Friday Links: Carrie, Petroglyphs, and Ding-Dong Slicing

Here're some horrific and/or bizarre bits you might have missed this week:

• Anything Horror reviewed the movie The Apostate: Call of the Revenant: "As the film opens we see Cooper waking up in the above mentioned parking garage covered in what is apparently his own blood. He’s confused, he’s disoriented, and he has absolutely no idea where he is, how he got there, who put him there, and how he’s going to get out. I really enjoyed the long, lingering shots of Cooper as we watch him trying to figure out what is going on. Cinematographers Dodd and Catherine Kerr-Phillips use the camera to really give the viewer a sense of Cooper’s disorientation. We get both wide shots of Cooper as well as some very tight, claustrophobic ones as he tries to figure out and comprehend his situation. The viewer is just as much in the dark about Cooper’s situation as he is. We then suddenly shift to a well-lit, sterile looking interrogation room as Andrews is questioning Cooper. At first Andrews is nice and accommodating. She’s acting as though she wants to be Cooper’s partner in discovering what happened that night in the parking garage."
• At Sean Eaton's obscenely incisive R'lyeh Tribune, he discussed the use of dreams and nightmares as a writer's source material: "Out of curiosity, I informally surveyed a number of aspiring authors recently about their uses of dream material.  Not all of them were horror, science fiction or fantasy writers.  I asked them whether they felt that using dreams as source material for their work was still a useful practice, and whether there were any special challenges to creating fiction using dreams.  Thirteen people responded, some more than once to contribute additional information."
• Fascination with Fear did a story on bizarre gravesites: "What if cemeteries were forests, and each tree represented a deceased person? Nature-lovers are sure to love Bios Urn, a form of burial that results in reincarnation. Bios Urn works like this: the urn, which is completely biodegradable, is separated into two compartments. The top compartment contains soil into which seeds may be planted. The bottom compartment holds the ashes, and after the roots become stronger and the urn biodegrades then the two compartments will become part of the subsoil together. The website (https://urnabios.com/) sells six different kinds of seeds (Beech, Ash, Oak, Maple, Gingko, and Pine) but the urn is compatible with any seed. What kind of tree do you want to be when you die?"
• Joe Young at Ginger Nuts of Horror compared two versions of the movie Carrie: "To be perfectly honest I was wondering how anyone could possibly do better than Sissy Spacek, but that turned out fine. Piper Laurie, the original 'Margaret White', the deranged religious nutcase mother of Carrie was a fine performance. The same cannot be said for Julianne Moore's version of the role, which I thought was given far more screen time than deserved or required. Although not a poor performance I found it dragged out beyond necessity."
  
• A man in Kwara State sliced off his own penis, which is at least a bit better than slicing off somebody else's: "Speaking in on his experience while still in the hospital, Sa'adu said that he was acting on the instructions of witches who appeared to him in his dreams, telling him to cut off his penis since he was impotent."
• Patrick Tillett went to Antelope Hill and took awesome photos of petroglyphs: "Antelope Hill is located in Southwest Arizona, next to the Gila river and has been visited and used for thousands of years. It is said that no particular tribe of Indians ever claimed ownership of the place, but many used the resources found there. This hill is composed of a particular type of sandstone, that is well suited to create grinding stones and other stone tools. It is not found elsewhere in the area. Some of those who used this hill left their markings. Many of the petroglyphs in the photos below are thousands of years old, while others are several hundred. In a general sense, the lighter a petroglyph is (when compared to the darker desert varnish on the rest of a rock), the newer it is."
• Here, I wrote about the Gray Men of Horror (you might be one) and reviewed several books, some of which were really good.