In China, many people believe that the dead visit their loved ones, especially shortly after death. Sometimes when they do, they hurt the living. They don’t mean to. But dying is a big shock, and the minds of new ghosts are often cloudy and damaged. Even those new ghosts who retain their wits can accidentally hurt you.
In my family, for example, the ghost of my yeye [grandfather] would sometimes visit us. We could always tell who he had come to see because that person would get violently nauseous, and their stomach would hurt in a very particular way. This, my grandmother said, was a result of ghosts being made mostly of yin energy, while human beings were made mostly of yang energy.

Whenever we would suspect my grandfather might be visiting, we would do “the chopstick test” to make sure. This is where you stand three chopsticks up in a bowl of water, while calling out the name of a spirit that you suspect is in the room. If they are in the room, after you remove your hands from the chopsticks, they will remain standing. I saw this happen several times. It was very unsettling. The following story is even more so. —YIY



When I was three and a half, my yeye drank pesticide and killed himself. To understand why, you first have to know this: from the day I was born, Yeye loved me dearly. He fell in love with me, he said, as soon as he saw my tiny face. And on that very day, he asked my parents to move in so that he could watch me while they worked.

In China, it is common for one grandparent or another, or even an aunt or an uncle, to move in with new parents to help look after children. But my grandfather had a characteristic that worried my parents. He was addicted to liquor and drank it every day. A lot of it. Because of this, my father denied Yeye’s request.

Yeye’s feelings were hurt but not enough to quit drinking. Not at first. After all, my dad still let me stay with him and my grandmother during the Lunar New Year and Autumn Festival holidays. So for a while, he was able to have liquor and me both.

However, my parents eventually started to worry about this unsupervised time too. And my dad picked me up from these visits earlier and earlier.

When Yeye noticed that our time together was dwindling, he devised a strategy to avoid my father. As soon as he saw my father’s car, he would hoist me on his back and race up the mountainside behind his house to hide and play until my dad gave up looking for us.

But Yeye knew his trick would not last forever. After all, my dad could just refuse to drop me off. So finally Yeye did it. He went to my parents and solemnly promised not to drink liquor anymore.

At first, my parents didn’t believe him. But when he didn’t touch a drop for several weeks, they talked. Afterwards, my father called Yeye and told him that he could move in for a year and watch over me. And he could begin this new role on his birthday. That would be their present to him.

Yeye’s eyes filled with tears at the news. He was so full of excitement that it was very hard for him to wait until his birthday. Nevertheless, he managed to be patient until the day arrived.

But then the whole plan fell apart.

It happened like this:

My third uncle, who ran a bus business, was supposed to drive the couple of hours to my yeye’s village and then get him to our apartment in time for Yeye’s birthday celebration and first night as my caretaker.

That was the plan.

But my uncle started in a game of cards with friends early that morning and got lost in that. By the time he remembered Yeye, it was too late.

Today, of course, everyone would be constantly calling everybody else to check on everything.

But this all happened before there were cell phones. True, we were one of the few families with a landline. But we could only afford one. And my dad kept it in his office, which was located in another apartment in our building.

That’s why when it started getting so late that something was obviously wrong, my dad decided to walk to my uncle’s. He thought that maybe my uncle had misunderstood the plan and driven Yeye to his place to wait on us. Just before my dad got out of the building, the phone in his office began ringing—over and over—and would not stop. When he answered it, he heard my grandmother’s voice.

“Your father’s gone,” she said.

* * *
My yeye waited for my uncle a long time.

He waited until he became convinced that no one was coming and that my dad had changed his mind.

Sad to lose my dad’s trust again, and his chance to be with me, Yeye drank a glass of alcohol. Then another—all the while crying his heart out.

When the alcohol didn’t dull the pain, he drank a bottle of pesticide.

My grandmother watched him drink the pesticide—but she thought he was just drinking more alcohol. Even when she went out a little later to go shopping and came across him completely still on a sofa, she just thought he had fallen asleep. But then she came back home and tried to shake him awake.

* * *

The first seven days after Yeye died were filled with funeral preparations. My mom had to use up all her sick days from work to get everything done. My dad was very busy with the preparations too. So neither of them had time to look after me. That’s why on one of these days, they sent me to a daycare.

I seemed okay when my father dropped me off that morning. But when he came to pick me up later, he couldn’t wake me. Not completely. I’d mumble and stir but immediately drowse off again.

Worried, he asked the daycare attendant how long I had been sleeping.

“Most of the afternoon,” she said. “She was asleep during snack time and also when her grandfather visited.”

The attendant told my father that she was so concerned by my deep sleeping that she asked the daycare nurse to take a look at me. The nurse said that I was probably just catching a cold, and my body was fighting it.

The attendant’s words didn’t make my father feel better. Not only did he still find my deep sleeping strange, but the comment about my grandfather visiting unsettled him. Since his father was now dead, this grandfather had to be my mother’s dad. But neither my dad nor my mom had mentioned to anyone that they were going to drop me off at the daycare. So how did my mom’s father know I was there? And why had he even visited?

Confused, my dad asked the attendant what my grandfather looked like.

She gave him a long careful description that included the wearing of a unique black fedora.

My dad was so shocked he couldn’t breathe. She had described his dead father, my yeye, perfectly.

My dad rushed me home, and he and my mom tried everything to wake me.

Pushing pressure points.

Slapping my feet.

Pricking my middle fingertips with an acupuncture needle.

Nothing worked.

Suspecting my problem was related to the daycare visit by my yeye’s ghost, he and my mother carried me to a psychic.

The psychic confirmed their worst fears. “Yes,” she told them. “You’re correct. Your daughter’s problem is her grandfather. He’s attached himself to her. He loves her very much and doesn’t mean harm. Nevertheless, the attachment is draining your daughter’s strength.”

Frightened, my parents begged for the psychic’s help. She agreed but said that she couldn’t help until the next morning. That’s when the sun was powerful enough to give her the yang energy she needed to fight the ghost.

When morning came, the psychic set up a square table in our living room. She sat in front of it, meditating and chanting, while my father—per her directions—walked around our yard, holding a black umbrella and shouting my name. After they’d done a bit of this, the psychic took a chicken out of a wooden carrier, cut its head off, and used the bloody neck stump to paint magical symbols on a stack of yellow papers. These she pasted all over the walls. When she finished with the last one, I woke up.

The unhealthy bond between my yeye’s ghost and me was broken, the psychic explained. But I would still be vulnerable to ghostly influences for a long time. So the paper talismans should stay on our walls.

The talismans stayed up until I turned eight.

* * *

Some people question whether the psychic and her rituals really helped. Maybe I would have woken up anyway, they say.

Maybe.

But I’m convinced that they worked. This is because of what I remembered when I awoke.

After Yeye walked into the daycare that day, he led my spirit away from my sleeping body to a Western-style carnival. (It’s important to say here that all of this was very real and not like a dream. To this day, for example, I can still recall how things felt, tasted, and smelled at the carnival.)

The carnival surprised me. I had never seen it before in our town. And, at this time of my life, I had never even been to a carnival or encountered one on TV. This was 1993. Just like phones, televisions were still rare and so were Western-style carnivals.

Nevertheless, I had a really good time there.

I ate a big strawberry candy, rode on a Ferris wheel, then in a bumper car, and finally on a giant car-shaped ride that swung in the air.

But there was one bad thing. Or at least strange.

The weather.

Ever since Yeye and I left the daycare, the sky looked wrong. It was an odd, ashy gray—stained with purple. A very scary kind of color, as if a big storm was about to break.

It didn’t rain though. So we kept playing and eating delicious food.

But even carnival fun can last too long. And after what felt like two days passed, I was so exhausted that I could barely stand.

When I complained to Yeye, he hoisted me on his back and took a couple of steps forward.

Suddenly, we were no longer walking on the carnival grounds but on the mountain road next to his and my grandmother’s house. Trees lay to the sides of the road. Icicles hung from several. Yeye and I took turns snatching them off the branches and eating them like popsicles (people in the mountains did this all the time when I was a kid).

I had just about finished one of these tree-sicles when abruptly I found myself back at my parent’s place, fully awake, my opened eyes taking in my parents, the psychic, and the talismans all over our walls.

This is how I know the rituals really helped.

* * *

After I woke up that day, I rarely saw my yeye—just a dream every year or so. Three dreams were especially vivid. I think these might have been actual visits.

In one, Yeye was digging a hole in the ground—a deep one as tall as a person. When he looked up from his work and saw me, he handed me some candies.

“Why are you digging?” I asked him.

He told me the hole was part of a highway and that he was part of a work crew. He could have chosen other kinds of work, but the highway construction project was the closest to me. He intended to stay on it another twenty years. That way, he said, he could watch out for me.

The second dream occurred when I was grown up and just starting college in another city—far from where I and Yeye had once been so close.

In it, I was walking across a field when I suddenly came across Yeye sitting on a stone seat outside a yard with super high walls.

“What are you doing here outside the wall?” I said.

Yeye told me that someone had cut down the shade tree near his house and he was sitting under the wall to get some shade.

The next day I called my mom and told her about the dream. She said it was just a random dream and not to be so serious about it. But then a few days later, she called me back.

“Your dream meant something,” she said. It turned out that my fourth aunt’s husband had cut down the tree in front of Yeye’s grave.

The most recent dream happened in 2015. It was different from the others. While I could hear Yeye’s voice, I couldn’t see him. It was like we were standing in a large dark room.

“I have to leave you, little one,” he said. “It’s time for us to let each other go. You have to look out for yourself now. Don’t fight this. It is the right thing.”

I promised him I would do my best to let go. Since then I have not dreamed of him once.

My yeye really, truly, so deeply loved me. Even more than my dad. No matter his faults, he constantly showed me this.

If I wanted candy, he would buy a big box and then another big box.

If I wanted to eat watermelon, he would get one of those big, twenty-five-pound ones.

If I wanted clothes, he would buy me three outfits and let me switch from one to the other—all on the same day.

Sometimes, his generosity drove my dad crazy. He would yell at me for asking Yeye for so many things. At those times, Yeye would jokingly chase my dad out into the street and threaten to beat him with a stick for scolding me.

Once, a chicken that Yeye raised scratched me. The next thing I knew the chicken was cooked into a soup for me. He never raised any more chickens in his yard after that. My dad sometimes says that if Yeye were still alive, I would have turned out to be a spoiled, rotten girl. I’m not certain that is true.
​
Anyway, it’s approaching midnight now. I miss my yeye. That’s all I wanted to say.

In this collection, award-winning writers and translators Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum share paranormal and glitch in the matrix tales from across present-day China. Confided by eyewitnesses, these true stories uncannily echo Western encounters with chilling dimensions of reality and supernatural entities. At the same time, they thrillingly immerse the reader in everyday Chinese life and occult beliefs.

Zhiguai: Chinese True Tales of the Paranormal and Glitches in the Matrix includes such accounts as:
*The reincarnation of a teenager whose fate eerily mimics his predecessor’s
*A girl who dies in the womb but nevertheless continues to communicate with her twin
*Terrifying shifts into demonic parallel universes
*Walls desperately painted with blood to save a family from tragedy
*Huge populations that disappear into thin air
*The revenge-seeking ghosts of murdered cats
*Weird temporal shifts
*Occult murders
From the terrifying to the uncanny, this collection will not only change your understanding of China but of reality itself.

​Comic-books are a medium, not a genre; they can tell any story and suit any palate. You want horror? I've got bottles of the stuff. Welcome to 'Splashes of Darkness.' 

​WesterNoir gets its kick from that bottle of tequila tucked away yonder; the one the barman's been experimentin' with. Seems he's been keep the worms back from the usual batches and dropping 'em into it, month by month. Once in a while some damned fool demands a shot of it, neat, but your barman ain't the killin' kind. If you're takin' it, you're chasin' it with a little sugar. A body can only swallow so much stark reality. Best y'all sit down to drink this.
​
The clue’s in the title, but I’ll lay it out plain for you – WesterNoir is a magnificent mongrel. The creative team behind it have clearly spent some time sneaking around the genre graveyard, digging up the choicest bits and pieces for their grand project – a monster-hunting mash-up set in the wilds of the American West, portrayed with the *monochromatic starkness and darkness of the bitterest noir. Each issue is a tight little number, no more than 35 pages, but every one packs a punch.

​Say hello to Josiah Black. T’ain’t his real name of course, but it’ll do for now. He’s running from a long history of blood and sorrow. Trouble is, he spends so much time looking over his shoulder, he has no idea what he’s headed towards. When the woman with the dead eyes hires him to hunt down the fella who killed her family, he learns there are deadlier things than men abroad in those dusty frontier days. Ghouls, vampires, were-creatures – and who knows what else – hiding amongst ordinary people. Wolves in sheep’s clothing, stalking the innocent and devouring the vulnerable. It might be there’s no such thing as redemption, but if Black’s guns can take down a few of these monsters, save some folk that might have otherwise perished, well, at least he can begin to settle accounts.
​
AccentUK are an independent comics publisher who place a great deal of value on intelligent stories told from unusual perspectives. Take the time to imbibe a few and you’ll be as blown away as I was. It seems to me their book covers have done them little justice in the past, but the WesterNoir series bucks that trend with their bold headers and dramatic imagery. The books are eye-catching, exciting and intriguing artefacts that demand to be picked up. You can practically smell the pulp oozing from them; and little visual touches like creases, peels and scratches complete the illusion of battered books, long-treasured. These wear-marks may be fake, but the love poured into the tales is true enough. 

​Dave West writes with real style. Each volume tells a complete tale, expands the world and fills in touches of back-story too. The dialogue is peachy; constantly developing character and plot while showcasing a fine ear for accent. Old-fashioned American dialogue may be formal but it’s chock full of subtlety, and West writes with considerable fluency. His greatest success is in Black’s narrative voice running throughout the stories. The cynical voice-over has long been a staple of film noir, commenting upon both the action and the dialogue to undercut (or throw dramatic new light on) what is happening. It lends a certain tone to a story, and depth to a character that could otherwise appear callous or cold.

​Gary Crutchley does a similarly grand job bringing the world of WesterNoir to life with his astonishing inks. Facial features are expertly picked out, costume and scenery given recognisable characteristics and atmosphere without ever feeling overworked – which is a wonderful trick if you can manage it. This lush economy can be seen throughout the books in various forms, from both sides of the creative team and, for me, it defines the style of the book. 

​The general sparseness of background detail chimes with the Western sensibility (as do the occasionally ornate splashes of detail, when appropriate), while the bold shadows and harsh lines occasionally evoke the nightmare noir of [Sin City]. He makes use of a couple of watery grey shades to bring out the intermediate depth, but little more than that is required. Sepia tones might have been more appropriate for this world, and a different colour palette would have been nice for those times we look through Black’s special glasses, but I guess an indie budget only stretches so far. ​

​The layouts are used to control the narrative pace as much as its direction, and this is so finely gauged that you only realise the sheer variety of panel sizes, density and dimensions when you consciously look for it. These are people who know how to grab you and give you a great ride. There are certain images that you do kind of expect; shots and angles that form part of the visual vocabulary of Westerns and film noir. I was exceptionally pleased to see so many of them worked in without once jolting me out of the story.

WesterNoir may be a patchwork creature, but the needlework is very fine indeed. I urge you to seek it out.

* Note: This review was originally written for Geek Syndicate. At the time, WesterNoir only existed as 4 black and white issues, with more on the way. Since then, the creative team have revisited these issues to update them in full colour. They’ve also produced several more issues with many more to come. I’ll be returning to the world of WesterNoir in the not-too-distant future to see how the colouring adds to their creation and find out just what in tarnation has happened to our black-hatted hero in the meantime.

The late nineties/early 2000s were a fantastic time to be a fan of horror on Britiish Television; from Channel 4’s gritty Vampire-series-that-never-mentions-the-V-Word “Ultraviolet”, Channel 5’s Horror anthology “Urban Gothic” (discussed on these very pages at length by the awesome John McNee) through to the superlative Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.


Creeping in in the year 2001 was a series that arrived with little fanfare and achieved so few viewers that it was never recommissioned for a second series. This was despite a stellar cast, lead actor Steve Coogan’s star still being (mostly) in the ascendance, and the already proven track record of relatively newly formed production company Baby Cow Productions.


That series was Doctor Terrible’s House of Horrible, and it was truly diabolical (and not to be confused with the similarly named Doctor Horrible of Sing-along-blog fame).


Doctor Terrible’s House of Horrible was a satirical, yet affectionate spoof (and tribute) to the 1970s British horror films of Amicus and Hammer, consisting of a total of six episodes. Each episode was a spoof of a style of horror film, rather than a direct snipe at any film in particular.


Steve Coogan portrayed the eponymous host beneath several layers of prosthetics, a creepy bald white-suited individual sat in his study, open fire blazing. He opens and closes each episode like a slightly less sinister and anti-Semitic Roald Dahl with choice words of wisdom.  The concept of a horror host is more familiar to American audiences (for instance, Cassandra Peterson as Elvira) but the framing mechanism here provides a familiar continuity, much as the same technique used in the earlier series of Tales of the Unexpected – the old tradition of being read a ghost story before bedtime. He’d star in each episode as well, mostly as the lead. Well, it was half his production company, after all.

Lesbian Vampire Lovers of Lust (Originally shown on BBC2 on November 12th, 2001)    ​

Setting its stall from the outset (and if that title isn’t going to attract viewers to a new and unproven series, nothing will) Lesbian Vampires of Lust is a gentle piss-take of Hammer’s late sixties and nineteen-seventies obsession with acres of pale-skinned cleavage (“The Vampire Lovers”, “Twins of Evil”, etc). It was no longer sufficient to have the star power of Christopher Lee glaring menacingly off camera – sex was needed to sell your movie as well; a perfect storm of boobs, bodices and blood.


In the tale, Coogan plays the dashing Hans Brocken, a perfectly coiffured dashing Military captain whose hand is, erm, broken (That’s the level of satire, folks – and it’s all the better for it). It’s 1877 and Brocken, and his new wife, are travelling to a remote castle in (Upper) Carpathia for their honeymoon. Little does he suspect that he and his virgin bride are heading into Vampire Territory ruled by Ronni Ancona’s Countess Kronsteen. Honor Blackman (as Transeet Van Eyre) gently lampoons the type of roles she was playing in the seventies, and the episode also features a never-camper Ben Miller.  It’s one of the stronger episodes in the series, and is a great introduction to the style of humour that will continue over the short-lived series.


It’s of interest that this is the first transmitted episode, but it’s the fourth episode on the DVD.

It’s easy to forget that, interspersed with his Hammer Work, Christopher Lee made six Fu Manchu films, the last of two which – “The Blood of Fu Manchu” and “The Castle of Fu Manchu” - with Jesús Franco. Fu Manchu was a villain created by the English author Sax Rohmer, featuring in fourteen of his novels between 1913 and 1959. Fu Manchu even ended up with a moustache named after him, which is no small feat.


Well, Steve Coogan never forgot. “Frenzy of Tongs” is a shrewd – yet slightly offensive – look at that character, a villain created to stoke up anti-Chinese sentiment. A make-up plastered Mark Gaitiss plays Hang Man Chang, a Chinese villain attempting to get the population of London hooked on his drugs. Plastered in make-up that slants his eyes and yellows his skin, it’s not a good modern look. Coogan plays Nathan Blaze, the Peter Wyngarde-esque dashing hero (and I’m beginning to notice a theme here…)


It’s one of the more forgettable episodes in the series, only really memorable for spoofing something from an era that was best left forgotten.

​
Curse Of the Blood of the Lizard of Doom (Originally shown on BBC2 on November 26th, 2001)
​

Doctor Donald Baxter (Coogan) is trying to find a cure for skin regeneration in order to cure burns victims. Eventually, frustrated with his lack of progress, he injects himself with an experiment lizard serum and finds himself transformed himself into a giant reptile. Part “Jekyll and Hyde”, part “The Reptile” (a Hammer film starring a young Jacqueline Pierce, 12 years before she’d portray Servalan in “Blake’s 7”), it’s a loving pastiche of the “Good scientist going to evil extremes” trope. (Warning: Contains Steve Coogan and Simon Pegg doing thick Scottish accents)

​
This is the first episode on the DVD, but was transmitted as the fourth episode on the original broadcast. It’s my personal favourite of the six, containing three short stories – an anthology within an anthology.  It’s a clear spoof of the portmanteau The Vault of Horror in which three people in a new high rise development (Amicus(!) Towers) end up trapped in a lift. TO pass the time until their rescue, they get chatting and end up discussing recent nightmares they’ve all been having, each segueing into one of the three tales.

Coogan plays Denham Denham, the owner of the Amicus building, Julia Davis plays Stephanie Wise and Pointless Lead singer Alexander Armstrong plays Michael Masters. It’s the strongest narrative out of all six episodes, and of course ends up as one of the morality tales that all such portmanteau horror tales ended up being. Evil – be it selfishness, envy or greed - is punished, seemingly for all time.

​In the sixties and seventies, you couldn’t move for limb transplants being carried out by unethical doctors. Legs, arms, even little fingers, the denizens of Harley Street were all at it – defying their peers to prove that their old science was dated. Little were they to know that, inevitably, and for reasons not ever fully understood, some vestige of the previous owner would remain in the transplanted part. And, invariably, the part would always have come from a psychopath (“Hands of Orlac”, etc)


Voodoo Feet of Death sees Coogan play Lester Crown, a 1930s World Champion Ballroom dancer whose career is cut short when he loses both of his feet in an accident involving a freakishly large pair of scissors.  Doctor Lorimer Maitland - Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes specialist and Europe’s pioneer in Foot Transplantation – arranges for a foot replacement, but at a terrible cost.


It’s a tale of bitter jealousy that can only ever end one way. Coogan and Sarah Alexander are clearly having their time of his lives playing Crown and his ever patient girlfriend, plummy upper-class English accents and all.

No series such as this would be complete without spoofing witches, a common trope amongst Hammer and its ilk. In “Scream, Satan, Scream”, Coogan plays Captain Tobias Slater, Witch Locator - clearly based on Matthew Hopkins (as portrayed by Vincent Price in the excellent “Witchfinder General”). Warwick Davies plays Tygon, his assistant (named after the production company behind that same movie).


Tobias Slater is as corrupt as they come, using his position as an excuse to defile as many attractive young virgins as he can. It’s another cleavage-heavy episode, and – of course – Slater gets his just desserts.


The humour feels a little more forced than the other episodes – it certainly has the feel of “Carry on” meets “Witchfinder General” - but it’s still a worthy conclusion to a series which is a loving tribute to the horror genre.  If you’re a fan of the double (or in many cases, single) entendre, you’re in for a hoot.


“That was truly diabolical.” – Doctor Terrible


“Doctor Terrible’s House of Horrible” is an absolute steal on DVD from Amazon UK, and well worth picking up. So often it’s the case that our memories of a series are better than the actual rewatch, so it was good to see it hold up. I’d argue it’s only the Fu Manchu episode that remains the weakest, feeling somewhat like a spoof so far – the humour in it has aged badly. Generous extras too; an interesting “Making of” documentary and full audio-commentary with the cowriters and the director.

​As mentioned earlier, John McNee did an excellent series of articles on the TV series Urban Gothic, the first part of which can be found here


The BBC details on “Doctor Terribles House of Horrible” are limited, but can be found here – there are a few clips.

David Court is a short story author and novelist, whose works have appeared in over a dozen venues including Tales to Terrify, StarShipSofa, Visions from the Void, Sparks, Burdizzo Mix Tape Volume One and Corona-Nation Street. Whilst primarily a horror writer, he also writes science fiction, poetry, and satire. His newest collection, Contents May Unsettle, was released in 2021 and his debut comic writing has just featured in Tpub’s The Theory (Twisted Sci-Fi). As well as writing, David works as a Software Developer and lives in Coventry with his wife, three cats and an ever-growing beard. David’s wife once asked him if he’d write about how great she was. David replied that he would, because he specialized in short fiction. Despite that, they are still married..

A TV station employee takes a camera crew out to an abandoned factory to investigate a purported snuff film that was made there, only to end up running for her life.

"Put yourself in the shoes of Japanese late night-talk show host Nami: You receive a mysterious VHS in the mail. When you pop it in and press PLAY, you are shocked to see what appears to be a genuine snuff film; Before your eyes in living video color, a helpless woman is brutally tortured and murdered. Now, what would you do if confronted with the possibility of a snuff videographer sending you mementoes in the mail? Would you (A): Immediately alert the police? Or (B): Gather a group of your TV station coworkers to trace the source of the tape, regardless of the obvious possibility of danger? Well, luckily for us, Nami chose option B, and “Evil Dead Trap” (1988) is a roller-coaster nightmare ride!"  - 80's Horror Movies

10/31 Part II is the second installment of the popular Halloween themed anthologies that taps the best directors, actors and composers from the indie film world and brings them all together to make one terrifying feature.

Premiering on Demand and Digital August 13 from Terror Films, the film stars Jennifer Nangle, Anastasia Elfman, David E. McMahon, Tim Robinson, Rhema Srihartiti and London Grace.

“As a huge fan of horror growing up, especially anthologies like Creepshow and Tales From the Crypt, I was thrilled to be able to work with a group of such talented writers, directors and actors to make our own anthology film come to life”, says producer Rocky Gray.

10/31 Part II on Demand and Digital August 13.

From the producer of Get Out and Us, Antebellum stars Janelle Monáe as a woman who finds herself trapped in a terrifying reality and must uncover the brutal truth
before it’s too late...
 
Successful author Veronica Henley (Janelle Monáe) is finishing a book tour before she returns home to her husband and daughter. But a shocking turn of events is about to upend Veronica’s existence, plunging her into a horrifying reality that forces her to  confront her past, present, and future — before it’s too late.
 
From directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz comes this tense and provocative thriller with a terrifying twist. Antebellum also stars Eric Lange (Lost, Narcos), Jena Malone (Donnie Darko, Nocturnal Animals), Jack Huston (Boardwalk Empire, Fargo), Kiersey Clemons (Zack Snyder’s Justice League) and Gabourey Sidibe (American Horror Story, Empire).

Certification: 15 Run time: 106 mins

   
Antebellum is on Digital Download, Blu-rayTM and DVD 2 August from Lionsgate UK

Wiertz was, in contrast to Poe, a bothersome do-gooder who believed in “progress,” as evidenced by the way he treated the topic: there is no question of humor or perspective or of depicting the expensive funeral “touches” that Poe describes so charmingly. No, the coffin the possibly indigent, apparently dead person is trying to crawl out of is hammered together hurriedly, with a cross painted on the lid in a rudimentary manner, the floor covered with some straw, and lowered into an anonymous catacomb in an equally hasty manner, without any pomp. The direct provocation for Wiertz’s creation was the cholera outbreak that occurred in Antwerp in 1853, with the epidemic then spreading across the other towns and cities of Belgium and claiming thousands of vic- tims who had to be hurriedly buried (still alive?) in order to stem further disease. Wiertz leaves no doubt with regard to his reason for painting this canvas as the following can be clearly read on the coffin: “Mort du choléra, certifié par nous Docteurs Sans Doute” (dead by cholera as pronounced by doctor Without Any Doubt), including stamp--thus an open indictment of the physicians.

In Poe’s very short story entitled “The Oval Portrait,” a traveler retreating at night to a deserted castle in the Italian Apennines is fascinated to read the comments on a virtually lifelike painting of a young girl. According to this observation, the poor painter was, with each stroke of his brush, actually drawing, like a vampire, the life from his young bride and model, who grew increasingly weak until he found her dead on her chair when applying the final touch and uttering the words “This is indeed Life itself!”

The definitive version of “The Oval Portrait” --which initially bore the title “Death in Life” and had a longer introduction con- cerning the effects of opium on the mind--dates from 1842, the year of Virginia’s first hemorrhage due to tuberculosis. Besides the underlying theme that art can therefore, so to speak, overcome or
“avert” physical death and can make a person “eternal,” Poe also inadvertently reveals two other intimate, and asexual, aspects of his marriage to his cousin: firstly, he portrays the painter as some- one who gives priority to his artistic vocation over his love, which he therefore cannot or does not want to experience physically; and secondly, he admits with the necessary feelings of guilt how this vocation does not even enable the painter to feed and clothe his loved one and will eventually rob her of her life. All that is pre- served of their relationship for posterity is a literally lifelike oval portrait...an oval portrait in the “vignette” style, so typical of the time, and which, in Poe’s imagination, must have had much more of the features of his very own and perhaps virginally deceased child bride than those of his late mother, Eliza, or his late foster- mother, Frances Allan. Ironically enough, however, Poe was never able to gather together the financial resources to hire an artist with a view to producing a genuine likeness of his young wife, with the result that only one portrait of his cousin-bride remains preserved, painted a few hours after her death. Truly macabre...

Wiertz’s best-known painting is La belle Rosine, a model that is much more bare, as well as less virginal and asexual, than the model from “The Oval Portrait” by Poe. And yet, it deals with the same theme in an almost identical way, namely that art can overcome or “avert” physical death and can make a person “eter- nal.” Rosine, in contrast to many of Poe’s female personages, is indeed a girl of flesh and blood, as Wiertz had painted her a few years previously while she was doing her makeup, proof that they were lovers and had carnal contact with each other on more than one occasion.

And the skeleton here? For the sake of convenience, the canvas could be completed as an illustration for “vanitas” in the form of “Death and the Maiden” if it were not for Rosine assisting in anything but a chaste manner and a small detail lending a “twist” to the picture, i.e., with a label bearing the words “La belle Rosine” stuck to the skull. In this way, Wiertz makes the model stare into the hollow eyes of her own cranium, i.e., a chronologically impos- sible situation, though this did receive much acclaim among the later Symbolists and Surrealists such as André Breton and Salva- dor Dalí.

However, what does Wiertz actually mean by this brutal “state- ment”? La belle Rosine is perhaps both a hymn to her earthly beauty and a firm refusal to make her his wife: Rosine will shortly lose this earthly beauty she has and turn into a skeleton, with the result that Wiertz will prefer to devote the time allocated to him on this earth to painting “eternal” canvases rather than loving a transient woman. And yes, Poe’s Virginia and Wiertz’s Rosine do continue to live in their short story and canvas--Virginia as the heavenly beautiful girl and wife of a destitute artist, Rosine as the volup- tuous model of a painter who treats this evidently well-to-do lady almost like a prostitute.

One of the lesser-known short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Power of Words,” is a philosophical jewel. A self-assured “Oinos” (Greek for wine, although the Norton Critical Edition suggests that it refers to the Hebrew word for “man”) flies toward the immeasurable universe for a moment after his death and, in all his confusion, is immediately welcomed by a spirit named “Agathos” (Greek for “good”), who explains the theories of the universe to him. Very briefly, it could be argued that, according to these theories, God created the world and humans, who then continue to create with their thoughts and words, prompting actions that will, however, remain ad infinitum. Because the universe is thus so dynamic and endless and “restless,” it is not omniscience that brings supreme happiness but, rather, the gathering of further knowledge. The only thing that the Creator does not know, according to Agathos, is that he is omniscient. In order to illustrate this power of words at the end, Agathos points to a planet with the most beautiful flowers and volcanoes belching the most lava and, half crying, tells Oinos that this planet was created by a passionate love poem he jotted down three centuries earlier for a beloved.

“Its brilliant flowers are the dearest of all unfulfilled dreams, and its raging volcanoes are the passions of the most turbulent and unhallowed of hearts.”

This is a splendid vision of the universe, a vision in which not one single thought, word, or action is lost but can, on the con- trary, bring about a “butterfly effect,” as it were, and also a vision in which Poe praises the immortality of the soul. In this story, he depicts himself after his death as “a spirit new-fledged with immortality!” which, with his poems--Poe regarded himself pri- marily as a poet --created the most exotic planets. Was he aware that his work would become such a source of adoration and study after his death?

Wiertz’s painting Une seconde après la mort or Les grandes choses de la terre vues à 500,000 kilomètres de ce globe (One second after death or the great things on the earth seen from a distance of 500,000 kilometres) depicts the same scene as Poe’s narrative in a virtually identical manner: a man in a shroud flies into the immea- surable universe and will be met by another soul. As optimistic and profound as Poe’s version is, however, the picture painted by Wiertz during the latter years of his life is equally pessimistic and embittered. The man --a self-portrait perhaps --looks back nostalgically at his planet earth, which now has the importance of a shriveled pea, and lets a thick book slip from his hands --“Gran- deurs humaines” (Human greatness). This is the “statement” of an artist who feels he has failed (he could never be the equal of a Rubens or Raphael or Michelangelo), who realizes that he could never achieve his grandiose ambitions (he has doubts about the “eternal value” of his work and has not even been responsible for bringing any children into this world), and who then bids a bitter farewell to his life of failure. Indeed, one of his last utterances on his deathbed reads: “A quoi me sert mon imagination à présent. On se détache facilement des misères humaines” (To what good is my imagination now, one grows so quickly indifferent to human misery)...Grandeurs humaines, actually, or Sic transit gloria mundi...

Antoine Wiertz. Edgar Allan Poe. Contemporary artists of their time on either side of the big pond. Poe always saw himself as an aesthete and a poet, though he is nowadays mainly revered for his macabre and frenetic short stories published in inferior magazines of the time. Wiertz wanted to be the equal of the great painters, though he only arouses interest now on account of his rather bizarre and macabre pictures and, as already explained, these do have something in common with Poe’s stories in terms of the associated themes and shock effects.

Irreverently, it could be said that Antoine Wiertz was the Ed Wood among the Romantic painters because of his clumsy tech- nique, though digging a bit deeper reveals a fascinating person whose canvases now, almost two hundred years later, increasingly manage to excite the interest of enthusiasts all over the world on account of their incredibly original and almost avant-garde approach.
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