Sunday morning drowsy randomocity

As I promised myself, I watched Alien again last night.

It was the director's cut, and I downloaded it from ITunes. I already have it on DVD but I wanted it on my IPod--the picture on that tiny screen is incredible, and listening to it with headphones helps me to hear and appreciate the sound mix better. It was an awesome and terrifying experience.

Of course, the whole point in this little exercise was to remind myself of why that film is so special, as it embodies the qualities I want to capture for my newest project, which I have decided will be a novel. Yes, it was helpful, and I came up with a couple of practical ideas, too, as to the creature that will be at the heart of the story. With any luck it'll scare the everlovin' piss out of whoever reads it.

Horror lately has been so disappointing to me. Nobody seems to be interested in being scared anymore. It's all gore--make as grisly a death as possible. It's really uninteresting, not worth watching. Plus, nobody seems to understand how to do monsters. From what I understand--I haven't seen it--J. J. Abrams understood in Cloverfield. In that one the monster is kept mysterious as long as possible--you can see what the creature does, which is create an incredible amount of death and destruction, but you don't see it. The thing remains shrouded in mystery. Which is how it's supposed to be done.

Lovecraft is a master at that sort of thing, too, and since I see Alien as sort of the progeny of Lovecraft's work, he's the basis for what I think of when I think about truly effective horror. Lovecraft at his best captured the awe-inspiring, terrifying vastness of the cosmos. Granted his prose tended towards the purple, and most of his stuff is way too wordy, but read "The Dunwich Horror" or "The Shadow Out of Time" to see what I'm talking about. The latter story is a perfect example of the last sentence in the work giving rise to a massive episode of horripilation, as H. P. himself would say. (You're on the Internet right now--look it up!)

Anyways, the very beginnings of the plot are now starting to come together. I'm going to relax a while, then have lunch, and by then hopefully I'll have enough to be able to go into my little home office and start on a basic outline.

Lunch, btw, is gonna be a nice New York strip steak, some fried popcorn shrimp, and some fries--good old surf 'n' turf.
So, stay cool! Stay out of trouble--or, if you can't, at least come over here and tell me all about it!