Category Archives: Writing

The Living Dead…for kids.

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I love this story (and kinda wish my own kiddo was a bit older to enjoy it). The Seattle Children’s Theatre is putting horror classic Night of the Living Dead on the stage for all the little zombies and ghoulish girls to enjoy. And just in time for Halloween. Night of the Living Dead has already had successful runs in Portland and Dallas. Based on a screening, director Linda Hartzell says the production is intended for kids 13 and older.

George A. Romero’s 1968 seminal move was adapted by Lori Allen Ohm (opening night is Oct. 3rd). From Pennsylvania, Ohm has translated horror to the stage before, even adapting Blatty’s The Exorcist. Drawing inspiration from horror spoofs like Shaun of the Dead and Young Frankenstein, Ohm injected a zombie dance routine, gummy worms for intestines, and even promises blood (this version is set in Seattle).

Head to the Seattle Times for more on the production, photos of the cast or the Seattle Children’s Theatre for Night of the Living Dead show times.

‘Blindness’, from novel to screenplay to film

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More than ten years after it was published, Jose Saramago‘s Nobel Prize-winning Blindness is about to hit the theaters (release is set for October 3rd by Miramax). In the story, people are suddenly stricken blind. Key words: epidemic, government, quarantine. I’m all for end-of-society stories, so I’m onboard for this flick. The book was first published in Portuguese (1995) and then English (1997) and won the Nobel Prize in 1998.

For more, check out the slick website put up by Miramax. Great open. For the journey to story took from novel to screenplay to screen, the LA Times has an interesting column that came out this week (Joe Penhall, who adapted McCarthy’s The Road, is quoted in the article). The film stars Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore (it also opened the 2008 Cannes Film Festival). You can read Guardian (UK) review of the film here. Peter Bradshaw gave the film 4 stars.

Lovecraft online, must read ebook

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Okay, now I’m way behind.   My wife lost her father a few weeks back and we’ve been very busy.  While you’re never really back to business after such a thing, business goes on — and so does the blog.  With that in mind, what a great way to start but with a heavy dose of some free HP Lovecraft.  Now if you dig horror and haven’t read Lovecraft, well, do.  You can start so right here.

This jump will take you to an ebook of Lovecraft’s, part of the Project Gutenberg in Australia (free ebooks, texts, at no cost to read or download).  The book offered back at the jump is Lovecraft’s seminal Supernatural Horror in Literature.  It’s a must read for horror writers, and lovers of all things that go bump in the night.   Here is what Amazon.com has to say about the book:

This is a lively and opinionated historical essay on supernatural literature written during 1924 through 1927. Indispensable to horror fans (even for those uninterested in H. P. Lovecraft‘s fiction) for its superb plot summaries and subjective assessments, the book is a short history of horror from folk tales, ballads and myths of the Middle Ages, through the Gothic novel, Victorian ghost story, and American “pulp” writers. It is especially good on Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Machen, and William Hope Hodgson, and includes Lovecraft’s views on what makes a good horror story. E. F. Bleiler, renowned scholar of supernatural fiction, provides the introduction.

If you want a better understanding of speculative fiction of the horror bent, go read the ebook.  Or, buy it from Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble, your neighborhood store, or wherever you buy books.  And keep reading, and reading, and reading…

“Fear Itself” debuts, a “The Last Winter” look

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I finally caught the debut of NBC’s Fear Itself. Between Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who and the horror flick The Last Winter, I hadn’t had the chance. Reviews were mixed on the Fear Itself premiere episode, written by the show’s creater Mick Garris. CBS’s Swingtown beat Fear Itself in the Nielsen Ratings, getting 5.23 million viewers (18-49 yr-olds) and a 2.0 rating/6 share to CBS’s 8.68 million, 2.8/8.

Writing good horror for the networks is always a tough go.  I would have liked to have seen the first episode breathe a bit more, but who knows what kind of hurtles the production team faced.  The main vampire was creepy, but I went back and forth with the sirens’ motivations.  But then again, it is network TV.  Until the networks open up… This week’s episode is Spooked, with Eric Roberts, directed by The Machinist‘s Brad Anderson.  It’s a bad-cop-in-haunted-house bit.

Meanwhile, the horror movie The Last Winter is a great isolation thriller. One of the tough, early hurdles a speculative fiction writer faces is suspension of disbelief. The Last Winter may actually suspend too well, and when director/writer Larry Fessenden finally shifts gears from global-warming-and-its-consequences straight into creepy town, it takes the viewer a moment to adjust to the idea the film is actually a supernatural horror flick.

While comparisons are there, The Last Winter is not Carpenter’s The Thing, thankfully Fessenden didn’t try. But it’s one of the best stabs I’ve seen in the horror genre at a very current fear–oil and global warming–and what the heck humans may be doing to the world.

Cory Doctorow hits Seattle

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Sci-fi author Cory Doctorow will be in Seattle this month, on a book tour for his new YA Little Brother. If you haven’t yet heard about Cory, you can check out more at his website craphound.com. He’s pushing the envelope for downloadable content for writers, which is always nice. Envelopes should be pushed. And pushed. And I don’t just mean those containing query letters. Here are the places you’ll be able to see Cory. He’ll be here from the 17th-20th, at Elliot Bay and the downtown Seattle Library. Tor is financing the tour, which gives you a hint what they think of the book. The cover even has a quote from Neil Gaiman. Why does Cory give away his books for free online? Read this post, and you’ll get an idea.