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Read to Survive! Monster Librarian’s Horror Movie Survival Guide

 

 Read To Survive! Monster Librarian’s Horror Movie Survival Guide.

 

As editor of Monster Librarian, I was recently challenged to come up with a list of things I’d    want to take with me if I was suddenly dropped into a horror movie. The only restriction      was that the items would have to fit in a crate. I’m a reader, and a trained librarian, so my   first instinct is to suggest The The Horror Movie Survival Guide Movie Survival Guide, because that would have all kinds of great strategies for making it through (we have a similar list, The Shocklines Horror Movie Survival Guide, on our site). However, chances are that while I consulted the book, I’d probably be the #1 victim for taking my eyes off my surroundings. Fortunately, I have a fabulous and knowledgeable group of reviewers, and they’ve seen LOTS of horror movies. If I had to go, I’d want to take them with me, and I’m sure they wouldn’t leave me behind so they could escape. Right, guys?

 

Unfortunately, I can’t fit them in a crate. So I asked them what they would take, if it happened to them. They’re a very practical group. After wishful thoughts of distracting the creature(s) by sending members of Congress, or sending John Constantine instead, there was majority agreement that if you couldn’t get reception on your fully charged cell phone to call for rescue, it would be great to have a full canteen of water, so you don’t dehydrate, and plenty of energy bars, to keep you fueled with more than adrenaline. Also, comfortable running shoes are essential, (since chances are you’ll be doing a lot of running). There was debate over whether it’s better to take a working flashlight, a lighter, or candles with waterproof matches (in case the batteries in the flashlight die, after you’ve been running for your life for days on end), but I think it makes sense to take them all. Candle flames don’t shed much light, but you can’t make a fire with a flashlight, and a lighter won’t work if it gets soaked. As one reviewer noted, with good shoes and plenty of light, you’re much less likely to trip and fall (like everyone does). And there are so many reasons you might need to set a fire. Did I say set a fire? I meant light a fire.

Ash with his chainsaw and boomstick.
Found at fridaythe13th.wikia.com

 

And, of course, as one reviewer put it, “you’ve got to have weapons”. Popular suggestions included a machete, a knife, a sword, a chainsaw (“handy for cutting through things that go bump in the night”, according to another reviewer) an automatic weapon with extra ammo, and a “boomstick”, (the double-barreled shotgun Ash uses in Army of Darkness). I’d add a stake to that list, as well, since sometimes only wood will do, and a silver bullet for that boomstick, just in case you have to deal with a conventional werewolf.

 

While some of these might not fit in the crate, one reviewer suggested that you could always wear them to save room for other things that would. It was also mentioned that night vision goggles would be very helpful to weapon wielders in the dark. It’s true, you can’t really hold a flashlight or candle while flailing around with a chainsaw, and you want to make every bullet count. While I wouldn’t necessarily consider it the most effective of weapons, I liked the suggestion of a Swiss Army knife—it may have a tiny blade in comparison to some of the previously named weapons, but it does have one, and its many other tools could come in handy. It’s small, so it won’t take up much room, and it can be carried in your pocket.

It also might be the only thing listed here that I wouldn’t actually hurt myself with.

Weapons are not my thing, and in a horror movie, Murphy’s Law is multiplied times a dozen, at least.

 

I should note here that this challenge was issued to us by Man Crates, a company that ships gift sets in crates that must be opened using a crowbar. The crowbar is included, so assuming that our crate is coming from her, we’d have one of those to arm ourselves with as well. A crowbar could be quite useful in times of peril.

 

If you’re in the kind of movie where the monster is impervious to mere weapons (although it’s hard for me to imagine anything being unaffected by a chainsaw), you’ll want a selection of religious or occult items that you can easily keep on you while you’re on the go. A cross might ward off evil, holy water can be an effective deterrent (you could keep it loaded in a water pistol in order to get your creature from a distance), salt can be used to contain demons, and glow-in-the-dark chalk could be used to draw a circle. Rope has many uses, including restraining victims of possession.  However, if you’re feeling loaded down by now, you could take one reviewer’s advice and “forget those religious trinkets, as you can get some off the dead”!

 

Need access to resources? Problem solved.
Found at Univ. of Arizona Harry Potter Alliance site.

Finally, I know it’s an unusual suggestion, but as a librarian, it’s obvious to me: I suggest a library card, because you never know when you’re going to need obscure reference material on religion or the occult, and as any fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Harry Potter can tell you, you can always find the necessary occult knowledge in the library’s Restricted Section. Our motto here is “Read to Survive”, and we take that very seriously.

 

Although this challenge came from Man Crates, Monster Librarian is not endorsing or advertising for them.  And, while I recognize the problematic nature of being gifted with ugly neckties, it’s not just men who get presents they don’t want and won’t use. Everyone enjoys getting a present that’s fun to open and suits their interests (I think the entertainment value of opening your present with a crowbar could be pretty awesome regardless of sex) so why limit your audience?

Of course, if you aren’t stuck in a horror movie, and a crate full of the items we listed above, or similar ones, came as a gift, there are a few practical problems with the contents. Especially if you have little kids. When the horror lover in your life opens up his survival kit to find a machete and a crossbow (and yes, I speak from personal experience here) what exactly are you supposed to do with the weaponry?

 

At Monster Librarian, we don’t accept paid advertising. We just want to provide you with honest reviews and resources about the horror genre, and we like to have fun. I have to offer Man Crates a great big thanks for what has turned out to be, for us, an entertaining Halloween treat.

 

–Contributors:  Aaron Fletcher, Benjamin Franz, Kirsten Kowaleweski, Jennifer Lawrence, Michele Lee, Lucy Lockley, Patricia Mathews, David Simms, Sheila Shedd, Colleen Wanglund, and Wendy Zazo-Phillips

 

 

 

 

Monster Movie Month: Werewolves, Wolf Men and Lycans, Oh My! Guest Post by Gregory Lamberson

Gregory Lamberson is both a filmmaker and author working in the horror genre. As a filmmaker he’s best known for the cult favorite Slime City and its sequel Slime City Massacre. In addition, he’s the author of the nonfiction filmmaking book Cheap Scares!: Low Budget Horror Filmmakers Share Their Secrets (I’m reading this right now, and his writing really shines). Gregory is also the author of many horror fiction titles reviewed at MonsterLibrarian.com, including Johnny Gruesome (reviewed here); the occult series The Jake Helman Files (which includes Personal Demons (reviewed here), Desperate Souls (reviewed here), and Cosmic Forces (reviewed here); and, most recently, the werewolf series The Frenzy Cycle. The first book in the series is The Frenzy Way (reviewed here); the second book, The Frenzy War (reviewed here),was just released this June.

Because of his experience in both filmmaking and fiction in the horror genre, and his contributions to werewolf fiction, we asked Gregory if he’d share a little about werewolf movies and how they’ve influenced him. You can see what he has to say about werewolf movies in his guest post below. Once you’re done, scroll down to check out our suggested links!

 

 

Werewolves, Wolf Men and Lycans – Oh, My!

By Gregory Lamberson

 

If Rodney Dangerfeld was alive today, and he was infected with lycanthropy, his catch phrase would still be “I don’t get no respect.”  Werewolves are the shaggy dogs of horror, be it literature or cinema.  Some people complain about vampires, others wish zombies would go away, and both camps seem to despise werewolves.  Not me, I love them, which should come as no surprise since I’ve completed two books in my Frenzy Wolves Cycle, The Frenzy Way and The Frenzy War.  But this blog isn’t about my work, it’s about my influences: the moon howlers that have inspired me.  There are readers and moviegoers out there who, like me, know that when treated properly, werewolves kick butt…and chew it…and spit it out.  It’s their ferocity that makes them more visceral than those talky vampires and slow, shuffling zombies.

 

I probably didn’t know what a were-creature was until my mother bought me the Aurora Wolf Man monster model kit.  To me, he didn’t look like much: sort of a dirty, hillbilly old man.  Because of the syndication packages broadcast on my local TV stations in those days before cable, VHS and DVD, I grew up on Hammer films rather than the Universal classics, but I studied film history through books and became well aware of Larry Talbot; and before The Wolf Man, The Werewolf of London.  As a voracious reader, I soon discovered that wolf men/werewolves took their inspiration not from a literary classic as so many of the other movie monsters did, but that much of the lore I took as written in stone had actually been created by screenwriter Curt Siodmak for The Wolf Man; that man was a creative genius.

 

The wolf men I grew up with were TV movie creations, usually stunt men filmed in low light to prevent their rubber masks from showing.  In Moon of the Wolf, David Jansen battled a “loup garou” in Louisiana; Robert Foxworth wore a Hawaiian shirt for his transformations in Death Moon; and Peter Graves proved that Clint Walker was just playing “The Most Dangerous Game” in Scream of the Wolf.  Even Carl Kolchak got into the “Is that a werewolf?  It’s too dark to tell!” game in an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  During this same period, Famous Monsters of Filmland and The Monster Times made me aware of the films The Werewolf of Washington and The Boy Who Cried Werewolf; I believe this was the beginning of pop culture’s swing toward preferring “werewolf” as the correct beastly term, and Marvel’s Werewolf by Night comic sealed the deal: The Wolf Man was old hat.

 

For lycanthropy fans, the seventies ended on a high note with the publication of three  influential werewolf novels: The Howling, by Gary Brandner; The Wolfen, by Whitley Strieber; and what remains the greatest werewolf novel, The Nightwalker, by Thomas Tessier.  At the time, Brandner’s novel seemed like a less ambitious, less literary attempt to replicate King’s Salem’s Lot, substituting werewolves for vampires; it seemed ideally suited to be another TV movie of the week.  In retrospect, it’s an admirable novel, tight and to the point.  The Wolfen, about two unbelievable cops battling a small pack of super intelligent wolves, never really impressed me, but it was a bestseller.  The Nightwalker, on the other hand, is a classic, and it’s easy to imagine John Landis reading it and thinking, “This is good, but it’s too damned serious!”  It would still make a hell of a movie…

 

I view the 1980s as the Golden Age of werewolf entertainment.  The movie adaptation of The Howling, written by John Sayles and directed by Joe Dante, made a lot of surface changes to the novel but retained much more material than people seem to remember; it also introduced the world to the first truly astounding man-into-werewolf transformation sequence, courtesy of Rob Bottin.  That scene has yet to be topped, although I think the film’s spoofy moments, which seemed fresh at the time, have dated badly.  Although written first, Landis’s An American Werewolf in London – despite a weak third act – was filmed and released after The Howling, but it is perhaps the classic werewolf film–filled to the brim with great comedy and horror, and astonishing werewolf effects by Rick Baker (apparently Bottin apprenticed under Baker, and Baker resented that his former pupil got to use his techniques on a werewolf film before he did).  Michael Wadleigh’s adaptation of Wolfen is superior to its source novel, and the film is a different breed entirely from its fellows in this period: a smart, sophisticated, and serious approach to the subject matter, with very few special effects.

 

The first werewolf boom was upon us, spawning such films as Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, and the less poetic Silver Bullet, based on Stephen King’s novella Cycle of the Werewolf. The advent of VHS in the 80s unleashed an onslaught of sequels to The Howling, which enabled Sybil Danning, Reb Brown and even Christopher Lee to collect paychecks.  In 1987 I wrote a screenplay called The Greenwich Village Monster, which later evolved into The Frenzy Way.  I briefly re-titled the script Werewolf, then abandoned that moniker when Fox TV, in its infancy, launched a weekly TV series with the same name, featuring man-in-suit werewolves created by Rick Baker.  The show had a decent two hour pilot, but the weekly version’s half hour format didn’t allow the writers to develop much…anything.  Michael J. Fox delivered laughs in Teen Wolf, which begat a sequel without him, and in The Monster Squad, Fred Dekker gave us the most iconic lupine reference in cinema since Curt Siodmak wrote, “Even a man who is pure of heart…” when one of his protagonists discovered, “Wolf Man’s got nards!”  In the world of comics, Alan Moore wrote a daring issue of Swamp Thing which posed that lycanthropy was the result of a woman’s menstrual cycle and oppression.

 

The 90s were an unremarkable decade for howlers, populated by more straight to video Howling sequels and the theatrical An American Werewolf in Paris, which was a creative and box office failure.  The best excursion during this decade was the novel Animals written by John Skipp and Craig Spector (I haven’t seen the recent film adaptation, but I’ve not heard good things about it).

 

The 21st century has been kinder to the beast, producing at least three films which could become regarded as classics in time: the feminist Ginger Snaps; the masculine Dog Soldiers, and the kinetic Brotherhood of the Wolf.  Ginger Snaps, which owes a great deal thematically to the aforementioned Alan Moore Swamp Thing tale, gave birth to two sequels, both somewhat interesting but neither on par with the original.

 

When I sold my second novel, Johnny Gruesome, the word in publishing and movie circles was that werewolves were going to be “the next big thing” – how fortunate for me that I was in the process of turning The Greenwich Village Monster into The Frenzy Way! Unfortunately, the predicted boom hasn’t come to be.  Four Underworld films, several seasons of True Blood, the entire Twilight franchise, and seven Harry Potter adventures (or eight, depending on whether you count the novels or the movies) have presented werewolves to larger audiences, but in supporting roles.  Skinwalkers came and went, and squandered a good title.  Joe Johnston directed a big budget remake of The Wolfman.  I haven’t seen the film, but it did well enough for Universal to develop a straight to DVD sequel.  Tim Burton’s recent Dark Shadows revealed a werewolf almost as an afterthought, to juice up an enjoyably haphazard climax.

 

I’ve pledged to avoid werewolf fiction until I’ve completed The Frenzy Wolves Cycle, which will hopefully run another two or three books, but I’m aware they’re out there.  I did read Shara, an entry in Steven Wedel’s The Werewolf Saga, and I enjoyed Jeff Strand’s Wolf Hunt until a plot point similar to one in The Frenzy War forced me to put it down.  I read the first book in W.D. Gagliani’s series about a werewolf cop, and Christopher Fulbright’s Of Wolf and Man is on my list of titles to read far down the road.  So there are plenty of werewolf books out there to read if you’re a fan, but none of them have become bestsellers.  Of course, Anne Rice could change all of that with The Wolf Gift. . .

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If you’d like to learn a little more about some of the movies mentioned above, you can check out Werewolf-Movies.com, a database of information about werewolf movies. It’s no longer being updated, but it’s still a great resource! The site also has an article listing the “The Wolfman Returneth: Essential Werewolf Movies”. It is one person’s opinion, of course, but if you’re trying to narrow the choices down, you might want to take a look.

In the past, July has been Werewolf Month at MonsterLibrarian.com, so check out our page on werewolves and shapeshifters for all kinds of reviews and lists of great (and not so great) werewolf fiction. Just scroll down the page, and you’ll find plenty of interesting material!

 

Contest: Win a Werewolf!

Okay, not an actual werewolf. But in honor of Werewolf Month, HalloweenCostumes.com has offered to give away two Full Moon Werewolf Costumes, which include a shirt with attached fur and a Motion Mask- the mouth and lips move when you do, from their collection of werewolf costumes. Here’s the costume description:

Howl at the moon all night long in this full moon werewolf costume! The scary costume includes a full, realistic werewolf mask. The mask is covered in faux grey fur and is made from polyester. It has a plastic interior while the exterior is covered in a rubber foam like material. The mask’s jaw moves when you move your mouth. If the mask is too large, foam blocks are included to enclose the gaps and create movement. An adjustable velcro strap on the interior secures the mask in place and slits for the eyes provide unrestricted vision. The white, black and green flannel shirt is made from polyester and has shredded edges for a worn appearance. Padding fills the shoulders for a full look and fur emerges from the chest, torso and sleeves to complete your transformation. Bring this full-moon legend to life in this great costume!

Words don’t do it justice though- even if you aren’t interested in owning a werewolf costume, you should still go watch the video– it mesmerized my five year old.

So… The contest. Tell us what your favorite werewolf moment is, in fiction, television, movies, or video games. Post below and I’ll pick winners randomly at the end of July.

Oh, I should add that this contest is open only to US residents, and, of course, that we are not being compensated in any way for holding it. We just like werewolves.