Friday Links: Lowell Dean, Iain Rob Wright, and the Mothman

Now that the promise of Friday has arrived, let's take a long look back at the days that led up to it.

• The Film Connoisseur reviewed the classic 1927 film Metropolis: "One of the questions Metropolis addresses is, how can you feel sympathy for something you ignore or don’t understand? When Freder goes and sees the working class, laboring away, nonstop, exhausted, even to the point of putting their lives in danger, he has a change of heart. Now he understands, when he sees things with his own eyes, when he experiences their pain. Freder literally switches places with the working man."  (Note that it's very funny when you pronounce "connoisseur" as "cun-OIS-er".  Just an FYI.)
• Kurt C. Schuett reviewed Sebastian Junger's A Death in Belmont for Ginger Nuts of Horror: "The series of murders highlighted in and around the City of Boston in the 60s, earmarked by increasingly dramatic staged sexual assaults and post-rape humiliations, serves as the book’s catalyst.  Most readers will be shocked to discover the perverse arrangement of victims as the killer’s blueprint maintains consistency through ninety percent of the killings.  One of this book’s strengths is its descriptive fact checking; Junger and his editors at W.W. Norton spared no expense in regard to their collective and expansive foot-noted road map of the Boston Strangler saga."
• At Nev Murray's Confessions of a Reviewer!!, it's been all Iain Rob Wright all the time.  Here's part one of Nev's interview, part two, and a sneak peek at Wright's newest novel Hot Zone.
• Snakebite Reviews reviewed Splatterpunk #6: "I shouldn’t have to sell Splatterpunk to you. It’s usually a limited run of a few hundred copies and it always sells out. And so it should.  Jack Bantry continues to dazzle with his latest offering collecting of five stories plus an assortment of reviews and musings on the horror genre."  This issue included a story from Kit Power.
• HorrO's Gory Reviews got a great interview with Lowell Dean, writer and director of WolfCop: "HorrO: The first thing I always like to ask is why horror? How did you end up in the horror realm? Lowell: I think I got into horror because horror enlists a big emotion. It gets you on multiple fronts. If it's sometimes sillier or not as good horror you'll laugh and it will be a big laugh, and if it's really good horror it'll haunt you and it'll be in your brain for years to come. So I just love the big reactions that a horror film, a good horror film, sometimes even a bad horror film can get."
• At the mind-crunchingly erudite R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton discussed monsterology: "In less civilized times, monsters were placed just beyond the margins of the civilized world.  They were assumed to inhabit the surrounding forests and wilderness, out in the region known as terror incognita.  Some of the earliest monster stories seem to be related to archetypal tales of the hunt.  The monster is not so much ‘the one that got away’ as ‘the one we almost didn’t get away from.’"
• Ghost Hunting Theories focused on the Mothman: "One year later, in 1967, the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant collapsed. Forty-six people died. In a mid 1970s book written by John Keel, the story of the Mothman takes a turn toward the concept of a harbinger of the coming disaster. The Mothman showed up in the town before the disaster and encounters increased, supposedly including the passage of information of a prophetic nature."
• Here, I analyzed the 1991 movie The Rapture.

Illustration by Kevin Ramos for Call of Cthulhu's Spawn of Azathoth supplement.