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Author: Nick Ozment

Oz loves Godzilla, middle-school G.I. Joe (not old-school, not new-school; middle-school, spooky stories, trees, and really too many other things to list here.
The Weird of Oz Wishes You a Happily Horrifying Hallowe’en

The Weird of Oz Wishes You a Happily Horrifying Hallowe’en

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Don’t fear the Reaper. — Blue Oyster Cult

Fall 2013 062
Visitors to our house on Hallowe’en are greeted by a presence.

Oh, I’ve loved being spooked, terrified, creeped out since I was knee-high to a werewolf and not much bigger than Bigfoot’s foot.

Okay, sometimes I chickened out; it got too much for me.

I have a vague recollection of my Grandpa Yontz, who died when I was very young, taking me into one of those spookhouses somewhere along the side of the road. We got a few feet into the dark, narrow entry hall. Up ahead to our right, glowing heads hung suspended in air (recalling it decades later, and now being something of a scholar of spookhouses, I can exactly identify the effect: polystyrene mannequin heads, the kind used to display wigs, strung up on fishing line beneath an ultraviolet light). Even then, I knew they weren’t real, but that’s as far as I got. I just couldn’t bring myself to plunge further into that black unknown. I ignored my grandpa’s reassurances, pulled my hand away from his, and darted back for the entrance.

Within a year or two, a real horror visited us: my grandpa was snatched away in a traffic accident on a narrow road coming back from a camping trip on the Mogollon Rim. In the face of reality, pretend horrors aren’t so scary after all, and I never again turned away from a spookhouse or a scary movie.

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Oz and Frederic S. Durbin Discuss Hallowe’en Monsters

Oz and Frederic S. Durbin Discuss Hallowe’en Monsters

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Dragonfly_durbinIn response to my “Five Weeks of Frights” Hallowe’en post “Oz Meets the Scarecrow,” novelist and short-story writer extraordinaire Frederic S. Durbin sent me a thoughtful email, furthering an ongoing discussion of iconic Hallowe’en monsters. With his kind permission, I am reprinting it here.

Consider it a guest post from the writer of the wonderful Arkham House novel Dragonfly (a quintessential Hallowe’en read) and — one of my favorite Hallowe’en short stories — “The Bone Man,” which ran in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2007. Of course, he will also be familiar to regular Black Gate readers; his story “World’s End” was, according to John ONeill, “one of the most acclaimed stories in Black Gate 15.” Here’s Fred:

Fantastic post on the Scarecrow! That’s insightful — I’d been wondering what the next center-stage monster would be, and I would trust your impressions as one poised to see into various oncoming and now-arriving streams of the pop culture.

It’s interesting to ponder what about the classic monsters is at the center of the terror they hold for us.

1. The vampire is essentially Death. He comes from the graves. He feasts on the living. He gathers us unto himself.

2. The werewolf is the beast within us, the monster at the core of man. He is our fear of ourselves.

3. Frankenstein’s monster is our fear of our gifts, our behavior — what we might do when nothing is beyond our reach. We might steal fire from the sun. We might reanimate the dead. And the fire and the dead will bite us in the butts.

4. The zombie is our fear of illness. Alzheimer’s . . . global pandemic viruses . . . irreversible illness; it looks like our loved one, but it no longer is, and there’s no cure.

So what is the scarecrow? I think you’ve answered that question eloquently. Essentially, he’s the daddy of them all, the Last Boss, the overlord — because he is our fear of the unknown. I italicized that as an homage to Lovecraft, who told us what our greatest and strongest and oldest fear is.

Durbin went on to add a more personal note…

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Oz Revives The Screaming Skull!

Oz Revives The Screaming Skull!

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screaming skull coverA few years back, I had the pleasure of reviewing B-movies on a page hosted by Nathan Shumate’s Cold Fusion Video Reviews. Yes, I was part of his cabal of Cold Fusioneers — not to be confused with early scientific researchers into the elusive possibilities of cold fusion. Until a “catastrophic server failure” wiped out the main site and all the ancillary sites it hosted, Cold Fusion had been one of the longest-running review sites on the Internet.

Nathan decided to retire Cold Fusion and pursue other popular web projects he has launched, but I still have my reviews safely stored on a hard drive, the only place they currently exist…until now! As part of my October “five weeks of frights,” I’ve dug up my review of The Screaming Skull (1958), a fun film to watch this time of year. Some Black Gate readers will also take note that this film allegedly was inspired by a short story of the same name by classic weird-story author F. Marion Crawford.

[And if you wonder “What’s up with this David guy?” with whom I co-hosted the review, stick around to see my explanation at the end of the post.]

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DAVID: This is a Manning’s Manly Movies review that reaches its climax in shocking horror. Its impact is so terrifying that it may have an unforeseen effect. It may KILL you! Therefore the reviewers feel it necessary to provide free flowers to anyone who dies of fright while reading THIS REVIEW!

OZ:  What are you doing?

DAVID:  A-ha! About time you pulled your head up out of your books long enough to review another movie with me, professor!

OZ:  What were you doing?

DAVID:  I’m borrowing an idea from the producers of this week’s movie. When The Screaming Skull was screened in theaters back in the fifties, the movie opened with a voice-over narrator as a casket lid slowly opened, revealing a burial contract inside…

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The Horror: Oz Meets the Scarecrow

The Horror: Oz Meets the Scarecrow

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dark harvestAs Stephen King once observed, horror has a short shelf life. What scares us today will lose its impact tomorrow. The shock of the new will wear off, the fear of the unknown dispelled by our having come to know it.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein may be a literary classic, and it is still required reading in high school and college classes the world over. But when was the last time anyone was actually scared by Frankenstein’s Monster, I wonder? Or by Dracula, or any of the other classic monsters that now grace the sides of cereal boxes?

Familiar, tried-and-true monsters suffer from overexposure just as surely as vampires exposed to too much sunlight. After the umpteenth new Hollywood film, movie of the week, and YA book series, they “jump the shark,” so to speak. They lose their ability to produce chills and instead become the butt of parody or — worse — a love interest.

Until, that is, they come creeping back in an altered guise, rendered frightening and unfamiliar again by the latest horror maverick. Oh, they keep coming back, these perennial terrors. After all, there is a reason they are iconic: they have so aptly embodied so many human fears throughout the ages. We will likely be spooked — genuinely frightened — by a vampire again, hard as that is to imagine now, somewhere down the road.

In this macabre dance, venerable monsters take turns in the blacklight; their popularity waxes and wanes and waxes again, like the cycles of the moon.

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The Horror! Weird of Oz Introduces 5 Weeks of Frights

The Horror! Weird of Oz Introduces 5 Weeks of Frights

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old-postcards-vintage-halloween-01There are ghosts roaming around / Don’t you hear that spooky sound? / They’re out to scare / It’s like a nightmare / There are ghosts roaming around / Tonight’s their night / They’re out to fright / There are ghosts roaming around / Where oh where? / I think one’s there! / There are ghosts roaming around — Nick Ozment, 3rd grader, 1980

Okay, that is one of the earliest pieces of writing I have, about thirty-three years ago. As you can see, my themes haven’t changed much. October is my favorite month.

Sooo, throughout October, my Black Gate blog posts are all going to be horror-themed, building up to my favorite holiday (which I spell with an apostrophe), Hallowe’en.

For those readers who have been following my blogging of Arak, Son of Thunder through the first 10 issues of its 50-issue run, fear not! I will be returning to that in November (so you’ll have to wait a month for another installment, coincidentally the typical wait for a new issue of an actual comic).

Ghosts and hauntings are on my mind pretty much year-round (for the record, I consider myself an open-minded skeptic). Nary a month goes by that I don’t watch a horror film or read a horror story or do some prying into the paranormal, and this month in particular such thoughts will be at the forefront of my haunted lobes.

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What is the Practical Benefit of Science Fiction and Fantasy?

What is the Practical Benefit of Science Fiction and Fantasy?

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photo-3[The transcript that follows is of a voice memo recorded on an iPhone during my commute to work.]

So the local police cruisers in the town where I live recently got a new paint job to make them look like Transformers.

Well, mostly they just look like police SUVs, but on the hood of two is the large silver decal of an Autobot; the third sports a red Decepticon logo. These are quite striking against the black paint.

The first time I saw the Decepticon Dodge Durango squad car, I did a double take just to confirm that it was an actual police vehicle and not some private party’s clever paint job. My first conjecture was that it was the vehicle they use in the D.A.R.E. program, the one they drive when they go to schools in the area, and that they must’ve calculated it would be more cool to the kids.

[Subsequent to my recording these thoughts, I did talk to one of the local police officers. He confirmed that it was done largely to get local youth talking, to help with public relations in providing a bridge to younger residents. He added that many of the people in town over forty have no idea what they are. That may be skewing the demographic for recognition a tad young — I just turned forty-one and I knew what that robot face was right away. The Transformers toys exploded in the early ‘80s, just at the tail end of my toy-playing days. I suspect some older people also recognize the logos either from having been parents of Transformers fanatics or from having seen the recent Hollywood films. This is a rural farm community, though, so I’ve no doubt that many older locals would have no clue what this robot face on the police cruisers is all about.]

One upshot of this is the possibility that in my town you can be pulled over and ticketed by an Autobot (or a Decepticon). Indeed, just prior to beginning this voice memo, I saw that black SUV with the big red Decepticon face coming toward me in the northbound lane and I eased down on the gas a little as I passed him. Not that I was really speeding; I had it on cruise, but I tend to set my cruise control at two-three miles over the speed limit.

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Blogging Arak 10: Arak Goes Greek!

Blogging Arak 10: Arak Goes Greek!

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Arak_Vol_1_10Arak has had his share of sea serpents, vampires, Lovecraftian cave-beasties, demons, and devils. What was this comic lacking?

Legendary creatures from Greek myth, of course! So with issue 10, Arak and Valda make a side trip to Mount Olympus. And there are some surprises in store for both of them…

We open on very human terrain, in medias res. Arak and Valda, on horseback, are being ambushed by Byzantine soldiers.

Last issue, we left them adrift at sea after the Pompeian undead vengefully sank the merchant ship they were hitching a ride on. Between the two issues, we’ve skipped how they got to land, procured new mounts and (if we’re going to be nitpicky) all of their weapons and gear. Later in the issue, we’ll get a one-line flashback-thought from Arak about having purchased the horses from a Grecian farmer — but where did they get the money? Valda even still has the scrolls bearing endorsements and writs of passage from Carolus Magnus and the Pope — though given what will happen shortly, those may as well have just been lost at sea.

Anyway, while Arak and Valda are trying to be diplomatic, some of the mounted soldiers charge down the hill toward them, weapons drawn. One is nocking an arrow even as he rides, ignoring his commander’s warning cry: “Hold, archer! Do not go near them! They are dangerous!” A shame such skill as both horseman and archer is wasted, a couple panels later, on Valda’s blade. It’s on.

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Blogging Arak 9: Adventure on the High Seas

Blogging Arak 9: Adventure on the High Seas

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ARAK9CWith the return of Roy Thomas to the scripting helm, Arak issue 9 has our protagonists Arak and Valda resuming their quest to rescue Malagigi from his demonic imprisonment in far-off White Cathay. After having rescued Pope Hadrian and having rid the world of one Black Pope, our stalwart heroes are set for some adventure on the high seas. It’s time for a one-off pirate tale, but one in which Thomas manages to work in Vesuvius and an encounter with the lost souls of Pompeii.

Arak is about fed up with cities: “He-No take me — I’ll be glad when we’re done with the cities of your world, and I can take to the forests again.”

But first they have to pay a visit to Neapel (modern-day Naples) to find Pope Hadrian’s friend Gallio, who can provide them passage to Byzantium.  The Holy Bishop of Rome told them that they would know Gallio by the ring he wears, “which shows two hands grasping but a single cross.”

As with every past arrival at a new city, the first signs are ominous. People are packing up and leaving the port in droves, because “there’s no longer work there for free laborers — or honest seamen!”

They soon discover the reason: Gallio’s ship is now manned mostly by slaves. When they begin inquiring down at the bay, two “lecherous merchants” immediately hone in on Valda, because, as Thomas narrates, “Alas, however, in these unenlightened days, the presence of an attractive woman on the docks usually has but one meaning for the sea-rovers of Neapel…”

Need I tell you how their pawing at her ends? With her knife at the throat of one, of course, and the other one nearly skewered like the pig he is. Their lives are spared, though, in exchange for pointing the way to Gallio’s ship.

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Blogging Arak: Valda Gets Naked on Christmas Eve

Blogging Arak: Valda Gets Naked on Christmas Eve

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Arak_Vol_1_7Happy Labor Day! Here you are, (hopefully) enjoying a well-deserved break from labor to spend some time on the down low at the Black Gate.

For this Labor Day edition of Oz’s ramblings and my (if I’m counting correctly) thirty-first blog post, I’m going to kill two birds with one blog by covering issues seven and eight of DC Comics’ Arak, Son of Thunder. And I’ll keep it brief. My rationale? Series creator Roy Thomas penned neither issue of this two-part story. He provided the plots, but they were written by guest scripters Gerry Conway/Mike W. Barr (7) and Mike W. Barr (8). What I’m wondering is this: Will they be able to channel the sword-and-sorcery vernacular that is old hat for Thomas? Or will their dialogue veer into self-parodic melodrama? Will it fall flat? Will it feel too modern? Let’s find out.

Issue 7: “Behemoth from the World Below!”

The cover of issue 7 boasts the caption “Perhaps the Most Unusual Christmas Story of the Millennium!” Gotta love the hyperbole. Pope dragged into the underworld by a pale giant, then rescued from the Black Pope by a Viking Native American from the unknown New World across the sea? Pretty unusual, but perhaps not the most unusual one of the past thousand years.

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A Shard in Horror’s Broken Mirror…

A Shard in Horror’s Broken Mirror…

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The Dad Who Turns Into a Supernaturally Driven Psycho Killer

shiningAre you afraid of the dark? Are you afraid of ghosts? Hey, if you’re a family man, are you afraid a malevolent ghost is going to possess you and turn you into a psycho killer?

[Okay, before I get to all that, let me give a quick shout-out to those who have been following my ongoing blog of ARAK, Son of Thunder: I’ll have a new installment (covering the two-part story of issues 7 and 8) here for you next Monday. But this week I’d like to introduce the first in an occasional series examining aspects of the horror (primarily film) genre, which I’m going to call A Shard in Horror’s Broken Mirror. (Hey, how many “occasional series” does this guy have, anyway? Is he really, like, three different guys who take turns writing this blog under the same pen name?)]

The shard of horror I’m looking at today is an oft-recurring theme in many modern ghost thrillers: A character — usually, but certainly not always, the lead male — is manipulated or outright possessed by a supernatural agent (ghost, demon) and gradually becomes mentally cracked. This nearly always culminates in a final act where he is chasing his loved ones through a spooky locale with murderous intent.

Let me say at the outset that I’m generally not a big fan of this plot twist in most contemporary horror films. More on that later. First, though, a few words on where this narrative concept comes from.

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