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Post by dem bones on Mar 10, 2008 20:39:56 GMT
David J. Schow (ed.) - Silver Scream (Tor, Nov. 1988) Introduction - Tobe Hooper
John M. Ford - Preflash F. Paul Wilson - Cuts Robert Bloch - The Movie People Ray Garton - Sinema Clive Barker - Son Of Celluloid Stephen R. Boyett - The Answer Tree Joe R. Lansdale - Night They Missed The Horror Show Karl E. Wagner - More Sinned Against Chet Williamson - Return Of The Neon Fireball Robert R. McCammon - Night Calls The Green Falcon Jay Sheckley - Bargain Cinema Craig Spector - Lifecast Richard Christian Matheson - Sirens Richard Christian Matheson - Hell Mike Garris - A Life In The Cinema Douglas E. Winter - Splatter: A Cautionary Tale John Skipp - Film At Eleven Ramsey Campbell - The Show Goes On Edward Bryant - The Cutter Mark Arnold - Pilgrims To The Cathedral
David J. Schow - EndsticksFrom the broken down picture palaces to glorious neon drive-ins, from the has-been stars of yesterday to the ambitious, rapacious would-be stars of tomorrow, from the tinsel and glitter ... to the blood and guts. SILVER SCREAM proudly presents the best that terror has to offer.As far as I'm concerned, the late 'eighties were a mini-golden age for US anthologies featuring (mostly) original stories, what with the likes of Book Of The Dead, Shock Rock, the early Hot Blood's and Silver Scream. The main thing these consistently entertaining and often mega-gory collections had in common was the high quota of "Splatterpunks" - Schow, Ray Garton, Nancy Collins, Skipp & Spector, Joe Lansdale, Roberta Lannes, Mike Garris, etc. - with their modern, pulpy horror stories (Karl E. Wagner seemed to be an honorary splat-head). Is it too soon for a revival? Joe R. Lansdale - The Night They Missed The Horror Show: Leonard doesn't want to go to the drive-in because they're showing Night Of The Living Dead and the hero is a black guy. So he and the equally drunk Farto drive around bored out of their skulls ... until they find a dead dog in the road. For a chuckle they chain it to the rear bumper and drag it. Shortly afterward they see a guy from school, Scott, running from the Wild Tree Boys. Now Scott is black, but he's also the best player on the Mud Creek Wildcats so they grudgingly rescue him. Eventually they pull up outside a house in the middle of nowhere where, fatally, two fat guys in Hawaiian shirts, Vinnie and Pork, are entertaining their redneck pals with home made snuff-porn movies ... Lansdale's dedication reads: For Lew Shiner. A story that doesn't flinch. He's not kidding. John Skipp - Film At Eleven: Reminiscent of Karl Wagner's equally unpleasant More Sinned Against from the same collection with a touch of Hollywood Boulevard thrown in at the end. The lead characters, aspiring movie star Dale Snyder and his pathetic lover, Dottie, are believable drug f**k ups, and the sense of doom pervading the story makes the ending inevitable, yet for all that you're expecting it, it's still shocking when it arrives. Robert R. McCammon - Night Calls The Green Falcon: Creighton 'Cray Flint' Boomershine, 'forties serial star now all but forgotten, arthritic and reduced to mopping floors in Burger King, gets his superhero costume out of mothballs and teams up with go-go dancer Gracie and street-suss Ques when his kindly young neighbour is murdered by the Fliptop Killer. The big breakthrough comes via the furtive street scavenger 'The Watchman', who collects the detritus of the city and files and index's it in his basement. 'The Watchman' has been a Green Falcon fan from childhood and always kept the pledge - "Do right". Will his information help Creighton nail the psycho before he kills again? Karl E. Wagner - More Sinned Against: Aspiring actress Candace Thornton makes desperate sacrifices to finance her ruthless, abusive boyfriend Rick Justin as he embarks on his Hollywood career - she prostitutes herself, unwittingly cultivates a smack habit, appears in hard-core porn movies, bestiality flicks and even a near-snuff abomination - so it's a kick in the teeth when he finally gets his break in Colt Savage, Soldier Of Fortune and very publicly humiliates her. But the ruin that was Candace is still together enough to avenge herself and a Colt Savage doll provides her with the means. Jay Sheckley - Bargain Cinema: Chuck and his sweetheart Patty see too much of themselves in the hero and heroine of Italian love-and-suicide flick, Amplitude ( "Die With Love and flourish") .... Douglas E. Winter - Splatter: A Cautionary Tale: Rehnquist lives on a diet of video nasties and, appropriately enough, winds up a zombie having disfigured himself before anti-Splatter campaigner Cameron Blake. Each paragraph of the story begins with the title of a banned movie and J. N. Williamson apparently had reservations about including it in Masques 2 (Futura, 1987) due to "the power of certain images". To be Continued .....
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Post by dem bones on Mar 28, 2008 9:35:02 GMT
Another four winners, starting with another Splatterpunk minor classic!
Ray Garton - Sinema: His Mom's trying to make it in Hollywood so nine-year-old Brett Denver has been left with his grandparents in Manning, a small Seventh Day Adventist community in California's Napa Valley. For a boy whose obsession is the cinema, it's far from ideal. Gramps lost his legs in the war and barely even speaks, Grandma rants against all things "sin" which, to her way of thinking, is everything that gives pleasure. Needless to say, there's no Cinema in Manning. The Church committee hold the occasional Family Film Night but very few movies make the approved list. Fortunately for Brett, Mr. Moser, his Sabbath School teacher organises these events, and he's kept a stash of the unsuitable videos for personal use. Nothing too violent or dirty, you understand; Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Hitchcock's Blackmail, that kind of thing. Mr. Moser allows Brett to visit him at home whenever he chooses and as good as gives him the run of the VCR. Brett is made up.
More good news! Mom has landed a minor role in sex-horror movie, Bedside Manners, and even features on the poster. She writes promising she'll come collect him soon and they can both live in LA.
Meanwhile, some sick perve has been sodomising and butchering young boys. It was Brett, in fact, who found the most recent corpse. One afternoon, he decides to snoop in Mr. Moser's room and finds a secret horde of 'Little Rascals' video's. Wonder what they're about?
Shade's of Stephen King's Apt Pupil but this is so gleefully offensive and squirm-inducing as to be unmistakably Garton.
Two of the younger Matheson's highly effective short sharp shocks.
Richard Christian Matheson - Sirens: A beautiful actress, lusted after by her audience. As they relieve their sexual fantasies, her body develops new cuts, new bruises, new fractures .....
Richard Christian Matheson - Hell: LA in a heatwave and Lauren's Rabbit is caught up in the gridlock from Hell. A taunting Devil DJ cranks up the tension with sinister hits from the Summer of Hate - Sympathy For The Devil, Back Door Man - culminating in the Doors' When The Music's Over. For Lauren, it certainly is ....
Steven R. Boyett - The Answer Tree: "Weird shit. I mean, fuckin' weird. There was this one with a guy who got his eye cut open with a straight razor, and ants come out of some dude's hand. Like Friday The Thirteenth, but this was really old. Nineteen ... something or other."
Whoever this guy is, we need him to do reviews for Vault!
Controversial and not a little bonkers director Bienvido blew his brains out after completing his dark and disturbing labour of love The Answer tree. The movie has long been suppressed on the grounds that, reputedly, there has never been a screening which didn't culminate in the death of at least one audience member.
Prof. Grange, who contributed the introduction to the definitive reference work on Bienvido's life and work, attends a rare showing of the film with a motley collection of his students and sundry death groupies.
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Post by sean on Mar 28, 2008 13:46:42 GMT
"Weird shit. I mean, fuckin' weird. There was this one with a guy who got his eye cut open with a straight razor, and ants come out of some dude's hand. Like Friday The Thirteenth, but this was really old. Nineteen ... something or other." Whoever this guy is, we need him to do reviews for Vault! Un Chein Andalou , one of Dali's films, isn't it?
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Post by Calenture on Mar 28, 2008 14:14:00 GMT
"Weird shit. I mean, fuckin' weird. There was this one with a guy who got his eye cut open with a straight razor, and ants come out of some dude's hand. Like Friday The Thirteenth, but this was really old. Nineteen ... something or other." Whoever this guy is, we need him to do reviews for Vault! Un Chein Andalou , one of Dali's films, isn't it? From Spellbound Dali seemed to like the eye and razor image, and the ants. Long after Un Chein Andalou, he used it again. Alfred Hitchcock, talking about Spellbound: "I was determined to break with the traditional way of handling dream sequences through a blurred and hazy screen. I asked Seiznick if he could get Dali to work with us and he agreed, though I think he didn't really understand my reasons for wanting Dali. He probably thought I wanted his collaboration for publicity purposes. The real reason was that I wanted to convey the dreams with great visual sharpness and clarity, sharper than the film itself. I wanted Dali because of the architectural sharpness of his work. Chirico has the same quality, you know, the long shadows, the infinity of distance, and the converging lines of perspective. "But Dali had some strange ideas, he wanted a statue to crack like a shell falling apart, with ants crawling all over it, and underneath, there would be Ingrid Bergman, covered by the ants! It just wasn't possible. "My idea was to shoot the Dali dream scenes in the open air so that the whole thing, photographed in real sunshine, would be terribly sharp. I was very keen on that idea, but the producers were concerned about the expense. So we shot the dream in the studios." From Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut (Panther, 1969:
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Post by weirdmonger on Mar 28, 2008 14:52:04 GMT
From page 5 of the Small Press Ark:
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Will E.
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 24
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Post by Will E. on Feb 2, 2011 1:14:16 GMT
One of my favorite anthologies of its day, and one I still love to reread.
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Post by resrvordog on Jul 16, 2020 20:44:22 GMT
I'm pleased to report that after being out of print for 32 years, Cimarron Street Books (publishers of bare•bones magazine) has released an all-new trade paperback edition of David J. Schow's SILVER SCREAM! Now shipping! Free two-day shipping for Amazon Prime members! Available at www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08CWCGTSF (and other Amazon territories)
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Post by dem bones on Jan 21, 2023 18:34:49 GMT
Edward Bryant - The Cutter: "Robby, you can alter reality. If you don't like the way things are, you can change them." Small town America, late 'fifties. Mr. Carrington, proprietor of the Ramona Theater, is blessed with a genius for improving even the direst movie by diligently re-cutting the tape until it plays like he thinks it should. Unfortunately, Carrington's downfall is his undying love for Barbara Cartwood, who delights in putting out to every other man in town. When Miss Cartwood and her hoodlum lover take their spitefulness too far, Carrington does what he does best. Narrated by Robby Valdez, the kid who helped out at the cinema after school. He never got over what happened that last night.
F. Paul Wilson - Cuts : First time author William Franklin takes violent exception to writer-director Milo Gherl's woeful treatment of his Haitian voodoo novel, Hut. Gherl tells him, "get over it, Billy boy," you've had it too easy, you need to "suffer" for your art, etc. In his despair Franklin, who made a deep study of his subject, is ready to do so, provided Gherl suffers alongside him.
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Post by andydecker on Jan 23, 2023 14:02:46 GMT
I also took it from the shelves and started it again. The introduction as screenplay was a nice idea, still a bit pretentious, or? F. Paul Wilson - Cuts Never could get into his Repairman Jack novels, and it is astounding that the portrait of the cliche hollywood director/writer/whatever hasn't changed in 30 years, but I liked the ending. Never mess with voodoo.
Robert Bloch - The Movie People Bob Bloch could be sentimental when he wanted, but this is a nice celluloid ghost tale.
Ray Garton - Sinema Another one which hasn't aged a day. I should re-read Garton.
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Post by goathunter on Jan 30, 2023 14:14:59 GMT
For my money, Silver Scream is the best horror anthology ever published. Every story is a winner, and most are just flat-out amazing.
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