Horror

You'd think by now college kids would know better than to head to an isolated cabin deep in the woods for a laid-back weekend of beer, swimming and truth or dare, because… cue spooky music … as everyone knows by now most of them are destined to die, falling to their blood-soaked ends like dominoes: One. By. One. Actually that's exactly what longtime horror-making buddies Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard are counting on - that everyone knows...

Re "Video paints grim subway scenario," May 7 The video by activists opposed to tunneling under Beverly Hills High School for the Westside subway extension raises issues that do indeed need to be applied to the school. Abandoned oil wells are not exclusive to Beverly Hills; they litter Los Angeles. The existing subway lines and their tunneling avoided setting off an explosion, and it should be the same with the planned extension. The 1985 Ross Dress for Less store explosion occurred without subway tunneling.

Lurking in the 2,592 entries in the third annual Scariest Story Ever Told contest were thrills, chills--and a frightening brain scan of what's on the minds of Southern Californians. Our eight winners included eight writers--Joe and Denise Altick of Ventura, Peter J. Estes of Lancaster, Sara Ludovise of Laguna Niguel, Michael Hook Mack of Sun Valley, Lynn J. Reinert of Irvine, Michael Schwartz of Reseda, and Lotus Yu of Yorba Linda--and one illustrator, Barbara Abbott of Newport Beach.

In the pandemonium of people scrambling to escape the bloodiest shooting rampage in Orange County history, Kenneth Caleb saw a lone, limping figure possessed of a strange calm. Caleb was staring out the window of Patty's Place, the Seal Beach restaurant where he went for lunch that day in October. Moments earlier, a terrified employee at the Salon Meritage next door had rushed into the restaurant screaming one phrase over and over: "Call the police, he's shooting everybody!"

In her Film Clips article "Stephen King, Feminist?" (April 16), Elaine Dutka derides horror as a literary genre, suggesting that King could and should move on to better things--namely mainstream fiction. The fact is, horror is one of the most lasting and important of literary forms. Almost every major writer in every country throughout history has tried his or her hand at horror. In addition, the supernatural is an important element in the work of the South American magic realists, as well as in the work of African American writers such as Pulitzer Prize-winner August Wilson and Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison.

Moviegoers, beware. A host of masked, murderous slashers, demented fiends and demonic forces are about to converge on the multiplex, but it's not your immortal soul they're after. It's your hard-earned dollars. Horror films are dominating the release schedule in 2009 -- almost certainly, event movies like "Watchmen" and "Terminator Salvation" will outgross their spookier kin, but not a month will go by without at least one film designed to terrify audiences making its way into theaters.

"Halloween has always been a weird holiday," says George Maloof, owner of the Palms casino. He does not mean weird in the sense of haunted, but more in the sense of being afraid of Las Vegas being a ghost town for the weekend. Or to put it another way: The bump you would expect from the seemingly natural match of this most unnatural place, Sin City, with a holiday dedicated to naughtiness and disguises isn't as much as you would think. Halloween in Vegas has never become an event the way New Year's weekend has. As Maloof puts it, "To be frank, Halloween hasn't always been the best holiday.

IN her relatively short tenure with The Times, film critic Manohla Dargis has made her disdain for horror movies evident, but never more clearly than in her review of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake (" 'Massacre': Gory, With Little Story," Oct. 17). Her reviews make clear she is in no way sympathetic to the potential audience of such films and has little enthusiasm for the genre's history. Roger Ebert, a critic as mainstream as mainstream gets, has championed horror films such as "Dawn of the Dead," "Re-Animator" and "Evil Dead" with his highest ratings.

The recent awards dinner for the Horror Writers Assn. was less goth and more black-tie than you might expect. About 150 attendees met at the Burbank Hilton on June 25 to honor their members over a steak and fish dinner. There wasn't a hemlock brew in sight.

Two horror movies weren't too much to handle this weekend as "The Final Destination" proved a winner at the box office and "Halloween II" came in just a bit below expectations. The only bust was "Taking Woodstock," from Universal Pictures' specialty films unit Focus Features. The Ang Lee-directed look-back at the 1969 music festival cost nearly $30 million to produce but opened at ninth place with a weak $3.7 million in receipts. "The Final Destination," from Warner Bros.' New Line label, was No. 1 with an estimated $28.3 million worth of tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada, boosted by sales at pricier 3-D screens.

Never Fall Down A Novel Patricia McCormick Balzer + Bray: 224 pp., $17.99, ages 14 and up When it comes to genocide, Hitler is obviously well covered. There are countless titles for young readers about the atrocities he inspired. The Khmer Rouge, which seized control of Cambodia in 1975 and, in its attempts to create an agrarian form of communism, killed millions of its own people, is less familiar territory, especially for young readers. "Never Fall Down" offers a detailed look at what it was like to live under such a cruel government from the perspective of one of its best-known survivors, Arn Chorn Pond.

If you want to be afraid, be very afraid, on your next vacation, check out the "Saw at Sea" summer cruise from New York City to Canada. The trip features actors who have appeared in the horror-film franchise, including  Costas Mandylor (Hoffman), Anne Greene (Dina) and Ned Bellamy (Jeff). Dan Yeager, who played Leatherface in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D,” also joins the "Saw" crew aboard ship. Even Jigsaw's creepy puppet Billy will be on board for photo ops. The film series started in 2004 and has seen the creation of six successfully scary movies, box-office wise.

The Drowned Cities A novel Paolo Bacigalupi Little, Brown., 439 pp.: $17.99, ages 14 and up Whether it's a conscious or subliminal reaction to U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, war is an increasingly common theme in modern young adult literature. But its horrors are rarely so thoroughly detailed as in Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Drowned Cities. " One of the more graphically violent young adult titles of late, "The Drowned Cities" reads like a dystopian mash-up of the Vietnam War and modern geopolitics, where survivalism battles personal loyalties in a brutal and chaotic world.

You'd think by now college kids would know better than to head to an isolated cabin deep in the woods for a laid-back weekend of beer, swimming and truth or dare, because… cue spooky music … as everyone knows by now most of them are destined to die, falling to their blood-soaked ends like dominoes: One. By. One. Actually that's exactly what longtime horror-making buddies Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard are counting on - that everyone knows...

Julie Adams nearly turned down the role that has made her a legend among sci-fi and horror films fans: Kay Lawrence in 1954's "Creature From the Black Lagoon. " But who could blame her? As a contract player at Universal six decades ago, she had played opposite Arthur Kennedy in 1951's "Bright Victory," Jimmy Stewart in the 1952 western "Bend of the River" and heartthrob Tyrone Power in 1953's "Mississippi Gambler. " And now the studio wanted her for a black-and-white 3-D horror film that was sort of a fishy version of "Beauty and the Beast.

Threats A Novel Amelia Gray Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 281 pp., $14 paper In her bracing debut novel, "Threats," Los Angeles transplant Amelia Gray writes one of the most gorgeously clinical paragraphs about a blackhead you'll likely ever read. The description is somewhere between a David Attenborough nature documentary, soft-core pornography and David Cronenberg's 1986 movie "The Fly. " Here are a few choice lines regarding the blackhead's existence and its extraction by a skilled facialist: "The woman layered the [blackhead]

BOOKS Celebrate the spooky season with three chilling adaptations of classic horror literature presented at an actual cemetery with Wicked Lit. Walk the hallowed burial grounds as three scary stories unfold around you: Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher," M.R. James' "Casting the Runes," and Mark Twain's "A Ghost Story. " Mountain View Mortuary and Cemetery, 2400 N. Marengo Ave., Altadena. Thu.-Mon. 8 p.m. and Nov. 2-Nov. 6 at 8 p.m. $39-$60. (818) 242-7910. http://www.wickedlit.org.

While vintage horror films are being dusted off for annual Halloween marathons, one band is combing through classic titles to solidify its set list. The members of Nilbog love horror. But they appreciate the sinister, electro-rock orchestrations that anchor the slasher flicks even more. The Los Angeles-based, five-piece act covers the scores of horror, sci-fi and giallo films (an Italian genre of horror fiction such as Dario Argento's "Sleepless"), and they are certain there's no other outfit like them.

"If your mother says she loves you, check it out," goes the old journalists' adage. But when it comes to what writers recall in memoir and first-person reporting, it doesn't always happen. Ira Glass, host of the public radio program "This American Life," apologized last week for having aired an excerpt of Mike Daisey's one-man show, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," in which Daisey fabricated what he experienced on a reporting trip to China: There were no armed guards at a factory producing Apple products, for instance; the interpreter with him remembered no poisoned workers shaking uncontrollably.

Few working filmmakers invite the application of the auteur theory — the notion that some films bear a directorial signature — as frequently as David Cronenberg. The coherence of his body of work is hard to miss. In movies as varied as "Videodrome," "Dead Ringers" and "Crash," he has found myriad ways to explore a recurring set of themes: the thrill and danger of transfiguration, the interrelation of the mind and the body. With these obsessions so firmly established, it is no wonder that many critics and fans watch a new Cronenberg film looking for signs of the old ones, sometimes detecting their encoded presence, sometimes bemoaning their absence.