The monster mash-ups of writer Tim Hall and artist Jen Ferguson combine lovely visual tributes of classic creatures with deadpan gag dialogue. Above is my fave, the wolfman.
The strangers-in-a-madman's-death-trap set up of Steven Hentges's 2009 film, Hunger, immediately calls to mind the standard-bearer franchise of the much maligned torture porn subgenre, Saw. One of the character's evens suggests that the trap they find themselves in is game and, in order to survive, they need to successfully play the trap out. Within the world-logic of the film, the character's suggestion makes no sense. The maker of the trap has left no instructions and there's never any clear condition the trapped characters can induce that would bring the game to satisfactory conclusion. For the characters, there's no reason to assume they're in a Jigsaw-like game. Rather, this odd assertion is a muffled sort of fourth wall breach; it's the director and writer indirectly communicating the viewer that, yes, they know, there's a seven-film large elephant in the room.
In a recent interview about his new book, Kraken, China Miéville, Marxist economist and New Weird pioneer, discusses what he believes is the state of monster creation in the early 21st Century. Here's the relevant section of the interview:
Since his starring role in Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, H. H. Holmes, 1861 to 1896, has widely been acknowledged as America's first serial killer. Holmes' bizarre method of dispatching his victims - through the use of a nightmarish gas chamber and abattoir that seemed, at once, to be an organic outgrowth and a demented satire of the slaughter houses of his adopted Chicago home - carries with it the stamp of modernity: His death chamber was, in essence, a human processing plant, a mechanical expression of homicidal urges that seems to presage the genocidal madness of that threatened to entirely engulf the century to come.
