The League of Tana Tea Drinkers supporting domestic extremists? It's more likely than you'd think. Maybe.

Shocking title aside, here's an odd story about the weird world of paranoia and suspicion that, despite the dawning of the Age of Obama, we still seem to live in.

It starts like every good WTF story: with a good deed.

On April 29, a link appeared on the League's communal web site that took readers to the following post on Gospel of the Living Dead (my apologies for linking to the author's entire April archive, I can't seem to figure out how to link to individual posts on his blog):

I really think the only thing we should each celebrate more than our own faiths, is the rich tradition of religious pluralism we have in our country. Lots of countries, all over the world and at all different historical periods, have had deeply religious populations. I don't think any have had populations as diverse and respectful as ours. So it's the American thing to do, really. Please consider sticking up for a tiny religious minority as they seek a small recognition of their members' faith and potential sacrifice:

The post ended with another link which took readers to the Internet home of the Asatru Military Family Support Program, a.k.a. "The Hammer Project.". You can check out the web site, but the short version of the Hammer Project's mission statement is that they want to get Asatru's holy symbol – the hammer of Thor – approved for use as a religious symbol in military graveyards.

This certainly seems like an unobjectionable goal and the Asatru faith has the right credentials (it is recognized by the IRS as a non-taxable religious organization). Gospel's to be commended for the display of cross-faith tolerance and I'm actually in total agreement with him that any religion recognized by the state should be allowed to display the symbol of its faith on the gravestones of fallen troops. It's strikes me as kind of a no brainer.

However, because we live in a strange world, I recently ran across a reference to the Asatru church in a considerably less favorable light. The group appears in a March 23rd memo produced by the Department of Homeland Security titled "Domestic Extremism Lexicon."

Intended to hip DHS officials to cultural trends among extremist groups, the lexicon contained the following entry:

racial Nordic mysticism
An ideology adopted by many white supremacist prison gangs who embrace a Norse mythological religion, such as Odinism or Asatru.

Hmmm. That's not good.

Still, before any conclusions are drawn, I feel it is important to state that the lexicon was not without its detractors. Critics said it is little more than a paranoid blacklist and that, because it tars with a particularly large brush, puts completely innocent Americans under suspicion for truly heinous crimes. The DHS claims that the memo was withdrawn "within minutes" of its release – though no reason was given for withdrawing the memo.

So what's up with Asatru? Are they neo-Nazis or what?

The Asatru Folk Assembly's official bylaws contain the following clear denunciation of racism: "The belief that spirituality and ancestral heritage are related has nothing to do with notions of superiority. Asatru is not an excuse to look down on, much less to hate, members of any other race. On the contrary, we recognize the uniqueness and the value of all the different pieces that make up the human mosaic." That's about as inoffensive a stance on race as one can take.

However, the very same group's "Declaration of Purpose" contains the following goal: "The preservation of the Peoples of the North (typified by the Scandinavian/Germanic and Celtic peoples), and the furtherance of their continued evolution."

Then there is the issue of metagenetics: a philosophical stance outlined by the AFA's founder that claims "there are spiritual and metaphysical implications to heredity." A claim he later, um, clarified by stating, "The hypothesis that there are spiritual or metaphysical implications to physical relatedness among humans which correlate with, but go beyond, the known limits of genetics."

Finally, there's the bizarre Kennewick Man incident. In 1996, the AFA sued the United States government to halt the surrender of prehistoric remains to the the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Yakama, Wannapum, and Colville Native American Tribes. The founder of the AFA claimed that modern adherents to the Asatru faith were genetically closer to prehistoric Americans than modern descendents of the various tribes. Courts actually ruled against the tribes – though not really on the basis of the AFA founder's arguments – and the remains were never returned.

All of this could be explained away or dismissed. Metagenetics might be to the Asatru what predestination is to most modern Calvinists, a curio that is still on the books but that is rarely seriously considered. The Northern People thing could be as simple as a group celebrating its historical roots. And the Kennewick Man deal could reflect the work of some minority sect within the group. Ask any liberal mainline Protestant about the behaviors of their more fundamentalist co-religionists and you'll find that, despite the supposed common faith, they are not a monolithic group.

So what's the story: has the DHS libeled an innocuous religious group or is there a strain of racial extremism haunting the church? Can any reader, preferably one with actual knowledge of the Asatru religion and its adherents hip me to the facts of the case?

[UPDATE: Two things:

1. Despite my description of blogger and novelist's Kim Paffenroth's post as a "good deed" and claiming that his post is "commendable," there's been some reaction among readers that I'm suggesting he was either implicitly supporting or pointedly ignoring the seemingly unseemly info that I later ran across. For the record, I do not think this was the case. I stand by what I originally wrote: Paffenroth support for the inclusion of of Asatru symbols on the list of religious icons that can be displayed on military gravestones is both geuninely humane and logical. As I said in the article, I agree with him on that issue.

2. I think it is important to note that this may well be a case of all-smoke-but-no-fire. I fully admit the possibility that the DHS list is some paranoid libel on the church of Asatru. It wouldn't be the first time either the current or previous administrations made wildly inappropriate assumptions in the service of "keeping America safe." Not only did Paffenroth not endorse any strain of political extremism, but there may well be no extremism here to endorse.]

Stuff: Therewolf.

I wanted to plug a nifty post by the relentlessly productive B-Sol of Vault of Horror. Among the video blogs, weekly top ten lists, news bulletins, and paternalistic odes to the joys of raising monster-kids, this engine of Interweb copy has managed to produce the first of three posts on the history of werewolf flicks.

It's nice to see ol' fuzzy face get the B-Sol treatment. Long the red-headed stepchild of the Universal fold, the werewolf's is to the universe of classical monsters what Martian Manhunter is to the Justice League – everybody feels he's iconic, but nobody has ever been able to raise his status to the level of a Frankenstein or a Dracula (the Superman and Batman of the JLA conceit).

From B-Sol's post:

With the highly anticipated Benicio del Toro remake of Universal's The Wolf Man on the way this fall, the time is ripe to take a long, considered look at the history of one of the horror genre's most venerable and beloved sub-categories. Although not quite as popular as its cousin the vampire, and perhaps not as thoroughly explored cinematically, the lycanthrope has nevertheless provided us with some of the most terrifying films ever made.

A beast whose origins go back nearly to the beginnings of Western civilization, the mythological being who can transform from man to wolf under the influence of the full moon has gone through its fair share of Hollywood-ization, much like its blood-drinking brethren. And in general, the history of werewolf films can be divided into three major eras. Today we will take a look at the first.

Most of the comments have focused on the odd film that's been left out, notably the list's lack of reference to the werewolf cycle of Euro-horror "master" Paul Naschy. These omissions don't bother me. You can't cover everything and, while Naschy probably deserves mention for holding the record for most-performances-as-a-werewolf, it doesn't strike me that his body of work has had some massive influence on the development of the genre. Despite their cult status among Euro-horror fans, they're sort of an evolutionary dead end. I think Naschy's the William Blake of werewolf filmmakers: There was nobody quite like him and he left no notable imitators, so he stands alone as a weird one-shot mutation in the genetic history of the subgenre. That's my take anyway.

I would, however, underscore something in his discussion of 1935's Werewolf of London:

The movie is Werewolf of London, and for some connoissuers of vintage horror, it remains the high watermark of lycanthrope cinema. Henry Hull stars as Dr. Glendon, and English botanist who falls under the curse of the werewolf after being bitten on an expedition in the Himalayas. The vast bulk of cinema's take on the werewolf legend is already established in this one film: the transmission through biting, the transformation under the full moon, the beast's desire to destroy that which its human half loves most.

The makeup created by Jack Pierce is striking, and Hull's humanoid, intelligent portrayal of the creature is quite unique, giving us one of the only talking werewolves of the silver screen. The film also puts the transformation scene front and center, a tradition that would continue throughout the history of the subgenre. Werewolf of London remains one of the most influential, and yet also one of the most underrated horror films of the Universal canon.

The biggest paradigm shift Werewolf of London introduced to the subgenre is the "humanoid" part. Prior to Werewolf of London, werewolves were depicted as changing from men into standard issue wolves. After London, the norm would be a mostly bipedal human-wolf hybrid creature. Ancient wolf stories tended to assume either a purely mental transformation (a dude gets on his hands and knees and starts acting like a wolf) or a complete physical transformation (in which the transformed person becomes a wolf-wolf). The ancient idea that the transformation is complete – though often a crucial part of the pre-film folklore - would become increasingly less common.

(There are, of course, dissidents. Perhaps ironically, American Werewolf in London and its sequel mostly keep their wolves on all fours. The Ginger Snaps franchise avoids extensive two-legged walking as well. Sharp Teeth and Sacred Book of the Werewolf are novelistic exceptions to the general trend – both assume a complete transformation).

Still, that's a small quibble. It's an excellent post and worth your attention. Dig, Screamers and Screamettes.

LOTT D: Toxic assets?

NY Times theater reviewer Charles Isherwood takes a look at the new Trroma-inspired off Broadway musical The Toxic Avenger. To this blogger, the review suggests that this is one of those things you either decide you're into or you throw it a pass, but it is pretty much exactly what you think it's going to be. More interesting is Isherwood's rapid oscillations between elitist disdain and displays of "hey, I'm just a regular guy" wackiness. Check the end of this excerpt:

Actually, the dopey, intermittently funny show that opened on Monday night at New World Stages is not the first all-singing, all-dancing adaptation of this horror spoof dreamed up in the 1980s by Lloyd Kaufman, the no-brow auteur behind the nigh-legendary cheesy-flick manufacturer Troma Entertainment.

Um, it’s not even the second.

This new version, with book by Joe DiPietro (“I Love you, You’re Perfect, Now Change”) and music by the Bon Jovi member David Bryan, is at least the third attempt to transform Melvin, the geek turned righteous monster of the movie, into a Sweeney Todd for our times. Clearly some fictional characters are born to sing, but who could have imagined that Mr. Kaufman would become the new Metastasio?

If you can’t quite place Metastasio, he wrote opera libretti in the 18th century that were used and reused by various composers. Possibly this review is the first time these two artists’ names have ever appeared in a single paragraph. (And by the way, wouldn’t Metastasio be a great name for a superhero?)

To be fair, Isherwood's not above this campy self-referential trash cult stuff. He later opines:

Musicals based on preposterously unlikely material have become fairly commonplace — we have already been exposed to “Evil Dead: The Musical,” for heaven’s sake — so you don’t get a free pass for simply choosing a cheesy movie and making it sing. The joke is getting stale. “Little Shop of Horrors,” perhaps the progenitor of the genre, had wit, charm and a melodic, lovable retro score. Only a few songs in “Toxic Avenger” rise above the generic in either music or lyrics. (Mr. DiPietro wins a point for rhyming “macho” with “gazpacho,” but would a girl who thinks Toxic is a French name really know about that Spanish soup?)

We'll leave the aside the incongruity of wondering if a blind librarian would know gazpacho is, but not wondering why exposure to toxic waste gave Toxie superpowers instead of cancer. Rather, I think he's pulling his punches here. What he's really lamenting is the idea that, if you work in certain subgenres, you don't really have to try to produce quality. It's that free pass mentality that says, "I'm making a [fill in vaguely disreputable entertainment varietal]; quality is beside the point." This free pass mentality carries with it an often unspoken corollary that demanding quality is, somehow, elitist. As if to demanding that a third-time rehash of a production at least include some good music is the equivalent of declaring that theater has been dead since the Puritans pulled down the original Globe.

Recently, Roger Ebert hit a Isherwoodian note in his review of the new Last House on the Left. Like the Toxie musical, the new Last House is the latest addition to a long line of remakes, being the second remake of a remake. At the Hall of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers, it was decided that we should compose a response to Ebert's pan, specifically focused on this line:

Other scenes, while violent, fell within the range of contemporary horror films, which strive to invent new ways to kill people, so the horror fans in the audience will get a laugh.

That's certainly a zinger, composed intentionally to tick off a bunch of people Ebert thinks should be harassed. His characterization of horror film fans is broad and derogatory and his dismissal was sure to kick of wave after wave of pro-horrorist rodomontades. Though Ebert was an important defender of the original Halloween and (as his review mentions) the original Last House, fans have suggested that he doesn't understand the horror genre. Even more hysterically, some suggest that Ebert's a snobbish elitist, which ignores the fact that he wrote the Citizen Kane of trash flicks: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Still, despite it's fan-baiting sharpness, that line is not, I think, the heart of Ebert's jeremiad. That appears in the paragraph previous, emphasis mine:

Not many unseasoned audience members will find the 2009 rape scene "toned down," and indeed I found it painful to watch. In the 2005 film, it was so reprehensibly and lingeringly sadistic, I found it unforgivable. So now my job as a film critic involved grading rape scenes.

For Ebert, Isherwood, and I suspect a large number of critics and fans, the issue is the gratuity of so much genre art. By "gratuitous" I don't refer to extremely violence (though that is certainly the case in many horror flicks). Rather, I mean the pointlessness of its extremes. In Ebert's review, he contrasts the inspiration for the trio of remakes, Bergman's The Virgin Spring, with the later models. His issue is not, necessarily, with the violence of the latter flicks. After all, the story is pretty much the same between all three films. What he misses is the tangle of revenge and guilt, the questions about justice and the limits of the Christian ethic of forgiveness. In the remakes, all that's left is the killing. He admits that there is a primal tension in the naked struggle to survive – "We are only human, we identify with the parents, we fear for them, and we applaud their ingenuity." – but this is that really enough?

This film, for example, which as I write has inspired only one review (by "Fright"), has generated a spirited online discussion about whether you can kill someone by sticking their head in a microwave. Many argue that a microwave won't operate with the door open. Others cite an early scene establishing that the microwave is "broken." The question of whether one should microwave a man's head never arises.

(As an aside, some have suggested that this line points to Ebert's lack of a clue, claiming that it shows Ebert is unable to distinguish the fictional depiction of murder from the real thing. "Of course you don't really stick peoples' heads in microwaves, dummy," say these critics. What Ebert is really referring to is the moral conflict the parent's feel in the original film. When does justice become bloodlust? That's what Ebert claims is missing from both the film and the fandom that supports such flicks.)

Ultimately, Ebert's correct. He has over-generalized, but he gets the basic dynamic down. Too many horror producers are willing to take the free pass. The rebirth of the slasher subgenre, perhaps the purist expression of the "ugly, nihilistic and cruel" filmmaking Ebert decries (though here Ebert's wrong; these filmmakers very strongly believe in something: they believe they'll make some money), is it most recent example. Uninspired and phoned-in pastiches that are the color-by-numbers paintings of the horror film world, these flicks are the very definition of "free pass." And it’s the fans that are handing the passes out. When fans explain to critics that bad dialogue, lack of characterization, predictable plotting, barely competent camera work, and atrocious acting are part of the point of the subgenre, they're giving these talentless hacks carte blanche to turn in crap work.

I think it's high time for a little elitist disdain up in here and I'm glad Ebert brought some.

Imagine how different the genre would be if fans told filmmakers that every time they were going to kill a bunch of people, they should have a dramatically and intellectually convincing reason to do so.

To paraphrase Kurt Weill, I don't know if that would bring you joy or grief, but it would be fantastic, beyond belief.

Stuff: The great horror unwashed, the horror canon, the talented tenth, and a little thought experiment.

Recently, LoTT-D member and all-round stellar human being B-Sol, the legend behind the myth behind the Vault of Horror blog, posted a piece on a "top 50 horror films" poll created by the Euro-based music and movie retailer HMV. For the full list, make with the clickee clickee over to his site.

The poll hasn't been well received. B-Sol suggested that the poll showed a gap between committed fans of the genre and weekend warrior types. Final Girl said the list "makes the horror snob in me want to curl up in a little fetal wad of self-righteous indignation." (She then admits that some of her all time fave flicks are a bit cringe-worthy, so there's a bit of self-aware stone tossin' in this here glass house.) Curt, of Groovy Age fame, takes some pride in having not seen half of the top ten flicks on the list. And even I, with my strong contrarian streak regarding the baffling worship of Euro-crap directors and slasher junk among League members, must admit that my first thought was that HMV's customers must every manjack one of them be utter morons.

But now I'm thinking. Kinda.

My ill-conceived review of the fifth Saw pic started with a long (perhaps overly long) gag which basically used box office numbers and the idea of a relevant horror canon to make the claim that anybody who had followed all the Saw movies wasn't worth taking seriously as a critic of the genre. This was, actually, just a joke. The idea was supposed to be that I had created an elaborate justification for having seen all the Saw flicks, even when diminishing returns had long since put paid to the series' most vital aspects. Still, at least one reader took it seriously and, I noted, that the issue he took with it was not methodological, i.e., he had no real problem conflating box office numbers with things like unique viewers or my quite unsupported claim that Saw's ticket sales represented the significant population of the horror viewing public. Rather, it was defense of his specific context as valid grounds for producing critical judgments regarding horror films. It was a dismissal of the idea that good critics need to share certain touchstone works. His problem was with the idea that there is a canon of works a critic needed to know in order to have the context from which to critique other works. UPDATE: Sean, the reader in question, clarifies his objection in the comments section. I misstate his position here. Sorry Sean.

This response has made me think more and more about a canon, whether such a thing should exist, and, if it should, how would you make it.

Which brings us back to HMV's list.

HMV's customers might very well be morons. But their taste, or lack thereof, is not responsible for how unsatisfying the list is. The problem is not lack of context, the absence of critical faculties, the dismal state of modern horror filmmaking, or mainstream disrespect for the genre. It is just math.

The issue isn't that young people today don't watch good horror movies. Or that young, modern horror fans aren't familiar with the history of the genre. The issue is simply one of sample size and population demographics. B-Sol has proposed that selected horror bloggers should propose an alternate list made from the weighted votes of their collective top ten lists. The idea is, I guess, that the superior genre context of the bloggers will produce a more interesting, nuanced, diverse, and worthwhile list. But the HMV list doesn't show a lack of context. It just shows what happens when you expand your sample size.

Compared to any "grassroots" list that bloggers could cobble together, the HMV list pulls from an absolutely huge sample size. Consequently, any idiosyncratic tastes will get averaged out and only those films that have been seen by a huge number of recipients will even have a shot at getting on the list. This is going to make the skew heavily towards movies that came out fairly recently (within the last 20 years or so) and towards movies that, in a decade or two, will probably drop off the list.

"Explain yerself, CRwM," you might well demand.

Okay. Let's do a little thought experiment to test my point.

Statement 1: There have been fewer films released during the lifetime of any given film viewer (the set x) than are available to be watched (the larger set A of all horror films available, including subset x).

Assumption 1: To vote something as one of the best horror films, the voter must have seen it.

Statement 2: Given assumption 1, in order to qualify to make the best of list, the film must be seen by a significant proportion of viewers – i.e., unless many people have seen it, a film cannot get many votes.

Assumption 2: Being a film viewer includes watching new films.

Definition 1: New films are defined as films that come out in film viewer's lifetime.

Statement 3: There is a limited number of films that one viewer can see in their lifetime. If assumption 2 and definition 1 are correct, then some portion of those films must be from subset x.

Statement 4: As the population of the voters increases, the number share titles in the subset of x for all viewers decreases. This is because the number of shared titles among all viewers is bounded by whatever voter has seen the least. For weighted voting, the number of films that are almost shared in the subset of x for all viewers remains important, but that number still shrinks as more voters are added.

Statement 5: The forward motion of time and the work of human biology ensures that the shared subset of x will always consist mainly of newer films, as new viewers inevitably watch the limited selection of what is new (as defined above) and distribute the remainder of their limited amount of viewing time among an ever-increasing pool of set A flicks. NB: The further you get from the birth of film, the less statistically significant the viewing of any single film outside of set x becomes, as the set of A but not x is constantly growing.

From these premises we get the following three conclusions:

Conclusion 1: Even if the films viewed are distributed randomly over set A, with the condition that the number of films in set x must be equal or greater than the number of viewers, the results are that film viewers are probabilistically likely to have shared more films in the subset of x then they are in larger set of A.

Conclusion 2: Given assumption 1 and statement 2, it is more likely that films in the subset of x will make the list then films from the subset of A but not x.

Conclusion 3: As new viewers shift the shared titles of subset x ever forward in time, films that enter the larger set of A will begin to experience the same sort of viewing patterns that most set A films experience and are, therefore, likely to fall off the face of the Earth.

If that's unconvincing, you can run a little simulation using easy-to-manage numbers. Take a set of whole numbers 1 to 1,000. Take 10 volunteers and ask them to pick 50 different numbers, but tell them that at least 4 of these numbers must come from the set of numbers 1 through 20. Then tally up the votes each number got and find the list of "favorite numbers."

In this simulation, the whole set of numbers stands in for set A and numbers 1 through 20 equals set x. Picking them is the equivalent of having seen them, so there's actually a step missing from the simulation. What this shows is not how voting would go, but how the actual set of films that have a shot at the list is whittled down. Still, given assumption 1, you can assume that the films watched – or numbers selected in the simulation – will lead you to the films voted for.

Admittedly, this simplifies viewing behaviors. There are certainly people out there who never watch horror movies and folks who never watch anything but old horror movies. Still, I think it is fair to assume that these are outliers in film watching behavior. Somebody who never watches horror films wouldn't spend time messing with a list of the best fifty horror films. And the population of people who never watch anything that couldn't be defined as "new" by our criteria is tiny and will tend to vanish because their votes, cast adrift the in ever-widening set A, will do little to off-set consolidation trends. I also think the ratio of new to all available films is pretty generous, but we're trying to keep this workable and, in the model's defense, the generous ratio actually works against my theory - the fewer new films you have in comparison to the set of all films, the faster one should see vote consolidation.

Given a small sample size, you'll actually get a large amount of diversity on your final list. This is because, with a small population of voters, the threshold for entering the "best of" list is tiny. If anything outside of set x got more than one vote, it still has a shot at getting in the top 50.

But, increase the sample size and you'll notice that the selection of numbers in set x, the "hits" on the subset, begins to rapidly outpace hits for numbers outside the subset. This doesn't mean that people aren't picking things outside set x. In fact, they might be selecting tons of numbers outside the subset. The problem is that set A is freakin' huge! It swallows up votes. Furthermore, so long as there is the requirement of selecting some films from the restricted subset of x, the votes are going to consolidate in the subset. Even if you reduced that number to 1 or said that every one hundredth selector could ignore that rule, you'd still get consolidation as the sample set grew in size. Weighting, another common strategy when building a canon, eventually gets overwhelmed by sample size issues.

That all supports conclusion 1 and 2. What about conclusion 3? To test that, add a "new generation" of horror films and fans to simulation. Add a new set of numbers to the model: prime 1 through prime 20. Now add some more selectors: Group N. All the previous selectors (group O) can select any ten numbers from the set of prime 1 through prime 20 and 1 through 1,000 – but they must choose 4 numbers from the subset of prime 1 through prime 20 and 1 through 20. As for the new group N, they can choose any ten numbers from the full set, but 4 of those numbers must come from the subset of prime 1 through prime 20. As each generation gets added, votes will cluster towards the new. And, of course, eventually generations of viewers will pass away, leaving some numbers completely out of the subset.

Again, this simplifies the whole generational process, which in RL overlaps and staggers forward. Still, it gets across the same idea.

What does this all mean for B-Sol's list? That the horror snob (his term, not mine) list will essentially be bounded by the same criteria, it will simply benefit from a tiny sample size that will allow for more idiosyncratic, less widely supported films to make the list. In short, films that fewer people like will be given more weight.

Will a horror snob's list of best flicks be more interesting to a self-professed horror snob? Probably. Will it be more diverse and include better films? Maybe.

Personally, I suspect that our list will be a little heavier on slasher stuff and Euro horror. Not because these flicks are in anyway superior to what made the HMV list, but because the personal-blogger demographic is relatively old (anybody not currently in their first year of college thinks of blogs as team-written link dumps, usually tied to a corporate media entity or driven by ad revenues – they aren't venues for personal expression). The population of horror bloggers will have that stuff in their subset x when large swaths of the HMV population probably didn't.

If we wanted to make it interesting, we should create a control to limit the statistical accumulation in subset x for each voter. We should adapt the Copernican principle that says, when grossly simplified, "you are not special." Statistically speaking, your viewpoint on a system is unlikely to encompass a significant juncture. You are most likely one of those 95% of people with nothing particularly interesting in your subset x. That is to say that you're unlikely, for example, to be lucky enough to see the debut of the first horror film, catch the greatest horror film, suffer the worst horror film, or be at the last screening of the last horror movie ever shown. In all likelihood, your subset x is pretty mediocre. Don't feel bad, mine is probably crap too. Almost everybody you know has a crap set x. It is not your fault. Blame Copernicus. Damn you, Copernicus! Don't think we'll forget this, stargazer!

Anyway, to capture data that might escape the wasteland of mediocrity that is our subset of x's, we are forced to attempt to avoid the tendency to come strictly from our singular perspectives. We can't vote on movies we haven't seen (well, we could, I guess, but that's stupid), but we can at least complicate the link. B-Sol could have put the condition on voters that they could only vote for movies that debuted before the voter's lifetime. You'll still get some consolidation, but it would be less of an influence. Instead, you'd be asking voters to choose those films that aren't "special" to them, but rather indicate the shared common past of all voters, a shared common past that endures the constant forward creep of vote consolidation.

That, I think, might be as close as you could get to a popularly constructed canon.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: A commenter on Final Girl has claimed that HMV poll was really more of a ranking exercise as you have to choose from a limited slate HMV selected films. The criteria behind slate selection seems to have been to drive sales for new editions out on DVD. This basically makes the poll useless as measure of anybody's actual tastes.

LOTT D: Want a little fromage with that whine?

Let me tell why it's cooler than cool that Casey Criswell – the blogger behind Cinema Fromage (a long-time feature on the ANTSS sidebar), one of the gang behind the Bloody Good Horror podcast, and the sterling human being lucky enough to be married to lovely and talented Colleen: The First Lady of Fright – is now a member of the august League of Tana Tea Drinkers.

What?

Too bad, I'm going to tell you anyway. When you don't live on my blog, you won't have to live by my rules.

There's a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story called "Earth's Holocaust." In it, the inhabitants of our little home planet decide that life is essentially suffocating under the weight of past culture. The burden of what's come before, the long trailing chain of history, literature, art, philosophy, and all the rest of it, is stifling humanity's ability to create anew. It is dooming modern artists to endlessly parrot universally acknowledged masterworks and creating a tyranny of the dead ideas over the living. To solve the problem, humanity consigns all its culture to a massive bonfire in one of the expansive plains of the Midwest. Genealogies, heraldry, historical documents, letters, plays, paintings, novels, money, clothes – all that can be tossed to the flames is burnt away.

The point – and I know some of you doubted I had one here – is that the horror blog-o-sphere sometimes reminds of Hawthorne's pre-bonfire world. It is so often so besotted with nostalgia as to be blind-drunk on it, so focused on the past of the genre that there's no hope for the future, so utterly backward that the thought of moving forward is pretty soundly mocked.

But not Casey.

Casey's blog won't hesitate to drop some horrortastic science about a classic like Young Frankenstein, The Brood, or even Something Wicked This Way Comes, all of which were recently featured on his blog or podcast. But what Casey does that makes him a real HERO OF THE INTERNET™ is give massive amounts of time to new releases, especially straight-to-DVD releases. And he reviews these puppies with wit, insight, and genuine good humor, eschewing the condescension and cynical "been-there-done-that" attitude so many horror bloggers take to anything made after 1989.

He's one of a handful of horror bloggers – including ANTSS fave Mermaid Heather and Black Horror Movies (one of the newest additions to the sidebar) – who care about what's going on now and cover contemporary horror with real energy.

Plus, he writes sentences like this: "If you refrain from seeing this due to the name, you’re a goob!"

Anyway, enough jibber jabber! Go check him out and congratulate him. I command it!

LoTT-D: Nilbog skoobs.

As regular readers of the humble electro-digital periodical know, we here at ANTSS, by which I mean "me," pride ourselves on keeping abreast of the latest doings in the genre. Which is why it pains me – Pains me, I say! – to confess that I totally dropped the ball in introducing our latest LoTT-D member. This delay is inexcusable; but if you'll accept an excuse nonetheless, I blame the economy.

Ladies and germs, give a big belated round of ANTSS-style applause to Paul Bibeau, the man, the myth, the legend, the blogger. At his deeeee-lightful Goblinbooks, Bibeau shares original short stories, waxes philosophical about missing car keys, shares vintage horror clips (including the silent classic Nosferatu in its entirety), and even explores a ghost town in Virginia.

One thing you should know about Paul.

Having achieved membership in the League, many of us would rest on our laurels. On any given day, you can find me kicking back by the League pool at our members on penthouse club in Hong Kong, sipping mai tais with Tenebrous Kate and Zombo's man Friday, discussing the finer points of Freud with Curt over tea and moules a la mariniere at Balthazar, or harassing the in-house talent at Entourage Vegas with Chad. Basically we Leaguers live la buona vita. What more, I ask, is there to aspire to?

But does Paul lapse into a sybaritic life of hedonistic and decadent pleasures with the rest of us libertines?

No sire-ee Bob! Instead, he's busy being the author of not one, but two – count 'em, TWO – books: a short story collection called The Big Money and Other Stories and a horror-centric memoir/travel tome called Sundays with Vlad.

Overachiever! Nerdelmeister! Way to make us look bad, Paul!

But I think you'll like him anyway. His boyish charm is disarming like that. Click on over and let him know you care, won't you?

LOTT D: Two wrongs do not make a right. But they can make for some fine bloggin'.

While the nation settles into its lazy post-school weekend schedule, the proud men and women of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers are tirelessly at work, diagnosing the modern horror film industry and safe-guarding the health of our collective nightmares!

The results of this painstaking diligence and ceaseless vigilance can be found in the second part of the LOTT D roundtable on "Modern horror, why must you suck?"

Let's salute these selfless bloggers who form the thin virtual line between the unsuspecting viewing public and cinematic disaster. Part the second features commentary Jeff Allard, of Dinner with Max Jenke, Unkle Lancifer, everybody's favorite creepy uncle from Kindertrauma, and, of course, ANTSS fave and America's Internet sweetheart: Absinthe from Gloomy Sunday. And let's not forget to pay solemn tribute to Iloz Zoc, Zombo's faithful man Friday and the cat responsible for this whole shindig.

Read up, Mr. and Mrs. Internet and all the ships at sea.

LOTT D: What's Wrong with Modern Horror Films?

I've got your Thursday efficiency black hole right here! The members of that fine and thoughtful body of fright fanciers, the League of Tana Tea Drinkers, have posted a new round table. This time the topic is "WTF is up with modern horror films, seriously?"

And there must be quite a bit wrong with them as this is just the first of two posts on the topic!

Contributors to Part the First include Theofantastique, Slasher Speak, and Horror's Not Dead.

I'm not in this two-act commentravaganza, but you should really spread your horror reading around more anyway. Neither man nor woman can live off CRwM alone; it doesn't have enough vowels for that. Besides, I didn't really have much to say for this one as I don't think anything is wrong with today's horror films. See? That wouldn't have been much of a post.

Speaking of League members, the overachieving mad-genius behind Sweet Skulls has a second blog running: Monster Memories. Read it. Because when Fred's mad plans to completely dominate the world come to fruition, do not think the master will forget who stood by him and who did not. You've been warned. Here's some shameless self-promotion from Fred:

LOTT D: This is why I'm hot (and evil).

The League of Tana Tea Drinkers has banged together another group post. The topic this time around was suggested by League member and ANTSS fave Absinthe, of the Gloomy Sunday Absinthes (see sidebar).

From the executive summary introduction provided Iloz Zoc (the League's heart and soul):

Why are we attracted to and mesmerized by evil people in horror cinema and novels? Gloomy Sunday's Gothic-romantic, Absinthe, kicks off this round of commentary from the League of Tana Tea Drinkers to explore this question. From Bela Lugosi to Freddy Kruger, the league pokes and prods as only it can do, to unearth the answers, the assumptions, and the contradictions.

Contributors include Absinthe, Chad Helder from Unspeakable Horror, Curt from Groovy Age of Horror, John Kenneth Muir from Reflections on TV/Film, and a little something something from your own favorite blogger.

"Wow, Cory Doctorow posted something?"

No, dammit! I meant me. Sheesh. I'm in there too.

Anywho, pop on over and check it out.

BONUS EVIL HOTNESS, because ANTSS is the blog that freakin' delivers, with a capital DEEE: Check out Top Horror Movies Club, hosted by the lovely and talented Rachel (see their new listing on the sidebar). Rachel and her various co-conspirators dig on horror big time and you owe it to yourself to swing by their blog and see how they do do that voodoo that they do so well.

LoTT-D: Fresh meat.

The League's got two new members. That's right. We're spreading around the League logo like a bad case of athlete's foot in the boy's locker room . . .

And speaking of the boy's locker room: Permit me to introduce Billy Loves Stu: the blog for "homos who love horror and the non-homos who love them." Dude, did you know there was a Leather Pride Flag (pictured above)? If you read B Hearts S, you would. It's actually kinda cutesy for leather types, I think. But my personal feelings about the design of the Leather Pride Flag aside, blog-master Pax Romano is an insightful and clever writer whose posts are well-worth your attention.

The League also welcomes Jeff Allard: the man, the myth, the legend behind Dinner with Max Jenke. Alllard's an experienced horror writer. His work has appeared in newspaper columns, fanzines, online sites, and more. His main love is 80s horror cinema, but his tastes are wide-ranging. When you're tired of the amateur ramblings here, go all-pro with Din-din with Maxie J. You'll want seconds.

LoTT-D: The Hungarian Suicide Song, but in blog form.

The League of Tana Tea Drinkers welcomes the genius behind Gloomy Sunday to their ranks. Posting under her nom de blog Absinthe, GS's mistress of ceremonies specializes in Gothic romance novels, from the seminal classics like Radcliff's The Mysteries of Udolpho to more obscure finds from the golden age of the mass market paperback. With her entertaining reviews, she posts boss cover images. Viewers who dig the pop goodness of Groovy Age might find GS another great source for cover art that tickles their fancy. Along the way Abby drops in some movies, opines, and otherwise comports herself in a manner befitting a blogger of note. Do check it out, won't you.

Which reminds me . . .

Here's a Instructable on how to make a version of absinthe - the drink, not the blogger.

LOTT-D: The kids are all fright!

The latest League of Tana Tea Drinkers Roundtable is up. The topic under discussion is "evil kids." From The Bad Seed to The Ring and all points in-between, league members opine on the terrifying tots that have been the pro-choice movement's greatest cinematic mascots. I'm a little sad to see that Milo, the titular homicidal demon child of the 1998 fright flick, didn't get a shout out. Still, you can't have everything, Screamers and Screamettes. Where would you put it all? Besides, the quality of the League's write-ups more than compensates for this otherwise unforgivable oversight. Check it out.

Vault of Horror discusses why the destruction of childhood, both literally and metaphorically, remains horror's biggest and most strangely attractive taboo.

Kindertrauma, our resident specialist on all things small and creepy, discusses the two major categories of evil child and the impact they have on us.

Gospel of the Living Dead focuses in on zombie children.

Blogue Macabre takes a close look at how evil children play to our conscious and unconscious anxieties.

TheoFantastique looks at the political implications of a classic "evil child" episode of The Twilight Zone.

And, last but not least:

Unspeakable Horror gets a little Freudian on us and discusses how he's used the concept of the "evil child" in his comic book work.

If you're anything like your humble horror host, then you didn't need another reason to hate children. But, better safe than sorry, right?

Meta: ANTSS becomes the Marvin of the horror-blogging Superfriends.

Today the fine folks over at The League of Tana Tea Drinkers invited your humble horror host to join the merry macabre band of malicious malcontents. I, cribbing a calm and collected response from James Joyce said, "Yes I said yes I will Yes."

So, Screamers and Screamettes, you might well ask, how will this meteoric, if entirely justifiable, rise to almost unimaginable Internet fame affect CRwM?

Well, in a rushed and utterly half-assed attempt to put the League logo on my sidebar, I completely wiped out all my links and had to scramble to fix my freakin' blog. I reckon that sort of regularly displayed incompetence should serve to keep me well grounded.

Sigh.

Still, it is an honor to be asked to join up. Please check out the new LOTT-D link in the recently un-destroyed sidebar and look for future ANTSS participation in League round-tables, guest shots, and other good stuff.