Send assistance. In the meantime: The Bible according to Google Earth. Steve Martin's art forgeries. Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter talks about Twitter. The Tinnitus Research Initiative. Painting on the iPad. The I Ching online. A history of computer operating systems in the movies. John Carpenter talks about the fight scene in They Live. Author Nicholas Carr on the web and concentration.How do you see the horror genre having changed over the years, especially as you're coming back into it at this point in time?Full interview here.
It's changed. It's like it always has been, in some ways. There are a few really good horror movies made each year, but mostly they're shit. Most all of them are bad. Most are derivative. Most don't try anything new. Now they pick up whatever style has just been popular and they just use it. People like to associate horror now with torture movies because of the popularity of Saw... I thought Saw was a good movie, I really enjoyed Saw. It was fun, it had a great twist ending...
What did you think of it by the time we got to Saw VII?
You know, I got a little bored with it. It's the same thing over and over, but it's OK. People want to see that. It's like Jackass. Let's see people — and in Jackass they're willing! They're willing to be tortured and made fun of and have cruel things done to them, and they think it's cool. People nowadays, I think because of the internet and the culture, have become more cruel than when I was young. Look at the bullying. Look at what it does to people. Look at cyberbullying.
Does that then make the way that horror movies are consumed vastly different?
Oh, yeah. They're consumed like a lot of entertainment, it's just disposable. What you try to do is fight through that somehow, try to get the audience's attention in a more direct way. The really good movies do it. The Social Network was a terrific movie — not a horror film, but boy, that did it. I don't care about what happened, but I started to care. Wow, look at this! Look at the issues we're dealing with in this!
Thanks to Mr Rob O'Neill I have finally acquired OCR scans of my first published short stories from Other Voices (1988). I've spent a wet Sunday morning correcting the text recognition errors and cleaning up the files to be converted into another ebook mini-collection. Reading the stories back I found I could recall nearly every word, and my life at the time of writing them: the sensation was as vivid as flicking through old photographs. Coding and design advice for my ebooks has come courtesy of Mr Chris Bell. It's not really self-publishing when so many other people help, is it? (One day I will get Russell Crowe to star in this.) Above: some blonde chick. That's one pretty foot.
