It’s Halloween, a time when sales of candy and rentals of horror movies spike off the charts. Candy has been around since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but the horror film is barely 100 years old. The genre is enjoying a resurgence in popularity over the past several years: right now you’ve got Saw V in wide release, Let The Right One In in limited theaters, the vampy teen Twilight coming up in a few weeks and True Blood making waves on HBO. Studios can’t seem to go more than a few months without releasing some sort of a zombie flick, and vampires are coming back into their own.
But what was the first real horror film? Before movies existed, people had to get their scares from books and the local newspaper, but now you can just switch on cable and tune into NBC’s Chiller channel for instant scares. Check out a brief history of the horror movie after the break, and look just how far we’ve come.
Legendary six-time-Oscar-winning make-up artist Rick Baker joined stars Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt to bring us the first footage of Universal’s new version ofThe Wolfman. And it’s a period piece.
Highlights:
- The origins of the remake stem from Del Toro’s Lon Chaney Jr. fandom.
- It looks like “Francis Ford Coppola’s The Wolfman”
- Of course, Anthony Hopkins would be more welcome as Van Helsing again
- At least it will likely be R-rated, as it looks quite bloody
- Baker honors Stan Winston by labeling his death “the end of an era”
- Blunt is apparently into two-headed dudes
Check out the full liveblog transcript after the jump.
Geek Prom. That’s what we used to call Comic-Con in the late 90s –– self-mockingly, because we (or, at least, I) weren’t actually cool enough to go to real prom. That was before there was an actual Geek Prom every year in Duluth, and before Comic-Con itself became less a comic convention than an 100 hour press conference, where Hollywood studios are (for the most part) able to bypass the pesky press and sell next year’s product line directly to their most desired demographic.
As you’re reading this, I’m en route to San Diego for my fourth Comic-Con, my first in a couple of years. Kevin and Kevin will be joining me, and starting with tomorrow night’s preview, we’ll be live blogging all the major panels, and some of the not-so-major panels (Lloyd Kaufman, I love you), so plan to refresh the page roughly every 30 seconds from Wednesday night through late Sunday.
But whilst spoilers on the dreaded Wolfman remake are one thing, I’m also interested in how the Con has changed in the ten years since I comfortably fit within its target demo, especially for the fans and kids who––I assume––still make pilgrimages to attend. I have all these half-baked theories about how nerd culture has essentially become the new frat culture; if you’ve ever been bullied on a fanboy blog comment thread, maybe you’ll agree, or maybe I’m just talking out of my ass. Regardless: with the former totems of high school rejects long since transformed into the bread and butter of the mainstream culture industry, will there be any real geeks left at the old Geek Prom?
Whether you’re a long-time Con attendee or if this will be your first time, let me know if you have any thoughts. And if you spot an old lady wandering around the Convention Center in granny glasses, fumbling for her arthritis medicine and her inhaler, come say hi!
Throwing a wrench into the WGA talks that neither side really needed, SAG has started talking shit about the recently-cemented DGA/AMPTP deal. SAG’s Alan Rosenberg wrote a letter to his guild warning them that the publicized details of the DGA pact were too vague to put much faith in, and that the pact may not actually be a victory on the digital download front. The DGA’s Michael Apted responded (and I’m paraphrasing), “If you don’t know the details, how come you’re sending letters, gettin’ all up our shit?”
Variety has scant new details on Mark Romanek’s exit from Universal’s Wolfman remake: in this case, “creative differences” seem to translate to “money.”
Oliver Stone’s not just talking about making a George Bush movie––he’s now found someone to fully finance the thing, so that it can be fast tracked into production by April, and possibly in theaters in time for the November election. Chris previously did a double take on this project here.
Bloody-Disgusting is passing along the rumor that Emily Blunt has signed on to star opposite Benicio DelToro in a remake of the 1930s Universal horror classic, The Wolfman. I guess I should be really upset about this. As I’ve said before, I’ve got a huge weakness for the monster movies of the 1930s, which, for me, hold up as well as they do primarily as star vehicles. I’m the biggest fangirl for Boris Karloff, but Lon Chaney Jr, who played the original Wolfman, is my second favorite. Karloff and Bela Lugosi could be inhumanly creepy, but Chaney had a regular-guy thing which is maybe more interesting in retrospect–– his transformation into the monster is less campy and more legitimately scary, and as a whole, the film feels much more modern than many from the era. I think Benicio will probably bring something very different to the table, which may not be a good thing.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Geek Prom. That’s what we used to call Comic-Con in the late 90s –– self-mockingly, because we (or, at least, I) weren’t actually cool enough to go to real prom. That was before there was 
