In ‘Providence’ #4, Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows take a step back from the previous issue’s intensity to let issues of bigotry, bias, and privilege intermingle with Lovecraft’s ‘Dunwich Horror’ in an altogether more nuanced and human, if no less thoughtful, entry to the series.
This is the best issue of Providence yet. It’s entertaining, it carries some emotional weight, and gives you a full, diverse understanding of the world it’s building. Hopefully this series continues to be as challenging and provocative moving forward. Hopefully the creators have more surprises up their sleeves. If this is the best it gets, well, that’s a little disappointing, but I can live with it. Because this issue here at least lets you know that you can hate a creator and love their creation. It is possible — as long as you’re willing to take it back from them. Art is too important to leave in just anybody’s hands. And that message is good enough.
Providence #2 continues the cycle of using a pastiche of Howard Phillips to comment upon the man’s works, and then turning around and using a pastiche of his works to comment upon Howard Phillips, the man. It’s literate and it’s dense, but it knows how to tell a classic horror story, as well. Burrows draws a damn horrible monster, and Moore knows how to indulge a horror cliché — here the “you must have bumped your head and imagined some monsters!” — to masterful effect. Providence #2 keeps the series in its place as one of the best new titles of 2015, and is putting up a good fight for some of the best stuff of its creators careers — it’s just that good.
Rat God #1 Story and Art by Richard Corben Colors by Richard Corben and Beth Corben Reed Published by Dark Horse Comics Master of comics Richard Corben channels H.P. Lovecraft’s knack for horror and combines it with elements from Native American legends in Rat God #1, creating an unnerving tale that has readers gripping pages with all their might. …
Anything involving H.P. Lovecraft is worth a look, but when it’s a short film that stars They Live’s Roddy Piper, then you have movie magic. Director Vivieno Caldinelli and writer Matt Watts have taken to Indiegogo to ask for help getting funding for their short film, Portal to Hell. Here’s a little bit of info …
Re-Animator, another obscure zombie flick, questions scientific advancements by revealing potential consequences and effects to the people around us. This last Tombstone Tuesday could have easily been given to Army of Darkness by Sam Raimi, Night of the Living Dead by George A. Romero, Shaun of the Dead by Edgar Wright, Dead Snow by Tommy Wirkola, or maybe even Dead Alive by Peter Jackson. But Re-Animator offers something beyond braining eating and strange noises. Re-Animator is a non-traditional classic that is centered on an underlying message of whether or not science is going too far.
Lovecraft’s monsters typically defy the conceptions of the brain, so they tend to fall into a formula that doesn’t sound like ideal fodder for a visual medium.
Having finished Lolita, a subversive Hollywood piece even by noirish standards, Kubrick returned to war. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’s scope was more encompassing than the private torture of Paths of Glory, looking forward to the threat of apocalyptic destruction instead of a reflective portrait of immediate world wars. Instead of matching and multiplying the grave tone inherent in both his previous work and the source material, Red Alert by Peter George, Kubrick opted for a brand of blacker-than-pitch humor claiming “The only way to tell the story was as a black comedy or, better, a nightmare comedy, where the things you laugh at most are really the heart of the paradoxical postures that make a nuclear war possible…”. This does not deter from the omnipresent horror surrounding both the film and the historical environment that determined its existence. Beneath the antics and the (wonderfully) strained acting of Sellers and Scott lies the taut strains of nuclear holocaust with only these chummy actors in control. It’s dread at its purest, comfortably resting amongst the instantly quotable dialogue and perfectly composed images: an atmosphere of unspeakable horror-that-is-to-come.