According to Ars Technica, after seeing this trailer at E3, the press was notified that the ESRB refused to approve the trailer, so it couldn't be released in the U.S. Why this means anything at all with a form of media intended to be released online is anyone's guess, but it sure won't hurt the marketing buzz. Dead Space is the tale of a mining operation that cracks open an alien planet looking for materials . . . and finds something they didn't bargain for.

Two Dead Space Trailers: one the ESRB doesn't want you to see. [Ars Technica]

The accident last June happened at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom, where a thirteen-year-old girl had her feet torn off by a broken cable on the "Superman Tower of Power" ride. Although surgeons were later able to reattach her right foot, her left leg was too damaged from the accident to be able to operate on.

Those aren't the only times that DC's theme park rides have resulted in disaster; a 55-year-old man died after falling from a "Superman Ride of Steel" at Six Flags New England in 2004 (22 people also ended up in hospital in 2001 when there was another accident on the same ride), and a 53-year-old woman died in 2003 when one of the cars on the "Joker's Jukebox" ride hit her at Six Flags New Orleans.

Much to DC Comics' guilt-tinged relief, it's not only rides related to their characters that cause terrible accidents, of course (In fact, some theme park aficianados keep track of as many accidents in parks online). Now all they need to do is remind everyone else about that.

Superhero Ride Curse Continues At Six Flags [Comic Book Movie]

About the size of a thick tombstone, including over 400 pages of mostly full-color art, with nonfiction by Harlan Ellison, Thomas Ligotti, and others, this absolute stone-cold classic is a testament to the publisher’s attention to detail and Lovecraft’s enduring influence. It also provides a wonderful gallery setting for H.R. Giger, Bob Eggleton, John Coulthart, Michael Whelan, Lee Brown Coye, Virgil Finlay, Ian Miller, Gahan Wilson, John Picacio, Harry O. Morris, J.K. Potter, and many others.

Often, the images in the book mix fantasy with Lovecraft’s take on “cosmic horror,” the idea that the universe is hostile and inert.

In SF-nal terms, Bob Eggleton interprets that cosmic horror as alien influence:

Lovecraft's elder gods, unspeakable ones,shamblers and so on...were all in reality malevolent aliens from other worlds. They were ancient and evil, but the fact they're from another world is lost in the mists. His stories had references to astronomy, astrology and science and yet took this 180 turn into something scary and dark. Nigel Kneale, for instance wrote the Quatermass series in much the same way. Quatermass & The Pit was truly Lovecraftian.

John Coulthart notes, too, that:

The young Lovecraft was a keen astronomer who became acquainted at an early age with a sense of cosmic scale, the vastness of the universe and so on. That combined with a natural pessimism, and his later atheism gave him a strong sense of human insignificance in the face of cosmic enormity. ‘We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,’ as he says at the opening of "The Call of Cthulhu."'

Not exactly the most uplifting of messages, but definitely powerful—and revolutionary within genre at the time.

“His problem as a writer was that most Western supernatural fiction up to that point had some kind of Christian dimension to it, even if this wasn't directly stated,” Coulthart says. “That was obviously a problem for an atheist writing a form of fiction which needed something malevolent at its core. His solution was to replace the Devil and the Christian idea of evil with vast extra-dimensional entities which disturb or threaten us because we mean as much to them as microbes do to human beings.”

Disappointingly (to us at least), Harry O. Morris rules out a literal cephalopodic element to the idea of cosmic horror:

[It’s] not a giant squid descending from outer space, but rather an all pervasive sense of dread that permeates everything we think we know including our faces in the mirror and the knives and forks at the dinner table.

For Ian Miller the concept is more visceral, citing films like Alien as Lovecraftian in mood: “Things hidden in the shadows, in tight dark place, dangerous, scratching, moving, creeping, stalking, mysterious, and always at the peripheries of one’s vision waiting in the shadows to spring out and bite you...Things arcane. Airless dark places with strange smells. Dark cupboards. Things that scratch and suffocate. Tight shoes and fish eyes...I suspect fear fueled by adrenalin gave rise to the notion of warp speed, though I'm sure some would disagree.”

How, then, do these artists put their own personal stamp on something so strong and powerful on the page, and thus indelibly imprinted upon readers’ minds?

For Eggleton it’s trying to give “a kind of epic feel to [the paintings]. A sense of the familiar and then at the same, something alien and bizarre.”

Morris’ approaches Lovecraft through ambiguity: “For me, the best way to express this uncomfortable aura visually is to leave portions of the picture undefined, in shadow, and influenced by chance/chaos. Also, I'm inclined to try and convey a sense of timeless antiquity which seems to be a cornerstone of Lovecraft's vision.”

John Picacio also believes the best Lovecraftian art doesn’t try to show everything. “It leaves something to the imagination....a few conceptual voids here and there, purposely left for the mind to fill with something personal and therefore much more potent....I think trying to literally illustrate a Lovecraftian monster usually misses the mark. It’s just not as scary anymore because the terror has somehow been contained in the lines and the strokes, and therefore distilled. That’s why his stuff is so difficult to effectively translate to comics and film although so many have tried.”

Coulthart is one of those creators who, in addition to his Lovecraftian paintings has successfully translated the icon’s vision to comics:

I wanted to take Lovecraft's fiction seriously on its own terms, something which—in the comics world especially—wasn't happening very often. When I started illustrating his work in the 1980s there was little apart from the Lovecraft special issue of Heavy Metal from 1979 which had attempted that. I tried to match his dense writing style with an equally dense and detailed drawing style and tried to make things look solid and historically accurate. I've always been interested in architecture and Lovecraft's concept of alien architecture continues to fascinate.

This might make the art seem ultra-serious, but it’s not all “cosmic.” As Jerad Walters, the genius behind Centipede Press points out:

Some of the artwork is humorous or whimsical, and rather good-natured. There's a difference in humor between the ‘Deep One’ Horrora Model Kit image, which is more nostalgic, and the ‘Where the Great Old Ones Are’ image, which is just a send-up of HPL and Maurice Sendak, and the black humor of the Gahan Wilson piece, which is just over-the-top. It is the black humor of some of the works that works best in the book, for me at any rate. I think that the humorous side comes out because all of these bleak, nihilistic visions of Lovecraft can be so dreary and depressing that a send-up of it all is just inevitable.

All of these approaches and many more are showcased in The Art of Lovecraft; the gallery above can only begin to hint at the variety, depth, and jaw-dropping quality of the book. It’s a stunning love letter to a long and storied tradition.

As for those tentacular horrors, Walters says:

I don't think any reader of weird fiction can ever look at tentacles the same way after Lovecraft. I remember boiling some squid and chopping off the heads, putting them off to one side of the cutting block, planning to save them for something, until my wife quite reasonably asked if I was out of my mind.

Or, as China Mieville writes in "M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire":

The spread of the tentacle—a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in “Western” aesthetics)—from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture....The “Lovecraft Event,” as Ben Noys invaluably understands it, is unquestionably the centre of gravity of this revolutionary movement; it’s defining text, Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ published in 1928 in Weird Tales.

While Frank tries to calm Nola down, Raglan is upstairs trying to rescue the couple's daughter from a herd of rage babies. The best part is the way they're all dressed in cute little pastel onesies in this giant room full of bunk beds. It's like sleepaway camp with mind-controlled mutants! Watch them kill! This is one of those classic flicks that probably wouldn't get made these days. Partly that's because 1979 was a golden year for freaky psychotherapy, but also because today this would all be CGI. And CGI just don't bleed like that freaky-ass baby does. [The Brood via IMDB]

It is indeed almost exactly the same movie as The Island, except in two respects. One, it is actually creepy and interesting; and two, the place the clones are told they're going is "America," not "the island." Which makes the whole movie way more of a political thriller and enlivens the plot. In this scene, a clone named Richard has escaped and the people running Clonus are questioning his girlfriend. Love the creepy talk of "America." Do ignore The Island, but Parts is definitely worth a see.

Parts: The Clonus Horror [via IMDB]

Obviously, not all scifi madness is space madness, but there are some great examples of this classic form of mental degeneration coming from being cooped up in a tiny place that is your only life support. Sometimes you're cooped up with a bunch of annoying people, like in the Michael Crichton book/movie Sphere, where the space madness is actually "undersea madness" but it's the basic idea. You're in a tiny, stinky space and you want badly to leave, but if you do you die. In Sphere, as in many "space madness" classics (including the best Ren & Stimpy episode ever). One of the basic signs of space madness is rampant hallucination, usually enhanced into something real by alien technologies. This also the case in the original Russian version of Solaris, where a mad spaceman starts seeing freaky visions of his mother and lots of macrame because the planet he's circling has some kind of power to manifest the unconscious.

You see a strange and gooey-disturbing variation on the theme of space madness in Donnie Darko, a cult film that may be slightly incoherent but wins the awesome award anyway for successfully depicting a genuinely scary cute bunny costume. In this film, which has about a billion interpretations, one thing is clear: our antihero Donnie has a potentially-fatal encounter with a jet engine that crashes into his bedroom. And then time goes out of joint, or maybe his imagination does, and he begins to have visions of an evil cute bunny and car crashes and a sky filling up with clouds like dark ink. Space doesn't drive teenager Donnie mad, his family does. And his suburban house is sort of like a spaceship in that he's still too young to leave home and survive. So he's stuck there, until his world is punctured by a giant piece of jet junk. Are his visions real? Can he change the future? You'll be creeped out by these questions and his mental anguish until the very last scene.

The novel and movie Mysterious Skin turn childhood trauma into space madness. It's the story of two boys who grew up together in Kansas, barely knowing one another, but connected by an incident that one of them is convinced was an alien abduction. The movie, an indie directed by Gregg Araki with Joseph Gordon Leavitt, is terrific — but the novel by Scott Heim is simply gorgeous and haunting and full of midwestern teen angst turned trippy. While one character pursues his theory that he was abducted by aliens, the other pursues gay hustling and moves to the alien city of New York. It's to Heim's credit that you don't know until the very end whether the aliens are real.

As I said in reference to Sphere and Solaris, one of the hallmarks of space madness is that your mad fantasies become real. That's certainly the case with one of the most tragic and beloved crazy creatures in science fiction: The Hulk. I'm not the first person to point out that Bruce Banner is basically a mutant with multiple personality disorder, whose dark alternate self has the unfortunate ability to embody what would in an ordinary person be merely a delusion of grandeur. Like Mr. Hyde before him, Hulk is the literal representation of repressed rage. Like madness itself, which can sometimes be contained but often never completely cured, Hulk is always returning from whatever prison the military, the shrinks, or the Avengers cook up for him.

Of course, there is one perfect way to defeat madness — perhaps as perfect as the cold virus was at defeating the tripods in War of the Worlds. Simply destroy the brain that spawns the madness. Hence the amazing brain-drilling scene in Pi, which allows our hero to escape his own mind — and escape the evil corporation that wants to exploit his mind. This idea also feeds into the utterly depressing scene at the end of Brazil where our romantic hero Sam Lowry has been tortured to the point of complete catatonia. I suppose in Brazil his madness may in fact be his salvation. Depends on how you read it.

There are dozens of other books and movies that deal with space madness writ small or large: Jacob's Ladder, Perdido Street Station, Dark City, and Octavia Butler's superlative Patternmaster series. While some of these stories imagine that you can get over "the crazy," as it's called in the TV-signal-makes-you-smash-heads movie The Signal, most of them don't. Either the characters die, or remain alive in a state of horrifying out-of-controlness like Hulk or some of the creatures whose minds have been eaten in China Mieville's novel Perdido Street Station. So, like I said, things could be a lot worse than having your brain eaten by zombies. You could have zombies in your brain. Forever.

Here's another view of the mining station on the planet.

And here's what you'll find when you start exploring. Uh oh, blood.

Serious uh oh — some kind of morphing yucko monster. As you can see in the video, there are some great robo-spider looking monsters too.

Plus, there is a comic book based on the game illustrated by the fucking awesome Ben Templesmith.

Look out for Dead Space this Halloween. And you can see a lot more cool artwork and video on the Dead Space site.

Dead Space [Official Site]

And you can friend The Dark Lurking on Myspace, just in case you're feeling lonely. [QuietEarth]

I still use this little survival mechanism to get through the scary scenes in movies. It's amazing how covering your ears, rather than your eyes, makes it all much more bearable. Plus, I wouldn't want to miss the best parts: the spatter of gore when the infected lady explodes; the crunch of the monster's gigantic mouth through the annoying dude's neck; the boiling pool of bloodslime where the ladies stab each other with rock-climbing equipment while a monster looks on; the giant alien orgy where some poor sucker gets dissolved and eaten.

So I have trained myself to watch horror movies, using little tools like fingers-in-the-ears and watching so many flicks in the genre that I know what will happen before the director does. And I'm willing to admit that I pay a little price in my electricity bills every month. That's right: I can't sleep without leaving the hall light on. I've got too many excellent eviscerations packed into my imagination to ever sleep soundly again.

Why do I do it? Why do we all do it? Here are five reasons — they may not be good reasons, but I guarantee that they are true.

To Survive
As I have already pointed out with my little story about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, part of the fun of every horror flick is getting through it alive. I am a firm believer that the right way to watch horror is not to distance yourself from it, but to plunge in and let yourself be completely credulous and scared. Sure the monster in Neil Marshall's amazing spelunking horror flick The Descent was a little cheesy, but watching those women get deeper and deeper into the dark tunnels, more and more lost, squeezing through the claustrophobic, dirty spaces and into madness — if you let yourself feel the horror of the situation, you'll be thrummingly high on relief when the flick ends.

To Take Your Secret Thoughts to Their Most Extreme — and Laugh
When I first saw Stuart Gordon's mad doctor gorefest Re-Animator, it was like a revelation. There were all these gross brain-operation scenes, and headless zombies, and people drooling blood. And that was good, but I'd been over that terrain before. But then came the moment of pure breakout genius. The headless zombie bad guy, whose body carries his head around in a bowling bag, finally kidnaps the lady he's been wanting to hook up with. His body straps the lady to a medical table, and proceeds to jam his severed head between her wiggling legs. He's giving her head! Also, holy crap what the fuck. Director Gordon WENT THERE. I mean, he wasn't afraid to just show you the most fucked up thing he could possibly imagine. How could even your weirdest private thoughts ever seem disturbing once you've laughed at the most fucked-up thing in the universe? Same goes for the moment in Frank Henenlotter's Brain Damage where the main character's penis-shaped parasite hides in his jeans and pops out to eat the brains of a girl who is just trying to give him a nice blowjob. Damn. I will never feel weird about any of my random fantasies ever again, because they can't top what Henenlotter actually committed to film.

To Let Everyone in on Your Nightmares
All of us have dark thoughts, but probably some of us more than others. I'm one of the ones with the ultra-super-dark thoughts — and my dreams are even worse. But the whole situation becomes a hell of a lot more bearable, and even fun, when some of those dark thoughts are realized in film. After all, most of our dark thoughts aren't really unique or special. That's why I will always treasure David Cronenberg's mad gynecologist movie Dead Ringers. Those gynecological tools for mutant women, pictured below? Oh yeah, I imagined stuff like that about twenty million times before I saw them in his flick. And now I can force all my friends to think about them with me when we watch the movie together. Same goes for the lady impregnated by aliens in Slither, who grows to the size of a barn before exploding with all those sperm-shaped baby aliens going everywhere. Sick, but I've dreamed that one too. Welcome to my mind. Nice to have company in here!

To Speak the Unspeakable
It may be hard to articulate what's wrong with your city, your sexuality, or your relationship with your boss. That's why horror does it for you, in grisly, unsparing detail. While the movie Akira is usually billed as pure scifi, anybody who has watched the grotesque physical mutation-explosion of the gangster-psychic Tetsuo at the end knows that it's also a terrifying look at the unspoken but well-known psychological consequences of poverty in the city. And anyone who has ever quietly suspected her boss might be controlling the fabric of reality was rewarded by that scene in The Matrix when Neo is kidnapped by Agent Smith, told to be a good little worker, and then tortured and implanted with a tiny robot while his mouth is sewn shut. In a few months, when Frank Henenlotter's latest movie Bad Biology hits theaters, we're about to get a good dose of inexpressible sexual panic in a tale of a guy whose giant cock is both detachable and addicted to drugs — so it's always running away to score some dope. I know the feeling. But I wouldn't have been able to tell you about it without the help of Henenlotter's film.

To Shove a Big Spiny Stick Up Rationality's Ass
The great part about science horror, full of mad doctors doping themselves with Hyde serum and physics experiments gone wrong, is that they are a slap in the face to so-called rationality. How many times have you heard someone describe the "rational thing to do" and known that it was also the worst, scariest thing to do? Sure, it was "rational" to try to get samples of those aliens in the first Alien flick; and it was "rational" to put that futuristic Prozac in the air of that planet in Serenity that created the rapin, cannibalizin' Reavers; and it was rational to genetically engineer dinosaurs for a cool new theme park in Jurassic Park. All those things were done with pure science in mind (and a little profit). My point? Scientific rationality is great and all, but scifi horror is here to remind you suckas that sometimes you need to check with your ethics and all that mushy crap before experimenting on people's brains or messing around with outer-space superweapons that you don't understand. Your science won't save you when the Hulk comes around to beat your sorry ass.

The overt homage to Blair Witch Project throws up a red flag for me, not because Blair Witch wasn't fun, but just because I'm tired of watching scared chicks breathe heavily into a camera while barely-seen boogies hover menacingly off-screen. What excites me about the premise is the idea that this film is really about the failings of Homeland Security, which has left disaster victims to die in their homes enough times recently to spawn a whole season of horror movies. And while the idea of vampirism as an exotic disease isn't new, the vampire herself is genuinely scary. When Halloween month comes, I'll be lining up for this one.

In the meantime, we can all watch the original, called [Rec]. The U.S. version is written by Jaume Balagueró, the same guy who wrote and directed the Spanish version.

Writes Seward in his introduction to the book:

Unlike Dick or Spinrad, sci-fi writers who confined Nazis to a book or two, Britton and Butterworth have pursued their theme with a probably disturbing intensity that can be quantitatively measured in the sheer volume of Lord Horror productions. What's more, they do not tack a moral to the end of their tales. This is not to say that there are no morals but rather that there are no easy answers, seals of approval, rubber stamps, calmatives ("don't worry, it's just fiction, the jackboots won't hurt you"). Their work is not ideological, like a hate tract, but is rather a deliberate collision of seemingly incompatible ideologies: death camp + dream factory = ? Satire, hyperbole, and reductio ad absurdum work to energize, anger, inspire, offend, but the one thing they do not do to readers is pacify. And why should anyone be pacified by Nazis, even fictional ones?

Horror Panegyric [Supervert]

Anatomy

The earliest horrifying science was clearly biology, and anatomy more specifically. In the West, a fierce battle raged for centuries between the Christian church and anatomists who wanted to dissect cadavers to learn more about human physiology. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many anatomists were hounded into giving up the knife because it was defilement of a dead body. This wasn't an issue in the East: Muslim anatomists had mapped and explained the circulatory system over 1000 years ago.

Still, you can already see a horror tradition in early Western anatomy drawings — this is a famous plate by Juan Valverde de Amusco from 1559. This was in fact a medical drawing, but it has a sense of grisly fun. It looks as if the guy holding the knife has skinned himself, and is holding his skin like a jacket or cape. The horrifying image of a guy without skin comes up again and again in science horror, most recently in a plot arc from Sarah Connor Chronicles where a Terminator who has lost his flesh goes looking for a doctor who can build him some new tissue. Once he's got the tissue, he has to steal somebody else's skin to wear over it.

Anatomists are also ignite the horrorshow at the heart of science horror's most famous tale: Frankenstein. In fact, the mad doctor in that book has to go out and steal body parts from cemeteries because there are regulations (inspired by the Church) against doing experiments on dead bodies. Since Frankenstein, however, there have been countless science horror movies about anatomy, starting with 1930s Peter Lorre flick Mad Love, where a mad doctor grafts the hand of a murderer onto a pianist who has lost his digits in an accident. Pretty much every movie you've ever seen where people inherit murderous body parts (think The Hand) is inspired by the terror of anatomists.

Neuroscience

The study of the nervous system, and specifically the brain, leads in only two directions: mind-controlled zombies, and close-up pictures of giant, bleeding brains full of electrodes. 1950s and 60s movies like Donovan's Brain and The Brain that Wouldn't Die are both about the scariness of brain transplants (later parodied in Steve Martin's The Man with Two Brains).

But in the contemporary world, brain transplants are less shocking than the idea that your brain could be turned into a fancy computer. That's the basic idea in the Matrix trilogy, and we see how that would work in rather gory detail in a short called "The Second Renaissance" from the movie Animatrix (this is a collection of animated shorts set in the Matrix universe). In this clip, which gives us the backstory on the final war between the machines and the humans, you can see how the machines move from destroying humans to controlling them at the neurological level. They poke and prod the people's brains until they figure out which blips and boops make them laugh, cry, and see visions that later become the nonconsensual hallucination known as the Matrix. This is a really intense scene, and it's worth picking up Animatrix to check out the whole thing.

Other tales about using neuroscience to control people's brains are legion: tales from Re-Animator to Robocop contain glimpses of how horrifying it would be if scientists could hack our neurology as easily as they can knit our bones.

Psychiatry

Psychologists may be creepy sometimes, but even more creepy are psychiatrists — the people who can prescribe drugs that might turn an entire planet into a bunch of listless zombies ala the flick Serenity. In that movie, as in many movies where psychiatry goes evil, futuristic Prozac-pushers have seeded the atmosphere with drugs to make people happy and serene. Of course, it all goes terribly wrong: most of the population becomes so serene that they lose the will to live; and a minority of them go apeshit, turning into the cannibalistic Reavers who kill and rape and eat everything in their paths.

Similar kinds of psychiatric nightmares can be found in movies as cheesy as Equilibrium (where everyone is forced to take a drug cleverly called "Prozium"), and in literature like Brave New World (where unhappy people take the drug Soma to "go on vacation"). And don't forget that the ultimate evil that the bad guy Scarecrow is going to unleash on Gotham in Batman Begins is a psychiatric drug that gives everybody hallucinations. The point is, nobody likes a mad psychiatrist with pharmaceuticals to get too close to the water supply.

Quantum Physics

Though nearly all the shocking sciences on film involve the body, there is one branch of science that never fails to give people the willies. As the recent lawsuit brought by a couple of black-hole-fearing dudes against the Hadron Supercollider makes clear, people are always scared that messing around with the laws of physics could do something really, deeply bad . . . like stop the core of the Earth from rotating as it did in the weirdly compelling yet awful flick The Core.

There are hints that mad physics may be behind the sudden universe-altering events occurring in Quiet Earth, an amazing post-apocalyptic film where the fabric of reality keeps shifting under our heroes' feet. And one of the things that makes Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan such a formidable and scary dude is that he controls reality at a quantum level. (In the film, he'll be a CGI effect.)

With CGI effects getting better and better, you can expect more quantum physics horror coming your way. I can't wait for a movie about a tiny black hole zooming through the Earth. Or a wormhole dumping weirdness all over the solar system.

Luckily, the rat gets his chow. Or will the chow fight back? After all, once you're a zombie, all your body parts take on a life of their own.

It won't surprise you to find out that this brilliant movie is the brainchild of my personal deity Brian Yuzna, with special effects provided by Screaming Mad George. They're the same team who provided you so much pleasure several weeks ago with this NSFW scene from Faust where a lady's body parts suddenly get a little . . . out of proportion. Basically, you always know you're watching a Yuzna flick because there will be lots of creative gore mixed with foot fetishism and weird sex.

I highly recommend Beyond Re-Animator — this scene hardly does justice to a movie where one of the bad guys spends most of the movie as a severed torso swinging from bar to bar through the prison. And of course, the zombie rat and zombie penis meet again several times . . .

Beyond Re-Animator

For my money, two of the scariest science horror flicks out there are David Cronenberg's 1980s version of The Fly, and Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. What stands out about them, aside from the fact that they are eat-your-arm scary, is that they are both sustained, visually-arresting movies about men going apeshit because they are men.

The Fly is a simple tale of a guy who has invented a teleportation pod that has a bug in it — literally. One day when our mad scientist Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is zooming between pods a fly gets stuck in there with him and the computer decides the best way to deal with the situation is to merge the two creatures genetically and create BrundleFly.

The film's special effects sometimes look strange and jerky to our CGI-trained senses, but Cronenberg manages to use a puppet-and-prosthetics infrastructure to his advantage by sticking to visuals that look as real as possible. When our mad scientist Jeff Brundle merges genetically with a fly and starts to transform, we are truly grossed out by his mulchy face and sudden need to eat sugary food by barfing on it first and then slurping it up fly-style.

Brundle is a stereotypical male science geek, totally obsessed with his machines and teleportation experiments to the point of caring about little else (though he does take some time out to get with Geena Davis — who wouldn't?) He's your basic guy nerd who doesn't give a crap about his body or meatspace. It's all about the machines. Brundle's rapid physical deterioration into half-fly, half-man is as pathetic as it is terrifying: He makes us gag and we feel sorry for him, so when he goes lethal, we sort of understand why. His gooey revenge is exactly what the Star Wars Kid has in mind for us.

28 Days Later draws its frenetic horror from another stereotypical idea about what dudes are like when given the chance. A virus turns most of the population of England into bloodthirsty, mindless superzombies, and one of the only holdouts against the diseased hordes is a military squadron holed up in a fortified mansion in the country. Our heroes, who have also managed to survive and escape London, join the military dudes for safety.

But then they discover the truly scary shit. These military guys, led by Christopher Eccleston at his most eye-buggingly Naziesque, have been trying to lure women into their little lair so that they can imprison them, rape them, and "restart the human race." Unfortunately, two of our heroes are female and now they're trapped between zombieland and a dark, dudely place.

This is a gory movie, but its horror doesn't come from looking at decaying bodies like it does in The Fly. Instead, it's scary because we're watching a decaying society. In Boyle's vision of the apocalypse, a bunch of guys with guns are more horrifying than any genetic disaster. He seems to suggest that men automatically revert to a state of violence and rape when provoked, and the inevitability of that transformation is what terrifies — the fact that these men seem so blind to the fact that they've become monsters.

And yet one of the heroes of 28 Days, Jim, is a guy who refuses to join Eccleston and his rape gang. He has no interest in possessing his female companions, and his blood-soaked rescue of the women takes up the latter half of the film. I think seeing the evil military guys through the eyes of another man who doesn't want to be like them makes this movie even more of a nail-biter. It would be easy for Jim to join up, to stay safe in the house protected by their guns, and to have a little gang rape for fun on the side. But he fights tooth and nail (literally) to stop that from happening.

In fighting the monstrous men, of course, Jim has to become a little bit like them. Those fight scenes are some of the most chair-grippingly intense I have ever seen. Scary, gory, shocking.

That's true horror, people. And never a vadge in sight.

Here's the quickie backstory, in case you need it: Blade is a half-vamp, half-human who can walk in daylight. He hunts baddies, mostly vampires, with the help of his crusty old white dude pal. In Blade II, the former baddie vamps enlist his aid to fight a race of supervamps called Reapers who have mega-mouths. (It's a Del Toro movie — of course the monsters are utterly cool.) In this scene, we learn that the Reapers are actually a genetic engineering project. Reminds me of Octavia Butler's awesome book Fledgling, which is also about vampires who dabble in genetic engineering.

A promoter named Warren Betts with Fox Pictures writes in his story pitch to Anonymous:

Generally, I cover the world of science and technology and publicize movies with those themes, but this is a very intriguing story and in the film the characters use very sophisticated technology and optics in trying to capture this apparition on film. Next year a Japanese company is introducing the first camera (very expensive) that will allow photographers to shoot in the invisible light spectrum. This might make a very powerful tool for understanding this phenomenon and the possible scientific causes. The public is very interested in this subject and I wanted to check with you and see if you might be interested in hearing more about this? Would this possibly be something you would be interested in covering on your pages?

Look, I have no problem with product tie-ins or goofy expensive shit that people buy when they like a movie. Hell, I have a ton of ridiculously expensive kaiju dolls — some of them are from the 1970s, and who knows what they'd be worth on Ebay. But nobody sold me those dolls pretending that they were somehow a "scientific" method of making Gamera come hang out with me, or helping me reach my dead mother. Pretending that something unscientific from a horror movie IS science in order to sell people movie tickets and expensive cameras is, as Penn and Teller would say, bullshit.

And it's the crappiest kind of viral marketing, too.

1. Double mouth, or double-wide mouth. (See: Alien)

As the Alien series taught us, there's nothing scarier than a really long, giant toothy mouth — especially if there's a second long, toothy mouth inside it. But the long, toothy mouth rule shows up in a lot of alien movies. In Slither, for example, a guy is taken over by an alien and one of the first things it does is elongate his mouth so that it practically stretches to his ears on one side. (Lopsided elongated mouths are a bonus — lopsided is always scary.)

Corollary: Drool

A scary alien must drool. Again, we know this from the Alien series where the drool flows like water. But since Ridley Scott first gave us full frontal drool in the first Alien flick, drool has been the sign of scary for all aliens. It says "out of control." Now, of course, we cannot imagine any monster without drool. See, for instance, Beowulf, where the monster's drool is one of the first 3D effects. And there's 3D drool coming up in Journey to the Center of the Earth, too. Dinosaur drool!

2. Collective Consciousness (See: Borg from Star Trek)

One of the scariest and most alien things we can imagine is a species that has collective consciousness, or group think. All their minds are connected together like a bunch of little networked Linux boxes, rapidly churning through all that knowledge to figure out exactly how to kill you. Plus, collectively conscious creatures can more easily coordinate an attack, because they are all in mental communication with each other all the time. And they might absorb you — think how scary it was the first time you saw the Borg chanting: "You will be assimilated."

3. Looks Exactly Like a Human (See: Invasion of the Body Snatchers)

Somehow it's scarier when an alien looks exactly like a human, or is camouflaged as one. Even though Men in Black wasn't exactly scary, there was something uncanny when the alien took off its human skin and revealed its true face. And of course one of the reasons Hollywood has remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers four times in the past 50 years (Invasion was the most recent one) is that it's so freakin creepy that the aliens look perfectly human — except for the fact that they have no emotion. We will not, however, speak of the human-camo farting aliens from Doctor Who.

4. Treats Humans the Way Humans Treat Animals (See: Predator)

The infamous Twilight Zone tale "To Serve Man" packs all its punch into one single idea: the aliens have a cookbook ALL ABOUT EATING HUMANS! They look at us the way we look at chickens! The same idea lurks at the heart of popular franchise Predator, where the whole conceit is that the alien has just come to Earth on a safari to hunt human game. Where's the respect? 5. Polymorphous (See: The Thing)

If there's anything scarier than an alien that looks just like a human, it's an alien that can look like whatever it wants. Although the shiny, pretty aliens in Abyss wind up being our friends, they are super scary at first because they can morph into any shape they want. And of course what makes the thing in John Carpenter's version of The Thing so scary is that it can turn any body part into chunks of alien — human heads sprout legs, blood jumps up and runs around the room, people grow dog heads. Whoa. Same goes for the aliens in my personal favorite alien movie, Society, where a bunch of rich Beverly Hills types turn out to be polymorphous creatures who love to have giant orgies where they merge into a big room full of goo and eat humans.

6. Wants to Mate With Humans to Produce Scary Hybrid Offspring (See: Species)

The fear of an alien being who wants to mate with you probably goes back thousands of years, but in terms of current pop culture we can probably trace it back to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories of the 1920s. Remember, one of the scariest things about Cthulhu's spawn is that they are mating with humans, producing strange, fishy-looking humans who eventually go back to the sea. Combining this rule with rule 3 (looks human) is the Species franchise, where a super-hot alien lady goes around humping unsuspecting men for their seed and then killing them in flagrante delicto.

7. Buglike (See: Independence Day, Starship Troopers)

Buglike aliens are a staple of the genre. Even the aliens of Alien are buglike, with their hard carapaces. Bugs are so scary-looking already, and we suspect they may also participate in rule 2, having collective consciousness. In fact, "buglike" has become shorthand (sometimes lazy shorthand) for "scary alien," which is why you see so many depictions of aliens with feelers or antennae on their heads. Bug aliens show up in some of the most generic scifi flicks like Independence Day and Starship Troopers. But there are buggy aliens in more highbrow places too, like the Ender's Game series, where Earth is battling (and ultimately genociding) a buglike race.

At one point, thinking that he might be going insane, our narrator - a kind of rogue anthropologist, uniquely attuned to the grotesque details of human existence - begins to hallucinate. On the trail of this conspiratorially strange and well-disguised cult, the man dreams of vast structures made from "exposed stonework," inside of which "great globes of luminous crystal serv[ed] as lamps." He sees "inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods" standing around in the shadows.

Later, I had visions of sweeping through cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated must have towered in the sky for thousands of feet.

There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril.

Everything he sees is so architectural, clouded with the air of eras long gone. In another hallucination, for instance, the man stands on the "titanic flat roof" of a massive dream-structure, from which he sees "almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feet wide... Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the gray, steamy heavens."

He even stumbles across "aberrant piles of square-cut masonry" and "dark cylindrical towers," where "fungi of inconceivable size" grow amidst "great jungles of unknown tree ferns."

It's as if the surrealist montages of Max Ernst have been combined with Le Corbusier's Ideal City.

I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trapdoors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung.

After all, he lets himself speculate, what is housed here, in these dream palaces where stone buildings look more like extraterrestrial coral reefs, might be the very gods this ancient religious cult once worshipped. And then things get really weird - or, as Lovecraft's narrator explains, "the real horror began." Still caught up in his dreams-cum-hallucinations, our amateur anthropologist has visions of "South Africa in 50,000 B.C.," and he sees the "ruins of incredible sunken cities" covered in coral. Amidst all of this, there are creatures with "semifluid" anatomies who have "no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores." They are almost indistinguishable from the architecture they inhabit, being "supremely natural parts of their environment."

Bizarrely, the man then predicts that an "Australian physicist... will die in 2,518 A.D," and he mentions something about the "military use of great winds."

There is even a cryptic, and absurd, reference to "a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future."

With all of these things in mind, our rogue investigator, on the trail of his ancient cult, sets off for the deserts of Australia - where the "monstrous waste" of a city made from basalt blocks "half shrouded by sand" greets him.

To make quite a long story short, he almost immediately realizes that this is the very city, here beneath the desert sands of Australia, that he's been seeing in hallucinations all these years. "What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of old," he asks himself, "in the millions of years since the time of my dreams?"

But he's scared even to think of the answer. "Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to think," he mutters - because beneath this ruined city in the remote Australian interior are the "secrets of the primal planet," where weird, shambling, underground forms meander through vast concentrations of architecture that aren't quite cities, they're more like hives: they are alien habitats for a form of life that humans might not ever come to grips with or understand.

In any case, he sets about exploring the place, too fascinated to resist. "Madness drove me on," he says - "sheer madness that impelled and guided me," as if archaeologists might become intoxicated with the thrill of excavation, unable to stop themselves from going further. Driven by a "hellish delusion," our narrator thus enters the underground ruins through a doorway, which he describes as a "downward aperture" into the Earth.

Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged and staggered - often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner of that demoniac gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through choked and crumbling, yet familiar, archways.

But it is this very weirdness that our rogue anthropologist, with his fevered dreams and inexplicable compulsions, soon realizes might lie at the distant origins of human life, something altogether alien - something forever preserved in the "vague old myths" of the religious cult that Lovecraft's narrator has been attempting to research. But I could go on and on. Lovecraft's characters are always taking misguided and badly outfitted tours through remote landscapes, hoping to find something, whether it's in Greenland or Iceland or Australia or Antarctica. They explore old Native American burial mounds in the American Midwest and they travel through untrafficked fishing villages in New England. Distant Pacific archipelagos are mentioned, as is Einsteinian relativity. Plus, there's a lot of vague and poetically misunderstood science, of which I've always been a fan. "The Shadow Out of Time" is only one such example.

Earlier on io9: Guillermo del Toro, Report To Cthulhu

(Note: The second-to-last image is from the always stimulating k-punk, and the last image is by no one less than John Coulthart, master of the extradimensionally weird. The other two are by Max Ernst.)

You play through the game as weaponless systems engineer Isaac Clarke aboard the USG Ishimura, and not only to you have to survive the onslaught of demon hordes out in space, but you also have to seal up their doorway so they can't get back out. All in a day's work. It seems like spacefaring folks don't ever have things go that well. Just ask anyone in the Doom universe. However, we sure wouldn't mind having a Planetcracker to fly around.

Here our poor disposable lady gives birth to a full-grown Adrian Brody-looking dude. Gross! What is it with gigantic birth scenes in scifi? There's one in Slither, too.

Our first tipoff that things are getting bizarre comes in a scene clearly designed to remind us that signal-induced violence is only a tiny step away from TV-induced violence in every day life. Mya returns home to her husband Lewis after her rendezvous with Ben, and finds him and his pals getting drunk and filled with rage as they watch the game on TV. Each time the mind-scrambling signal interrupts the transmission, they take another step beyond armchair-slapping and curses. Finally, Lewis beats one of the guys to death before Mya's eyes, then turns to her.

From there we follow Mya on her horrifying flight across a city littered with dead bodies, as she tries to reach the train station where she's agreed to meet Ben at midnight to run away. Lewis and Ben, meanwhile, are both trying to find Mya — the former giving into his most violent hallucinations, and the latter trying to maintain his sanity. Perhaps the best parts of the film, however, center on Lewis. His jealous-husband monomania is pitch-perfect, as is his comic timing.

In the second part of the movie, Ben stumbles upon a group of people attempting to have an uptight, suburban New Year's Eve party even while they periodically give into the urge to kill and mutilate each other. A kind of freakish sitcom air settles over the film as a lady who wants nothing more than to have a "nice party" feeds crackers to her blood-spattered guests and brings her dead husband a drink (she killed him with an air pump to the neck after he tried to strangle her to death). Lewis joins in gleefully, lecturing everyone on the value of having a faithful wife while trying to beat various people to death with a tank full of insect poison.

One is a bit sorry to leave this world of violent satire and return to the drama of Ben and Mya attempting to reunite with each other — there's a kind of sentimental core to the film that seems misplaced. This is no Videodrome, where a rogue TV signal turns human sympathy into a phantom and all love is programmed. Beneath all the gore and antisocial mayhem in The Signal, there's a strangely traditional belief in the redemptive love of a tough man for a teeny blond woman.

Still, this is hardly the point. The Signal delivers the freakout all cult movie lovers hope for, and does it far more artfully than most mainstream scifi-horror does. You'll laugh; you'll puke; and most importantly you won't forget it.

Some of the early standouts in the horror-scifi genre are Donovan's Brain (1955), about a scientist whose mind is taken over by the brain he's keeping alive in a tank, and The Tingler (1959), about a parasite that lives in everyone's spines and controls their ability to feel fear. The beasts are fine as long as they stay inside you, slowly sucking up all your fear chemicals. But if they get out — they will kill! Movies like these set the tone for later mind-control flicks, which all seem to contain a certain amount of surreal goofiness. In 1960, Village of the Damned played gave us those iconic blonde, glowing-eyed children who are all born mysteriously after everybody in town conks out for an hour. A cross between pod people and devils, the kids can use their mental powers to control people's actions and of course MUST BE STOPPED.

During the 60s, however, the horror of mind control took a decided turn for the political. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), full of trippy drug sequences, combines the idea of government conspiracy with brainwashing, suggesting that the Cold War is really a battle to control people's wills rather than geographical territory. Those who remember the original flick — way better than the 2004 remake — know that it's the harrowing tale of a soldier brainwashed by commies to become an assassin. (Plus Frank Sinatra joins the fun as another brainwashee.) Or was he brainwashed by somebody else? In 1987, era of corporate mania, poor Robocop gets mind-controlled by a giant corporation, rather than the government. Company geeks program him with a secret behavioral modification called the "fourth law" which prevents him from doing any violence to employees of the corporation that made him — even when they are breaking the law or threatening somebody's life.

The upcoming Russian flick Inhabited Island, based on a 1970s novel, is another political mind control tale. It's set on a planet that's clearly meant to be the USSR, and everyone is completely obedient because they're being controlled by signals sent from giant towers all over town. (No, they're not cell towers, but you can bet that if the novel had been written in 2008 they would be.) This political brainwashing is of course presaged in one of the ultimate scifi mind control tales, 1984, published just as World War II was coming to an end. Countless movie versions of the novel seem to bend to reflect the political tenor of the times. A 1954 film version makes it obvious that Big Brother is an evil commie (something that the book suggests too). An Apple commercial (pictured above) makes Big Brother out to be IBM. And a 1984 film version, while clearly about fears of fascist commies, is also obsessed with the way television manipulates and mind-controls the masses. Big Brother is a baddie here, but so is television itself. And television has continued to be a mind-controlling nasty, inspiring one of the best and weirdest of the mind-control movies: Videodrome (1982). This classic, directed by freaky brainfarm David Cronenberg, is about a television signal that turns people into the puppets of a shady media conglomerate. It also makes them have kinky sex with Debbie Harry, but I suspect that's just the side-effect of being in a Cronenberg movie. Creepy-funny flick The Signal, hitting theaters next week, is a direct inheritor of Videodrome's mantle. Residents of a city which is clearly intended to be Atlanta are turned into ultra-violent psycho killers by a strange signal broadcast on all televisions, radios, and cell phones.

The mind-controlled mob of psychos, of course, is an old chestnut in movieland. You'll find it in everything from Re-Animator (1987) — where a mad doctor wants to create an army of mind-controlled zombies — to Batman Begins (2005) — where the Scarecrow releases drugs into the water supply that turn Gotham City into a town of dangerous maniacs.

But for sheer mind-control weirdness, I'll bet you can't beat 1977's Empire of the Ants. It's the only example I know of where an insect controls the minds of humans. A town overrun by giant ants becomes enslaved the the ant queen, who is controlling their minds to make them help the hive. The ant-controlled townspeople keep bringing more humans in so the ants will have more slaves — and possibly human food!

In The Burrowers, a group of men goes out to try and find a family of settlers that has gone missing. The posse suspects that natives have killed the settlers, but the actual culprit turns out to be something much more sinister. Something deadly is stalking the men from under the ground. The posse includes Clancy Brown (Pathfinder), William Mapother (Lost) and Doug Hutchinson (The Green Mile.)

The movie takes place two years after the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, Petty told Shocktillyoudrop. White people have pretty much wiped out the Indians, but are still terrified of them.

So you've got this giant influx of population and people are still terrified of the 2% of people who are out there, basically dirt poor and living in camps. There's a fair amount of human violence in the movie. And there are a lot of classic monster movie elements in there.

Concept art from DreadCentral. [