Brad C. Hodson
A writer who still thinks the word "blog" sounds like something dirty.
Love, Beheadings, and a Tommy Gun: Let’s Celebrate St. Valentine’s Day
As I write this two birds sing to one another outside my window. It would be romantic to assume it was a love song. The reality is they’re warning each other about my cat eyeing them through the window as though Purina had gone out of business.
So much for romance, eh?
Or not. I’ve always found that, no matter how sweet and well-intentioned, all romance has an air of the predatory. What is wooing your loved one other than a unique combination of cunning, wit, and using your physical strengths to your advantage?
Cynical, perhaps. I try not to be. But it’s no coincidence that all the great loves that poets sing about and history passes down ended in tragedy. After all, the goal of the predator is the death of its prey.
And so what better way to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day than to explore the harsher reality of the holiday named in his honor?
Women In Horror Month: An Interview with Lisa Morton
February is WOMEN IN HORROR MONTH, a month I’m sure most of you had no idea existed. February, I mean. Who keeps track of anything between Christmas and the Fourth of July?
In all seriousness, women in the horror genre are often relegated to the role of Victim. Only female stand-up comics seem to get less respect. Yet, without the contribution of female writers, the genre would lose many of its greatest works. Frankenstein, The Haunting of Hill House, The Lottery, Interview With A Vampire, and Beloved are all born from the twisted minds of the fairer sex.
Being a huge fan of the works listed above, I wanted to take a little time this month and showcase some of my favorite women in the genre. Who better to start with than my friend and mentor Lisa Morton?
If you’re a fan of horror prose, then you undoubtedly have heard of Lisa. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines like Cemetery Dance, anthologies like THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, and even in the LA Times. Her fantastic 2009 novella THE LUCID DREAMING won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction, followed by a win in 2010 for her first novel THE CASTLE OF LOS ANGELES. She’s also the author of several nonfiction books, including THE HALLOWEEN ANTHOLOGY, and was the imagination behind films like MEET THE HOLLOWHEADS.
I could continue to list her accomplishments, but my fingers don’t have that type of endurance.
On to the interview!
Riding the Digital Seas
In the wake of Congress failing to perform REDACTED upon the whole of the internet, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the issue of piracy.
I realize I’m a little late to the party here, but the recent debates over SOPA and FUBAR and whatever other idiotic bills were put forth to stop online piracy have kept my brain churning.
Webster’s defines piracy as:
1. practice of a pirate; robbery or illegal violence at sea.
2. the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.: The record industry is beset with piracy.
3. Also called stream capture. Geology. diversion of the upper part of one stream by the head ward growth of another.
While I’m sure we’re all in agreement that definition 3 is the sexiest and most exciting definition, let’s look at the first two.
It’s no mistake that the idea of infringing upon copyrighted material has purposely been labeled with a word that conjures images of violence, rape, and horrible sea shanties.
I initially assumed this was a tactic of the music industry. Yet, upon further in-depth and difficult research using the most obscure resources (i.e. Wikipedia), I stumbled upon the fact that copyright infringement has been labeled “piracy” for over 400 years.
An Interview With the Cast of “George: A Zombie Intervention”
In 2008, we started shooting a movie. It was long and frustrating and far more expensive than it should have been. It was stressful and didn’t turn out how we wanted it to. It fell victim to the budget and to a small timeframe to shoot the film in and every other worry that low budget films have.
But we made it through it. We made a feature film. It’s won dozens of awards at festivals from here to Germany. Fans have sent us artist renderings and t-shirt designs. We’ve gotten some great reviews. People like the movie. No matter what pitfalls we had or how many film snobs can point out that we rushed a shot, at the end of the day the fact that it’s enjoyed is all that matters. People get it. It makes them laugh in all the right places. It makes them cringe in all the right places. And they dig the characters. For the longest time I watched the film and could only see our compromises, our mistakes. But. while I know what we wanted to do differently or with more panache, a theater full of fans don’t. All they know is that it makes them laugh. Every fan letter, every chuckle at a screening, every smiling face at a signing, makes me realize that the movie works.
And now, finally, after so much work and so much stress and so much money, it’s finally available to the public. Vicious Circle films releases GEORGE: A ZOMBIE INTERVENTION (formerly GEORGE’S INTERVENTION) nationwide on DVD today.
A Ghost Story for Halloween – The Mythology of DARLING Part 2
My novel DARLING will be released by Bad Moon Books on October 26th. To celebrate, I’m posting a series exploring some of the mythology that inspired the book. This is an old post, but since it deals with one of the core concepts of the book I thought I’d do a little re-purposing. To learn more about DARLING, check out it’s page here or visit the Bad Moon Books site. You can also find a preview of the novel here.
Check out Part 1 of the series, “Black Hounds.”
A GHOST STORY FOR HALLOWEEN
I don’t believe in UFO’s. In fact, the whole idea of “Ancient Astronauts” being responsible for the pyramids and any other great achievement of ancient man offends me as an amateur historian and a human being.
I think psychics and mediums are frauds and scam artists. I think these people are the lowest of the low, using illusion and parlor tricks to prey on people in pain.
Loch Ness is empty of anything larger than an old truck tire and crop circles are, without a doubt, elaborate hoaxes. “Ghost Hunters” is, quite possibly, the most bullshit laden program I’ve ever sat through. I doubt most ghost stories that people tell me, understanding as a writer both how imaginative people can be and how fallible our senses (and our minds) are. I am, in short, a skeptic.
But I do believe in ghosts.
An odd contradiction to be sure, but there is something about the idea of ghosts that clicks in my lizard brain, something about the fact that it’s a shared phenomenon across every culture with little deviation from the idea of what they are and how they behave. Leprechauns are strictly Irish, penanggalan strictly South East Asian, yet ghost stories permeate every single culture that has ever existed on planet Earth.
Growing up in the foothills of Appalachia, you tend to develop a peculiar taste for ghost stories. There’s a definite cultural aspect to it, generations of Scottish and Irish immigrants bringing tales of black hounds howling along windswept moors and phantom highwayman stalking the crossroads at night into the storytelling atmosphere that pervades the South. Surely there’s a geographic element to it. How can anyone live amidst those dark, ancient mountains on streets named for long dead Cherokee and Creek chieftains and not feel like something stands at the foot of their bed at night?
But I still think most people who do think they saw something at the foot of their bed did not. Maybe I’m an asshole like that, but to me the mark of intelligence is a combination of keeping an open mind while applying logic and a healthy dose of doubt.
Webster has a couple of interesting definitions for the word “skeptic.”
The two definitions I like are:
*a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual
and
*a member of a philosophical school of ancient Greece,the earliest group of which consisted of Pyrrho and his followers, who maintained that true knowledge of things is impossible
Those two definitions perfectly encapsulate how I view “otherworldly” phenomenon. I question stories of encounters with anything that could be deemed supernatural, yet, like Pyrrho, don’t think that science is able to attain all the answers.
Beer and Moaning in Las Vegas, or My Weekend With Hal Bodner
In the van ride home from KillerCon 3 in Las Vegas, Hal Bodner looked out the window at the desert speeding by. Behind him, John Skipp flipped through his CD’s with John Palisano, trying to find the perfect road trip music. Lisa Morton and Shannon Neil sat in back, sunglasses on, Shannon napping while Lisa was deep in thought. The speed at which she works, she probably wrote another novel on the ride home.
I was tired. Hell, we were all tired. KillerCon will do that to you. It will wear you out, but in the same way that a beautiful hike or a one night stand wears you out.
“How many bodies do you think are buried in the desert here?” Hal bit his nails and squinted toward a dust-stained trailer surrounded by empty oil drums.
I glanced into the rear view and met John Skipp’s eyes. Skipp scratched his cheek and I could still see the blood caked under his fingernails.
The Clone Wars
I’m Getting Really Tired of My Clone
In the beginning it was rather nice. We were into all of the same books, the same movies, liked the same restaurants. We’d take turns going to work or cleaning the house. And he was always brutally honest about what that shirt looked like on me.
But then things changed.
The Ghoul Next Door – A Review of the “Fright Night” remake
The year was 1985. The Cola Wars were dying down as the Cold War was flaring up. Michael Jackson and Madonna ruled the airwaves and everyone was asking: “Where’s the beef?”
I was six years old, sitting down in front of the television to watch cartoons and draw monsters. And probably eating something made with peanut butter. But what was this? A videocassette was in the VCR. The sticker on it said “New Release.” Already a movie junkie at such a tender young age, I pressed play.
The film, of course, was DEBBIE DOES DALLAS.
Oh. Woops. That’s actually a different story.
No, the movie I popped in that day was Tom Holland’s horror comedy FRIGHT NIGHT.
2011 – The Year in Horror (so far) – Part 1: The Movies
As a writer, I’m often drawn to horror. Not exclusively, perhaps not even most of the time, but often enough. I grew up on horror films and ghost stories. One of the first “grown-up” books I read was `Salem’s Lot. I was probably eight at the time. Even now, on a dark and stormy night, I can conjure up the fear I felt reading about Ralphie Glick’s cold corpse scratching on his brother’s window and whispering, “Danny, let me in.”
Even when I work in comedy or drama or that non-genre that tweed jacket wearing types call simply “literature,” I always come back to horror. It’s in my blood, you could say.
Brad C. Hodson 