protean depravity

Enjoy thriller time!

These past two weeks Berlin wasn't only blessed with icy cold and incredibly sunny weather, there were also film lovers running all around the city because it was Berlinale time again! For the 75th time this year! Although the film selection wasn't necessarily the best of all time, it was decent enough and I had the chance to finally satisfy my hunger for lots of movies from around the world despite financial concerns (the tickets get more expensive by the year and it's going off my vacation budget), frustration over sold out showings, and lots of other personal stuff I had to take care of. I'm happy that I was able to join three screenings followed by director interviews, I think two of them were even premieres, and that despite the unsettling collective cacophony of coughing and sneezing and sniffling I made it out halfway healthy. Let's take a look at the films now, here's my festival in a nut shell!

Enjoy the new short reviews!

As I previously mentioned in my introduction to this series, very few short stories from King's debut collection Night Shift haven't been adapted into other media; notably films, short films, series or even radio adaptations, and that's one of the reasons this work is a staple to have set standards for horror fiction to come. That entails setting up new tropes, pushing existing tropes into the horror domain or reinforcement thereof, creating a "hype" around them. The next short stories I'll discuss, Graveyard Shift (originally published in 1970 in Cavalier Magazine), Night Shift (Ubris Magazine 1969) and I Am the Doorway (Cavalier Magazine 1971) are all writings that boosted tropes that were both sort of hanging in the realm between science fiction and horror as well as pushed them into the mainstream horror of its time. As always, I recommend reading the short stories along.

The Fantasy Filmfest White Nights, a mini-festival which took place this past weekend, was both a lovely launch of Film February as well as a warm-up for the upcoming Berlinale (February 13-23) followed by the Final Girls Berlin Filmfest (March 5-9). So as to not exhaust myself and my finances early on, I only did two films per day, totaling four films; Above the Knee , Presence , MadS and Street Trash - I liked them all, although I have little critiques, comments and opinions I want to dump here. It is noteworthy that three out of four (horror) films I saw rely on narrative or technical methods that are experimental in nature. Now of course, I'm referring to my personal selection and not the entirety of the festival, and I may have been unconsciously drawn towards a certain kind of film, but I can assure that it wasn't apparent in their description, at least not necessarily for all of them. The thing is, it's awesome that more and more filmmakers dare breaking through the...

Hey everyone! Here's the wrap-up of the past month or so. I have been mostly mood reading, and all over the place, which I'm afraid won't change in the near future because I probably won't be able to read as much in the upcoming month, due to Berlinale. I'll do my best, though. Hope you enjoy the short reviews! P.S. A couple of notes for your calendar: Dutch horror author Thomas Olde Heuvelt will be at the Otherland Bookshop on March 31st (!), and Nine Inch Nails are touring Europe this summer and will be in Köln as well as Berlin (!!!). Very  - very - psyched about these! Wild Seed by Octavia Butler Wild Seed is the inaugural book of the "Patternist" series by Octavia Butler, which I have owned as a collection entitled Seed to Harvest for at least a decade, unread. Since I'm very serious about finishing up all the unread books I have in my home library, this is the book/collection I'm starting in the year 2025. I'm secretly proud of wh...

In almost every horror anthology there's one recurring name that piques my attention because the stories under that name almost always land among my highlights: Joe R. Lansdale. I also keep on hearing how great he is, even more so since I started working at a crime and mystery bookshop, because Lansdale shines both in horror and crime fiction. So, you know how you have an endless back list of authors' names you want to read some day? Well, Lansdale was one of those names perpetually in the back of my head. I even have his The Best of Joe R. Lansdale sitting on my shelf, because you know me, I'll buy it and let it sit there for years before finally reading a book and then get frustrated because I had this gem in my home all these years.

Discussing Jerusalem's Lot , we just have to start at the root, and in many horror works, especially of that time, whether the writer knows it or not, whether the writer likes it or not, that root is H.P. Lovecraft. Not that King tries to hide anything: the setting and background, a mansion inherited by a cousin; the main character, a single young man, the only and last descendant of an old family line with a dark secret; the "symptom", noises from inside the walls of the mansion, mistaken (or not) for rats running around... All these are carbon copies of Rats in the Walls by good old HP. There are still twists - King decides to introduce vampires into the story, and gives it a supernatural touch, while Old Howard's dirty secret is based off human depravity and is much more terrifying, although there's arguably supernatural forces at work here too.