My first encounter with Tolkien was reading The Hobbit at age 11 or 12. I found it lying around my sister’s house while on a trip there. It was the paperback edition to the left, which was published by Ballantine in the mid-1970s. That’s Tolkien’s own artwork on the cover. For years I thought it …
I thought I was finished with this series, but there’s just too much good material, and a few book covers I overlooked. So let’s proceed. First of all, it occurred to me I never included pictures of non-Russian hobbits to serve as comparisons. So here’s the first ever, drawn by Tolkien. And isn’t it amazing …
Aliens who indulge in too many x’Qyschn shots should be very grateful to have helping hands lead them home from the bar. (The English translation of this — it’s Dutch — means “Horror on Alpha Centauri” while “Vlaamse Filmkens” might indicate it was a movie.)
It Came from the Closet – Queer Reflections on Horror Edited by Joe Vallese The Feminist Press, 2022 Time to squeeze in one more book review for October! It Came from the Closet is a collection of essays by LGBTQ writers about their favorite horror movie and why they like it. That it scares them …
The 1930s and 1940s were a golden age for horror movies AND graphic design for horror movie posters. Look at the color, the composition, the pleasing mix of typefaces in the poster above! It’s gorgeous. Which brings me to the subject of mummies. Mummies are part of the rarefied classic movie monster club that includes …
As it’s turning towards Halloween, I thought I’d do a post on second and third-tier horror movie antagonists. The human kind, not monsters. There are many versions of Dracula, The Wolfman, and Mummy and even more imitators. From the get-go, the Silent Movie era spawned Count Orlok (Nosferatu, 1922) an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula …
Scandal strikes the SFF world again. Writer Neil Gaiman accused of, but denies, sexually assaulting two women, one of whom was the nanny of his child. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated film by Warner Brothers based on Tolkien’s work, releases some preview artwork. (It’s anime style.) In related …
If you were an elementary school student in the 1970s, your school library probably contained a copy of The Little Prince. Written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a French nobleman, pilot, and adventurer, and published in 1943, it has since become an oddball but revered children’s classic, standing beside The Phantom Tollbooth, Willie Wonka and the …
Strange and alien creatures abound in SFF media, but most of the time we don’t get to see their skeletons. This screenshot, however, from one of the Predator movies, gives tempting hints of what lies beneath the skin or scales. Of course there are some human skulls (still with spines) there, because man is the …
… and daughters too, let’s make that clear. Trufflehunter called again, “Glenstorm! Glenstorm!” and after a pause Caspian heard the sound of hoofs. It grew louder till the valley trembled and at last, breaking and trampling the thickets, there came in sight the noblest creatures that Caspian had yet seen, the great Centaur Glenstorm and …