli, so the 2004 animated film adaptation by Hayao Miyazaki was our first exposure to the work. Before seeing the film, I had not heard of the late British fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones. Howl’s Moving Castle remains the only work by her I’ve read, though she wrote at least two other novels in which these characters also appear.

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Goth Chick News: IT Floats Into the Record Books (Even Before Its Release)

Goth Chick News: IT Floats Into the Record Books (Even Before Its Release)

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Black Gate IT

Clowns are creepy.

You know it. I know it. And Stephen King really knows it because he’s about to make bank on it… again.

After months of anticipation, the first trailer for director Andy Muschetti’s upcoming theatrical re-adaptation of King’s classic novel IT hit the net last week; and to say the response was positive would be a serious understatement. In fact, even though I’ve now watched it about a dozen times, I must say I was freaked out all over again when I attached it to this article.

In case you haven’t had the pleasure yet, check it out below…

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Future Treasures: Aliens: Bug Hunt edited by Jonathan Maberry

Future Treasures: Aliens: Bug Hunt edited by Jonathan Maberry

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Aliens Bug Hunt-smallWith a brand new Alien film on the horizon (Alien: Covenant, arriving May 19; see the trailer here), what better time for a Alien anthology, featuring Colonial Marines in bloody conflict with the deadly Aliens in deep space, on alien worlds, and in derelict space settlements and lethal nests?

Aliens: Bug Hunt featuring original short stories set in the Aliens universe by Dan Abnett, Tim Lebbon, David Farland, James A. Moore, Brian Keene, Christopher Golden, Matt Forbeck, Yvonne Navarro, and many others. I read Navarro’s 1996 Aliens novel Music of the Spears; Dan Abnett, Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon, James A. Moore have previously written in the Aliens universe as well. Aliens: Bug Hunt arrives in hardcover and trade paperback from Titan in two weeks.

When the Colonial Marines set out after their deadliest prey, the Xenomorphs, it’s what Corporal Hicks calls a bug hunt — kill or be killed. Here are fifteen all-new stories of such “close encounters,” written by many of today’s most extraordinary authors.

Set during the events of all four Alien films, sending the Marines to alien worlds, to derelict space settlements, and into the nests of the universe’s most dangerous monsters, these adventures are guaranteed to send the blood racing—

One way or another.

Aliens: Bug Hunt will be published by Titan Books on April 18, 2017. It is 368 pages, priced at $22.95 in hardcover, $16.95 in trade paperback, and $7.99 for the digital edition.