Presumably, all of you, my dear little zombie fans, have already pre-ordered your copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith. The book will be published this April:

[Grahame-Smith] and an editor at Quirk Books, an independent publisher, developed a diagram tracing connections between seminal period novels to cult movie genres, including robots, vampires and aliens.

“It quickly became obvious that Jane [Austen] had laid down the blueprint for a zombie novel,” said Grahame-Smith, a television comedy writer. “Why else in the original should a regiment arrive on Lizzie Bennet’s doorstep when they should have been off fighting Napoleon? It was to protect the family from an invasion of brain-eaters, obviously.”

(From the Times Online)

Here’s some more alterna-Austen for you: Pride and Predator. Predator as in alien like Schwarzenegger’s mud wrestling buddy in the 1987 film. Produced by Elton John of all people.

Written by Will Clark, Andrew Kemble, and John Pape, the film will have some sort of alien landing in England and slaughtering – please, oh, please – Mrs. Bennett and Lydia.

There are apparently other so-called Monster-Lit books coming out:

• Jane Eyre with Mr. Rochester’s bigger, creepier secret
• Wuthering Heights with Japanese ghosts
• The Mill on the Floss with human sacrifice

(On a less exciting note, there’s also a cartoon Gnomeo and Juliet being made, which is like the Shakespeare teen sob story with gnomes.)

Yes, I agree, Hollywood is getting desperate. Yes, this means my horror schlock film-watching society will have many more zombie crap evenings to come!

The night I returned from Japan, I watched Ju-on. You know, the movie the Americans had to remake as The Grudge with the whole cast of white people living in Tokyo.

With creepy dead women (see above), I am certainly glad I didn’t watch this before I went to Japan. It would have made my friend’s house seem eerie and her four adorable cats would have reminded me too much of the weird kid.

A few days later Ju-on 2 arrived in the mail. I was in Japanese horror heaven, needless to say. So I put The Grudge on my list. I expected to be disappointed.

But guess what? It had something that the Japanese version didn’t have. Or, rather, it was missing something that the Japanese version had…a lower jaw:

Mommy, I’m scared.

I’ve found my new favourite place at our glorious arirport.

Go to the last stall on the west side of the women’s washroom – the washroom smacked between the giftshops by international departures. Open that door:

It’s a mystery closet, with a lock on the inside:

It’s some sort of piping closet:

Women – presumably – have left all manner of crap in there. Not literally crap, it’s more like a homeless squatter den:

If YVR weren’t tasering central, I would love to go into that stall, leave the door unlocked, wait ’til another woman came in, then leap out when she’s least expecting it.

Yeah, people have no sense of humour.

…move slowly enough that you can amputate the chomped-on limb and save yourself.

Norwegian zombie comedy movie Død Snø (or Dead Snow) is about a group of medical students whose weekend of snow sports turns into a face-off with undead WWII soldiers. Obviously on my list of films to see.

By the way, while typing this, like many other bloggers, I wondered if the nazi zombie film could be really a subgenre of the zombie genre. To prove it one way or the other, I made an inventory of nazi zombie films:

• Revenge of the Zombies (1943), also known as The Corpse Vanished: traditional voodoo zombies, which, quite frankly don’t do a thing for me – it’s either undead cannibal ghouls in an apocalyptic setting or nothing – but it kind of fits into the nazi zombie theme.  It’s about a nazi mad scientist who dabbles in forbidden sciences and has a 1940s female zombie in high heels.
• The Frozen Dead (1966): the imdb synopsis covers it best: “A crazed scientist keeps the heads of Nazi war criminals alive until he can find appropriate bodies on which to attach them so he can revive the Third Reich.”
• Dark Echo (1977), also known as Dark Echoes, Deep Echo: has only one drowned nazi zombie and a witch decapitation is as far as the gore goes, apparently.
• Shock Waves (1977), also known as Almost Human, Death Corps: appears to be some sort of Island of Dr. Moreau with zombies.
• L’Abîme des morts vivants (1981), also known as Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies, Oasis of the Zombies, The Oasis of the Living Dead, The Treasure of the Living Dead: nazi zombies protect hidden treasure in the Sahara.
• Le Lac des morts vivants (1981), also known as Zombie Lake, The Lake of the Living Dead: drowned nazi soldiers return to avenge themselves on their French murderers, proving something, perhaps that 1981 was a good year to direct nazi zombie movies in France (see above).  I read that this one is so bad it does the wrap-around thing where it becomes good bad.
• Night of the Zombies (1981), also known as Battalion of the Living Dead, Gamma 693, Night of the Wehrmacht Zombies, Night of the Zombies II, Sister of Death, The Chilling: once more, another one about poor blokes who should have never dismissed the rumour about the zombies in the deserted locale.  Also, another one for hapless zombie fans who shouldn’t dismiss rumours that this one is a stinker.  Night of the Wehrmacht Zombies II, by the way, will be the name of the zombie movie I will one day film.
• The Bunker (2001), also known as The Bunker: The Evil Is Within: will people never learn to not go down into mysterious tunnels, especially when plague victims were murdered there?
• Horrors of War (2006): inspired one imdb commenter to suggest the genesis of this film project: “Hey, I have a jeep, let’s make a WWII zombie movie!”
• Outpost (2008): more proof that rumoured nazi bunkers in Eastern Europe where evil experiments took place to reanimate the dead are better left alone.

Only eleven films in the subgenre, but a decent checklist for those of us who appreciate the undead.  (Let me know if I missed any.)

I had been saving up this idea for over a year: a Halloween get-together with friends where we read ghost stories to each other. Very perfectly nineteenth century. Like when people didn’t rely on strangers to entertain them with TV shows or pre-recorded music, instead amusing themselves with their own talents.*

My dream was a Martha Stewart Halloween. The woman does Halloween properly, eh. Someone to emulate.

One day, Matt surprised me with a stack of Halloween-themed magazines, including that one of our creepy holiday doyenne. By the end of the evening, Matt and I jotted down our favourite ideas, whittled our menu to something more realistic, and made an agenda for the party preparations. On the morning of our ghost story night, we set out a few hours before our friends came to buy up supplies, only dillydallying long enough to buy more book darts.**

Of course, I always count on Matt’s chef skills to make my dreams a reality. Besides a stew in a pumpkin (we forgot to photograph it), Matt used Martha’s suggestions to create a nuclear waste green artichoke spinach dip and white chocolate-covered pear ghosts:

Matt anthropomorphized the cheese dip, while I cheated and decorated the table with cookies and rodents:

Lest you think I did nothing, I did decorate the place with inflatable toys:

Note: You can see our fireplace in the above photo.  I eventually flipped a switch and turned on the fireplace. It set the atmosphere.

Ivan also got into the act with the headpiece part of a Yoda costume:

When the guests arrived, we did succumb to pre-chewed entertainment with the latest episode of Supernatural, a clip from [REC] and Jan Svankmajer’s version of the Fall of the House of Usher (which only I watched).***

Then we remembered the reason we gathered: to read ghost stories by flashlight in the dark.

Ryan read “The Snail-Watcher” by Patricia Highsmith; Matt read “Incarnations of Burned Children” by David Foster Wallace; Rob read the story of a New Westminster ghost; and I read “The Furry Collar” from JB Stamper’s 1977 book  Tales for the Midnight Hour.

*Karaoke still sucks. Since today’s people rarely sing, when they make the mistake of getting on stage with a karaoke machine to back them up, they sound like farting giant clams.

**The subject of a future blog post.

***The subject of another future blog post. The link, alas, takes you to Youtube, my archnemesis. Svankmajer should be enjoyed on the big screen or on, at the very least, a very large television.

With a name like that, this is a movie I can’t wait to see!

Here’s what the press materials say:

An epic tale about a group of whale watchers, whose ship breaks down and they get picked up by a whale fisher vessel. The Fishbillies on the vessel have just gone bust, and everything goes out of control.It’s a cross between the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Blairwitch Project, combined with the dark and bloody humor of Evil Dead.

Fishbillies? Wow. Deliverance in Icelandic waters.

(I nearly forgot. It has Gunnar Hansen, or Leatherface from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.)

I am leaving for vacation to Japan in a few days.

Usually, when I travel to a new place, I spend the preceding months researching the place, sometimes studying the language, contacting locals for more information, talking to expats from that place, and reading many, many books about the place. For Tunisia, I spent an intense month of study; for my job in Japan, about seven months of research; for Ethiopia and the Navajo Reserve, about five months each.

Because I’ve gone through all the usual study for Japan – and because I cannot bear to pick up those daunting 1000+ page tomes on early Edo Period history – I decided to take a different approach for this trip. Instead of nonfiction books, I’ll be catching up on my Japanese horror in translation.

The Ring is one of my favourite horror movies. I love the idea of a purely supernatural creep. Those easily explicable serial killer psychopath types are everyday bores. I can read a newspaper and get the same story. But ghosts! Yowza. It turns out that before there was Ring the movie, there was Ring the novel.

Japan has quite a culture of interest in the supernatural. There are ghost-hunting tv shows, with annoying teen idols that explore abandoned buildings and exaggerate what they really see; summer horror films set in schools to thrill students during the summer heat; comics about demons; temples that exorcise evil dolls’ spirits; and a lengthy history of the creepy. In fact, summer as a whole is a season dedicated to horror stories. The chills one gets from listening to the stories is supposed to cool down the body.

When I first saw trailers for the Ring, back in the late 90s when I lived in Taiwan, I wanted to see this movie immediately. It turned out, of course, that the film was in Japanese with Chinese subtitles. My Chinese was ok, but those subtitles were a little too quick. I saw the movie three or four times in a week to try and figure out what was happening on screen. Once I got the gist of the story, I took my sister, who was visiting Taiwan, and knew no Mandarin or Japanese to see the Ring. I whispered the dialogue to her as fast as I could read the subtitles during the film.

Thus, for my first foray into translated Japanese horror, I picked up Koji Suzuki’s novel that was the basis for the film. Quite a few things leapt out at me: there was no female reporter – the protagonist is male; the professor is shockingly slimy; and Sadako is a bigger freak than I remember her being in the film.

Worse, the story is either awful, or the translators (Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Walley in my edition) only half-completed their work, or, as I suspect, both. Suzuki’s protagonist Kazuyuki Asakawa makes a few too many lucky assumptions. I am all too ready to believe in the supernatural between the covers of this book, but even I cannot believe that the answers should come so easily to the heroes. This book made me grimace many times.

Luckily for the book, it’s saving grace is that it is a quick read. I finished it in record time this afternoon, sitting in my car, at the edge of a mall parking lot under some trees. The coffee shop in which I originally intended to finish reading the novel, was too air-conditioned for comfortable reading. Just as the protagonist descends into the well to dredge up Sadako, a downpour started outside my car. Memories of the well scene in the movie still gives me the heebie jeebies. The rain pounding on my car roof helped set the mood.

Will I read the sequels to Ring? I really, really hated the film sequels. They were a garbled mess, with too many ideas thrown into the pot and no decent storyline to unify them. I will give Suzuki’s Dark Water a try, and, if his writing improves, might read the sequels out of sheer curiosity.

But not out of literary admiration.

In 2003, one of my friends went through a Jack the Ripper phase. Thanks to her interest in reading all about the Whitechapel murders and lengthy monologues about her horror at it all, I went away kind of curious. I ended up going through my own Jack the Ripper phase. Every now and then I still re-read the Wikipedia page on Jack and his victims.

For years I meant to pick up the From Hell graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. From Hell refers to one of the many letters Scotland Yard got from ghouls claiming they were Jack the Ripper; this letter is the only one suspected of having actually come from Jack himself. It arrived with a box containing a human kidney. The organ may have come from Catherine Eddowes, one of the murdered woman, who was found disembowelled and missing a kidney.

From Hell pulls together the various suspicions and characters associated with the Jack the Ripper murders. The story works from the premise that the murders were committed as part of a conspiracy, not by one lone psychopathic murderer. Everyone, it seems, has a part to play. Walter Sickert, John Pizer (or Leather Apron), Prince Albert Victor, Montague John Druitt all make an appearance.

I most recommend Moore’s extensive appendix. I essentially read the book twice, once without the benefit of the notes, the second time, once I found the notes, I flipped back and forth to the referenced pages. Moore wrote the appendix with equal parts erudite bibliography and familial conversation. At times, he is modest (he supposes only one person would ever be reading his notes), apologetic (for forgetting from where a reference may have come), appalled (when referring to Ripper’s state of mind during Kelly’s murder), and chatty (his work area is tottering with books, please come and clean it).

From Moore’s notes, one fact above all stands out, making the book worth it. Canonical Ripper victim Polly Nicholls wakes up from sleep in the lowest form of Victorian accommodation. Sleepers sat on a bench for a penny, slept while held from falling forward by a rope stretched across their chests. In the morning, the proprietor unfastened the rope from one end and let the sleepers fall into wakefulness. Really, with this sort of knowledge, one could become a slum lord the likes of whom our lovely city has never seen.

Now for the spoilers.

It’s a good thing that Gull, as the Ripper, is not a sympathetic character. The women, even despite their occasional drunken sloppiness, are likeable. Nicholls can’t get her miserable penny lodgings because she has only a tuppence and is sent out into the night to earn her “doss money.” She is more pathetic as she tells her sad story to her customer Gull before he kills her. Then annie Chapman’s alarming illness before her death, as she drags herself around, thrown out from shelter to fend for herself. Eddowes’ own demise, when a complicit policeman reports her by her unfortunate alias – Mary Kelly – to Gull, is an awful case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong identity.

As anyone who watched the movie knows, the real Mary Kelly supposedly escaped and someone else killed in her place. This is not entirely sheer fancy on Moore’s part. At least two people saw Mary Kelly in the morning, after her death around 4 am and before the discovery of her body at 10:45 am. One of the witnesses, a Mrs. Caroline Maxwell, in this book claims that at 8:30 am Kelly stood outside her apartment, having barfed from having had “the horrors.” Obviously, Moore wants to imply that Mary Kelly had gone into her apartment. She saw another woman, one of her guests from previous pages (Julia, I believe, because of the curly hair), murdered in her place as she slept in Kelly’s bed. If you haven’t seen the horrors inflicted on whoever’s body lay in Mary Kelly’s bed that night, here’s a link to the crime scene photo.

The mutilation of the corpse was so extensive, contemporary forensics were so primitive, that, if it had not been Kelly but one of her friends, no one could verify the corpse’s identity.

Perhaps, having grown to rather like Mary Kelly, the reader might feel a sense of relief that she got away. However, when we really think about it, some other chick lost her life.

I may not have long to live. In case I die mysteriously during the night and found tomorrow morning as a rotting pod person wallowing in a labyrinth of red fungal matter, please use this blog post as a starting point for the investigation into my death.

For weeks, Matt and I have noticed red dust all over Ivan the cat’s bathroom. At first I blamed it on plastic. I suspected that our latest package of toilet paper was shedding the red ink printed on it. Once we finished that package of toilet paper and got a different brand, the red dust continued to pollute Ivan’s bathroom.

So I next laid the blame on the mushrooms. Below our window, hundreds of mushrooms sprouted during the recent rains. Pretty little things, with jaunty caps, as if you’d expect them to start dancing. Must’ve been their spores wafting through our open window.

But tonight, I found out. I stuck my finger, unwittingly, into the heart of the matter.

In a frenzy to clean out the pet supplies cabinet to get to my foot bath basin, I found long-forgotten packages of cat and hamster treats. I collected a handful for Lucian, then a handful for Ivan.

Then I opened Ivan’s container of Pounce. The Bigger Softer Bite. Beef flavoured. Never even remembered buying it.

The inside was a red dust. Yet, I didn’t quite believe it was red dust. I did not believe what I saw. I poked it.

My husband was horrified. “Oh, my god, that’s where all the red spores have been coming from!”

*****

If you remember grade twelve biology, you recall the five kingdoms of life forms: bacterial, protist, fungal, plant and animal. You know that antibiotics kill bacteria, that fungicides kill fungi, that neither can kill viruses because viruses do not quite fit into any of the five kingdoms nor are even living organisms.

Yet, after sticking my finger in the motherlode of red spores, my first reaction was to douse my hands with anti-bacterial soap and scrub away. With no bleach around, this was the first thing I saw that spelled salvation.

I even accidentally ripped off the scab over my recent burn, probably in the process infecting myself further with the red spores.

Now I am sitting here, awaiting fate.

The vector for a new and terrifying fungal disease, I will be patient zero of some awful epidemic. While it would be nice if I start a dramatic zombie plague and end up triggering armageddon, I’ll probably just fester into an oozing red slime. Not too ladylike, I’m afraid. Please, please, just don’t let my pod double be some sort of gelatinous freak with a dog body and Donald Sutherland’s head.

Good god, I already feel the mushrooms sprouting in my veins.

It can’t be long now.

Ok, ok, I am calming down from the news.

28 Days Later has a sequel. 28 Weeks Later is coming out in the next month. Yay! More zombies! Er, more zombie-like* induced armageddons! Yay!

You can see the trailer here. Ha ha. More humans get it. Features lots of running around by protagonists, with no really secure place to hide.

Just as pleasing is that there are at least four other zombie movies at some stage of production or script work right now:

• reader input requested for the second draft of the Autumn script;
• a Dawn of the Dead remake sequel called Army of the Dead;
• Diary of the Dead, a new George Romero one that goes back to the first, low level zombie outbreak (as seen in Night of the Living Dead), this time following around a group of film students;
• Day of the Dead, which is presumably a remake of Romero’s 1985 Day of Dead and starring the Dawn of the Dead remake’s Ving Rhames;
• a scriptwriter is doing a go-over on World War Z, written by Mel Brooks’ son Max (who is, of course, the author of the Zombie Survival Guide).

To tide me over for when these movies come out, my DVD player has been regurgitating the original Romero trilogy and I’ve been revisiting the remake Dawn of the Dead on Youtube. This week my favourites are Tumble-weed Studios remake dubs. The hilarious episodes are here, then here and the latest installation here. Thanks to Proxy Indian.

Over Christmas, I read David Wellington’s novels Monster Island and Monster Nation, and Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead. While I’m not a big fan of talking zombies, I appreciate that the zombies at least shambled about. My really big fear is thinking zombies that can run. That’s a no-no. Anyhow, I have a review written on these books in one of my journals that I can’t locate. I’ll probably find it some time in the next six months.

PS I bought a house. It can be zombie-proofed in about half an hour.

*The infected in 28 Days Later are not technical Hollywood zombies (i.e. flesh-eating ghouls). They are not Caribbean zombies (i.e. people enslaved by magic). The 28 Days Later infected are simply crazy homicidal maniacs (boo). But they do run amok and turn everyone they bite into one of them (scary!).

**Zombie movies need to stop recycling zombie movie names.