Friday, December 18, 2015

Friday Links: Jeruzalem, Satan's Blade, and Yuletide Yog-Sothoth

The last Friday Links before Christmas! Yip yip yahoo! So, what's been happening in the world of the bizarre, the strange, and horrific?
  • A demonic apocalypse film called Jeruzalem released a trailer that's worth a look.
  • At his Confessions of a Reviewer!!, Nev Murray has been thrilling us all week with his Top Five lists of best books he's read this year. Start at the bottom and get clicking. You might recognize a title or two, and if you don't, then you know what you should add to your reading list!
  • Fascination With Fear told us about three Christmas monsters that aren't Krampus: "It isn’t surprising to see Japan at the top of the list, as their folktales are equal if not more terrifying than the Germans’. Namahage are demonic ogres that dwell high up in the mountains—how they have come to live there varies by region. All year long they watch each household in the village and monitor the children’s behavior, keeping notes in a little book."
  • The 2006 remake of the movie Black Christmas came up From the Depths of DVD Hell: "Yet another remake while one which chooses to tackle Bob Clark’s 1974 original which as I covered in my review of the original was also one of the first slasher and one which would have a much more subtle tone than the slashers which followed in its wake."
  • Monster Times Issue #30 from February 1974 fell out of Zombos' Closet: "Issue 30 of The Monster Times gives Long Island a bad rap by providing way too much coverage on The Horror of Party Beach, annoys comic book fans with an assessment of The World's Worst Comics, and goes ape over John Landis's Schlock."
  • Zombots has a brilliant article on Jewish mythology in movie and television horror: "I didn't cover the golem in my rundown of Jewish "monsters," largely because it's the most well-known creature of Jewish myth. For that reason, the golem often appears in Jewish-inspired genre fictions. The X-Files, of course, has a golem episode (season 4, episode 15: Kaddish). The last name of the Jewish family who play a central role in this episode is Luria. It bears mentioning that Issac Luria, who was a 16th century Jewish mystic, features in a number of Jewish folktales in which the rebbe deals with the supernatural. The Luria family in the X-Files and their use of a golem suggest that someone at work on the show had at least a passing familiarity with Kabbalah."
  • Breakfast in the Ruins picked up another striking novel: Gideon's Ride by John Creasey.
  • At Sean Eaton's always-brilliant R'lyeh Tribune, guest blogger John L. Steadman talked about The Dunwich Horror and the Christmas season: "The Christian mythographers, for various reasons, have shown interest in Yog-Sothoth.   The most prominent of these myth makers and the most representative, Robert M. Price, in Biblical Bits in Lovecraft (2013), imposes a Christian interpretation on Lovecraft’s great tale, The Dunwich Horror (1928). This tale develops the interesting idea of sexual congress between the Great Old Ones and human consorts.  In the story, Wilbur Whateley’s grandfather evokes Yog-Sothoth on the top of Sentinel Hill on Candlemas evening, 1913, and afterwards, Yog-Sothoth couples with Lavinia Whateley, a deformed albino woman."
  • Of course, no self-respecting horror fan would do Christmas without another look at Silent Night, Deadly NightThe Dwrayger Dungeon does it right.
  • The 1984 slasher flick Satan's Blade was the subject of an interesting post at Chuck Norris Ate My Baby: "On the surface, Satan’s Blade is a terrible slasher film. It’s not particularly well made, sharing more in common with a public access show than something like Halloween or Black Christmas. The performances, while being consistent, are amateurish and best comparable to that of an eighth-grade school play. And even the story – which focuses on two groups of vacationers being stalked and slashed by a guy who, as it turns out, is possessed by the spirit of a killer mountain man wielding the titular blade – is somehow convoluted, despite being so simple."
  • Here, I celebrated my brief status as #1 and told you about my five favorite horror books of 2015.
Illustration by Nick Smith for Call of Cthulhu's Cthulhu Casebook supplement.

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