Manga artist and comic writer Junji Ito will be getting a TV version of the highly rated Uzumaki comic. Adult swim Toonami, a Cartoon Network program, will produce a miniseries of the popular Ito story.
Vulture reports that the adaptation will be directed by Hiroshi Naghama alongside Production IG USA. Colin Stetson will be composing music for the show. Stetson composed the soundtrack for Hereditary, said Vulture. The show is expected to debut in 2020.
Horror fans will recognize Ito for his works such as Glyceride, The Enigma of Amigara Fault, and the grotesque body horror strip, Gyo.
Ito’s comic series Uzumaki centers around a teenager named Kirie Goshima along with her boyfriend Shuichi Saito. The story takes place in the town of Kurōzu-cho which translates to Black Vortex Town. The town is cursed by weird spirals that cause people to go insane. It’s up to Kirie and Shuichi to get to the bottom of these spirals and save their town.
You can purchase the complete collection of Uzumaki online with a simple search. Explore some more Junji Ito, especially if you like gross and distrubing stories the affect people that…well didn’t really deserve it. But we’ll leave that up to your judgement.
Hollywood is gearing up to resurrect an ongoing film franchise that is undeniably one of the best cult classics in horror.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre will be getting a new installment. Bloody Disgusting reports that Frede Álvarez will be producing the film. Alvarez has handled films such as Don’t Breathe and the 2013 remake of The Evil Dead. This will be the 9th film in the series.
Texas Chainsaw 3D came out back in 2013. The film was ripped apart by critics chastising it for straying from the original concept of the Hewitt family. A 2017 installment Leatherface didn’t serve the series any justice either, leaving long time lovers of the franchise vastly empty and disappointed.
Bloody Disgusting further reports that Legendary Entertainment will also be producing a TV series and more films for the franchise. They said that LE could go into a deal with Warner Bros. Studio, the parent company of New Line Films. NLF produced much of the Nightmare on Elm Street Franchise, said the horror blog.
It will be interesting to see what ways they will approach the franchise. It has gotten different ones of the years. The last two seemed more comical while the ones prior showed a more surreal look into the life of Leatherface. A series could very much bring this franchise upfront in center in a media world that is giving horror a chance on daytime TV.
For now, hold on to your skin and stay away from decrepit looking mansions in the countryside of Texas.
Sinking Spring is a little town in Berks County with a population of around 4,000 people. Like most Berks County towns, it sits surrounded by vast farmland, trotting horses, and simple Amish Folk. In almost every corner of Berks, you can find a farmer selling fresh produce and dairy products, and beekeepers with the purest golden honey. Drive around on any weekend, and you’ll find a flea market featuring fine Pa. Dutch foods, furniture (which some would argue is the best) and novelty items that tourists empty their pockets for.
But one thing about Berks and most areas in Pennsylvania is how festive and beautiful it is in the Fall season. City folk from New York and New Jersey flock to see the leaves change. An Indian Summer is a reality here and most of the time, one can see it right out of their own backyard. Especially if you live in the Lehigh Valley which is essentially a howl. We’re surround by hills with trees. The beautiful essence of fall is unavoidable. Nothing is lacking. Pumpkin patches, orchards, and corn mazes are only 30 minutes away in any direction. Enjoy if you ever have the satisfaction of visiting
Like most places, Halloween itself has become a season. Haunted attractions are not limited, and I myself have hit up quite a few. Dorney Park in Allentown has its annual “Halloween Haunt”. Of course you could take a trip to Philadelphia and tour through the Eastern State Penitentiary rumored to be haunted by the tormented souls that dwelled there, or you could stick to the rural parts of the Poconos and go to the Haunted Hotel in Saylorsburg. But if you wanna go really big, go to Shocktoberfest.
A small town with a population of about 4,000 easily has one of the most popular and largest Halloween attractions in the state. Shocktoberfest started out as a simple concept. Patrick Konopelski designed a hayride which then evolved into the Field of Screams, another popular haunted attraction. A few more added attractions later, we have Shoctoberfest. The festival starts in mid-September and features live music, haunted houses, vendors along with food and drinks.
It’s a seasonal amusement park with a new and exciting theme every year that keeps participants on the edge of their seats. Zombies one year, biochemical plants, and even a controversial “Naked and Scared Challenge”are just some of the events you’ll find at Shocktoberfest.
The festival has gained national attention, being voted Third best attraction by US Today and one of the featured haunted attractions in Time Magazine. Popular bands have headlined at the festival in previous years, Korn and Slipknot just to name a few.
Tickets can be a bit on the expensive side, but it is worth all of the amenities you’ll get. Personally, its fair for how large the festival and the accolades it has received. They’ll bring you experiences hard to find anywhere else like the Naked event as well as a torture chamber that pushes everyone’s heights of fear to the limits.
Oh sweet sweet nights of sitting down with dad in the living room watching stupid movies. Most importantly, in the crispness of fall on a rainy night, let’s cozy up with a blanket and some popcorn to watch the best but worst horror movies we can think of. I still long for these days. Now I mostly partake in this chaos on my own. Netflix and other streaming services have made it practically 2nd nature to stream the most redundant material known to man. I’m okay with that as long as we keep the scantily clad female villains gone super-psycho horror killers out of it. I mean, some of these movies are border line soft-porn.
My mother scorns my father for repeatedly watching these awful movies. I’ve bowed my head in shame afraid to admit this guilty pleasure out loud in her presence. But I love B-horror movies. I could watch them all day, everyday. Friends will say it has lowered my standards in movies. I get around to watching blockbusters every now and again. But nothing compares to the worst acting and horrifically funny deaths that these characters endure.
B-horror movies are screenwriting simplified to “What I learned in boating school is…” It is a very simple pattern to follow. That may seem dull, but what keeps it alive are the different scenarios and monsters that its backwards and twisted writers come out with. And to be perfectly honest, whether they are right to TV or a streaming service, they’re being produced in the masses and coming at you sooner than the next Hellraiser (please no more). There’s no doubt that these guys are making money here and there. It’s better than your side hustle.
I’ll defend my hidden passion until the day that I die. If anything, it’s the certain aspects of these movies that have made them more enjoyable to watch while throwing in the dice to see how it all plays out.
There’s always the one kid who makes it (or at least until the end)
“Laurie Strode” Halloween (1979)
They’re quiet or just too smart for their own good. Usually, they’re also just lucky. But if it is anything that sets them apart the most, it’s that they have good morals compared to their peers. They may come across as prudent or homely looking compared to their fully, albeit, way sexually developed best friend. They’re sitting inside on a Friday night studying for a test instead of drinking on the beach and having lots of teenage premarital sex. It’s common for them to be strong until the end.
2. The couple that needs to get a room already
“Paige and Blake” House of Wax (2005)
Speaking of premarital teenage sex, usually the kind that Jason Voorhees hates, there’s always that one couple that makes you gag. There’s not much to really criticize, but this is used most commonly as a way to indicate low-morals in a character. This was a particularly huge theme pre-2000’s horror movies . Often times, this works against them heavily.
3. The antagonist has been wronged somehow
“Daniel Robitaille” Candyman
Whether they were thrown in a lake or bullied in high school, something usually contributed to the antagonists downfall into…well… the antagonist. This isn’t true in every horror movie nowadays which actually makes them all the more interesting. If a B-horror film can work with the later, I’m usually pretty sucked in.
A movie that does that very well in my opinion? Sleepaway Camp. It’s by far the most ridiculous movie I have ever seen. Yet, the characters that come from it are just as iconic as the situation.
Sleepaway Camp is a film series that first debuted in 1983. It centered around a girl named Angela Baker who lost her father and twin in a boating accident. After that tragic ordeal, Angela was taken in by her aunt Martha, a doctor, and raised along side her cousin Ricky. Aunt Martha decides to send the kids away to Camp Arawak for the summer. Ricky adjusts quite well but Angela is relentlessly bullied by the other kids.
“Aunt Martha” Sleepaway Camp (1983)
While away at camp, people begin to die in very gruesome fashions at the hands of an unknown killer. No one knows what’s going on until one day, Angela snaps and shows her true identity. It is revealed that Angela had been committing the murders. If that was too obvious, it turns out that Angela is actually a boy. In the boating accident, her (his…?) twin sister, Angela, was the one that died. So this “Angela” is actually Peter Baker, Angela’s brother. Are you confused yet? When Aunt Martha adopted Peter after the accident, she decided to raise Peter as his dead twin sister in order to fill her void of never having had a daughter of her own. This explains very much why she’s described as a “disturbed divorcee” on her Fandom page.
“Angela Baker” Sleepaway Camp (1983)
The movie ends with Angela…well Peter standing with a knife, naked as he looks around with his genitals showing. Mouth wide open might I add. And I for one will admit, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be shocked. For a B-horror film, this was a good twist that not even I saw coming. That image of Angela launched the film franchise into cult classic status.
Pamela Springsteen reprised the role of Angela in the 1988 sequel Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers. She came back as a secretly vengeful camp counselor that picked off the kiddies one by one. To her bosses dismay, she had just “sent them home”. But she actually gave them a Friday the 13thsend off, which the movie alluded to frequently. The film ends with Angela running mowing down her last helpless victim on a dark country road.
In the third installment, Angela is back as a camper. The police are on to her after she had already killed the chief’s son in the previous film. With even more Friday the 13th tributes, this film felt more like a parody than anything else. However, this was also the last time we were to ever see Springsteen as Angela again.
She did a remarkable job, even for a B-movie. The movies that preceded afterwards didn’t have the same campy vibe. More sex, even more bad acting that didn’t even make the film entertaining. Instead it was a cheap soft-porno that kinda just makes you wanna flip off the TV and wonder why you even bothered flipping to whatever deep dark channel you landed on.
And whether it was an earlier form of a horror spoof much like Scary Movie, it doesn’t fail to appeal to the B-horror movie genre. It was gruesome, had a story line that was half way decent and it stuck to what it knew. And what it knew was Angela Baker and campers.
Late last month, Ma made its debut in theaters. Octavia Spencer starred in her first leading role in a horror movie. Spencer premiered in Rob Zombie’s 2009 film, Halloween II as a night nurse turned scream queen prior to taking on more serious roles in horror films. But most of us remember her in other movies such as The Help and The Shape of Water. How can we forget the infamous shit pie? But despite that, her characters are gentle in nature and often nurturing mother figures that offer wise advise to the troubled leads around her. Now Spencer is stepping into a darker form of her art. Yet, we’re keeping her within her element…somewhat.
Spencer plays the role of Sue Ann Ellington, a delusional vet tech who spends most of her days daydreaming or doing what sociopaths do best when they’re not at work. Some local teenagers come up to her at a liquor store and ask her to buy them some booze for the evening. After some convincing, She buys these kids booze and off they go to some old construction site to do what teenagers do best in horror movies: sex, weed and booze. Later on , they dub her as the cool middle aged woman that basically lets them do all the shit there parents won’t. She opens up her secluded home to them so they have a place to party. It’s all fun and games until the deception comes out and she pulls some Gypsy Rose Blanchard shit with her daughter.
It’s not hard to piece together that every bad thing that happens to these kids is because of Ma. After she gets the booze, she anonymously calls the police on the teens, getting them busted the first time around. She uses that incident to lure them into her home.
Behind every predictable plot, there needs to be a secret weapon. The producers did a good job of making you feel sympathy for Sue. Her circumstances are evil, sad, and yeah you want to avenge her yourself. I wouldn’t even say she was the victim of a practical joke. That’s a damn understatement. But I’m also not here to get political. Basically, you kind of get the idea that this is a big revenge story. It’s an incredibly vile turn of events when you learn why.
There were a lot of ‘usual’s’ in this movie, a lot of predictability. A movie that is foreseeable isn’t bad. It depends on how well the writers pull it off. They did in that respect. So anyway SPOILER:
You can figure out right away that the kids are the children of Sue’s classmates from high school.
The one kid’s dad who a the cop did something unforgivable to her. She also is in love with him.
She’s gonna try and kill all of them.
This isn’t the way you’d think a grown woman would get back at her former classmate’s kids. Sue is in some ways a living Freddy Kruger. Overall, the approach was unique and creative. The execution was powerful up until the very end and then I rolled my eyes. The reveal of her daughter and playing off of that Munchausen by proxy, I’m really hoping that device was used to emphasize just how unstable she was. Although, this is something we already knew. Otherwise, it fizzled out quick. This was such an unnecessary element. It helped no one.
At the very beginning of the movie, one of the kids assists a girl in a wheelchair. The disabled individual is later revealed to be Ma’s daughter, which I’ll admit, wasn’t predictable. Not to me folks. So because at least one of the girls showed her kindness, I kind of expected this to work in her favor somehow once it was revealed. But It didn’t save her anymore than she saved herself at the end of the film.
At the end of the film, Ma is seen laying down in bed with the man she loved in high school, also her bully. The house becomes engulfed in flames. It can be assumed that she burned alive sleeping on the chest of a corpse. We see her looking out of the window towards the end. While a lot of us can assume she’s gone for good, they still leave us on edge a bit. It’s not safe to say she’s completely gone, but I’m okay without a sequel.
But collectively, this was a tiny tale of some devastating abuse on everyone’s end. So regardless if it all intertwined or not, it was disturbing nonetheless. Writing techniques were good. Backstory really cleared up any questions someone might have had. This might be a common device, but it worked. This movie was a bit mindless in the respect that viewers don’t have to spend time thinking about all the information they’re getting. No deep inference needed.
The amount of murders in this film was underwhelming. Otherwise, it was a well executed cliche of a movie. One the Creep Meter, 6/10
![I went to Ma’s house one weekend [SPOILERS]](https://writingforfoodcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/screen-shot-2019-02-13-at-11.11.14-am.jpg?w=1200)
The Creep Keeper 