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  • Endless Joke
    Endless Joke
    by David Antrobus

    Here's that writers' manual you were reaching and scrambling for. You know the one: filled with juicy writing tidbits and dripping with pop cultural snark and smartassery. Ew. Not an attractive look. But effective. And by the end, you'll either want to kiss me or kill me. With extreme prejudice. Go on. You know you want to.

  • Dissolute Kinship: A 9/11 Road Trip
    Dissolute Kinship: A 9/11 Road Trip
    by David Antrobus

    Please click on the above thumbnail to buy my short, intense nonfiction book featuring 9/11 and trauma. It's less than the price of a cup of coffee... and contains fewer calories. Although, unlike most caffeine boosts, it might make you cry.

  • Music Speaks
    Music Speaks
    by LB Clark

    My story "Solo" appears in this excellent music charity anthology, Music Speaks. It is an odd hybrid of the darkly comic and the eerily apocalyptic... with a musical theme. Aw, rather than me explain it, just read it. Okay, uh, please?

  • First Time Dead 3 (Volume 3)
    First Time Dead 3 (Volume 3)
    by Sybil Wilen, P. J. Ruce, Jeffrey McDonald, John Page, Susan Burdorf, Christina Gavi, David Alexander, Joanna Parypinski, Jack Flynn, Graeme Edwardson, David Antrobus, Jason Bailey, Xavier Axelson

    My story "Unquiet Slumbers" appears in the zombie anthology First Time Dead, Volume 3. It spills blood, gore and genuine tears of sorrow. Anyway, buy this stellar anthology and judge for yourself.

  • Seasons
    Seasons
    by David Antrobus, Edward Lorn, JD Mader, Jo-Anne Teal

    Four stories, four writers, four seasons. Characters broken by life, although not necessarily beaten. Are the seasons reminders of our growth or a glimpse of our slow decay?

  • Indies Unlimited: 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology
    Indies Unlimited: 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology
    Indies Unlimited

    I have two stories in this delightful compendium of every 2012 winner of their Flash Fiction Challenge—one a nasty little horror short, the other an amusing misadventure of Og the caveman, his first appearance.

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Entries in Park Chan-wook (1)

Friday
Feb142014

12. to 9. Other to Mother

9. Psycho  

I've mostly tried to avoid the canonical favourites and given more recent entries a chance, but this is so classic, so iconic, so redolent of the genesis of slasher terror I couldn't ignore it. Dark, anxious, voyeuristic, and at times frightening in a way that's rarely if ever been equalled, here's creepy Norman Bates in all his Oedipal glory. Plus, uh, Janet Leigh, and "we're all in our own private traps." The first of many horror films to draw on notorious real-life serial killer, Ed Gein (Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs coming later), this set the bar extremely high. Then it decided to go in its own oddly claustrophobic and decidedly bittersweet direction. Goddamn it, this is one brilliant movie. The simultaneous birth of both slasher film and psychological horror.

10. Let the Right One In  

Sweden. Of all the films on my list, this is the one—had I been paranoid—I would have suspected as a personal dog whistle: externally cold, broad hints of inner warmth, unflinching, strangely loving, gender-confounding, drenched in a quiet yet creepy mood, and plain harrowing in its implications. I mean, in one sense, it's a story about a boy who's bullied and isolated who meets a girl who isn't what she seems, while the implied romanticism remains frozen beneath the (ice!) story that ultimately unfolds like icebergs slowly calving off from the greater mass. All of which, when you reassemble it, appears to comprise the bleakest of awful futures. Yeah, okay, and it's a vampire film. Sort of. Just watch it.

11. Funny Games  

I'm in the weird position of loving Michael Haneke's films yet loathing his judgmental attitude toward his audience. There are two versions of this film, both worthy contenders, and both filmed by Haneke (in 1997 and 2007), yet the "point" appears to be our insatiable lust for and expectations of vengeance, as dictated by some perceived tension between European art cinema and Hollywood convention. Whatever. Both films are worth our time, because aside from Haneke's moral hand-wringing, these films remain incredibly tense, visceral, violent, violating, and harrowing examples of home invasion horror, a la Straw Dogs, The Last House on the Left, and The Strangers. They are also elegant and beautiful in their way, juxtaposing the nihilistic immediacy of death metal with the baroque grace of Handel.

12. Oldboy 

South Korea. How do you begin to describe Park Chan-wook's singular, standout film? It's horror, sure; but it's also a thriller, a punishment and revenge tale, and a mystery. Who knew that, given the choice, protagonist Oh Dae-su would probably not choose to solve said mystery? It's a hyper-aware, brutally violent, unpredictable, anguished, mad, insectile, strange, appallingly human and damn near operatic horror film, and if you don't have some kind of emotional reaction to it, you are probably dead. In one sense, it's a seafood massacre. Hammerhead violence vies with live octopus consumption, while the eventual unfurling of the plot makes you wish you could recoil into your spiral shell until viral humans have danced their final dance and left the earth for good.