LatinoReview has a scoop that during The Brothers junket, Maguire was asked who he wanted to work with his answer was, Guillermo del Toro. Which he followed with:

"We may have something here in the near future."

Cue the internet fanfare and rumor whirlwinds. This must mean that Tobey is the next Bilbo Baggins — but then again, it's the closest thing we've heard to actual Hobbit news in a while. Plus LatinoReview confirms this overheard conversation with a CAA source. Plus, Tobey is not shooting Spider-Mans 4 and 5 back to back, so he may have some free time. And it is a role of a lifetime — we'd still rather see David Tennant in the role, but Tobey has had an impressive career, and there's no doubt he could handle the role. We guess the rest is in GDT and Jackson's hands.

UPDATE: Movieline has the update from Maguire's publicist saying that the whole rumor is false, meanwhile super Tolkein site TheOneRing.com says the rumor is completely new to them, and none of their sources can confirm the possible Maguire Bilbo talks.

As with LOTR, Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's Bones is the sum of its aesthetic choices, times the auteur's vision. Jackson brings a vibrant surrealism and suspense to the adaptation, and it says a lot that he chose Brian Eno to do the music for it. Spoilers below.

The Lovely Bones is the story of young Susie Salmon, who's murdered by a serial killer, and who then observes the aftermath as a ghost. A girl in her early teens, Susie is compellingly played by the luminous Saoirse Ronan. She observes the grief of her family, and their floundering responses as the police consider every possible suspect but the right one; she experiences an afterlife that seems a strangely logical mix of its own rules and her internal world. (In places it's a little like a subtler version of What Dreams May Come, without the philosophy-and without a Cuba Gooding, Jr). She resists complete absorption into the next world, drawn back to psychically finger the residue of her own uncompleted life.

The novel's story is told by the murdered girl. In the book, Susie says: "My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my dad talked to him once about fertilizer." This voice, as voice-over, usually simple, sometimes penetrating, neatly interlaces and tightens the film's narration. The use of voiceover is famously a cinematic bugaboo, a chain holding many films back - it mars Kubrick's otherwise brilliant film noir, The Killing - but occasionally it can work, and here's the occasion. Saoirse Ronan's voiceover brings the first-person voice of the novel into the film, so that we feel haunted by her as we watch events unfold. Jackson uses the voiceover just enough, and in just the right places.

We know early on - as in the novel - that Susie Salmon will be murdered, because she tells us so. But somehow Jackson makes us afraid for her anyway, though her doom is a kind of fait accompli from the first. Jackson stretches out the suspense about who does it for awhile, but by the end of the first act you know it's "Mr. Harvey." The psychopathic Mr Harvey, a predator who can be just charming enough to be well camouflaged, is played with creepy brilliance by Stanley Tucci - you absolutely know that this character is a guy from your neighborhood who's very fussy about his flowers, very punctual, lives alone. You accept that he builds dollhouses - perhaps miniature houses is a better description - as a hobby. And somehow his little quirks quite logically dovetail with the fact that he likes to rape, murder, and dismember young girls. We infer we shouldn't trust people who are too neat, wound too tight, and too charming. Good advice. The scenes where Mr. Harvey stalks Susie, and entraps her in the little pre-adolescent play-chamber he builds, like a dollhouse, under the cornfield - a resonantly symbolic setting - are quite frightening. One knows what will happen, and it doesn't help. Jackson's skills at suspense and the elucidation of fear – the bringing of background fear cracklingly into the foreground, at precisely the right moment - are powerfully in evidence.

The afterlife of The Lovely Bones has its various facets, like the Bible's "many mansions"; there is a kind of dark afterlife bardo feel to part of it, but there's also the freedom of living one's dreams, in a light-hearted way, as a fourteen year old girl. Never forget, when Jackson shows you her afterlife, that it's her afterlife. It's the afterlife of a girl in her early teens. In one segment that might strike some as a bit airyfairy, there is a Little Prince style planet; there are butterflies and teen-fantasy outfits. She even sees herself fleetingly on the cover of a teen magazine. But this isn't your afterlife. It's the afterlife of a girl who had teen heartthrob photos on her bedroom wall. That sequence is not overlong, and it makes sense. And it's just a portion of her life-after-death - other parts are almost Mordor-like; are certainly fraught with symbol and infused with a living presence, so that we're never surprised when it responds to psychological impulses from Susie or the mortal world. The scenes in the Next World are often spectacular - and yet they meld potently with the drama of the mortal world.

Susie's relationship with her father, likably played by Mark Wahlberg, is more powerful than her relationship with her mother - Rachel Weisz—whom we know largely from her grief. Her father is obsessed with finding her killer, and is thoroughly unsuited for it - eventually, spiritually guided by Susie in an understated way, he intuits the killer's identity. When he tries to do something about it, his fury bears bitter fruit, in keeping with the film's theme of acceptance over hatred.

It may be that the second act, at times, doesn't quite cohere, doesn't always lead immaculately into the third. Occasionally it seems episodic. But the film's imagery and characters exert a pull that draws us relentlessly along, and the third act plays out compellingly.

Susie's sister is the one who finds the evidence the blind, flailing adults overlook while Susan Sarandon, as the alcoholic, bohemian grandmother — holds the family together. Chainsmoking, endearingly incompetent , the character is wonderful, completely convincing, and sometimes quite funny. Sarandon may get a best-supporting-actress nomination for this - she simply becomes this woman.

Susie's murder has been with us from the first, in a way, but chronologically it comes right after she meets a stunningly Byronic young immigrant from Britain (reminiscent of the young man the girls love from the Twilight pictures), who might have been her soul-mate... had she not been murdered; had her life, with all its drama and joy, its highs and troughs not been brutally, maddeningly, senselessly and oh-so-pointlessly interrupted. This is one of the film's most poignant throughlines, and provides some of its emotional resolution, in time. Just in time - to rescue an ending that some might find a little unsatisfying.

The film strays in some places from Sebold's narrative, but the end belongs to the novel, a resolution as much emotional as plot-driven. It's a denouement written by an artist, not by a Hollywood screenwriter. There must have been some Suits feeling angst over that ending, when the studio distributors saw it. (I notice they aren't spending a lot of money promoting The Lovely Bones.) Not that it's a bad ending - it's just deep. And they don't like deep. Will they recognize the cunning symbolism of the faces in the dollhouse windows? The little ships suddenly taking shape in the bottles?

I found the ending to be just frustrating enough — about as frustrating as our world is. And it is another example of choices defining an adaptation. Some fans of the book may carp about certain freedoms Jackson took, but most will hopefully see that in this very creative, authoritative film Peter Jackson preserves the characters, the theme, the dread, the delight found in the novel - and has added just enough of his own.

John Shirley's newest novels are Black Glass: The Lost Cyberpunk Novel, and Bleak History

In an interview with Collider, Peter Jackson crushed the rumors about a 2012 release, and confirmed that the plan still is 2011 in December, which is soon, really soon. Methinks he may be singing a different tune come July.

Meanwhile, who's going to play Bilbo? IGN asked Jackson about the many actors that have been rumored to be in line [Daniel Radcliffe, Martin Freeman, James McAvoy and David Tennant]. Are any of them actually in the running? Jackson wouldn't rule any anyone out, because some of the names mentioned were not under consideration, and he didn't want fans to figure it out based on the process of elimination. Plus, he's still looking for an unknown that may be able to fill the role of Bilbo. (And presumably, handle his accelerated filming schedule, without any conflicts.)

Next, ultimate Tolkien site The One Ring, has the news that there's casting calls going out for — gasp — a woman to appear in this film. And since they probably wouldn't be casting bit parts and extras at this point, the fans speculate that maybe there's a she-dwarf in the mix. Or maybe it's the voice for something. And there are a lot of somethings lurking about in the woods and hills in this book. So your guess is as good as ours.

And finally, AICN Downunder is reporting, on top of their Brian Cox dwarf rumors, that Tom Waits may be joining the film as well. Both are still unconfirmed, and no one is sure what Waits would be cast as, so the whole thing is mere talk at this point. Still the man was amazing in Dracula and Dr. Parnassus, so nether he nor Cox would be a tough sell.

As we can see from that early concept art, some of the alien designs were way stranger than the final version. Why were those rejected? Were you told to tone down the nastiness?

Those designs weren't necesarily rejected outright, we just evolved away from them. A huge amount of work was done designing these things. There were so many iterations, by the time the final design was nailed down, these early images were out of sight and out of mind. The technical approach to realizing the creatures was always in flux, so that affected the look. I'd like to note that the reason the aliens in the early concept art have such human eyes was because they were, at first, intended to be actors in make-up. Due to budgetary constraints, we didn't think the aliens could be done as pure CG, which is what they ended up being. They were originally conceived as practical make-up with digital replacement over certain parts.

Neill actually encouraged us to make the aliens gross and unpleasant. He was very keen that the aliens should look revolting when they were eating, and left it up to us as to what that meant exactly. So I did my take of what an open alien mouth would look like, and some viewers have been disturbed by it! They took note of the genitalia-like aspect. It's my job to disturb people sometimes, and to be honest, I was only a little worried that genitaliia-esque aliens were old hat. But I think they continue getting such visceral responses because they remind the viewer of his or her own vulnerability, not because of the shock value. In the end, that aspect didn't make it into the final alien, possibly due to censorship issues, but as I said, these illustrations were old news by then. Oh well, it's all good.

It seems like a lot of the meaning of the story changes depending on how aggressive or how loveable the aliens appear. Was there ever any talk of making them cuter? Or more scary and soldier-like?

Definitely for the little child alien, Neill wanted to make him very cute. I collaborated on the child alien with Jamie Beswarick, and Neill encouraged us to play up the big eyes and rounded head, etc. For the the general alien populace, Neill wanted them to be intimidating due to physical strength and size, and off-putting. I think the endearing quality of the generic aliens was due to their ineptness and victim status, one felt sorry for their plight. There was another design phase of the Prawns I personally liked, where they looked very much like those early concept images, but with larger bug eyes. That evolved further into the final aliens. Neill really pushed the eyes to be bigger and bigger, which I initially wasn't sure about, but upon seeing the final movie, I understand the decision. A lot of people seemed to prefer that. It seemed so obvious to have big puppy dog eyes, but without them, perhaps no one would care about Christopher Johnson and his kid.

So the aliens were pure CG, not a mixture of CG and practical effects as you'd considered. How would that mixture have worked? And were any of the alien body parts still done with practical effects?

The Prawns themselves were entirely CG, from head to foot. The alien parts on Wikus were prosthetics built and applied by Weta Workshop (Sarah Rubano and Joe Dunckley took care of the make-up work on location), and there were various alien corpses that we fabricated physically, such as in the laboratory dissection scene. Initially, the aliens were to be an actor in a suit, who would then be augmented with digital replacement in some areas, at an earlier stage we considered mechanical puppetry mixed with prosthetics. Ultimately the decision was made to have them be pure CG.

The aliens in D9 are amazingly expressive — they do a lot of "acting" with their eyes and mandibles. It seems like the biggest problem for a really alien creature is getting human audiences to identify with it or feel its emotions. How did you approach this problem?

That credit should mainly go to the animators and Neill Blomkamp. They solved how this thing we designed should move and emote. But from a design standpoint, it would go back to the eyes. Throughout most of the design process, the aliens had mammalian eyes with pupils and sclera, etc., so we always knew they would be able to emote warm-blooded emotions. Neill didn't go with our versions of the eyes as solid black or cephalapod pupils, so they retained a relatable humanity to them.

Obviously, a lot of the press about D9 focused on its low budget. How do you create aliens who look more convincing and interesting than most big-budget movie monsters, on such a low budget?

Of course, that credit goes to Neill's filmmaking sensibilities. I was part of an initially larger team of designers who were later scaled down to Greg Broadmore, Leri Greer and myself. I worked as lead creature designer, concentrating on the organic creatures. Greg designed all the robots, bio-suits, weaponry, vehicles, the mothership, etc., and was the lead concept designer. In his role as art director, he also contributed studies of the alien's body coloration, as well as some subtle last minute tweaking on the final version aliens. Leri did the graphic design, logos and costumes. With Neill directing me, I just offered up as many possibilities as I could, bearing in mind that it had to be relatable to human audiences and based around a roughly humanoid shape. Initially, we tried not to heed any budgetary or technical constraints, so as not to become creatively impaired, but those things factored in later on. Eventually, time just ran out.

The aliens in the film are standing in for South Africans during Apartheid, but they don't act or appear like any human ethnic group — did you have any discussions about avoiding the "Jar Jar Binks" effect, and making them look less like members of a human ethnicity and more like real aliens?

I don't remember that we did. They spoke in an utterly inhuman language and were so insectile, they didn't really run the risk of mirroring any human ethnic group. Personally, I never thought our space lobsters would strike anyone as ethnic caricatures!

In the film, we got very little information about the aliens' social structure and how they came to be in such bad shape. Were you told anything more about this, during the design phase? Is it true that most of the aliens on Earth were worker drones? Did you have any ideas about what other aliens, like their Queen, might have looked like?

I think the idea was that the vast majority of the aliens were workers, and that Christopher Johnson was much brighter than most. Which sort of explained why the overall population were so lost and ineffectual. There was definitely talk of the social structure of the aliens during the design phase. It factored into how we designed them. There was a lot of stuff designed and talked about that never made it into the film. It's possible that Neill may want to save some of these ideas for other future projects, so I don't know if I should talk about it.

The story focuses on the tragic murder of a 14-year-old high schooler, and her journey through purgatory. As she drifts through pop culture-enhanced dreams, her family struggles with the mysterious circumstances surrounding their daughter's murder. The murderer, played by a deeply disturbing Stanley Tucci, goes about his everyday life next door to the grieving family. These images really give you a feel for how special effects master Jackson played with the colors of the 70s, on Earth and in the afterlife.

Through the midst of this heartbreaking work, one character stands out as the trouble yet hilarious family member, thank goodness they got Susan Sarandon...

Plus she also helps capture the feel of the 70s, or in her case the 60s, that this movie is beautifully set in. Here's another video that properly breaks down the family dynamic and the tragedy that befalls the Salmon family. The Lovely Bones, which is based off of Alice Sebold's novel, comes out in limited release Dec. 11 and wider release on Dec. 25.

The Lost World (1925)

There have been many movie adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel, but for our money, the original is still the best, thanks to some pretty amazing stop-motion animation showing dinosaurs trashing London. The groundbreaking special effects, by Willis O'Brien, gave rise to later classics like the original King Kong — and O'Brien trained Ray Harryhausen. This is also the only Lost World adaptation that Conan Doyle seems to have approved of personally. The whole thing is on Youtube, and here's the climax — skip to about 4:58 for the beginning of the dinosaur-rampage awesomeness.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

Sure, it's a Disney movie, and it's got Kirk Douglas singing "A Whale Of A Tale." But it also has James Mason's understated, creeptastic performance as Captain Nemo, full of subtle menace. And the special effects still look pretty breathtaking, even 55 years later. Most of all, it captures the wonder and boundless curiosity of Verne's book.

Fahrenheit 451

The original film version of Ray Bradbury's book-burning classic is a vivid, lurid masterpiece — I saw it as a kid, and it still sticks in my mind. But what did Bradbury think? He wrote, in the introduction to one edition of the novel:

And what do I think of the film?

I have heard those cries in the past of outraged authors whose books have just been gang-raped by a studio.

Such is not the case, luckily, with me.

I think that Truffaut has captured the soul and essence of the book. He has been careful and subtle in his shadings and motions. He has escaped making a technological James Bond film, and made, instead, the love story of, not a man and a woman, but a man and a library, a man and a book. An incredible love story indeed in this day when libraries, once more, are burning across the world.

I am very grateful.

Clockwork Orange

According to Wikipedia (although it's not sourced), original novelist Anthony Burgess felt Stanley Kubrick's film was brilliant — but almost too brilliant for our own safety. Whether Burgess really said that, he'll get no argument from the hordes of people who've loved this uncompromising, brutal look at hooligans and social control in a dystopian future. It's Kubrick at the top of his game, honoring and transforming the source material. (Note: We considered including 2001 as well, but since the book was written after the movie, we decided against.)

Blade Runner

Yes, this film takes some liberties with Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" But it's also one of the best reflections of Dick's constant paranoia and flood-of-weirdness storytelling methods. And of course, Dick himself wrote an ecstatic letter praising this film's vision and his belief that it would re-energize science fiction altogether.

1984 (1984)

It was almost required that this year would see a movie based on the famous George Orwell novel. Thank goodness this one didn't commit the thought crime of bastardizing Orwell's story of a totalitarian society that controls its subjects with constant surveillance and "newspeak." It's worth tracking the director's cut DVD which restores Michael Radford's original bleak color pallette and the original orchestral score (with no Eurythmics.)

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Of all the Dracula films throughout the years, Francis Ford Coppola's version came closest to capturing the original novel's darkness, with Gary Oldman making for a captivating Dracula. The whole affair drips with sensuality, thanks to some incredibly beautiful designs. (Screencaps from DVDBeaver.)

Handmaid's Tale

This was a troubled production, in which the original director dropped out and screenwriter Harold Pinter washed his hands of the thing. That meant that original novelist Margaret Atwood, among others, stepped in to revise the screenplay. Despite the problems, the resulting film preserves the key themes of Atwood's novel, about a fundamentalist culture in which many women are infertile and the few fertile women are given to high-ranking couples to give birth to their heirs. More importantly, it's a harrowing, weird epic.

Lord Of The Rings

Peter Jackson takes some liberties with J.R.R. Tolkien's epic three-volume novel, but nobody would deny that the resulting movie trilogy really is epic, and really does convey just why so many of us fell in love with these books in the first place. The full-length DVD versions of all three movies will take you the better part of a day to watch, but it's an absorbing story and never loses the feeling of great events taking place.

Call Of Cthulhu

This 2005 silent movie comes the closest of all the many H.P. Lovecraft adaptations of doing a straight-up recreation of Lovecraft's world. The campiness and cheekiness are kept to a minimum, and in their place, you see only the pure majesty of Cthulhu. The Old Ones are, the Old Ones were, the Old Ones shall be, indeed.

Children Of Men

We debated whether to include this one, since it makes such a radical alteration to the book's storyline — in the book, it's men, not women, who are infertile. But this, and several other drastic changes from P.D. James' book, don't detract from the fact that director Alfonso Cuarón crafts a pretty gripping film in its own right, which preserves the dystopian feel and obsession with reproduction from the book. And the film's use of long, single-shot sequences in which huge events feel like they're happening all around you, makes it hard to forget afterwards. Here's a video about the making of the film, including those amazing long takes. And apparently, James herself was happy with it.

A Scanner Darkly

Philip K. Dick has probably had more of his books adapted to films than any other SF author — but Richard Linklater's film version of his undercover narc tripfest does the best possible job of giving you an audiovisual tour of Dick's universe. Watching this film, you feel as though you begin to understand what it might have been like to be Philip K. Dick — which is terrifying in itself.

Jackson referenced a particular scene, in which a man falls off a cliff to his doom, saying that audiences felt the scene wasn't gruesome enough:

"We got a lot of people telling us that they were disappointed with this death scene, as they wanted to see [the character] in agony and suffer a lot more," said Jackson. "We had to create a whole suffering death scene just to give people the satisfaction they needed."

It sounds like he is talking about the death of George Harvey, who murders Susie Salmon at the beginning of Alice Sebold's book. Many readers have complained that Harvey's death in the book wasn't terribly satisfying, but it sounds like they might have their blood lust sated in the theater.

Peter Jackson: Lovely Bones test audience demanded more violence [Guardian]

Note: This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, just a rundown of the eras in horror comedy. Feel free to suggest titles, or whole epochs, that we may have missed out.

The 1920s stage plays

In the 1920s, playwrights decided to spice up their stage plays by adding more horror elements, creating silly haunted-house and monster stories like The Bat, The Cat & The Canary and The Gorilla. Some of these, like Canary, got adapted to silent movies. The 1925 Lon Chaney film The Monster also features a comic-relief character, but isn't really a full-fledged comedy.

Abbott And Costello And Laurel And Hardy And So On

In many ways, the 1930s and 1940s were the heyday of the "clean" horror comedy, which featured monsters without any real gore or violence. Laurel And Hardy did A Live Ghost in 1934, the haunted-house movie The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case in 1930 and A-Haunting We Will Go in 1942. The Three Stooges also dabbled in horror-comedy with short films like 1943's Spooks!. And then going into the 1940s, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Bob Hope, among others, brought the genre to new prominence. There's also the hilariously titled Zombies On Broadway. Let's put on a show!

1960s Anarchy

The 1960s saw a slew of trippy novels, movies and TV shows in which horror elements often jostled with comedic ones — several of Peter Sellers' 1960s comedies often veer into horror at odd moments. At the same time, monster sitcoms like The Munsters and The Addams Family ruled television with their zany portrayals of monsters who were just like us — almost. This was also the era that gave the start of the long-running Scooby Doo cartoons, and a slew of cute/funny images of monsters, from the Frankenberry cereal to the Count on Sesame Street.

Self-Aware Campiness

Susan Sontag published her famous essay on "camp" in 1964, but the 1970s really backed up the camp truck to our door, and dumped a load of glitter on our front steps. Horror comedy was no exception, with Vincent Price starring in two mega-campy Dr. Phibes movies, and other over-the-top horror films like Please Don't Eat My Mother and Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes taking over cinemas. Most of all, Rocky Horror Picture Show became a defining movie for a whole ripped-fishnets-sporting generation.

The self-aware horror spoof genre took off way more in the early 1980s, with movies like Creepshow mocking the genre's cliches. And in general, the horror-comedy movie genre really came into its own in the 1980s, diversifying into a bunch of thriving sub-genres.

Ghostbusters, Gremlins and more

1984 saw the release of both Ghostbusters and Gremlins, sparking a new onslaught of cute/scary monsters and ghosts, including four (!) Critters movies. I'd also put 1986's Little Shop Of Horrors and Haunted Honeymoon into this category: wide-eyed protagonists coming face-to-tentacle with weird, slimy or fluffy-but-nasty creatures. According to Box Office Mojo, both Ghostbusters films and the first Gremlins occupy three out of the top four best-selling horror comedy slots of all time.

Troma comedies in the 1980s and beyond

Troma deserves its own category, for its sheer volume of output if for no other reason. Although it's best known for the Toxic Avenger films and Surf Nazis Must Die, there are just so many weird, over-the-top and just plain wrong Troma films out there, you could fill a bookshelf with the DVDs. And really, Troma is just the tip of the iceberg of a slew of direct-to-VHS and direct-to-DVD movies that we've seen in the past 20 years ago, with a ton of cult auteurs pushing the boundary between scary and funny.

1980s Werewolf/Vampire Humor

Teen Wolf (1985), An American Werewolf In London (1981), Fright Night (1985), Mr. Vampire (1985), Once Bitten (1985), Vamp (1986) and Love At First Bite (1979) were just some of the cocaine-fueled laughs at Universal monsters. Here's a photo of Grace Jones at a vampire strip club, from Vamp.

Body Horror/Comedy

The Reanimator films and Brian Yuzna's Society, among others, take the David Cronenberg trope of the human body being transformed into something gooey, icky or disturbingly awful, and they find the silliness and subversive humor that lurks just behind that, with gore, decapitated limbs still moving and lots of oozing goop all providing opportunities for slapstick and discomfort. The 1980s were also the heydey of Frank Hennenlotter's over-the-top violence and bodily destruction, in films like Basket Case. I'd also stick Peter Jackson's Dead/Alive into this category. In many ways, this genre has been the gift that keeps on giving, as evidenced by the awesomeness of 2006's Slither.

The Rise Of Sam Raimi

Classic Sam Raimi films deserve their own category, especially the Evil Dead films and Army Of Darkness. Bruce Campbell in his prime, rocking the chainsaw hand, against the legions of dead. Good times.

Christopher Moore

No discussion of horror-comedy would be complete without mentioning the 1990s and 2000s novels of Christopher Moore, especially his vampire classics Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, You Suck: A Love Story, and Bite Me: A Love Story, plus his zombie Christmas tale The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale Of Christmas Horror.

Creature Features

Tremors (1990), Arachnophobia (1990), Lake Placid (1999) and Eight-Legged Freaks (2002) were just some of the slew of tongue-in-cheek monster-rampage films that came out in the 1990s and early 2000s. My fave is probably Lake Placid, just for the amazingly deadpan performances by Bill Paxton and Betty White, among others.

Buffy Etc.

Joss Whedon's Buffy empire, including a movie and two television series, pretty much deserves its own category, and it came along with a slew of other TV shows and books featuring (frequently female) heroines facing tongue-in-cheek magical/horrific threats, including Charmed and Xena: Warrior Princess.

The Chucky and Leprechaun Films

I have no idea where those fit in, so I'm putting them here. These are like the silly counterparts to the already quite silly Jason Voorhees and Freddie Krueger films. Chucky is a weird doll that comes to life and attacks people (I guess — I've only read a comic-book adaptation) and there have been a million films about a silly leprechaun going around disemboweling people and controlling their minds. And rapping. And dancing.

Horror Spoofs

The Scream films in the late 1990s jumpstarted the slasher-movie genre with their knowing humor and sly horror-movie references. And then with the release of Scary Movie in 2000, the floodgates opened. There have been a ton of horror spoofs, many of them with the word "Movie" at the end of their titles. Plus the upcoming Transylmania, which exactly one person is excited about. (And we know where you live.)

Zombie Rom-Coms

Shaun Of The Dead, Planet Terror, Jennifer's Body and Zombieland all, to some extent, use the reanimated dead as a backdrop for character-focused comedies. (Okay, so the rom-com thing in the subhed is stretching it slightly — they don't all feature love stories, exactly. But some of them do.) Zombie comedies that are less character-focused include the Nazi epic Dead Snow, the zombie slave masterpiece Fido, the zombie sheep masterpiece Black Sheep and the incredibly nasty Zombie Strippers. Plus Bruce La Bruce's Otto, Or Up With The Dead People. Oh, and there's also last year's Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead. No, really. There's also Jon Heder's webseries Woke Up Dead.

Meanwhile, in the world of books, many people see Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide as humorous, rather than as the indispensible handbook it is. There have also been a decent number of funny zombie books, including Breathers: A Zombie Lament by S.G. Browne, the mash-up Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, and several others.

Not entirely sure how it fits in, but horror spoof John Dies At The End, by Cracked.com editor Jason Pargin (under a pseudonym) is selling like hotcakes on Amazon.

Sources include Wikipedia, BoxOfficeMojo, IMDB, Scared Silly and the book Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror & Comedy by William Paul.

Additional reporting by Mary Ratliff.

As near as I can find out, there's only one horror movie that actually involves Alzheimer's directly: in Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea (1999), scientists are trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's. So (as one naturally would) they genetically engineer SUPER SHARKS with amazing brains. What can possibly go wrong? Oh, yes. The shark thing, is what can go wrong.

Here's a good chunk of that movie, which conveniently starts out with the foolhardy scientists explaining their scheme to Samuel L. Jackson, and ends with indications that things are going wrong. (I do not think Jackson, at any point, utters the words, "Get these motherfucking super-sharks out of this motherfucking seabase." More's the pity.)

But that movie just uses Alzheimer's as a plot device. If you're looking for stories that actually play on our fears of Alzheimer's and what it means to our tenuous grasp of personhood, you have to look a bit further afield. And as Sir Michael Caine says, Alzheimer's is scarier than any shark, no matter how big.

But here are the ways in which i think we're starting to see the rise of horror that takes about Alzheimer's, obliquely rather than dead on.

Forgetting:

There's been a rise in stories about people's memories getting siphoned off. I have a vague but vivid memory of reading a comic book (or maybe seeing a TV show) with baddie who exults in erasing people's memories, and says things like, "I just took your memories of your mother," with a smirk. But I can't for the life of me remember where I saw this — almost as if my memory had been erased, fiendishly. And googling has turned up nothing. (Any suggestions?)

(Update: Thanks to everyone who commented. I think Ian Cyr is right, and it's a recent issue of Green Lantern Corps. by Dave Gibbons et al., featuring a baddie with mental powers. Although, someone reminded me The Surgeon General does something quite similar in Give Me Liberty by Frank Miller and, yes, Gibbons again. But it's fascinating how many other examples people came up with.)

In any case, there are lots of other examples of recent stories about mind-erasure. Dollhouse is an obvious example, which asks explicitly what's left of us after our memories have been stolen away. (And comes up with a moderately hopeful answer, over time: There's still something that remains even after our minds are gone, although it's hard to define.)

Heroes has the walking plot device, the Haitian, who mostly just shows up and zaps some of your memories whenever HRG or someone else needs a little memory lapse — then wanders off to do his own thing, until he's needed to henchman up again. But there is that one super-creepy bit where HRG is interrogating his former mentor in Russia, and he gets the Haitian to zap bits of the mentor's memory, piece by piece, gloating the whole time. You get the full scariness of being unable to remember your mother, or your wife, or other bits of your past.

Torchwood season two had Adam, the guy who insinuates himself into your memories. Smallville had Lex getting some super-advanced electro-shock therapy, which erased seven months of his memory, and being shattered as a result. DC Comics grappled with the ethics of the magician Zatanna erasing people's memories in "Identity Crisis." Acheron Hades in the Thursday Next series has shown a propensity for zapping people's memories as well. Various X-Men have gone around zapping memories of late, including Rogue, Professor X and Jean Gray. (And in
one recent X-Men comic, Emma Frost sadistically erases an assassin's only happy memory, vowing to do worse if the assassin comes back. In Mark Millar's Authority issues, the Evil Doctor also gets off on nuking people's memories.

The 2001 movie Time Lapse features someone who's been dosed with a memory-erasing drug, rushing to stop an evil nuclear scheme before his memory goes away completely. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind featured people paying to have memories selectively erased, only to discover how terrifying that is in practice. And Dark City was all about people's memories being rearranged every night.

I feel like this is just scratching the surface — there's a lot of fiction right now talking about how fragile your memories are — and how, if they go, what's left may or may not be recognizeably "you."

The shambling hordes:

And then there's the fact that we're seeing a proliferation of zombie movies, which are all about people who are falling apart physically and have lost all of their personality and sense of identity. As someone who's lost a few close relatives to Alzheimer's, slowly and horribly, it's easy for me to recognize how zombies are a metaphor for this dissolution of the self. People with Alzheimer's are still conscious and aware, they still move around and seem to respond to stimuli, but as disease progresses they get less and less capable of reasoning or having any kind of meaningful interaction with anyone around them. It's heart breaking and horrible — the person you knew is still there, but no longer really him- or herself.

As I pointed out a while ago, the zombie movie which comes closest to depicting the awfulness of losing a parent to Alzheimer's is Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, which is also sometimes called Braindead:

Quasi-zombie movie I Am Legend even makes the link clearer by showing that the "zombies" still have vestiges of humanity and are capable of caring about each other. In the movie's original ending, Robert Neville is able to get through to the zombies and help them remember they used to be people — he comes up with a cure for their condition, and is able to get through to them. Because their real problem isn't that they're feral or mindless — it's that they've forgotten themselves.

The movie Fido also plays with this fairly explictly, by having the main character's dad become a docile, enslaved zombie by the end. He's still recognizeably the same old dad, but the biggest change is that he's lost most of his mind.

Obviously, a huge part of the zombie fad simply comes from the fact that they're a cool way to have an apocalyptic scenario — they're unstoppable and nasty, and if they bite you, you're screwed. They have many of the hallmarks of a good monster: loud, relentless, biting, overwhelming. But at the same time, as the zombie genre continues to expand and diversify, people are using zombies as metaphors for a bunch of different things — and one of those things, clearly, is having a loved one disappear, inexorably into the mists of forgetting.

So if it's true that we're only just seeing the beginning of the onslaught of dementia in our rapidly aging societies, you can expect to see more fantastical and science-fictional stories that attempt to capture the madness of it all. As Caine says, no monster can ever be as scary as Alzheimer's... but some monsters can help us come to terms with it.

Thanks to Kevin Schmidt, Morgan Johnson, Capt. Snowdon, Lynae Straw, Michael Wilson, Martina de la Cruz, Nivair H. Gabriel and anyone else I missed.

[via Wired]

You may also remember the little actress Saoirse Ronan for being able to hold her own next to Bill Murray in The City of Ember. She's becoming a major powerhouse, and her unique look is becoming mesmerizing. Besides that ship-in-a-bottle seaside purgatory, the other major source of excitement in this new trailer is Stanley Tucci's character. Tucci really knows how to commit to a character, so he's sure to bring the full-on skeeve. Heck, he's already bringing it, with his creeper haircut:

This essay will contain spoilers. I have already said that I think District 9 is one of the best science fiction movies of the year, and indeed maybe one of the best SF movies of all time. You can read my spoiler-free review of it here. In this post, I'm going to analyze the movie critically, not because the film is bad but because it's so rich that it deserves critical engagement.

Wikus is a recently-promoted bureaucrat with Multinational United, or MNU, a company whose tentacles seem to stretch into all aspects of the paramilitary industry, from armed interventions to weapons development. His new job is to evict every single alien from the Johannesburg slum, and relocate them to what he later describes as "a concentration camp" about 50 kilometers away from the city. As District 9 opens, a series of interviews and news clips hint that something has gone terribly wrong with Wilkus' operation.

Director Niell Blomkamp uses a pseudo-documentary style for the film, which has the effect of immediately plunging us into the media and pundit culture of his alternate reality. In this version of Earth, aliens have occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder in South Africa for the past 20 years. A sociologist explains how they simply showed up one day in an enormous generation ship, which hung in the air for weeks until UN troops cut into the hull and discovered the mysteriously wasted, diseased remnants of a shipboard city.

Eventually the aliens are relocated to living quarters outside Johannesburg, which quickly devolves into a slum. As another commentator explains, the aliens seem uninterested in work and spend all their time obsessively eating catfood and rubber tires. Nigerian gansters move into the slum with them, trading catfood for the alien's superpowerful weapons. And the city of Johannesburg is slowly papered over with "humans only" signs, while the locals take to calling the aliens "prawns."

The film is at its most intriguing when it focuses on Wikus' relationship to the aliens, whom he treats like cattle and refers to openly as prawns. Put into his current position because his father-in-law is an executive at MNU, Wikus is incredibly naïve about the alien relocation project. When the aliens violently resist him, attacking and murdering the people who come into their slums, he's genuinely shocked. And this shock transforms him from an ignorant bigot into a vaguely enlightened jerk.

There is no simplistic moment of enlightenment here, where the white dude suddenly embraces alien culture and learns something about himself. Wikus is selfish and stupid until the end, stumbling into heroic acts rather than authoring them. We get hints that he's not as horrifyingly cruel as his superiors at MNU, but that's not much of a recommendation. He's the kind of guy who approves of concentration camps, but draws the line at senseless torture.

Wikus is drawn into the aliens' world when he accidentally stumbles on an artifact in one of the shanties that he's trying to purge. It turns out he's fallen into an alien mad scientist lab that belongs to the one alien who seems devoted to getting off Earth and back home. Unfortunately Wikus confiscates the energy cell required, and squirts himself with alien fuel goo in the process.

And that's when things get ugly. The goo slowly turns Wikus into an alien, and that means he's the most valuable guy on the planet to MNU. All those alien weapons they've been confiscating can only be operated by the aliens themselves – they're triggered by alien DNA – and Wikus' half-alien body could be the weapon-trigger they've been looking for. The film's air of social satire crumbles into social horror as the MNU scientists force a now-imprisoned Wikus to test weapons for them, on an increasingly disturbing range of targets.

This is in many ways a classic scenario for framing tales of white guilt, where a clueless or possibly even racist white guy realizes people of color are people too. And then he's given a chance to reform and make up for his previous mistakes. District 9 never takes this easy route; even when Wikus realizes that his body is alien, and that the only place he's safe is in the alien ghetto, he never repents for what he's doing to the only home the aliens have on Earth. He's willing to forge an alliance with the alien scientist, but only because he so desperately wants to be human again. Any selfless acts he commits are based on selfishness.

While the portrait of Wikus is nuanced, the film's treatment of the aliens isn't nearly as sharp. Indeed, if there is any flaw in the movie it is the portrayal of the aliens. While there's a satisfying mystery surrounding their arrival, the mystery of their condition isn't so much ambiguous as it is simply confused. If these aliens have such amazing technology and weaponry, why don't they use it to fight back when the humans try to relocate them? We know they've learned to understand English, and it's never satisfactorily explained why they can't integrate themselves into human society. Surely, out of over a million aliens, there must be a few diplomats?

It's possible the aliens have been damaged in some way: We know they were sick and starving when they arrived. But we also know that the alien scientist still has his wits about him and has created an entire lab beneath his shanty. So clearly not all the aliens have lost the capacity for reason, though we see most of them spending all their time fighting and getting high on catfood.

We're left with a kind of bellyflop allegory as a result. District 9's aliens don't represent an oppressed race in South Africa, but instead embody the stereotype of outcast slum-dweller. They seem incapable of integrating themselves into human society due to something intrinsic to their natures, rather than anti-alien feeling among the citizens of Johannesburg.

District 9 doesn't ever need to resolve this issue because it falls back on the rules of the action film, sucking us into a fast-paced second and third act where Wikus runs from the law, uses alien gundam armor to awesome effect, and barely survives a harrowing gunfight in the alien ghetto. Heads explode, people barf extravagantly, and there is a good time to be had for anyone who likes fights and doesn't give a crap about politics. So the high-octane part of District 9 both rescues it from being a treacly message movie, but it also allows Blomkamp to wiggle out of grappling realistically with why certain groups remain ghettoized even when they have talents and technologies that are useful to the society that has cast them out.

Still, there is something deeply pleasing about a movie that manages to be both action-packed and thoughtful. Rarely do we find a film that entertains and provokes, and I don't want to suggest that the explosions get dialed back in favor of Meaningful Dialog about oppression. But as it stands, District 9 generates what you might call CGI politics, a kind of glossy simulation of political engagement. We are given no easy answers, and no cardboard cutout heroes. In the end, the focus of the whole film – the aliens – remain a mere special effect, something cool to look at rather than understand.

The politically charged and very graphic film will be released this Friday.

Because of the budget did a lot of things in District 9 that had to be cut?

Peter Jackson: Everything that Neill wanted to put into the film, we tried to make happen for him. We didn't have to compromise. It's weird because it was a relatively large budget film, i mean relative, $30 million is still a lot of money. It was enough money to be able to put on screen the story that Neil wanted to - it helped it largely by the style that he shot it in, which was very documentary, realism style. So we didn't have to put a gloss on it like some of the bigger budget movies have. We could be down and dirty and seem like some of it was shot with a handy cam, we had that ability which helped the budget immensely. It gives the film a vibrancy and a feeling of being improvised, it has that quality about it.

Would you ever consider making another alien film?

Possibly; I have no plans or rules about doing anything in particular. I just operate from some kind of instinct, that if I read a book or think of a story idea that I get excited about that ... it becomes a film that I want to make. At the moment I'm concentrating on The Hobbit, which we are shooting two movies back-to-back [that] I'm producing and Guillermo Del Toro is directing. And and I've got Tintin with Steven [Spielberg]... But beyond that, we'll see; I don't know the project for the future. It could be aliens, I've got no issues with aliens, happy to shoot some more movies with aliens.

Two great clips have been released that truly show you exactly how District 9 is filmed, and set up. It relies fairly heavy on the shaky cam, but I can tell you it won't distract you from a thing. D9 will be in theaters this Friday.

At Comic-Con, we interviewed Neill on camera, and he mentioned his hive mind concept about the aliens of District 9. Later on, we got to press further about the entire alien world that Neill had built around his alien creatures, past the hive.

What is your own back story for these aliens? What's their home planet like? Why did the end up on Earth?

The hive mind [concept] is the most important thing to me, because I love the idea of a civilization that can build all of that technology and then, at the same time, just have a massive population that was just drones that needed direction, and were absolutely incapable of building that stuff on their own. I found that to be a really interesting concept. Also, it sort of explains why they don't turn on the humans. Individually, they may be feeling oppressed, but they don't have it together enough to form a resistance and back one another. So I found that really interesting.

I think that they do have a home planet, it's pretty far away probably in the Andromeda Galaxy, but what I like is that they'll live on the ship for thousands of years. Obviously, there's much more of a population on the main planet, but the ships will go out and get the minerals and the ore and whatever resources they need and then bring them all back home.

The other thing is that the ship was meant to clip together with other ships. So there's, like, vast amounts of resources that they're bringing to the parent planet. And the ship, when the army generals or the queen of that particular ship died off by some sort of virus or bacteria that they picked up on some other planet, that killed them off. And it didn't effect these sort of resilient, hardy sort of drone workers. Then the technology is usually the thing that they relied on to save them, but in this case it sort of screwed them because it brought them to a planet that kind of treated them pretty badly, but it was the ship that realized that, unless it gets to a life sustaining planet everything is going to die, which is a cool idea. So the ship just auto pilots to the closest one in the Goldilocks band, and it's our planet and then pulls up and hits the breaks.

Where does this leave Christopher Johnson [an abnormally smart prawn who sparks a bit of a revolution... Not to give too much away]?

I think it's taken 20 years. I think because there is a subconscious hive mind happening, really what they should do is lay one egg that has a different embryo in it that grows into a Queen or being someone that dictates direction. But I think in the interim, because they may have done that, there may be an egg out there with that, but as that being is growing, I just like the idea that he may have been a lot more directionless in the beginning. But the hive structure of their society may just pick one or two that starts to become the leader. Like the overall structure of his brain may change because the hive may want that to happen. So he starts having a direction and a goal. Which is an interesting idea and it's just enough to kick start them to be able to get to the ship to get back.

Yesterday, we looked at the teaser for The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel about a murdered girl, Susie Salmon, who watches her surviving family from a personal heaven. Sebold's concept of heaven as an intensely personal place that manifested your conscious and unconscious desires was often the most fascinating part of the book, and the most frustrating in its lack of vividness. But Jackson has molded Sebold's ideas into a dynamic dreamscape, filled with brilliantly colored beaches, mountains, and glacial lakes that could never exist in the real world, juxtaposed against the simple reality of Susie's grieving family.

Also apparent is the way the living and the dead continue to haunt one another. As in Sebold's book, the trailer shows Susie's impact on the living world as her ghost brushes by Ruth Connors and she calls out to her father from the afterlife. But here, we see that Susie's world is altered by the actions of her friends and family. A drawing by her brother seems to come to life as a mountain sunrise. Her father breaking a ship in a bottle causes an exaggerated version of the same captive ship to shatter on the shores. And the memories of the place where she died continue to haunt her afterlife. It's a visually intriguing set of choices to be sure, and hopefully they will also make Susie's posthumous coming of age all the more convincing.

Entertainment Tonight has teased the first clips for Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, and in addition to the earthly scenes of Susie's grieving family, we also get a few glimpses inside her heaven. Susie's apparent entrance into the afterlife is accompanied by shimmering lights, and a hyper-saturated alpine scene grows around her, complete with wildlife.

Perhaps most notably, as her father smashes the ship in a bottle that Susie helped him assemble on Earth, a giant version of the same bottled ship falls to pieces on the shores of Susie's heaven, suggesting that Jackson plans to replicate the events in the living world with fantastical exaggerations of those same events in Susie's heaven.

[via CinemaBlend]