Month: December 2020

This was a month in which I took a step back from the Internet and focused on my larger projects. Plus the usual Christmassy stuff, too – or at least as much as “usual Christmassy stuff” could ever apply to 2020. I hope to have an update on how my projects are coming along soon; but for now, I’ll be brief and wish everyone a new year that improves on its predecessor.

Articles of mine published elsewhere this month:

• Remembering Charlee Jacob: Season of the Witch
• Amazing Histories, December 1928: Venusian or Venerian?
• Werewolf Wednesdays: The Maltese Bippy, Blood of Dracula’s Castle, The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals
• Aztec Mummy: The Curse of the Aztec Mummy, The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy

Article topics for January and beyond:

Were this an ordinary year, I would be marking its close with a fond look back at what came before. Alas, this was not an ordinary year, so I’ll keep things brief.

“What came before” has already been ably handled by other bloggers. For one, we have the annual round-up of “year’s best horror films” posts, which are handy if you’d like to catch up on titles you missed.Vulture, Rotten Tomatoes, Den of Geek and Rolling Stone (to name a few) have all chipped in. If you would like a list highlighting lesser-known films, then perhaps you might enjoy Killer Horror Critic’s feature on the 20 best horror films from 2020 that you might have missed or Bloody Disgusting’s take on the 10 best international horror films of 2020. Articles on the year’s top horror novels are a harder to come by, although The Lineup has one.

Continue reading “December 2020: A Month in Horror”

My weekly Killer Horror Critic column on werewolf films has reached one of the oddest lycanthropes in genre history: the Jackalman, who debuted in an obscure number called The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals...

Past instalments:

• Wolfblood (1925)
• Werewolf of London (1935)
• The Wolf Man (1941)
• The Mad Monster (1942)
• The Undying Monster (1942)
• Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
• Return of the Vampire (1943)
• Cry of the Werewolf (1944)
• House of Frankenstein (1944)
• House of Dracula (1945)
• She-Wolf of London (1946)
• Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
• The Werewolf (1956)
• I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)
• Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957)
• How to Make a Monster (1958)
• The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
• Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (1961)
• House on Bare Mountain (1962)
• Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964)
• Hercules, Prisoner of Evil (1964)
• The Blue Demon (1965)
• Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965)
• Mark of the Wolf Man (1968)
• The Maltese Bippy (1969)
• Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1969)

The penultimate post in my retrospective of Charlee Jacob’s extreme horror fiction is now live at WWAC:

Season of the Witch was nearly the last Charlee Jacob novel to be published (only one more, Containment, was to follow), yet it was the first that she wrote. She penned it in the ’80s, after which it remained a “trunk novel” until 2016. Jacob evidently revised the manuscript to some extent prior to its publication, as shown by its references to such post-eighties cultural phenomena as Internet porn, Scream, and the Black Eyed Peas, but it nonetheless has the feel of a throwback about it. In many ways Season of the Witch is closer to Jacob’s 1997 debut novel This Symbiotic Fascination than to anything she published since then.

Read on…

In Killer Horror Critic’s last Werewolf Wednesday column before Christmas, I’m looking at the vampire-werewolf-walrus mash-up Blood of Dracula’s Castle…

Past instalments:

• Wolfblood (1925)
• Werewolf of London (1935)
• The Wolf Man (1941)
• The Mad Monster (1942)
• The Undying Monster (1942)
• Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
• Return of the Vampire (1943)
• Cry of the Werewolf (1944)
• House of Frankenstein (1944)
• House of Dracula (1945)
• She-Wolf of London (1946)
• Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
• The Werewolf (1956)
• I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)
• Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957)
• How to Make a Monster (1958)
• The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
• Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (1961)
• House on Bare Mountain (1962)
• Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964)
• Hercules, Prisoner of Evil (1964)
• The Blue Demon (1965)
• Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965)
• Mark of the Wolf Man (1968)
• The Maltese Bippy (1969)

It’s become an annual tradition for me. I did it in 2018, I did it in 2019, and now I’m doing the same for 2020: a month-by-month review of the creative images which, for one reason or another, sparked outrage over the course of the year. Offensive? Inoffensive? I have my opinions, but once again, you’ll be free to judge for yourself (and as it should go without saying, some of these are NSFW)…

January: Flying the Flag for Wuhan

Near the start of this year the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten (of Mohammed-with-a-bomb-on-his-bonce fame) ran a cartoon by Niels Bo Bojeson in which the coronavirus replaced the yellow stars of the Chinese flag. The Chinese Embassy in Copenhagen called upon the paper to apologise on the grounds that the cartoon lacked “sympathy and empathy” for the 81 people in China who had lost their lives to the virus at that point. Some of the paper’s critics on social media posted parodies of the Danish flag lampooning, amongst other things, the country’s suicide rate and its surrender in World War II.

Continue reading “2020: A Year in (Offensive) Pictures”