Welcome back to The Week in Horror, fiends! Not a ton to dive into, but some interesting tid bits, nonetheless. So let’s get current…
First up, Netflix dropped a short teaser for the return of Stranger Things for its fourth season. It reveals nothing, really, I mean, it does, but I think we all already knew the surprise at the end and the image is right there in the thumbnail; yes, Hopper is alive, duh. This has been a show that I have had zero expectations for, but have liked from the beginning. I do have one expectation for this season though, and that is that I don’t have to suffer through a climax derailing nostalgia porn splooge fest involving a musical number from some 80s kids movie that I never saw and never wanted to, even though I was a kid in the 80s. I like that the show keeps getting bigger in scope and I thought the expanded cast in Season Three was great. I’m not seeing a release date, but at least we know The Duffer Brothers have begun production and getting a teaser now, one would assume we’d be getting the new season in the fall?
Lucifer is one of the only comic book shows I haven’t watched, mainly because I never read the comics. The series, published by DC’s Vertigo, just never inspired me to check it out, because I preferred the nasty, demonic version of the Devil we saw in other Vertigo titles like Swamp Thing and Hellblazer. The show itself also never appealed to me, based on the trailers, but I still thought it was cool as hell when the CW heroes, lead by John Constantine, went to Earth-666 to seek Lucifer’s help during Crisis on Infinite Earths. All that said, it’s worth mentioning that Netflix is interested in producing a sixth season of the Fox series which is set to end after it’s current fifth. Are you guys fans? Should I give it a shot?
Sticking with comics, Matt Reeves and Warner Brothers dropped a minute long teaser for 2021’s The Batman, giving us our first look at Robert Pattinson in the new suit. The video is dark and only lit with red light, but we can see stitching in the mask, giving it more of a homemade/handmade look, which is a very interesting direction to take, but it also seems like a little nod to the Adam West cowl as well. There’s a bit of a collar at the top of the cape and unsurprisingly we see a lot of armor. I had hope for a less tactical look, after the more comics accurate take of Bat-fleck was one thing fans really applauded. I preferred that to the military armor of Bat-Bale. Still though, Pattinson looks great, I’m excited to see the color scheme they go with (hoping for something a little closer to the comics).
Do you subscribe to the Youtube channel In Praise of Shadows? I hadn’t heard of it until this week when a video about modern horror book covers started getting shared all over my Facebook timeline. Very interesting points, particularly to me as a publisher of horror books (St Rooster Books, if you didn’t know, check out my latest novella The Gray Man, which got rave reviews from Diabolique Magazine and Biblioculus, cough cough shameless plug cough cough.) The narrator compares modern designs to the golden age of pulpy and lurid paperbacks from the 70s and 80s and he makes a lot of good points, but he needs to see some more indies, I think, because there are a ton of great publishers releasing really cool looking books. Check out the video, it’s really good. In fact everything I’ve watched on the channel so far has great production value and really well thought out discussions.
