Scott Nicolay

Ana Kai Tangata

Tag: Dada

E. Elias Merhige: The Greatest Apple You’ll Ever Eat | The Outer Dark: Episode 29 — JANUARY 28, 2016

85307_4070_1433688357_413a0b In possibly the most mind-blowing episode to date, filmmaker E. Elias Merhige (Shadow of the Vampire) traces his path from the genesis of the acclaimed experimental film Begotten to its highly anticipated rebirth in definitive and alternate versions on 35mm and Blu-ray in the near future. He explores and dissects his cinematic vision in the context of a shared interest with the Weird to push boundaries to create beautiful, powerful and terrifying works, recounts his first epiphanal encounters with Nietzsche and Artaud and the birth of his obsession with “art that actually lives,” relates his own creative process to a form of possession culminating in a volcanic eruption, transports listeners back to the life-changing screening of Begotten in Susan Sontag’s New York apartment when he was just age 25, discusses the fertile artistic nexus in the early-to-mid 20th century with surrealism, Dadaism and expressionism, muses on the artist/writer/filmmaker as our culture’s shamans, gets passionate about cinema as alchemy and Shadow1creating film emulsions that act as a lens for exploring meaning, effuses about the CERN Collider (an example of how now there is “more going on in science and biotech than in most art galleries”) and photographs as “life forms,” discusses why he feels more freedom working with lower film budgets, talks about the joy he gets from conversations with his creative contemporaries and his excitement in connecting with the Weird community, draws back the curtains on a beautiful back story involving John Malkovich, cocktail napkins and the powerful train scene in Shadow of the Vampire, provides an eclectic playlist of the music that drives his creativity (Wagner, Iggy Pop, John Cage, Nurse With Wound, Diamanda Galas, Stuart Dempster, and many more) and reveals an intriguing roll of artists, authors, poets and filmmakers who have served as his biggest influences and provocateurs from Homer to Baudelaire, Bely to Ligotti.

The conversation concludes with what’s next for Merhige including making the final feature-length installment of the trilogy that started with Begotten, writing a new film script which relates the Hiroshima bombing through the eyes of schoolchildren, editing the second draft of his first 900-page novel, and culminating with the restoration of Begotten. Included are exclusive announcements about the upcoming Kickstarter campaign for Begotten’s restoration and dynamic details about the endeavor which go beyond your wildest imagination. As Merhige says, ”some exciting shit, my friend.”

throatsprockNews from the Weird:. Arkham Digest columnist/Strange Aeons fiction editor Justin Steele joins Scott for the latest news and a retro review of classic horror novel, Throat Sprockets (1994), by Tim Lucas, editor/publisher of the venerable Video Watchdog. The book was inspired by cinema, has been described as “If JG Ballard wrote Dracula,” and was recommended by author Gemma Files.

This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes  or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

Next week’s guest: Simon Strantzas, author of Burnt Black Sons and editor of The Year’s Best Weird 3.

More Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Elias_Merhige

Begotten on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101420/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begotten

Din of Celestial Birds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCnp63TbxXw

Suspect Zero trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJLYRnHk8AE

Brian Jones Presents The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwEoDGeNyrE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Virgil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adalbert_Stifter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Nachsommer

https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/05/the-dissection/

News From the Weird:

https://vdarcangelo.wordpress.com/

https://perpetualpublishing.com/

https://chthonicmatter.wordpress.com/nightscript/

https://www.darkregions.com/books/new-releases/burnt-black-suns-by-simon-strantzas-deluxe-special-edition

Varieties of Weirdness Panel at BizarroCon 2015 | The Outer Dark: Special Presentation — NOVEMBER 9, 2015

bizarroconpanelModerator: Ross E. Lockhart. Panelists: Garrett Cook, G. Arthur Brown, Mike Griffin, Rios De La Luz.

Writers and editors working in Bizarro and Weird discuss the Germanic origins of the word “weird” in “wyrd” and how its association with fate and destiny continues in the contemporary Weird narrative form, whether Weird and Bizarro grew out of same sense of the Weird or are unrelated movements, authors who have walked between the lines of Weird or Bizarro in mind-blowing works of fiction, film and comics, the importance of dream realms and logic in Bizarro Weird fiction, if New Weird and Bizarro are different blurry wings on the same creature, similarities to the loud versus quiet horror rift, artificial taxonomies and bleed-through, slipstream as literary effect, Bizarro as a movement and a community, irreality versus surreality and how it might relate to Weird, objective vs. subjective lies, magic in fantasy versus Bizarro, and more.

Thanks to Helen Hopley for the panel photo.

This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes  or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

More Links:

https://bizarrocon.com/

https://www.fedoganandbremer.com/products/ana-kai-tangata-deluxe-limited

https://wordhorde.com/

https://cafeirreal.alicewhittenburg.com/index.htm

Next on Nov. 11: Orrin Grey, author of Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts.

s.j. bagley and Simon Strantzas: Thinking Horror in the 21st Century, Before and Beyond| The Outer Dark: Episode 10 — SEPTEMBER 8, 2015

thkhrrrs.j. bagley and Simon Strantzas converse about collaborating on their new Thinking Horror journal premiering in October, why it’s important now to have a journal that focuses on the philosophy and criticism of horror, the theme of the first issue “Horror in the 21st Century,” addressing the problematic nature of how the term “horror” is viewed by mainstream movie/reading audiences versus writers, the curse and boon of the horror boom of the 1980s and 1990s, the transgressive possibilities of horror, an ever-wider, ever-deepening field of diverse writers and content, the importance of recovering older weird writers to seeding the Weird Renaissance and the importance of the Weird in horror now, Weird horror as a mode to reconcile the self with an ever-expanding world and the relationship between contemporary Weird fiction and modernism, Asian and African influences on horror and Weird fiction, understanding the different facets through which specific writers see horror, upcoming issue themes, the importance of affordable reprint editions, the future of horror, their reading recommendations including Steven Millhauser, Kristi DeMeester, Michael Wehunt,Daniel Mills, Helen Marshall, and Jeffrey Thomas, and when and where readers can get copies of Thinking Horror (paperback and eBook).

This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes  or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

More Links:

www.thinkinghorror.net

www.valancourtbooks.com

NEXT WEEK’S GUEST: Daniel Mills, author of The Lord Came at Twilight

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