AS I mentioned in the last post, sleep is a precious commodity. So here's a song about sleep from one of my favorite bands, Savatage. (You may know them now as the band from which Trans-SIberian Orchestra grew.)

Enjoy and maybe take a nap.

You may have heard. I'm a dad now. My wife and I have had to make some adjustments, particularly in the area of sleep. Clark, our son, is more than two months old now and neither of us has been caught up on sleep since.


In other words, I've been thinking about A Nightmare on Elm Street a lot lately. The biggest difference, of course, is that I WANT to go to sleep. The crazy thing is that when I have been able to sleep, I've been having vivid dreams and some rather horrible nightmares. Tragically, I wasn't able to write any of them down. I hate losing such good material.

I haven't watched Nightmare since the birth of my son, but I'm thinking about it. It's getting harder to choose what to watch. I'm not getting more prudish--at least I don't think so--but some things are bothering me more than they used to. I was trying to get through season two of The Walking Dead a couple weeks ago and there is a shot of a bloodied and battered child's car seat in one episode. No child was around, thankfully, but even the sight of the seat made me cringe more than I would have a few months ago. I had to turn it off.

I can also admit to nearly losing it during the opening sequence of Hotel Transylvania. We watched it the weekend before Clark was born and the scenes of Dracula raising his little girl go to me. Turns out I'm a soft touch.

So maybe I won't watch A Nightmare on Elm Street for a number of reasons. Discounting the sleep deprivation angle, there's the whole Freddy Krueger is a child murderer thing to consider. Parts five and six, The Dream Child and Freddy's Dead, are definitely out. I just can't take it right now.

I might be stuck with such fare as The Great Bear Scare (cheesy cartoon from 1983 about a town of bears who are afraid of monsters, available via Netflix Instant Stream) and The Great Mouse Detective (it's Disney, but Vincent Price voices the villain, so it's a good substitute).

I may have to avoid many of my favorite Stephen King books/movies until I think I'm over this. (Or until I'm ready to do my scholarly work on the subject, whichever comes first.)

I'm curious: you other parents out there, what gets to you? What can't you watch anymore that you could before you became a parent?

In less than a month, I will finally finish my bachelor's degree (ten years and three schools after starting, thank you). It's a pretty big deal to me. Graduation is June 8 and presents (especially cash) are welcome and appreciated.

So here's a song to honor the occasion. Dethklok's "Go Forth and Die." Enjoy!

Edgar Allan Poe famously stated in his "Philosophy of Composition" that a short story should achieve a single effect. May is National Short Story Month and horror is one of the few genres the short story has truly thrived in.

As such, here follows a list of some of my favorite horror short stories. Feel free to mention your own favorites.

"Wordprocesser of the Gods," Stephen King.
"You Know They Have a Hell of a Band," Stephen King.
"1408," Stephen King.
"Quitters, Inc.," Stephen King.
"The Small Assassin," Ray Bradbury.
"I Sing the Body Electric," Ray Bradbury.
"Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead," Joe Hill.
"Best New Horror," Joe Hill.
"Dreams in the Witch House," H.P. Lovecraft.
"The Rats in the Walls," H.P. Lovecraft.
"The Masque of the Red Death," Edgar Allan Poe.
"The Pit and the Pendulum," Edgar Allan Poe.
"Prey," Richard Matheson.
"In the Hills, the Cities," Clive Barker.
"Echoes," Cindie Geddes.
"Bubba Ho-tep," Joe R. Lansdale.
"The Washingtonians," Bentley Little
"Saint John," Jonathan Maberry.

This, of course, is just a small sample. Everyone has their own favorites and you should leave a comment about your favorite short stories.

You may have heard that Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman died yesterday at age 49. And so, our scary song of the week is "Raining Blood." R.I.P.

This one is going to be touchy, but hear me out.  

I love my mother and I love my wife who recently became a mother. They’re great. There are plenty of non-creepy mothers in the world. There are even nice stepmothers. I have a stepmother and a stepmother-in-law, so I have I have plenty of experience here. Being a mother is probably the single greatest thing a person can do and only half of the world’s population even has the capability of becoming a mother.

But every now and again, some mothers go crazy. Or they have a creepy influence over their children (usually their sons—there’s a whole mythological/psychological background to this which I won’t get too deeply into. Google Oedipus and/or Freud if you are that curious.) Books and movies have helped bolster these notions.

I think of this now for two reasons: the first, as stated above, is that my wife is now a mother and we’ll have our first Mother’s Day to celebrate this year; the second is that I’m taking a course on Alfred Hitchcock and twisted mother/son relationships are all over his films.

The most famous mother-son relationship in all of cinema is in Psycho, one of Hitchcock’s acknowledged masterpieces. Loner Norman Bates loves his mother so much that he keeps her dead body in the basement and sometimes dresses up as her to kill people. (If you haven’t seen Psycho and I just ruined it for you, that’s your fault. You should have seen Psycho by now.) “A boy's best friend is his mother,” Bates tells the soon-to-be-dead Marion Crane. Psycho is a model of how messed up an extreme Oedipal complex can be. But it isn’t the only time Hitchcock used this model.

As Alex Sebastian in Notorious, Claude Rains goes through a similar situation as Norman Bates. Sebastian discovers his wife is not who he thought she was and turns to his mommy for help in killing her. It is the elder Madame Sebastian who devises the plan to slowly poison Ingrid Bergman’s character, Alicia. Madame Sebastian even looks almost as skeletal as the decomposing Mrs. Bates. And like Mrs. Bates, Madame Sebastian will likely escape the punishment for the crimes that her son commits. Mrs. Bates, of course, is dead and her influence on Norman is, for the duration of the film, all in his head. Madame Sebastian, however, is very much alive and not just complicit in the attempted murder of Alicia but the progenitor of the plan to kill her son’s wife. We don’t get any vocalization of Alex’s thoughts about his mother but she is the first person he turns to, even entering her bedroom while she sleeps. We do get to hear how Madame Sebastian feels about her son when she tells him, “We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity, for a time.”

It’s pretty messed up, to say the least. If not for Psycho, Mrs. Voorhees might not have been the original killer in the first Friday the 13^th movie. It’s a mirror image of Psycho. In the latter film, it’s Mrs. Voorhees that says, “Kill her, Mommy! Kill her! Don't let her get away, Mommy! Don't let her live!"

And there are plenty of examples beyond Hitchcock and even beyond the mother-son pairings. Disney has made a fortune on the “wicked stepmother” who can’t tolerate the beauty or even the presence of a stepdaughter. Nicole Kidman’s mother character in The Others turns out to be the villain. And who is the most bad ass being in all of space? The Queen from the Alien franchise.

Joe Hill has been on my mind a lot this week. So it's natural that I would pick a song that shares a title with his first novel.

P.S.-- I love Nirvana.

For about five minutes this morning, I got super excited. Author Joe Hill will be visiting Seattle on Saturday, May 18. It's not too far a drive for me to get there (especially since I don't work on Saturdays and Sundays anymore) and I'd still be home relatively early.

I email my excitement to my wife, because, for a second there, my brain collided two circumstances. You see, we just had a baby. He'll be around two months old by the time Hill comes to the Pacific Northwest. And she'll be back to her regular work hours which means Saturday nights on the copy desk. I feel very selfish, but I have to admit that it took me a second to add that all up. I didn't forget we had a baby, but I've gotten so used to her being home all the time that I figured an afternoon without me wouldn't be a big deal. My selfishness blocked out the reason why her reply was simply "Sorry honey."

So I won't get to go (which means I will probably miss my chance to talk to him about a nonfiction book idea that I've been rattling around in my head for a few months now). You can still go.

Joe Hill
Saturday, May 18
University Bookstore
4326 University Way NE
Seattle, WA 98105

He'll be stopping in a few other places that I won't be able to go to and you can check out the tour schedule here.

The tour will be ion support of his new novel NOS4A2, which will be available on April 30.

I freaking love that title.

I know, it's been awhile. Did you miss me? Really, I'm sorry. Give me a break. My wife just had our first baby back in March. Thankfully, my mom and sister came to visit last weekend, so we left the baby with his mom and aunt while I took my mom to see the new Evil Dead movie.

We reminisced about the time we saw Drag Me to Hell and watched a couple teen girls leave crying and screaming. That was a good day.

The new flick is satisfying in a number of ways and unsatisfying in others. There are plenty of nods to the original film and its sequels. Thankfully, they aren't distracting or interrupt the story. They make us think that one thing will happen but then gives us something slightly different. So that's cool. The unsatisfying moments, however, do the film damage.

Yes, this is a straight up horror movie. There is little comic relief and lines that are somewhat funny become horrible in context. I still giggled because I'm like that. Sure, I cringe a little when a possessed girl licks a razor, but then I delight in the effect of the bifurcated tongue followed by a very unnatural kiss. It's gruesome. Unlike the original set, the blood and gore aren't so repulsive as to become humorous. It's over the top but so serious it's impossible to laugh.

Kudos to the filmmakers for using a majority of practical effects, though. I'm pretty sure they used up the Karo syrup and red food coloring supply of their location. The practical and digital are mixed together in such a way that it's often difficult to discern when an effect came out of a computer versus out of a bottle.

The real problem for this film is that I don't care about the characters. Granted, there will always be a set of character we know are just going to die and not live on for the sequels. The beauty of the first Evil Dead was that we came to care about Ash and wondered how he would move forward after his encounter with the Necronomicon. he seemed like cannon fodder at the beginning but turned into the hero. We get a similar character arc for this film (I won't tell you who becomes the hero, but there really are only two choices), but it feels forced. I don't buy it and I don't care.

What I do care about is what happens next. Stay through the credits, you'll understand.

Threat Level: ORANGE. Mostly for fans and mostly to see a real gruesome movie at the theater without it being a torture porn flick.

How cool is this? For "Dracula" author Bram Stoker's 165th birthday, Google Doodle put up this "Dracula" illustration. They've done some neat stuff in the past, but this is classic.

You, faithful followers, may have noticed that recent output has been minimal. Sorry. I've been working on other projects. One of those projects is another blog. The kind folks at the Yakima Herald-Republic decided to give me a pop culture/entertainment blog. It's called Backstage Pass and you can check it out here.

While this blog will continue to focus on the horror genre, Backstage Pass will cross genre and media boundaries. I'm even going to go to concerts! You'll get to see reviews of movies from other genres and more. It's going to be fun.

While you are there, check out my review of "The Man With the Iron Fists."

For here, check back soon when we'll talk about a couple birthday presents I got this week: Blu-rays of "Grindhouse" and "Evil Dead 2" and new comics featuring The Phantom Stranger and Hellblazer.

There is no real reason that "Paranormal Activity 4" should even exist. There's a problem and we're going to talk about it because I am part of the problem. You probably are, too. But let's talk about the good stuff first.

Playing teenager Alex, Kathryn Newton gives us the best close-up scared face since Heather Donahue in the "Blair Witch Project." Instead of a Hi-8 camera, we see her through a laptop's webcam. For this fourth installment of the franchise, webcams are the preferred mode of recording the activities in the home.

Home, this time, is not Carlsbad, California, as the previous films have been. The action moves to Henderson, Nevada, and is five years after the end of the first two films (part three, you may recall, was a prequel). No one has seen Kathy and the wee baby Hunter since they disappeared and everyone in their homes were killed. Alex, her brother Wyatt, and their distant parents live across the street from a weird lady who we don't see for half the film and her weird kid Robbie. Robbie comes to stay with Alex's family when his mother is taken to the hospital in the middle of the night. That is when the action begins.

Years ago, I would see the VHS case for the live-action "Frankenweenie" short film Tim Burton made in the 1980s everywhere. It was pink and had the most messed up dog on the cover. The short starred Daniel Stern (the tall burglar from "Home Alone") and the kid from "The Neverending Story." The basics--dog is boy's only friend, dog dies, boy brings dog back to life-- are the same as the newly released animated feature. Usually, I would balk at such a remake, especially so many years later. "Frankenweenie," however, is worth it.

The best of Burton's works aren't about the weird situations or kooky gimmicks. His best works are about heart. Burton can do empathy as well as anyone when he tries. Yes, I am a fan of  "Big Fish" and thought the sentimentality of the film was perfect. The same goes for "Frankenweenie." The relationship between Victor and Sparky is not unbelievable. Victor spends more time with his dog than any person because the dog knows what he needs and provides it.

Being a feature, Burton added a few new elements to the plot. A hotly contested science fair, a firebrand science teacher and few other reanimated pets join in the fun. The science teacher, wonderfully voiced by Martin Landau and looking like a mix of Christopher Lee and Vincent Price (it IS a Tim Burton movie, after all), gives one of the best speeches of the year to a PTA meeting full of parents and teachers questioning his methods. Glorious.

Other highlights include a can of Miracle-Gro and a tug-at-your-heart-strings finally that is simultaneously an homage to the 1931 "Frankenstein" and classic Disney.

"Frankenweenie" should not be dismissed as just something for the kids to watch around Halloween. It's a joy for all ages.

THREAT LEVEL: ORANGE. It's no "Edward Scissorhands," but "Frankenweenie" should take a valued place among Tim Burton's filmography.