Happy Halloween!

These fascinating pictures come from Haunted Air, a book collecting antique Halloween photographs by Ossian Brown (with a foreword by David Lynch). Mr Brown is former member of Coil and one of the founding members of Cyclobe. I did an interview with Ossian on this blog. There is a surreal, sometimes scary atmosphere to these photographs. I own this book and if you are like me and you love to own beautiful books you can order it here!

Olivier de Sagazan — Transfiguration (2011)

Olivier de Sagazan is a french performance artist. He plays in various venues in France, Canada and Korea. Here he performs Transfiguration for the movie Samsara (2011) by director Ron Fricke. I already mentioned Fricke's most famous movie, Baraka (1992) on this blog.

The Nightmarish World of Roland Topor

Denise Grunstein — Photographs

Bret Easton Ellis — Lunar Park

Bret Easton Ellis is an author from Los Angeles, known mostly for the infamous American Psycho. If you read Ellis before, you are familiar with the themes of his books. It is essentially a critic of the wealthy and famous of the american society. It describes shallow people, leading shallow lives often with terrible consequences. The writing is direct, honest, disturbing, filled with dark humor and often downright violent.

So when I took Lunar Park and started to read, I was essentially expecting the same kind of story. And for some time, it was the typical Easton Ellis book. It seemed like an autobiographical description of the life of the author, his struggle with drugs, his broken marriage and his life in the suburbs of California. But most of all, it was a book about his difficulty being a father and the difficulty forgiving his own father for his lost childhood.

Until the book turns upside down and it literally transforms into a horror novel. The quiet suburb house progressively becomes an haunted house, the main character is haunted by his father's ghost. Suddenly I had the pleasure of reading a typical horror story. It could have been a Stephen King book for all I know.

Bret Easton Ellis usually has nothing to do with the world of horror literature but Lunar Park is a fun homage to the genre. And behind the horror, Lunar Park tells two stories. The story of a child abandoned by his father and the story of a father abandoning his child.

Amer (2009)

I often feel a little bored with the tactics of todays cinema. So of course movies with a bit of nostalgia speak to me. If you like italian horror cinema, have a look at the movie Amer by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. It is a very nice homage to the 70's italian movies of Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and company. The soundtrack is beautiful (some of it borrowed to Sergio Leone and other italian composers). The movie has that original feel, splendid images, with a lot of use of close-ups, saturated colors and rough montage. It is a fun stylistic exercise in a genre that we don't see anymore.

H.P. Lovecraft — Library of America

I have been an avid reader of H.P. Lovecraft since my teenage years. Only problem is I read all of his books in french (the french translation is great by the way). And so, for some time, I have been toying with the idea of re-reading Lovecraft in it's original english version.

If you read some of his short stories, you know it's pretty difficult to find a one-volume english compilation with an almost complete selection of his works. Not only that, I wanted to buy an edition with a hard cover, that is good looking.

I finally found out the Library of America have published a beautiful hardcover volume, that contains, in my opinion the best of H.P. Lovecraft. Here are included The Dunwich Horror, The Colour out of Space, At the Mountains of Madness. It's not complete and it would be great if Library of America published the rest of his work (including poetry and his letters to friends and writers). But it definitely is a beautifull edition, with lightweight paper, page markers and hardcover.