Friday, December 12, 2008

Link Proliferation: And tell her that her lonely nights are over.

We have a winner!

Here's the winner board for the "Tales from the Captcha" contest:

Troy Z wins the big ol' first season of Tales from the Crypt.
OCKerouac wins Billy the Kid's Old Time Oddities.
Sasquatchan has himself a slightly new copy of The Cobbler's Monster.

If you guys could shoot me an email at the following address: [my nom de blog]44@yahoo.com. Let me know where I can send these bad boys and you get them promptly.

Winners were selected at random from the entry pool. If you didn't win this time, I want you to meditate on what you might have done to earn such bad karma that the mysterious forces of randomness at work in the universe have it out for you.


Mutually interred destruction


I'm not a big Metallica fan. In fact, my level of fandom is somewhere between "active avoidance" and "vast indifference." However, their latest video – brought to my attention by the mad genius behind the delightful The Horror!? blog – used animation, "found footage," CGI, and first person camera work to reconstruct a Soviet plan to close the nuclear missile gap with zombie-making spores. It's pretty boss and you can listen to it on mute if Metallica ain't your bag.




Col' lampin'



I have nothing to add other than this very concept makes me all giggly.


And operator, please reverse the charges


From Screamin' Dave over at Forbes' Digital Download blog, the new Ghostbusters videogame trailer.

Regardless of what the trailer does or does not do for you, can we all admit that the bit of concept art below is some of the craziest crap we've ever seen connected to the 'Buster franchise?




Bring me a dream



Over at Horror's Not Dead, Mr. Hall suffers J. T. Petty's faux snuff mockumentary S&Man. His description of the movie is amazing, but what will get your noodle turning about is the following claim:

It matters not whether the Sandman tapes are real, whether Eric Rost is a real person or just a character. He is a parable for a reality we all know exists. There are people who have made real snuff films. There are people who have sought out real snuff films. More frightening than that, no past tense is needed in those sentences. People still make them. There exists today a market for videotapes of real rape, of real torture and of real murder. Or, failing that availability, as close as possible as anyone is willing to simulate.

I can’t think of anything that disturbs me more.


Excluding the claim that there's a snuff market out there – which remains the snuff of urban legend, as it were – is there a moral equivalence between watching simulated snuff and the real thing? If something is simulated so well that it is indistinguishable from the real thing, is the moral cost of consuming it indistinguishable from the real thing?

Victim-dar




New Scientist reports a weird correlation between psychopathic tendencies and the ability to recall biographical details of "vulnerable victims." Or, more simply, psychos have victim radar.

From the article:

Contrary to popular belief, most psychopaths are not Jack the Ripper types - often they have never committed a violent crime. But as many as one in 100 people display antisocial behaviours deemed psychopathic. Chief among these is a callous ability to manipulate other people to fulfill their own desires.

To investigate this behaviour, Kevin Wilson of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and colleagues put 44 male college students into two groups according to their scores on a test that measures psychopathic traits. "None of these students qualified as psychopaths, but some did have behaviours associated with psychopaths," says Wilson.

The students were shown a series of faces, each accompanied by a name, a job and details about interests and hobbies. When later asked to recall the details, those with more psychopathic-like behaviours were better at describing sad-looking and unsuccessful females than the normal group, especially details about the women's lives.


So ladies, do try not to be sad-looking and unsuccessful.


The dead travel fast



Over at the made-of-awesome Human Marvels site, there's the tale of Elmer McCurdy, former bank robber and wandering corpse.

In life Elmer McCurdy wasn’t anything special. Elmer wasn’t really unique or extraordinary. It was only following his demise that Elmer amounted to much of anything, when his corpse became famous and the stuff of urban legends.


Maybe this is why Euro-horror seems so lame to me



Over at the Neurophilosophy blog, there's a nice write up a recent study that suggests that expression of the biological fear response may be culture-specific, a case of nature being nurtured.

From the article:

The new study was led by Joan Chiao of the Social and Cultural Neuroscience Lab at Northwestern University. 22 volunteers were recruited for the study; 10 were Caucasians living in the United States, and the remaining 12 were native Japanese living in Japan. All the participants were presented with a series of pictures of 80 faces, each for 1.5 seconds, and each depicting an American or a Japanese person expressing either a fearful, happy, angry or neutral facial expression. Their neural responses to the facial expressions in the pictures were measured using functional neuroimaging.

The results:

Both groups of participants could recognize the emotions depicted in the pictures very accurately. Interestingly though, the Japanese participants were significantly quicker in recognizing fear in all the pictures, while the Americans were significantly more accurate at recognizing fear in pictures of people from their own culture. More importantly, the response of the amygdala was increased when the participants recognized fear in pictures of members of their own cultural group relative to others. Hemispheric differences were also observed: the increase in amygdala activity in response to fear recognition in own-culture faces was significantly greater in the right amygdala than in the left. By contrast, no significant differences in amygdala activity was observed when the participants viewed pictures of happy, angry or neutral expressions.

Earlier neuroimaging studies have shown that white Americans show an increased response in the amygdala when presented, either consciously or unconsciously, with pictures of black Americans with neutral expressions. By contrast, no differences in the response to neutral faces of either cultural group were observed in this study, even though Americans often hold positive sterotypes of Asians. Thus, the earlier observations may have been due to cultural knowledge of the negative sterotypes about African-Americans, rather than negative stereotypes of members of other ethnic groups per se. This is supported by the finding in the earlier studies that black Americans also exhibit increased activity in the amygdala in response to pictures of black people with neutral expressions.


Sir Larry's "Hard Day's Night"

This has nothing to do with horror. But it's pretty funny.

Here's Peter Seller's doing the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night" in the manner of Olivier's take on Shakespeare's Richard III. Don't try to wrap your head around that description, just watch.



Have a great weekend, my little Screamers and Screamettes.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yay I'm a big wiener! Woo hoo. You'll get a email shortly. I'll see if you're interested in an odd book I've got (and mentioned) to send back as a swap. Glad this one was chosen randomly, rather than based on skill like the last haiku contest ;)

Folks are still working through the snuff film angle ? After 8mm, and a CSI that claim they are real, countered with Cecil's debunking.. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1170/is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-snuff-film

I'm wary of the undergrad psych experiments.. I recall as part of fulfilling the liberal arts reqts, one had to take various 101/102 from sets of depts. I took psych 101/102, and part of that required 2 or 3 hrs of "be a lab rat" for some grad student's experiments.. I treated the experiments like a game, and had lots of fun doing it. So I don't put much stock in any results presented based on undergrad "volunteers"..

(That, and maybe I'm a psycho, since I recall the happy/sad/scared/disgusted pictures in the text book, horrid black/white shots, and I'll be damned if I could figure out which emotion the person was showing..)

Shon Richards said...

What gets me about Snuff films is that people who want to exploit the myth try very hard to insist they exist where as the real curiosity in my mind is why *don't* they exist? The lack of snuff films means humans are not total scumbags after all.

houseinrlyeh aka Denis said...

I'm also surprised that people are still insisting on the existence of snuff films (or the big hidden satanist conspiracy for that matter).
I've never thought that having a certain amount of fun with simulated violence is bad sign for a person - in my experience those people who like mock snuff the most are the least violent in real life.
My morals are based on the idea that it's not a moral problem when nobody gets hurt. But I am very European, take that with a grain of salt.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for hosting this contest, your generosity, and your obsessive attention to this blog!
But this email [my nom de blog]44 -at- yahoo.com, is this referring to "crwm" or "and-now-the-screaming-starts"?

-Troy Z

OCKerouac said...

My heartfelt thanks for your skills at random selection. I have e-mailed you my info and much like Sassy above have some potential returns I could send your way for a quid-pro-comic exchange...

Interesting links all... Just when I start to wonder what's wrong with people in general, Peter Sellers reminds me of the inherent good that accompanies the evil that men do...

I guess Edna Garrett, Blair, Joe Natalie, and Tootie were right when they told us 'you take the good, you take the bad...'

CRwM said...

Troy,

Plug crwm in there.

Curt Purcell said...

Good catch on the Neurophilosophy blog--did you see that current article about reconstructing visual images from brain activity?!? As for why you don't appreciate the awesomeness that is euro-horror, well, there's no accounting for taste!

CRwM said...

Curt,

I did see that. Amazing stuff.

As for Euro-horror, I openly admit it is my own fault for not liking it. I'm too hung up on plot, style, and quality. If only I could let that stuff go and enjoy. Guess I'm just old fashion.

I kid. One man's poison is another man's Euro-horror awesomeness.

houseinrlyeh aka Denis said...

But...but you only have to let go of plot to like them! Actually, you can keep the concept of plot and let yourself be astonished if and when something does in fact make some sort of sense.
Also, Jess Franco needs the money.