Dearly departed Forrest J Ackerman. Photo by Mark Berry from a series of portraits taken for Bizarre Magazine’s wonderful feature on the Ackermonster.

Forrest J Ackerman: literary agent, magazine editor, writer, actor, producer, archivist, curator, and so much more, too much to pack into a brief obituary. He was a crackpot visionary to the max, to be sure, and deeply loved by millions of fellow freakazoids the world over. Tip o’ the iceberg: he discovered Ray Bradbury, represented Isaac Asimov, Ed Wood and L. Ron Hubbard, founded Famous Monsters of Filmland and is widely acknowledged as the man who coined the term “sci-fi.”

Ackerman cultivated one of the most enormous private collections of science-fiction movie and literary memorabilia in the world, cramming his hillside “Ackermansion” with 50,000 books, thousands more science-fiction magazines, and such priceless collectibles as Bela Lugosi’s cape, actual Star Trek tribbles, and original props from War of the Worlds.

He sold off quite a bit of his collection back in 2002 and moved to a smaller place, but schedule permitting, continued to open his home to strangers every Satuday afternoon to view his remaining treasures. He greatly enjoyed sharing his many colorful stories and anecdotes with fellow Hollyweird aficionados. Speaking to the AP during a lively tour of the Ackermansion on his 85th birthday, Ackerman said “My wife used to [ask] ‘How can you let strangers into our home?’ But what’s the point of having a collection like this if you can’t let people enjoy it?”

His health had been in a steady decline for months. He passed away at his home in LA yesterday, aged 92.

The Scream Awards are Spike TV’s answer to the ho-hum award ceremonies that take over televisions several times a year. Scream focuses on sci-fi, fantasy and horror, with an amusing array of categories, like “Most Memorable Mutilation”. Despite such enticing details, I feared Hollywood asshattery and hesitated to accept the invitation, kindly offered to me by my workplace. Fortunately, I came to my senses quickly, bought a questionable dress, and went for the hell of it.

At first, my friends and I were overwhelmed by a rapid onslaught of attendees in Halloween costumes and alt-fashion refuse. They crowded around the end of the crimson rug, anticipating fresh celebrity blood. Fleeing our re-surfacing cynicism, we rushed into the Greek Theater where the real show was about to commence.

Inside, Very Important PAs herded new guests to their seats while beer and wine were passed around. There was a sullen Backstreet Boy in a row next to ours, unamused by the neon dragon and flaming torches on stage. Soon, the fun began. And I do mean fun – as much as I wanted to turn up my nose at the event put on by “bro TV”, I just couldn’t help but feel this was a special night. The stage spat fire, the beer was free and, suddenly, even the Backstreet Boy seemed to be having a good time. Though it’s redundant to call an awards show “star-studded”, it is of note here. As this LA Times article points out, for genres long-treading the line between fringe and mainstream, this year’s Scream awards were a culmination, a triumph, an arrival at last.

The Scream Awards presented a pop-culture environment where filmmakers like Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan shared the same stage as comic-book writers such as Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy who said that in the old days Hollywood would strip-mine comics and scoff at the creators. Now, they walk on the same red carpet…

I won’t spoil the show for those intending to watch it tonight on Spike, but one moment must be mentioned: Tim Burton’s balloon landing. Several balloons to be exact, strapped to a striped box with Burton’s name written across its base in the Nightmare Before Christmas font. This video clip’s caption admits this was a “precarious” happening and while that’s true, it was also very, very slow. The entire descent took several hair-raising minutes, in which the danger of being vomited on from above seemed all too real. The audience expressed concern between yelps and toasts, but our fear was unfounded. Landing went about as smoothly as expected and Winona Ryder greeted the slightly ruffled director onstage with open arms. As much as I’d like to delve further into the rest of this spectacular night, I’ll resist – you’re better off seeing it for yourselves.

After 2 hours of sitting on theater bleachers we were ready to afterparty, hard. The post-show festivities took place at the beautiful Roosevelt hotel in Hollywood. Dancers dressed as absinthe fairies frolicked in the courtyard and absinthe was indeed served. There was an array of yummy treats for starving guests – everything from mini burgers and fries to pizza and chocolate. After satiating our hunger and acquiring libations, we danced and drunk-texted the night away in true Hollywood fashion. If any moral is to be taken from all this, it’s “Comics have arrived”, “Fun is where the free beer is” and “If at all possible, don’t mix the free beer with absinthe”. Sorry, mom.

The 2008 Scream Awards will air in full tonight at 9pm on Spike TV.

• Comic Book Resources coverage of the event and photo gallery
• LA Times photo gallery

Quoth the Kaoru: it’s almost Halloween, which is basically Goth Christmas. Well, in that case, we’d better start dishing out the holiday goodies. First up, a heaping, tentacular helping of The Dunwich Horror:

Ganked from the excellent Nightchillers site, thanks.

If you’ve never seen this campy Corman-produced adaptation of Lovecraft’s famous tale, you might want to Netflix it in time for your pumpkin-carving party.* Produced and shot in 1969 in the immediate wake of Manson Family shenanigans, it’s often pooh-poohed by Lovecraft purists for being too cornball. But in my opinion, Dunwich Horror is actually one of the better adaptations of old Howard P’s oeuvre** with its sumptuous matte paintings, capable-if-hokey performances from the cast, a beautiful score by Les Baxter, and a couple of genuinely creepy moments. Lovecraft stories lend themselves really well to the pyschedelic era.

Yes, he really did just say “horrendipity.”

Starring Dean “Uh Oh, Sam” Stockwell in his most brooding role short of Yueh in Dune, a rather weary-faced-but-supposedly-virginal Sandra Dee, and the even wearier-faced Ed Begley (his final role, R.I.P.), Dunwich Horror is worth renting for the gorgeous animated title sequence alone. Other highlights: the sight of young, yog-sothothelytizing Stockwell’s torso covered in pseudo-runic sharpie scribbles, Sam Jaffe’s “GET OFF MY LAWN” geezerdom, and Gidget clenching her butt in the throes of orgasm on the altar at Devil’s Hopyard.

Other Coilhouse posts of possible interest:

• Tentacle Love: Why?
• The Abominable Dr. Phibes
• Death Bed: The Bed That Eats
• Kenneth Anger: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

*Or if you’re really cheap, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
**Not that that’s saying much, really. Other than ReAnimator, what’ve we got that’s not just crotch-punchingly horrid? Hmmm, let’s see… actually, I wouldn’t turn my nose up at any of these: The Resurrected, Die Monster Die, The Unnameable, that Night Gallery episode Pickman’s Model, and the amazing Call of Cthulhu indie movie that came out recently. Can you guys think of any others? A great suggestion from commenter Jack: Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness.

Andre Perkowski, YouTube’s mixologist of camp and horror, presents Silent Shadow of the Batman, a new classic in two parts. Borrowing scenes from such beloved silent films as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The Bat and The Man Who Laughs, he’s cobbled together a chilling exquisite corpse. Watch the first part, in which Bruce Wayne’s fate is cemented by the murder of his parents and his decision to become something truly horrible to the simple, superstitious minds of all criminals is made.

Silent Shadow of the Batman, Part 2 can be seen here. Other shorts by Perkowski can be viewed on his YouTube profile page.

Theremin-soaked electronica duo Zombie-Zombie cites John Carpenter and Goblin as two of their biggest influences. Appropriately, the “unofficial” music video for their Goblinesque tune “Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free” is a surprisingly complex re-enactment of Carpenter’s The Thing. It features stop-frame animated G.I. Joe dolls wandering stoically through carefully lit, finely crafted model sets, confronting one unearthly horror after another.

I was genuinely creeped out! And suddenly I’m deeply nostalgic for low-budget 80s horror flicks. Time to bust out The Stuff.

(Thanks, Wayne.)

Like every other sentimental mooncalf who watched too many Merchant Ivory flicks as a young girl, I continue to allow the actor Julian Sands to occupy a very special place in my heart, despite everything. Never mind Warlock. Or Harem. Forget Boxing Helena and Biker Mice From Mars. Put these sundries from your minds, my dears. Recall only A Room With A View, and Sands’ convincingly heterosexual ravishing of Helena Bonham Carter in a field of poppies.* It remains, to this day, one of my top picks for Most Romantic Moment in Cinema (seconded only by this tender scene from Myra Breckenridge).

I also happen to be a HYOOOGE fan of the Italian horror director, Dario Argento, so when I heard that he and Sands worked together ten years ago on an adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, I was quite curious! Why had I never heard about this movie before? Why?! I promptly Netflixed it.

“I gotta be MEEEEEEE.” Julian Sands in Il Fantasma.

Why, oh, why, indeed. Yes, Sands and Argento work seamlessly together… in a So-Bad-it’s-a-Festering-Masterpiece kind of way, their combined efforts cradling the budding psychosexual genius of Asia Argento like two slices of moldy sourdough bread wrapped around a generous dollop of indeterminate ooze in a rat salad sandwich.

The movie is quite long, and something tells me few of you will appreciate the full length version as much as I did. Luckily, Genevieve, a brilliant columnist over at Defenestration Magazine, has provided us with this MST3K-worthy “abridged version”. I laughed, I cried, it was better than… that other Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. Enjoy:

Parts II and III under the cut.

What happens when you bring together the leading actress from Audition, the FX artist behind The Machine Girl as a first-time director, the screenwriter of Uzumaki and the action star of Versus as fight choreographer? You have a cinematic supergroup that makes the geysers of blood you’ve come to expect from violent Asian films look like minuscule popping zits. Behold, the 5-minute trailer for the upcoming J-splatter film Tokyo Gore Police:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/QwNTwuizSF8" width="400" height="330" wmode="transparent" /]

The trailer starts off kinda slow, but gets better and better as it goes along. Gore and body horror await: exploding heads, sliced-off faces, penises instead of noses, borg-like facial implants and a mermaid-from-hell with a chomping crocodile head instead of legs. There are also some hyper-detailed fetish costumes by the latex designer duo Kariwanz.

One of the mutants looks like she escaped from Kurôzu-cho

The plot: future Tokyo is plagued by bio-mechanical a virus. People who contract the virus turn into “Engineers,” named so for their ability to assemble weapons out of their infected flesh wounds. A special privatized police force (the gore police, also known as “Engineer Hunters”) exists to wipe out these beings, but if they’re wounded by one of the engineers, they quickly join their ranks, horrific implements of death quickly spawning from their own flesh. The protagonist is Ruka, one of the strongest members of the police force. Ruka appears to be the archetypal cute Japanese girl with a sword, but one thing I found interesting about her character is that according to one review, she’s a cutter. There are not many films that I’m aware of in which a main character suffers from self-mutilation, other than the French film Dans ma Pau, or In My Skin (definitely not a ‘feel-good movie’… and since we already got the ball rolling on the horrors of the flesh, here you go)

The main storyline of the film is peppered with faux commercials, reminding me of the fake trailers in Grindhouse. As reviewer Mike Skurko describes it:

We flash back and forth to some extremely demented and hilarious public service announcements as T.V. commercials throughout the film. My personal favorite being three cute school girls singing “Let’s go stylish with wrist cutting!” Just enough “Engrish” charm and realism to make this scene as cute as Hello Kitty while they morbidly introduce a new design that is “rounded for a cleaner cutting edge that school girls love!” Oh, this can’t be beat. More great T.V. ads: “Remote Control Exterminate!!” is a demented Wii that lets the viewer slice and dice a tormented player. Complete with all the spraying blood we’ve come to expect from just about everything with the Tokyo Shock label.

If you’re in New York or San Francisco this weekend, you are among the lucky few who can catch this film’s on-screen North American debut. It will premiere this Saturday at the New York Asian Film Festival. In San Francisco, you’ll be able to see it this Sunday at the Brava Theater as part of the Another Hole In The Head film festival, which looks like a lot of fun. A little bit later on, this film will also be premiering in Montreal.

• Fangoria Article: includes some stills
• Dream Logic Film Review
• Mike Skurko Review for Another Hole In the Head
• Complete Cast List, Lots of Images of Set/Props (kinda ruins the mystique)

Artist Zdzislaw Beksiński is best known for his immense, obsessively detailed paintings of catastrophic landscapes, surreal humanoid figures and afflicted nudes. Born in 1929, he grew up in southern Poland, then traveled to Krakow to study architecture where he subsequently spent several miserable years working as a construction site supervisor. His work from that era is primarily photography and sculpture.

In his mid thirties, Beksiński shifted his focus to painting large, purely abstract pieces on wooden boards (he preferred wood to canvas). Eventually, their form and structure became more straightforward and he entered a self-proclaimed “fantastic period” reminiscent of Bruegel, Ernst or Bosch, and drawing comparisons to his Swiss contemporary, H.R. Giger.

Beksiński’s post-apocalyptic vision, much like Giger’s, is uniquely disturbing owing in part to a highly developed architectural eye. His manipulation of scale and manic overworking of texture is ingenious. Overwhelmingly huge structures rise up from dust or empty desert. Sinewy figures cavort under ominous skies.

I’m not sure how to explain what makes Death Bed: The Bed That Eats so special, or if I should even try. I certainly didn’t know anything about the film when it was first recommended to me (by some hairy-palmed weirdo lurking near the Jess Rollin section of Kim’s in NYC a few years back). Completed in 1977, this “forgotten horror classic” was never officially released. Legend has it that director George Barry had no idea anyone had even seen the picture until he Googled himself and found a bunch of websites raving about it. After 25 years, Cult Epics finally put it out on DVD.

Death Bed is definitely rave-worthy, but again, I’m at a loss to explain why without taking away some of the mystique. Here’s the overview from Cult Epics:

“At the edge of a grand estate, near a crumbling old mansion lies a strange stone building with just a single room. In the room, a four-poster bed waits to absorb the flesh, blood and life essence of unwary travelers…”

Wakey wakey, troche dear readers.

This vengeful cult classic starring our beloved Vincent Price has got it all. Art Deco by way of the 70s. Clockwork orchestras. A creepy, yet relentlessly stylish assistant named Vulnavia. (Yes, I said Vulnavia.) Bats. Bees. Deadly frog masks. A killer musical score by Basil Kirchin. Rat-induced plane crashes. Unicorn impalement. (Yes, I said unicorn impalement.) And the list goes on.

Perfect Day of the Dead fare. Watch at your peril.

By the way, if anyone wants me to name my secondborn after them (my firstborn shall be called Vulnavia, natch), all they have to do is give me an original mint condition copy of this poster: