For all you film festival lovers here’s the premier one - the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, Canada. This is the one where new horror, scifi, action, and cult movies are shown. This year’s world premier movies include Repo! The Genetic Opera, Midnight Meat Train and The Echo (as well as lesser-known, but no less intriguing, fare like Lady Blood, Home Movie and Pig Hunt), plus peeks at long-awaited flicks like All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Let the Right One In, [REC] and Dance of the Dead, and recent limited releases like Stuck and Mother of Tears. Fantasia starts today, July 3rd , and runs for three nearly three weeks until July 21st. Get all the details here.

Now, from the Raven’s Barrow, all you fine folks in the US have a happy and safe 4th of July. Eat a hot dog, have a beer, and blow off some fingers for me will ya.

“You don’t have to be a marketing genius to see what’s happening. The number of book stores is declining, and those that are left are offering fewer titles with a very short shelf life,” Taylor said of his decision to break with traditional publishing methods. “The longer a book sits in a store, the more it eats into a corporate publisher’s quarterly profits. The sky is falling on the old business model.”

In 2001, friend and Chief Information Officer for a large national law firm, Richard Van Dyk suggested Taylor move to the Internet. “Taylor and I have had an ongoing dialogue for decades, sometimes aggressively so, on where print media was going and what form it would take. I think in the end we were both reasonably accurate and what is available now is the best of both the digital and hardcopy formats catering to readers, not a publisher’s quarterly financial requirement.”

Taylor’s initial move online led to disappointing relationships with print-on-demand companies. “They weren’t embracing the technology and freedom of the new marketplace. Instead, they were building an expensive electrical shadow of the old business model,” Taylor said, which prompted him to sever those ties and bring his printing rights home.

Meanwhile, Van Dyk saw the growing conflicts in technology regarding patents and copyright and the opportunities presented by the mass duplication and distribution of digital works. From this he formed an idea for a business model that he then presented to Taylor. All Taylor had to do was agree to give away one of his life’s works. “Taylor has a franchise of material that is deserving of so much more attention than any publisher has given him. The entire publishing industry, be it music, movie or books, is trapped in an unsustainable business model and unable to view digital media as an opportunity, and those producing content suffer.”

Using print-on-demand technology and sidestepping expensive traditional distribution methods, Taylor is able to re-release all of his titles at affordable prices for order directly through his web sites as paperback or E-book download. Without the unjustified extra costs of outmoded distribution networks, the consumer can pay half the price for paperbacks and E-books.

“This works so well because readers are already used to ordering books they can’t find on bookstore shelves,” said Taylor. The new business model is a win-win situation. No longer forced to view publishing through the narrow focus of the corporate status quo and its diminishing choice in titles and authors, the consumer is free to visit the author directly on the Internet to sample or purchase his books.

“This isn’t just the future. It’s a future we can make for ourselves,” said Taylor of writers and the new model versus the old.

Ironstock, the big haunter event I mentioned in last week’s Weekender, is coming to an end. It looks like 2009 will officially be the last year for it as was announced at the Weasel Ball and confirmed on the Halloween-L email list. Book your rooms now.

Wow - one friggin movie. That’s all I could come up with folks. Maybe you know more.

July 1, 2008:

Dead and Gone [Lions Gate]

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but a wee beastie has been gnawing at the edges of my buried subconscious. It’s just stuff I think about and not a real or authoritative comment on people. For that I defer to you. So - hang with me won’t you if you’d like to read a pointless examination of the human condition, or if you have ADD then skip to the end for a brief Q&A and decide for yourself what exactly does “crazy” mean.

This past weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to attend Monsterbash in Butler, PA. Monsterbash is a con devoted to the love of the classic monster movies from the days of Saturday night horror hosts when vampires ruled the night drinking fair maiden’s blood and never, ever looked like Brad Pitt or were ambiguously gay. I took the occasion to search for a movie I remembered watching on Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theater called “The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck” (also known as Dance of the Vampires). I have been plagued for years by a singular memory of one particular scene from this movie of the two vampire killers – Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran) and his assistant Alfred (Roman Polanski) racing off from Count von Krolock’s castle with Alfred’s infatuation Sarah Shagal (Sharon Tate) who they have just rescued from the vampire’s clutches. Of course little do they know that Sarah has already turned into an undead blood sucker and in the end scene she, unbeknown to the Professor who is driving them away in a horse drawn sled, attacks Alfred, who is at first surprised and then relents to his fate as the gorgeous vampiress partakes of a hemoglobin smörgåsbord courtesy of Alfred’s jugular. Anyway, I could only remember the final scene and had to do an extensive search of the Internet a few years ago to find just what the hell this movie was. It only took me this long to getting around to buying it.

I plugged it into my Blu-ray player on Sunday and had a thoroughly enjoyable time watching this flick from my childhood. Most of it was new to me due to my crappy memory, and while this flick is a bit campy at times, Polanski, who not only starred in but also wrote and directed Vampire Killers, brought to the world in 1967 a nifty little piece of horror comedy that still holds up reasonable well today. Afterwards I went to look up a bit of trivia because while I knew who Roman Polanski was – he created two of my favorite horror movies: “Rosemary’s Baby” and ‘The Ninth Gate” among many other movies - I couldn’t place the actress playing Sarah. Then it finally all connected together when I found out it was Sharon Tate – the tumblers of tragedy and real life horror clicked into place.

Vampire Killers was released in 1967. Polanski and Tate would be married the following year. Then in August of 1969 Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, would become part of one of this country’s most diabolical events that made the name Manson synonymous with evil when she and four others were murdered by members of the Manson family while Polanski was away on business. He would later say that his biggest regret in life was not being home that night.

So where does real insanity come from?

Sharon Tate was an amazingly beautiful woman, not that that makes her life any more valuable than than someone who looks like Quasi Modo, but still I have to wonder what kind of person could kill another person, let alone a defenseless pregnant woman, in such a ritualistic fashion. So often in our haunted houses we represent psychopathic killers in order to add a gore filled element of terror to those that visit us. It works because nearly all of us are uneasy around those that . . . ahem, live their lives outside of social norms so to speak. When we’re not doing that – and I am right in there with yinz – we’re watching them in movies and on television. Most of the time we’re the nuts who cheer on the guy with chainsaw as he hacks up nubile young coeds. We do this yet none of us, well most of us anyway, would ever consider doing something like this in reality.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not proselytizing against what we do here. In fact I’d bet that most folks who love this stuff would have deep revulsion at seeing real photos of crime scenes and the deaths of very real people. So, I still have to wonder where that invisible line between social normality and what we call madness is drawn.

When does that quiet boy in the neighborhood decide he’d like to satisfy his curiosity about what human flesh tastes like?

I had a friend who was crazy. He and I hung around for a few years together and most of the time he was relatively normal except for the odd nervous tick. Then . . . there were those times he’d either go off his medication for his paranoia and schizophrenia or his VA psychiatrist, who he only got to see about once every six months or so (nice job taking care of our veterans there US of A), would play around with them making him think that God was telling him he was a Knight’s Templar. Basically he was good guy who had some bad experiences and even poorer genetics that blurred that line in his head I mentioned before. Fortunately he never got violent, but eventually, and I do feel a bit bad about this, I had to stop hanging around with him. His craziness was literally sucking the life out me because folks, I mostly tiptoe that line myself.

I don’t, however, have any recipe books entitled “Rachel Ray 30 Minute Meals To Make Out Of Your Neighbors” sitting on my book shelf or even a compulsion to lock and unlock my front door a prescribed number of times in order tosatisfy some unidentifiable need. Honestly though, I believe that most people, at least all the ones I have ever met – and I do mean everyone, when you get to know them actually do tiptoe that line. Really, admit it, we all have our own weirdness to contend with whether its some strange superstition about wearing the same red socks when playing baseball or a quiet and unnoticed compulsion to count the cracks on the sidewalk as we walk to and from work.

So this begs the question – how do we know when the line has been crossed. When does Crazy? turn into Crazy! I mean, other than finding the authorities knocking at your door because the little old lady across the street noticed a funny odor coming from under your house, how can we know when madness is near? Haven’t you ever wondered how many bug-eyed crazy fucks you pass on the sidewalk every day? How do you know your boss doesn’t like to dress up in woman’s underwear and cut himself in places it won’t show in order to keep the voices at bay? How many potential homicidal maniacs do we talk to at the grocery store or post office? What the heck is normal anyway, and who decided it was?

My friend never knew he was crazy when he was acting that way. Of this I am certain. So how do we know when we’ve lost it? More importantly how do we know the other guy has lost it and is aching to see what pretty colors human entrails are and if they can be used to hold up his pants? This is the shit I think of when I’m doing my job at the telephone company where I spend copious amounts of time by myself. It’s also the shit I think about when Steve from the Garage of Evil and I discussed the furries convention I posted about in yesterday’s Weekender. I mean, most of those folks are quite wonderfully normal – I think - , but there are the select few that become the critter they’ve dressed up to be and have the semen covered fursuits to prove it.

But who am I to judge. After all I spend thousands of dollars creating horrific props and a haunted house all for one or two days a year that makes me zero dollars. Many would call that crazy. And . . . I plan to be dressed in a kilt and cloak as King Oberon, High King of the Fae, and talking in a bad Scottish Brogue as I show it off this year. Still, though, I shan’t be wearing women’s underwear while I do it, nor will I, hopefully, actually believe that I AM King Oberon. It’s with all this stirring around in the craggy recesses of my brain that I offer you this list of questions so that we, together, may answer the eternal question we all ask about others and ourselves:

#1 You need coffee and cigarettes to get through the day. Crazy? or Crazy!

#2 You need a case of beer, eighteen joints, and four hits of amphetamines to get through the day. Crazy? or Crazy!

#3 While alone in your bedroom at night, sometimes you read Playboy and fantasize about the women in it being your sex slaves in order to relieve the stress of the day. Crazy? or Crazy!

#4 While alone in your bedroom at night, you habitually masturbate while looking at pictures of feet in shoe catalogs while fantasizing about the old ladies in the nursing home where you volunteer spanking you in order to relieve the stress of the day. Crazy? or Crazy!

#5 You are interested in body modification like piercings and branding. You decide to get branded by a searing hot piece of metal in the shape of a box fan because box fans remind you of a box fan your Grandmother had and you want to honor her memory in this unusual way. Crazy? or Crazy!

#6 You are interested in body modification like piercings and branding. You have more money than you need for your own good. Your identical twin brother is also interested in body modification. You decide together to have a disreputable surgeon remove your brother’s right arm and reattach it under your own. You honor no one by doing this. Your weird-ass friends think you and your brother are amazing. Normal folk who just get pierced, tattooed, or branded call you insane. Crazy? or Crazy!

#7 You develop a nervous eye tick every time the boss is around. Secretly you’re afraid he’ll find out you fudged numbers on your expense report about how much you spent on cellophane tape which you buy for scrap booking. Crazy? or Crazy!

#8 You develop a nervous eye tick every time the boss is around. Secretly you’re afraid he’ll find out you fudged numbers on your expense report about using your corporate card to buy latex body paint you slathered all over the two transsexual hookers you met in Toledo while there on business last month. Crazy? or Crazy!

#9 You have an extensive collection of human toenails. Crazy? or Crazy!

#10 You have an extensive collection of human toes. Crazy? or Crazy!

#11 Your eight cats - Miffy, Muffy, Fluffy, Mittens, Boo Boo, Snookums, Ginger, and Bob - awaken you each morning. You arise, speak to them lovingly like they are people, and feed them because they are your only friends. Crazy? or Crazy!

#12 Your eight cats - Anjelina, Lindsay, Paris, Nicole, Jessica, Beyonce, Princess Di, and Brad - awaken you each morning. You arise, dress them like celebrities, sodomize Brad while singing the theme to The Love Boat, and then feed them because they are your only friends (except maybe Brad who doesn’t really like you all that much). Crazy? or Crazy!

#13 You fantasize about the hot guy who moved in next door. You dream he’ll marry you and take you away to live in a castle and call you his princess. Crazy? or Crazy!

#14 You fantasize about the hot guy who moved in next door. You dream of flaying the skin from his body while he’s alive and begging for mercy. You want to hear him call your princess as you eat his eyeballs. Crazy? or Crazy!

#15 You take sewing classes. Then you order special furry fabric through the Internet that can’t be found at your local fabric retailer. Then you construct a fluffy chipmunk suit to wear to Furcons and call yourself Mr. Puffy Cheeks and speak only in chirps while your there. Crazy? or Crazy!

#16 You take sewing classes. Then you sneak into cemeteries at night, dig up recently deceased women, remove their skins and their naughty bits. Then you tans the skin and sew it together to make yourself a woman suit. You wear it around the house while beating a skull drum and admiring your collection of preserved vaginae. Crazy? or Ed Mother Effing Gein Crazy!

So folks, which answers did you circle? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

If you’re reading this blog then you must be a haunted house and Halloween fan. If you are then unless you live under a monster mud and PVC fake rock built to house hidden speakers and pneumatics you undoubtedly have heard of Ironstock. If not, then read on you n00b.

Never has there been a gathering of haunters filled with more sin, debauchery, and plenty of good old fashioned family fun. Despite being talked about on virtually every list ad infinitum and thus causing many a haunter to have to add an email filter just to screen out all the chatter about it, this is still the gathering that has been around since Jesus was a trick-or-treater and shows no sign of stopping now. While I personally have never made it - the thought of spending a weekend out of doors in the high heat and humidity of the Midwest makes me want to openly weep - many, many haunters do and find a wealth of knowledge in the seminars, comradely from their fellow Halloween fans, and plenty of booze at the party. Check the Ironstock site for full details.

And now for something completely different. Anthrocon is the world’s largest convention for those fascinated with anthropomorphics, which are human-like animal characters. So, do you keep a fursuit in your closet you don’t share with your neighbors? Then this is the con for you. I actually found out about this years ago when I was researching the folks from Thrillvania that make those wonderful werewolf costumes for their haunt. Yes, some of them go to Anthrocon as werewolves - how frakin’ cool is that. Anyway, you can find all the info at the Anthrocon site.

Hypericon (Jun 27-29 ‘08) Days Inn Stadium, Nashville TN. GoH: Joe R. Lansdale; Artist GoH: Alex McVey; other guests: Sherrilyn Kenyon, Glen Cook. Website: http://www.hypericon.info/.

ConRunner 2008 (Jun 28-29 ‘08) Britannia Hotel Wolverhampton, UK. A convention for UK/European convention runners from all the communities SF, Fantasy, Anime, Horror etc. Details and online membership http://www.conrunner.org.uk.

Hello,

If you are planning on computerizing your Christmas display this year then this is the best time to get your Light-O-Rama System. Get one of the ShowTime Starter Packages (big or small) and join the thousands of people that have added this exciting new dimension to their displays. As Rick in Florida wrote: “I smile every time I round the corner and see my lights dancing and welcoming me home. It’s awesome.”

SALE STARTS SATURDAY JUNE 21, 2008

Our annual sale will be June 21 thru July 5. This is our only scheduled sale for the rest of this year. Every light controller we sell will be on sale. Most accessories will also have reduced prices.

We would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate the winners of our Christmas Display Contest.

This year’s
CONTEST WINNERS

Be that as it may, I’ve gotten so many kind words from yinz (just added that - BTW it’s Pittsburghese for “you” plural) that I can now see the Barrow is an entity all its own, and since I’m all out of that special pink medicine they use to put down animals it’ll just have to limp along until I have more free time. If any of you have a Doc Brown special Delorean I can borrow or have a voodoo ritual that can add hours to the day then let me know. Until then I’ll do the Tuesday New DVD and Thursday Weekender posts and what ever else I may have time for until at least the end of August. I’ve changed the banner on the site so do stop by to see the new Raven’s Barrow philosophy.

Also, if any of you fine readers would like to guest blog then hit the contact page and fire me off an email or just reply to your email newsletter and I’ll get it. Hey, you don’t have to be good - look at the crap I write. Brag about a new prop, talk about an event, gossip about other haunters - hell, I don’t care - just keep it mostly clean and about Halloween or Horror and I’ll put it up.

Coming soon: “How to Comment on Blogs so the writer knows he’s not talking to the wall.” Until then - goodnight and sleep warm.

Patrick

Here’s a real no-frills bare-bones not a link to Amazon in site list. Enjoy.

June 24, 2008:

The Eye 3 [Lions Gate]

Hell To Pay [York]

Hell’s Ground [TLA Releasing]

The Hilarious House of Frightenstein Vol. 1 [First Run]

J-ok’el: Curse of the Weeping Woman [Maverick]

The Lodge [Monarch]

Nobody Loves Alice [Indie-Pictures]

Raising Jeffrey Dahmer [Lions Gate]

The Serial Killer Collection [Lions Gate]

The Tattooist [Sony]

When everyone has a voice then it’s all just noise. Nothing could be truer when it comes to the world of Internet blogging, and this blog is no exception. I have come to the end of it I think, due largely to the fact that I have way too many irons in the fire right now. The weakest return has to go and the Raven’s Barrow is most likely it.

Since its start back in April of 2007 I have tried virtually every way I can think of to market it, and at its peak it got traffic of several hundred visitors each day. Respectable for spending no money on advertising I suppose. Then when Google spanked the blogosphere last fall and basically took away the page ranks of thousands of blogs that were selling posts for advertisers - something it does itself with Adsense and I suspect that’s the real reason it did it - my resolve to spend hours a day blogging and marketing were dashed. Not that I actually made any money from this blog - I took two paid posts, one for Rob Zombie’s Halloween and one for Sweeney Todd - but still I did it and I also had the Do Follow plugin installed so that my links out would be crawled by search engines as real links like any other web page. Google hates that and says it unfairly adjusts web page ranks in their search - what a bunch of crap these Nazis spew. To make a long story short I doubt if my links mean anything to a website I link out to now.

The effort to produce this blog has been a labor of love for me. It forced me to keep up with every email list and horror and Halloween site out there in order to compile the best of the slurry into a readable set of posts each day. This task necessitates that I get up an hour early each day, and if I were to market it properly it would entail another two because, folks, I just don’t have 500-1000 dollars budgeted every month to pay someone else to do it. This is time that could be better spent working on my own home haunt and the myriad of real life home projects I have going. Yeah, I could use the sleep too.

So I have to ask myself why would I do this at all. I haven’t made one thin dime from all the posts - except the two I mentioned - and no one ever buys anything from the Amazon links I provide to movies and books and music. Accolades perhaps? The bulk of my comments are essentially from spammers, and I can’t remember the last time someone new joined my email list. I suspect those emails are going the way of a mass delete in users email boxes anyway like I do with the many email newsletter I subscribe to. I do have a handful of loyal readers who give me feedback, which a blogger needs in order to know if their efforts are in vain or not, and I must thank them for their kind words and devotion. However, when weighed against the time and effort that goes into this blog I find that this is just one the many irons in my life’s fire that has to be pulled out in order for the others to get the necessary energy to glow bright.

So in short I will leave this blog intact until the end of Summer. I may return to it if I find I just can’t keep away, but at this point I doubt it. Maybe if I get twenty comments on this post by then that aren’t from weight loss or real estate or barely legal porn sites.Thanks for reading and coming along the dark and twisted path with me folks. I shall be hanging about on the lists and forums and posting about my haunt’s progress at www.CastleNottingham.com. Pop on over and see the happenings there won’t you, and yes, leave me a comment.

Beastly Wishes and Horrid Hauntings,

Patrick Nottingham