31 Days of Halloween - Day 4

In this year of Covid-19, none of us have been traveling much. Back in February, just before the outbreak began, but when there were no doubt unknown cases already present, I was in New York City.  I did not know I would not be getting back there anytime soon, nor did I go with an eye towards this Halloween Countdown, but I did see a number of things that were Halloween appropriate. Most of these images came from the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, including items on display in the Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey exhibit, The Jim Henson Exhibition, and Creatures from the Land of Thra: Character Design for The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance exhibit, as well as items from the permanent collection. 

There are a lot of images, so this post will continue tomorrow.

Part 2 will appear tomorrow. I also have a ton more photos from the Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey exhibit. If there's any interest in seeing those after the Halloween season is over, please leave a comment. 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 3 - Movie

A young boy, raised by wolves, is taken in by a traveling troupe of entertainers. As a young man he transforms into a werewolf, kills one of the performers and runs off. He ends up in Paris where he falls for a prostitute, unaware of what she does for a living, Once he finds out, he starts killing all lot the men who pay for her services. Peter Cushing plays a police scientist determined to stop him.

Legend of the Werewolf (1975) feels like a really cheap Hammer film, not surprisingly since, besides Cushing, the film also features Hammer regular Michael Ripper. The screenplay was by Anthony Hinds (as John Elder) writer of numerous Hammer productions, and directed by Freddie Francis, also a Hammer veteran. Despite the talent involved, the film comes across as a lackluster Curse of the Werewolf (1961), Hammer's only werewolf movie, right down to the look of the werewolf himself. The two films also feature some overlapping story similarities since both are loosely based on The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore. Watched at 1:00 in the morning, this movie might be passably entertaining, but overall it's more of a miss than a hit.






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31 Days of Halloween - Day 3 - Book

Horror Cinema edited by Paul Duncan & Jürgen Müller. Taschen. 2018.

I wasn't really looking for another general book on the history of horror cinema, but Taschen has such a good track record with other books that I picked up this hefty volume anyway. Beginning with the silent era and strangely ending over ten years before the book's publication date, Horror Cinema, offers up an overview of what's generally considered to be the most significant films in the genre.  Broken down into categories such as The Living Dead, Slashers and Serial Killers, Ghosts and Haunted Houses, etc., rather than a chronological examination, the authors still manage to present an insightful look at why these films are so important and how they fit into the larger scheme of things. The book also includes a longer series of essays on single genre films, considered to be the most crucial, which is presented in chronological order. There are more surprises for what is left out than what is included.

The book is a real mixed bag of thoughtful examination marred by some really horrendous errors. Character names are incorrect, photos used are often from a completely different movie from the one they are attributed to, etc., and not just a couple of times, but with regularity throughout. This book, which is 633 pages in length, is chockfull of illustrations (I was able to casually read the entire book in about 2 days. While the movie stills and poster reproductions are welcome, whoever was tasked with captioning them chose to do so in an inane humorous manner that would have had punster, Forry  Ackerman of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, cringing. Not only were the captions not funny, but more often than not they did not inform the reader what the image was actually about.

In the end, if you are just finding your way to this film genre, the essays are worth reading. For everyone else, you may want to skip this.







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31 Days of Halloween - Day 3

A couple of Halloween related entries from the Golden Book Encyclopedia - Volume 7 (©!959 / Revised 1961 edition).

31 Days of Halloween - Day 2 - Movie

A meteorite lands on the Gardner family's property and things begin to take a change for the weird. An unknown color flares up. The family members begin acting strangely. Mutated insects and unknown plants and flowers begin to grow all over the property. Their animals begin to change. Their youngest son begins to communicate with something at the bottom of their well. Their phones and car stop working. Then physical changes begin to occur to the family members and all hell breaks loose.

Color Out of Space (2019), which is Richard Stanley's first feature length movie in 25 years is a triumphant return for the director of Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992). Based on the short story "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft, the film delivers on the Lovecraftian elements while expanding the story to include elements that the infamous author would no doubt have found distasteful such as a black scientist, sex, and strong female characters. Depicting an unknown color is, well, not possible, but the choice of purples and magenta is inspired given the recent controversy over whether magenta actually exists or is an impossible color (look it up. It's pretty interesting.

The characters and the cast playing them are all really strong and we really feel for this family as their lives begin to be adversely affected by the meteorite. My only quibble is Nicholas Cage's lapsing into Donald Trump speech mannerisms as he begins to lose his shit.

I look forward to revisiting this film in the future and look forward to Stanley's next Lovecraftian adaptation.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 2 - Book

The Night Ocean by Pail La Farge. Penguin Books. 2017.


Charlie, a writer of profiles of obscure people, becomes obsessed with a section of time in the life of H.P. Lovecraft when forty-three year old Lovecraft was visiting and being listed by a sixteen year old boy named Robert Barlow. He thinks he's come across evidence that they were having a homosexual affair when he uncovers a book called The Erotonomicon which is a collection of journal entries that demonstrates that such an affair did occur. Charlie's discoveries become a best selling book and launch him into fame, but that all starts to unravel when not only does The Erotonomicon turn out to be a hoax, but that Charlie interviewed an imposter pretending to be Robert Barlow. Convinced that there was no hoax, nor scam, Charlie tries to save his reputation and ends up sucked further down a rabbit hole of unreliable narration until he finally disappears. His wife, certain he's still alive, retraces his steps and finds herself being pulled into that same spiraling hole of indeterminate truths and half truths and outright lies.

This book is excellent. La Farge is a fantastic storyteller and shores up the wavering line between truth and deceit by filling the narrative with very real people and events from not just the life of H. P. Lovecraft, but Barlow, William Burroughs, Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, Frederick Pohl, Donald Wollheim, Samuel Loveman, Leslie Perri, Isaac Asimov, and prominent members of early genre fandom. With such a well researched foundation of facts, La Farge is able to build a convincing narrative with which to pull the rug out from under the protagonists (and the readers') feet.

If you like the work of Lovecraft, or have an interest in the early years of fantastic, weird, and science fiction this book is not to be missed.







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31 Days of Halloween - Day 2

Throughout the month of October I will be posting cut paper Halloween art that I've created. All of the artwork is for sale and will be made available at The Art of John Rozum sometime during the same day as it is posted here. This is the first piece I'm offering up, It is based on a costume idea presented in the Dennison Bogie Book of 1922. Check back throughout the month for new art.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 1 - Movies

In the town of Derry, Maine, every 27 years a cycle of missing people takes place. Among those lost in 1988 is young Georgie Denbrough. His older brother feels guilty and is also determined that somehow his brother is still alive. When he and his group of misfit friends start having strange encounters that involve their own particular fears and a clown named Pennywise, they become determined tisane themselves and end the curse of Derry by destroying Pennywise. They don't. When the cycle begins again 27 years later, the group of kids returns home to try again.

It (2017) and It - Chapter 2 (2019) is a two part adaptation of the novel by Stephen King, which was previously adapted for television back in 1990. The new adaptation is superior in every way, even though it  follows the same beats as the previous tv version than feeling like a something that ignored it and instead went straight back to the novel for source material. The cast is fantastic and the casting of the adult versions of the kids is so believable as to be uncanny. The standout is Bill Skarsg˚ard as Pennywise. His performance suggests something of an anglerfish rather than anything human, he's simply a lure to bring children to their doom.

The films directed by Andy Muschietti, are both entertaining and solid entries in the "kids with bikes" genre, but the novel, which remains one of my favorite King books, has yet to be adequately adapted in my opinion. This version is very good though.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 1 - Book

When Darkness Loves Us  by Elizabeth Engstrom  (Tor. 1986) is made up of two novellas also including Beauty Is... Both stories are about young women growing up on farms in rural America with isolation and sex being a big part of what are really only coming of age stories in the broadest sense.

In the first story a sixteen-year old newly wed woman is accidentally sealed into a series of pitch black caverns and eventually discovers she is pregnant. What's most shocking in this tale is not what she needs to do in order to survive, but Engstrom's spare storytelling controlling the amount of time that passes in the woman's subterranean life. The story has a peculiar feeling to it and is entirely engrossing.

The second story is about Martha, now in her fifties and living alone on her family's farm while the people of the community, out of thanks to Martha's mother who was a local healer, care for most of her day to day needs. Martha was born without a nose, and while corrective surgery, more or less, fixed that, a traumatic experience in her youth made her something of an imbecile. Now as she finds someone in the community who genuinely cares for her, her intelligence slowly starts to re-emerge and she also develops a confidence that wasn't there before. There's one member of her community who is a real bad seed and has it in for Martha and her new friend and his confrontation with her leads to a dark conclusion. While the ending is abrupt, and not entirely unexpected, since Engstrom does plant the seed for it early on, the story itself is very engaging, and again Engstrom's spare style somehow emphasizes the dread and isolation that provide so much of what makes these stories successful.

This book is a real gem. It somehow wound up in my collection decades ago and remained unread until now. Apparently long difficult to get ahold of, it's now easily available as part of Valancourt's Paperbacks from Hell series cultivated from Grady Hendrix's outstanding book of the same title.







This post contains affiliate links, which means that John Rozum receives a percentage of sales purchased through links on this site. Thank you for your support!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 1

Welcome to my fifteenth, and final, Countdown to Halloween. While my love of the holiday has not diminished, a number of factors have led me to giving up all my ghosts when it comes to this annual event. The first one of these took place in October 2006, and serendipitously, there were a handful of other people doing this too and we became a supportive, like-minded community, and eventually turned it into an organized online event, The Countdown to Halloween , (where you can sign up to participate yourself, or simply find lots of cool blogs to check out for all of your Halloween treats and tricks). I have also stepped aside as organizer of this event. I think all of the other early pioneers of this event have long stopped participating, and I am the last holdout. I had toyed with trying to make it an even twenty years, but after the last few realized that it would only lead to a lot of stress and disappointment. Even this final year, where I'd hoped to go out with a bang with five different types of posts each day, ended up being a compromised effort, which will have three daily posts, a daily movie, a daily book, and a random post made up of what were going to be the other three categories, including some original Halloween art I made and which will be available for sale. Over the course of fifteen years, and with literally hundreds of participating blogs also osting daily each October for most of those years led me to decide that it was getting more and more difficult to offer up anything that everyone hasn't already seen. While I will continue my tradition of watching a horror movie everyday throughout October, not wanting to repeat myself here meant that if I felt like watching The Wolfman during the month of October, I couldn't. After this year I can watch whatever i want without feeling obliged to keep offering something new each day. Time commitments were the biggest factor in my decision to stop. Between work, family, and other obligations, it's harder and harder to make time to put together the material to share here. Finally, the shifting nature of what people pay attention to on the internet has made me consider that blogs now reside off a hidden back hallway of popular culture, and that most people now don't want to look past image heavy places such as Instagram and Tik-Tok. For the first few years, every post got at least a handful of comments, making it feel like the effort of putting this together was actually reaching people. In the past few years, while page visit traffic remained steady (and always much higher for October), almost no one leaves a comment anymore, so I have no idea if people actually even enjoy seeing this stuff anymore. So, now that all the whys are out of the way, onward to the treats. While, this final Countdown is not all that I wanted it to be, I still managed to pull together some full size candy bars to hand out, including original art which will be made available for sale the day it is posted over at my store. I will have three posts up every day, so keep checking back. Also, if you like monsters, my companion blog, The Grim Gallery, not only has images of monsters from movies, art, and popular culture up every day through October, but every day of the year. The Grim Gallery is now in it's tenth year, so there are plenty of monsters for you to find just by scrolling through the old posts. Speaking of which, I have 15 years of old Countdown posts that you can investigate, if you wish tom do so, by clicking on the month of October under each year in the Blog Archive to the right. Grab a mug of hot apple cider, or pumpkin spice latte, slip on your mask and let the month of Halloween begin.

The Art of John Rozum

I have a new website to display and sell my cut paper art. The website will have art added regularly in a wide range of prices. There will be a bunch of Halloween themed art introduced to the store tied in directly with my Halloween Countdown here. Please take a look at The Art of John Rozum, visit often, and help spread the word.

In Two Weeks...

My annual Halloween Countdown is only a couple of weeks away. The festivities begin at Midnight, October 1st. Check back here then, and daily throughout the month of October.

 If you are interested in hosting your own Halloween Countdown and would like to be part of a group of celebrants, please check the Countdown to Halloween homepage to find out how.

The Grim Gallery Enters Its Tenth Year

My companion blog, The Grim Gallery, devoted to monsters and horror is now entering it's tenth year of daily posts. If you like images of monsters of every kind you out to yourself to check it out. You can do so by visiting here.

Bloody Disgusting Names Xombi In Their Must Read List

The horror media culture site Bloody Disgusting has included Xombi on their binge-worthy reading list of dark titles published by DC Comics. You can see what other titles are on the list, and find links to begin reading them here.

Recent Commission

Squid. 3-D cut paper. 2019. 

Ask Me Anything #64

With the new year I thought it might be worth putting up another Ask Me Anything Post. It's been a while since I've done one, and I have no idea if there's still any interest, or if anyone even looks at this blog anymore.

Blogging seeming to be on the wane as other, more immediately gratifying, forms of social media have taken people's fancy, and readership has shifted elsewhere. Meaning that my own posting efforts, just like most people's, have shifted elsewhere more and more as well.

I've always preferred Blogger over other forms simply because it allows me to cover things more in depth than other delivery services, and to delve into somethings that I wouldn't really think felt at home on say, Facebook, or certainly Instagram.

This blog was set up primarily as a means of promoting my work, share some of my process and inspirations and, hopefully, steer people towards some things of interest and enjoyment I've found along the way. For the past few years I've broken away from monthly comics and have been working on longer range projects that I can't share yet, which means that this blog has not really had the content is was designed for.

So, while "Ask Me Anything" is meant for you to ask anything you are curious about regarding my work, inspirations, opinions on anything, or pretty much any other thing you may want to know from me, I'd like to also start by asking you what sort of content you'd like to see here so that it's not months of empty space, and returns to something worth checking in on. Certainly feel free to ask me anything as well.

Questions can be posted in the comments section below, and I'll either answer them there, or in a separate post sometime later in the month.

I've been asked a lot of good, thought provoking questions in the past as well as some really banal ones, all of which I tried to answer. You can see the previous questions by visiting Ask Me Anything  #1, #2 ,  #3, #4, #5, #6 , #7 , #8, #9,  #10,  #11,  #12 , #13, #14,  #15 , #16, #17 , #18 , #19,  #20,  #21, #22,  #23, #24, #25, #26, #27, #28, #29, #30, #31, #32, #33, #34, #35, #36, #37, #38, #39, #40, #41, #42,  #43, #44, #45,  #46, #47,  #48, #49,  #50,  #51, #52 , #53, #54, #55, #56,  #57,  #58,  #59, and #60 , #61, #62 and #63

Answers not found following the questions can be found in the archives section for each associated month under Ask Me Anything.

Now ask away. 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 31 - Movie

Emma Larsimon, a successful French horror novelist, ends her bestselling series of books and announces that she's going to write non-horror fiction from now on. A visit from an old school friend and some unpleasant dreams force her home instead where she learns that the villain of her books, a demonic witch named Marianne, may not be fiction and is not happy that she's stopped writing about her.

Marianne (2019) an original 8-part series made for Netflix, may be the best Netflix original anything I've seen. It succeeds unlike every horror tv series they've tried and far better than most movies, Netflix produced, or otherwise, with an intensity not seen since Hereditary (2018). A French production, the cast was uniformly excellent, with great chemistry between them, and genuine believabilty. The direction, writing, cinematography, sound design, music, make-up, were also all top notch, and the location added so much to the sense of dread that infused this series. This was just overall outstanding on every level and easily the best thing I watched for this Countdown.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 30 - Movie

A child killing terror, which most often appears in the form of a clown named Pennywise, fights a group of youngsters in 1960. Thirty years later, when new murders begin, the youngsters, now adults, reband to attempt defeating Pennywise once and for all.

When I read Stephen King's novel It back in 1986 when it was first published, I loved it, and could not put it down. It remains one of my favorite novels of his. When I saw It (1990), the two part miniseries, based on the novel, when it debuted I was really let down.  Coming across it in the $5.00 bin at Walmart around the time the new movie adaptation came out, I thought I'd give it another look, something I ended up putting off until now.

I still don't like it. The cast is fine, but this mini-series lacks any bite and because of its length and the way the book is broken down into vignettes focusing on each character as a child, and as and adult, not only does the plot feel simultaneously simple and disjointed, but the relationships between the characters lacks the depth and the strength that really powered the novel. Without it, I just didn't care about what happened to any of them. I had no stakes in their winning over this clown which was presented as something somewhere between Caesar Romero's Joker if he were a drunk, carnival clown with an unhealthy interest in children, and Krusty on the Simpsons. He wasn't scary like a monstrous cyclical, unstoppable evil. He was mildly disturbing in a drunken relative has invited himself into my house and I can't get him to leave kind of way. One of the big disappointments, too, was that when we get to see Pennywise in his true form it's as some sort of big spider. Yawn.

I know a lot of people love this mini-series, and I suspect those that do were significantly younger than I was when they first saw it, and I get that changes things. You are welcome to keep this version of It warm in your hearts. I'll stick with the book.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 29 - Movie

The Prince of a South Seas island is murdered in a power grab, but allegedly for befriending the American Scientists whose vaccines they fear. Having vowed to return for vengeance, he comes back as the nearly indestructabe tree creature, Tabonga.

I don't think I've actually ever seen From Hell It Came (1957) before, and after this viewing I expect I probably never will again. Sure, the tree monster suit is not exactly chilling, but that's the least of this movie's problems. Wooden acting (and not by Tabonga), over acting, clumsy writing, and poor direction all combine into a boring mess that drags on for what seems like hours longer than its running time.

If you still feel compelled to watch it, here's a link:

31 Days of Halloween - Day 28 - Movie

Seventeen years after being raped by a strange creature, a woman's son starts transforming into a similar creature. Seemingly possessed by his progenitor, the son seeks vengeance against the enemies of his inhuman father, then as his own lifecycle nears its end, he rapes the one girl he's been trying to protect in order to bring the next generation of his kind into being.

The Beast Within (1982) received a lot of press as it was originally released, but has mostly fallen into obscurity since. While the notion of a creature with a seventeen year life-cycle, like a cicada, is a good one, the ugliness of its reproduction through rape, while keeping with the dark nature of horror, is pretty distasteful. The filmmakers did try and make these scenes as discrete as possible without diminishing their ugliness. The film itself seems to meander around more than build. There's what is meant to be a showstopper transformation scene - all the rage following Altered States, An American Werewolf in London, and The Howling - which goes too far in it's latex rubber and air bladder stretchiness and makes the viewer all too aware that what they are watching is a bunch of inflated pulsating rubber. I didn't care for this movie when I saw it on the big screen way back when, and my opinion of it now is really one of indifference. It wasn't as bad as I remembered it, but it wasn't really entertaining now either. It's just sort of there.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 27 - Movie

Blade (Wesley Snipes) joins a group of young vampire hunters seeking to destroy Dracula, and all vampires.

Blade: Trinity (2004) written and directed by David S. Goyer, who has given himself the worst script to give lackluster direction to. Strangely considering that he wrote all three, this story, which essentially puts Blade in a barely involved supporting role, doesn't feel at all like it was written by the same writer. Blade's character sometimes acts uncharacteristically, the continuity is sloppy, especially regarding the vampire physiology, there's too much inspiration from the Matrix films, and the new characters are really uninteresting, as is the story in general. It's dull.

The new pack of vampire hunters, the Nightstalkers, are really poorly defined. Ryan Reynolds plays the same character he does in every movie/ Jessica Biel says little, prefers hunting with a bow and arrow and showing off her stomach. Patton Oswalt plays a geek, and Natasha Lyon a blind biologist with a young daughter that I can't remember whether or not gets rescued from the vampires at the end of the movie. There are a few other people, I think, but they are wallpaper.

The bad guys don't fare much better. Parker Posey is bad and annoying as their leader. Dominic Purcell as Drake, amy be the screen's least interesting, or intimidating Dracula, and the others are cypher strongman, and cackling toady types.

This was just a bad bad movie. Do not watch it.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 26 - Movie

Blade (Wesley Snipes) is recruited by the vampires to help stop a new mutated breed of vampires, the Reapers, who threaten the existence of both vampire and human populations.

Blade II (2002) written by David S. Goyer and directed by Guillermo Del Toro is a major step up from the original film. While the screenplay was written by Goyer (based on characters created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan for Marvel's Tomb of Dracula), Del Toro's fingerprints are all over the storytelling, from his use of color, to a more biological approach to the vampires and reapers, and the increased amount of elaborate technologic weapons. The characters are also richer and more dimensional with a more romantic and tragic feel to the entire film.

Blade II would be the highpoint for the series and allowed Del Toro to try and succeed at grafting an action movie onto the genre he loves best.