Friday Links: Joe Dante, Horrifying Sounds, and Exorcising Mexico

In the run-up to the beginning of summer, what's been going on in the land of the strange, surreal, bizarre, and horrific?

This stuff, that's what:

• At Ginger Nuts of Horror, Jim Mcleod reviewed Hollywood legend Joe Dante: "Well the appeal of making a low budget film is that there is not so much money riding on it and if we can make a big blockbuster film there are many, many cooks and many people looking over your shoulder because it’s a tremendous amount of money and it is such a responsibility and they want the movie to be as popular as possible and so very often people just try and cut the edges off any make it a bit more (inaudible)everyone will love it, and when you are making a low budget film you don’t really have that problem because you are in and out so fast that it’s like a boulder rolling downhill, there’s really nothing you can do except get it out of the way as you don’t have a lot of time to meddle with the process."
• A most interesting lobby card was presented to us at Zombos' Closet of Horrors.
• Nev Murray reviewed The Spartak Trigger at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "Okay, I had a few problems with this book. Problem number one – how to classify it. Which genre to put it in to. I still have no idea. A thriller? A techno thriller? A – I don’t know really. It’s so mixed up."
  
• A mass exorcism was held in Mexico: "Under the guidance of Pope Francis, the Catholic Church took the unusual step of trying to banish demons from an entire country when they held a mass exorcism in Mexico.  Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez and Archbishop Emeritus of Guadalajara presided over a mass exorcism held in Mexico, as Spanish Priest Father José Antonio conducted the ritual himself."
• Terrorphoria gave us a eulogy for Silent Hills: "Nobody knows if Silent Hills would have been incredible, but in the nature of all cancelled projects that look excellent on paper, it was clearly going to be the best, most amazing game that ever existed or ever would."
• John Kenneth Muir expertly deconstructed The Lazarus Effect the way only he can: "The whole movie looks like it has been terminally re-jiggered with, so that it consists, simply, of story set-up and then a series of brutal, but not terribly original murder scenes.  Accordingly, The Lazarus Effect is the worst new horror movie I’ve seen since The Pyramid (2014), one of remarkable promise and utterly terrible, scattershot execution."
• Sean Eaton offered his views on the recent dust-up with the English scientist making a joke that upset all the wrong people, and in his inimitable way, connected it to a Lovecraft collaboration in his trenchantly trenchant R'lyeh Tribune: "The female lab partner in Ashes does not cry when criticized, but the narrator does fall madly in love with her and her with him. “That girl took to chemistry as a duck takes to water!” he remarks, worshipfully.  But the poor woman is later gagged, tied up and locked inside a big mahogany chest by the maniacal Professor Van Allister, a brilliant chemist, (but probably not a member of The Royal Society)."
• Ghost Hunting Theories collected video of horrifying sounds with no clear origin.  I touched on this phenomenon in The Blessed Man and the Witch.
• Here, I solved the mansplaining problem and warned you about Ghanghatas.

Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu's S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters.