Stuff: And the dessert specials this evening are revenge and an orange crème brulee with poached quince compote.

The horror-themed web site The Monster Club has an excellent archive of old-school Halloween appropriate radio broadcasts.

The collection includes well-known classics, such as Welles' famous Mercury Theater War of the Worlds adaptation. However, there are some odd surprises mixed in. For example, there are several radio adaptations of then-popular suspense films. I've always known that radio plays were sometimes adapted into film, but I was unaware that this process cut both ways and was surprised to see how long these adaptations continued to be made. The Monster Club collection includes adaptations of The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Birds, The Wizard of Oz, and Gaslight, among others.

Even if you don't have time to listen to anything, the titles and show summaries for many of the lesser known broadcasts are worth the click through. Series include the The Price of Fear, Beyond Midnight, and the wonderful The Strange Dr. Weird. Here are a few choice episode summaries:

The Snowman Killing: A family with 2 boys moves into a new house. One boy begins to see a snowman no one else can see, while the other develops an odd malady.

Sub-basement: A mal-intending man takes his cheating wife to the sub basement of the department store where he works and discovers a horrible creature.

An Eye for an Eye: A chef creates a fantastic new dish, live octopus. Unfortunately, revenge is on the dessert menu. Starring and hosted by Vincent Price.

The collection also features performances from some of horror's most famous icons: including Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and, my favorite, Vincent Price.

Speaking of the price of fear, the whole darn collection is free. All treat, no trick. Happy Halloween.

Movies: How I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb . . . and the taste of human flesh.

I did not have high hopes for the remake of The Hills Have Eyes released earlier this year. The original, while fun, was not a particular favorite of mine. Perhaps more importantly, it wasn't the sort of film I thought would be improved through the simple addition of more gore and slime – the overarching concept behind remakes since Bay started producing his somewhat tedious remakes of iconic '70s horror flicks. Happily, and somewhat to my surprise, the remake was better than I think anybody has reason to expect.

The plot, a reasonably close adaptation of the original, involves a family traveling West who takes one of those many unfortunate short cuts that litter the imagined landscape of the modern horror film. It is this family's bad luck to run afoul of a clan of mutated flesh-eating morlocks – the descendants of a mining community that refused to leave the area when the US government decided to use the area around their mining town for nuclear testing. The how and why of the situation is interesting, if not particularly convincing, but it does efficiently get all the elements into place: stranded family, harsh desert, mutant cannibals. What we've got is the classic Beau Geste trapped and surrounded scenario. Will the family pull together? Can they fend off their relentless attackers? The same plot has served Hollywood in across genres, from Rio Bravo to Aliens, for as long as people have been going to the ol' picture show, and it is so popular for a very simple reason: done well, it gives good movie. And, for the most part, The Hills Have Eyes is a well executed, tense, and worthwhile addition to the long tradition of the "circle wagons" sub-genre.

Much of the credit goes to the dramatic sensibilities director and screenwriter Alexandre Aja brought to his remake. One of the secrets to his success was the realization that tension, and not gore, is the real core of the "circle wagons" style film. Yes, there's gore in them there Hills, but the real core of the flick is the ever increasing tension and the cat and mouse game between our fish-out-of-water protagonists and their cannibalistic counterparts. The gore, what there is over it, is deployed to elevate the stakes and not as a sort of nerco-porn collection of travesties to wallow in. For comparison, think to that banner movie of the new horror revival Hostel. How much abuse was really necessary to tell the viewer that the characters were truly and deeply in horrific danger? Certainly some torture helps heighten our fear, but eventually we're not adding to tension so much as emerging ourselves in the details of bodily mutilation as a form of shocking our jaded sensibilities – pursuing excess as a way to get the jolt of the new (and it is at that tipping point that the guiding imagination behind Hostel shifts its sympathies from the side of the tortured victim to the sadistic thrill craving torturers). Instead of simply throwing around buckets of gore, Aja, who is not shy when it comes to aesthetic splatter, uses every violent incident to add an edge to the mounting levels of tension. This strategy explains why Aja is happy to off characters in the blink of an eye or even off screen, denying the gorehound his or her visual money shot, but increasing the viewers' sense of the protagonists' powerlessness. This is not to say Aja has made a gore free film – we get treated to a meat freezer of human parts that would make the Texas Chainsaw Family salivate as well at the now obligatory "hero loses some fingers" shot (the wound of choice for the new horror director – it is the perfect damage as is induces crazy squirming among audience members, but does not kick in their disbelief when, despite the pain and blood loss such a wound must actually cause, your hero continues to fight, run, and otherwise generally function). Interestingly, much of the gore comes from our heroes picking off mutants with axes and the like and from the violence the mutants bring down on our heroes. Again, the gore functions dramatically, emphasizing how savage our once innocent family has become in response to savagery.

The second secret to Aja's success is the use of imagery so seductive and powerful that it overcomes logical objections. This is, I think, what shows that that, despite the English dialogue, its origins in an American cult classic, and its American setting, Hills is very much a European horror film. Europeans have made an entire subgenre of horror that operates primarily on style over substance. From the iconic Eyes Without a Face to nearly any film from the Italian masters of horror – in the old world, creating an luxurious dream vision of the horrific trumps narrative logic or even the use of cause and effect. This is way Europe elevated the work of Poe and Lovecraft years before Americans realized what these homegrown horror masters had produced. There is even a familiar Euro-horror pattern that we see in Hills, namely: Take hero, remove to dream-like setting, sever ties from real-world, now pile on psycho-horror images. Think Susperia and Phenomenon. Heck, think Oasis of the Zombies or Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory or Murder Mansion. All these movies start with our heroes not just finding themselves out of their normal surroundings, but in a surreal, almost magical and otherworldly place. The viewer is prepped for the illogic of what will follow by repeated warnings and ominous suggestions that they are no longer under the old order of the real (think of Phenomenon's wind that everybody suggests always blows and drives people mad – the idea is that the very weather in the place is insane).

In this film, Aja uses decaying fencing, faded signs with warnings from the government on them, the fading cell phone connections of our primary hero to suggest a drift into an alien otherness. His sun-blasted desert reminds one of an alien, lifeless landscape – even down to a visual allusion to Luke Skywalkers high-tech binoculars from Star Wars. This family didn't just drive into the desert; they've driven to another world were the normal rules – not just of civility, but of logic – don't apply. This division is necessary because there is a lot that is illogical, if not outright stupid, about the plot. For example, though the mutants' isolation is the key to their continued existence, apparently enough people come through their desert hellhole that they can live pretty exclusively on long-pig and even manage to keep a meat freezer full of seemingly fresh human parts well stocked. Also, though authorities are well aware of the missing folks these mutants have been offing regularly (and presumably in great numbers) since the 1960s, they've been unable to find either the above ground town the mutants call home or the giant crater full of victims' cars. This is especially absurd given the first people we see killed are a government research team. While one presumes a good number of the civilian victims could have all been lured off their path and therefore lost to any who might look for them, the government research team was presumably intentionally in the former radioactive zone, with their bosses fully aware of where they were sent. Still, while watching the film, these objections get rolled over by the excellent pacing and superior visuals. In our case, my friend and I even commented on some of these problems as we watched, but we were to into the flick to let our brains ruin it.

Aja pulled this same trick with less success in his breakout film, the much loved and much reviled High Tension. There, he attempted to use strong visuals to cover up a plot that simply does not work. Though the film has its fans (I'm one of them), even the most devoted of its supporters must try to explain away that films confused and unnecessary ending. I've heard nobody say the ending "works." At best, people argue it should be ignored in the light of better parts of the film. Here, the trick is much more effective.

There is a second way in which this is a very European flick. The somewhat pointless display of the target family's ultimately useless faith, the simplistic conflict set up between the clichéd right-wing thuggish father and the initially ineffective liberal wimp, the Lolita-ish teen daughter, the cultural artifacts the viewer sees are limited to barely heard crap rock and a short clip of Divorce Court – this family is some sort of Euro-intellectual's stereotype of the all-American family. The setting, a vacuous nowhere-land that swallows its residents whole, is the "no there there" visions of America related by Baudrillard, Bernard-Henri Levy, and dozens of other slumming French philosophers given horrible, literal life. The mutants are an odd study in the American body. Their deformed bodies are metaphors only slightly less subtle than the bloated American forms waddling through The Triplets of Belleville. It is an odd study in America has horrible nightmare vision, a weird byproduct of European's love/hate relationship with the US.

All and all, despite its flaws, Aja proves that he's a developing a real mastery of that uniquely European hallucinatory style of horror. In this case, he may have outdone a lackluster original film by bringing his Continental style to it. He certainly out did his previous film. Head for the Hills, it's worth the rental.

Comics: Damned if you don't.

Now this is what I'm frickin' talking about!

This week, Oni released that first issue Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt's five-issue limited series The Damned. It was another crowded week on the horror comic shelf – besides the usual tangle of zombie titles, this new work was going up against the gorgeous first issue of the new vampire series Impaler, the Showcase Phantom Stranger, and Dynamite's guilty pleasure Army of Darkness vs. the Reanimator TPB collection – and, having missed advanced press on this thing, I almost passed it by. And that would have a cryin' shame because it has, in the space of a single issue, jumped to the top of my read list.

The Damned is a creative fusion of horror comic tropes and 1920s gangster flick trappings. It follows the story of Eddie, a man with a most unusual curse. Eddie has a hard time staying dead. When he gets whacked – as one does when one is a gangster – he croaks just like anybody. But, should somebody touch his body, Eddie's fatal wounds transfer themselves to the toucher and Eddie is up and walking again, some new scars the only sign of his latest demise. Personally, Eddie's sick of the whole thing, all he wants is to be left dead so he can rot away in peace. But local gang boss Alphonse Aligheri, a horned demon with a fondness for natty suits and the finer things in life, needs Eddie. See, somebody is trying to queer a profitable peace treaty between the demon and a rival gang boss. It could be anybody: an out of town player making a move, a rival gang, somebody in his own organization. Eddie's the only guy he can trust because Eddie's been dead for the past three days and couldn't have been behind the trouble. Aligheri makes Eddie an offer. If Eddie fixes this little problem, Aligheri promises to quit digging him up. Eddie, eager for his true and final rest, takes the job.

There are superficial similarities to Dracula vs. Capone, which also serves up a tale of supernatural monsters and pin-striped gangsters. However, that series is really little more than a fun excuse for monster mayhem and tommy-gun trouble. It's a clever, but strictly light-weight project. The Damned is stronger stuff. In many ways it resembles the fully realized (if not fully revealed) criminal underworld fantasies of things like the superlative 100 Bullets. The dialogue, while full of tough-guy genre staples, is fresh and sharp. The characterizations are built on a bedrock of genre archetypes, but then twisted and reworked until they've got new life.

The black and white art is good. Though not as stylistically arresting as the neo-noir of Miller's otherwise knuckle-draggingly lame Sin City, it uses a naturalistic look to help make the strange and bizarre elements of this particular world seem everyday. It also deploys subtle cartoonish elements to great effect. The impossibly lanky Eddie, his face criss-crossed with scars from untold numbers of offings, is immediately visually appealing.

To top it all off, the first issue is a double-sized, commercial-free dealie for just $3.50. When other comics are bloating up on ad pages and charging us extra for it, this is a sweet little deal. Smart, good-looking, fun, cool, and cheap – if this was a date, you'd be all over it by now.

Damn good stuff.

Stuff: Cenobite case-mod – which is the nerdy way of saying "I made my computer look like the puzzle box from the Hellraiser flicks."

From my amigo David Ewalt over at Digital Download comes this odd little bit of Halloween creativity.

Some dude's new case-mod makes his computer look like the puzzle box – "the Lament Configuration" for those hardcore fans – from the Hellraiser films. For added cool points, an image of Pinhead's famous phiz glows through the casing when the lights are out.

Event: "But then maybe a spiritless age deserves a spiritless death. It is not for me to judge."

In 16th century, musicians dedicated to the performance funerary violin joined together to form what would become the oldest surviving artistic guild in England: the Guild of Funerary Violinists. Funerary violin music grew out of the Protestant Reformation. With the end of concept of Intercession, the idea that only priests could petition God on behalf of the souls of the departed, violin musicians filled the spiritual vacuum that death of priestly ritual left behind. The original funerary violinists would begin playing at funerals as early as the late 1586, with a well-reported performance at the funeral of famed poet Sir Philip Sidney. Granted official status under a warrant from Queen Elizabeth I, the Guild of Funerary Violinists spread the unique genre of funerary violin through England. By the 17th century, the art form was common throughout the Continent, especially in Protestant countries. Funerary violin truly becames its own genre when Friedrich Heidebrecht produced the first funerary violin suite in 1670. Funerary violin reached it peak during the Romantic Era, only to fade from memory in the modern era. The death of funerary violin was the product of specific political and religious purges as well as broad cultural trends. The Vatican-led Funerary Purges of the mid-19th Century were an enormous blow to the Guild. Furthermore, modern attitudes regarding death made the intensely meditative and melancholy art form seem morbid. Finally, the modal and tradition bound form, which rigorously eschewed virtuoso performances, failed to appeal to experimental and aggressive modernists. By the end of World War I, funerary violin was practically extinct.

In September of this year, the UK-based publisher Duckworth released a curious tome titled An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin. In the book, author Rohan Kriwaczek, the current acting President of the Guild of Funerary Violinists, lays out the history of this most obscure and unjustly forgotten genre of classical music as well as provides biographical sketches of the most important and notable funerary violinists. Kriwaczek's book is at once a lament for the neglected art form he loves and a thoroughly researched introduction for the music scholar and the lay reader. It is difficult to think of a better place to start exploring this fancinating subject.

In fact, there's only one flaw with book – it is completely made up.

Shortly after its publication, scholars, musicians, and historical experts all told the New York Times that there wasn't a shred of evidence to support any of Kriwaczek's claims. As far as they know, there was never a Guild of Funerary Violinists, no special genre of funerary violin music, and no massive effort to destroy the form. It is, they decided, a massive hoax.

Or is it?

This Halloween, Rohan Kriwaczek, author and acting President of the Guild of Funerary Violinists, will be performing funerary violin music live at McNally Robinson Bookseller's in SoHo. The performance starts at 6 PM. Either you'll get to see one of the last remaining practitioners of a forgotten art doing his thing or you'll get to be in on one of the most charming literary hoaxes in recent memory. That's what we call a win-win situation.

Music: Dig this.

Though they began musical life as the less than inspiring Bob's Vegas Five, the Undertakers soon found a necrological shtick that would keep the kids coming back for more. Combining funerary fashions with goofy on-stage antics and off-kilter performances, the Undertakers rode the post-Beatles wave of Liverpool hype to achieve cult status in the Merseybeat Era.

The early career of the Undertakers weirdly shadowed the early career of the Beatles. Like the Beatles, the Undertakers worked out the kinks in their road show by undertaking a grueling tenure in Hamburg's Star Club. Later, on returning to Liverpool, they were courted by Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Unwisely, perhaps, they turned Epstein down and took the road less traveled by the Fab Four.

The Undertakers signed to Pye records and were teamed with producer Tony Hatch for a series of singles. Unfortunately, Hatch and the group did not see eye to eye. Hatch wanted the Undertakers to tighten up their anarchic and wacky performances, essentially draining the group of much that made it unique. This conflict of artistic visions combined with lack of label support doomed the Undertakers to cult status. Not that the Undertakers didn't try to break into the public consciousness. During a European tour the group tried to grab headlines by arranging to get two of its members busted at Checkpoint Charlie on a currency smuggling charge. Apparently currency smuggling doesn't bring the same bad boy cred as drug offenses and the music world answered the publicity stunt with a collective shrug of indifference.

Check out this wonderful Undertakers page at the Merseybeat Nostalgia Web site. There you can hear an almost Sonics-ish version of "Money" by the 'Takers as well as three other tunes from the boys in black.

The collected singles of the Undertakers can be found on the Big Beat album The Undertakers: Unearthed.

Attractions: The scariest thing since loganberry-based drinks.

Buffalo, the City of Good Neighbors, is justly proud for many things. It is the home of underappreciated blue-collar rockers Wide Right. Teddy Roosevelt, never fussy about beltway traditions, was sworn in as president not in Washington D.C., but in Buffalo (though historians believe President McKinley's taking a bullet to the head in Buffalo might have had something to do with Teddy's unorthodox choice of locations). Honest folks washing down an honest Mighty Taco with an honest splash of Aunt Rosie's – yes, the Nickel City, is a city.

Though, for the kind of folks who slink about this site, nothing quite sums up the charm of Buffalo like Fright World: the city's enormous 5-in-1 haunted house extravaganza. Housed in a gigantic 50,000 foot building, Fright World encompasses five distinct "haunted house" environments. Wrap your head around that. 50,000 square feet of screaming, bleeding, scare-ifying haunted house action.

Of special interest to "Screaming" regulars will be a Halloween screening of a film featuring blood-flow provided by none other than "Screaming" comment-leaver and general provider of moral support, Mr. Cattleworks.

If you are in Buffalo this Halloween, go to Fright World. I'll be scarier than the Millard Fillmore museum. (That's the last Buffalo reference I had. Sorry. I was going to do some thing like: "puts the eerie back in situated at the confluence of Lake Erie and the Buffalo and Niagara Rivers," but that was too much of a mouthful.)

Check the trailer:

Comics: Come Hell and high water.

After years of sporadic and half-hearted attempts to convert their vast back catalogues into revenue, both DC and Marvel have hit upon a winning way to resell old stories. Marvel's Essential series and DC's Showcase series utilize a black and white, no-thrills format to get a crap-load of classic stories back into circulation cheaply and profitably. And it is working. Not only are the big two comic company's now cranking out phone-book style collections, Image is currently bringing Spawn back in to popular format. Word is that the popular Savage Dragon might get the same treatment soon.

All in all, this has been a boon for fans Silver Age horror titles. Marvel has re-issued its major horror series and DC has compiled its popular anthology series House of Mystery. But the impact of the series is being felt beyond the popularity of the reprints themselves. Fans snatching up these reprints have shown a surprising amount of love for properties that haven't seen the light of day in years. And here come the re-launches! At Marvel, it looks like the late 70s again: Luke Cage is a major hero, the blaxploitation –ish Misty Knight gets a book full of forgotten b-listers, Iron Fist is back, Moon Knight, Ghost Rider.

Perhaps the oddest of the Marvel revivals is newly launched Hellstorm: Son of Satan mini-series. At Marvel, during a brief moment in the 70s, Satanism was, for lack of a better word, hip. Satan himself made several appearances in titles like Tomb of Dracula and when he himself didn't appear he was serving as some hero's origin story (Ghost Rider) or showing up as some "not-really Satan but sort of" character (Mephisto, for example). Out of Marvel's short-lived infatuation with Satan came Daimon Hellstrom, a.k.a. Hellstorm, a brooding superhero whose powers came from his being the son of the Lord of Darkness himself. With his name swiped from the popular Omen series and his look swiped from Kirby's design for DC's The Demon, Hellstorm was not one of Marvel's most innovative creations. Still, he was remembered fondly, and with Marvel robbing graves in the Cemetery of Under-utilized Properties, it was only a matter of time before he was dug up and dusted off. (An alternate, unpowered, suck-job version Hellstorm appeared briefly in Marvel's series The Ultimates, but it was a completely different character there and more of a satire than a revival.)

Re-launched as a five-issue mini-series, the new Hellstorm hit the stands last week. The cover was promising: a painted image of our hero, rendered in washed out reds, oranges, and yellows, evoking Brandon Lee in The Crow. Sadly, even that slight promise is not lived up to. Hellstorm, originally a bit of a copy, is not so much re-invented and re-stolen. Now instead of being a visual rip-off of DCs Demon, his is a swipe of DC's John Constantine. The plot involves Hellstorm arriving in post-flood New Orleans (in one of Marvel's less tasteful editorial moves) to investigate some unsettling dreams he's had. The idea that clues to the future come to Hellstorm in his sleep is paradigmatic of the lazy way in which the plot builds. Hellstorm doesn't so much investigate events as he has visions, bumps into people who randomly tell him pertinent info, and accidentally stumbles across important doings. For example, while sitting in a bar, a random doctor comes up to him and says: "You're not from around here. You don't have the look. Listen: you're going to think this is crazy, but I'm pretty sure I saw a woman give birth to a kid who, a week later, could walk and turn into a bird." A clue! Another case solved by Daimon Hellstrom! The woman in question turns out to be an ancient Egyptian goddess and the world's going to end or something. Truth is, you'll have to tell me, because I'm not going to follow the series.

The art, while functional, is workman-like and pedestrian. Scenes of gore have haphazard red splashes about: blood as abstract impressionism. Bodies get torn and appear to be hollow or made of a solid and consistent red mass. People in Hellstorm's world are apparently made of red Play-Dough. Continuity from panel to panel is all cock-eyed: Was the floor covered in blood? Maybe? Who can remember all of these things?

Finally, the one thing worth checking out the comic for – a charming group of flesh-eating demons that disguise themselves as NOPD – seems weirdly distasteful and shows what a crap idea it was to stage the comic in New Orleans. Real disasters and comic book heroes are a lousy fit. I know that many people contributed to post-9/11 anthologies and whatnot – but real disasters just don't make sense in the world Marvel has created. Let's say, for example, the Katrina happened in the Marvel Universe. Such a massive disaster would have immediately sent heroes scrambling south to airlift the entire Astrodome out of the imperiled city. Even if they were late to the scene, somebody would whip up some time travel device or whatnot and save the day. We've seen Marvel's heroes go to greater lengths for considerably less. So, not only is it illogical, but as it is used in this comic, it is simply in poor taste. Either the flood is simply window dressing, in which case the demonic police and the allusions to the disaster are just for mood, or, even worse, they are going explain the narrative significance of the disaster (it will be the work of Satan to get Hellstorm to . . . who knows what, something bad, I guess, he's the devil after all), turning a real tragedy into a plot point in their exceedingly silly story.

Final call: avoid Hellstorm. If you want to check out a revival that is hitting all the right notes, I recommend Marvel's excellent Moon Knight re-launch or their top-notch Heroes for Hire, which brings back the fun of the kung-fu choppin', jive talkin' Marvel 70s. If you won't have anything but Hellstorm, check out the Essentials: Marvel Horror collection which reprints several of his original adventures.