michael arnzen

Since January, I have had the great fortune of teaching a 15 week course in Horror & Suspense Writing at Seton Hill University. As their final project, the students were asked to create a multimedia story. I am happy to share the great results below!

• Tyler Carter, “The Lost Man” (short film)
• Sarah Lago, “Eradicate” (short film)
• SarahTantlinger, “When the Sky Turns Red” (short film)
• Michael Ingram, “Grave” (short film)
• Calvin Yoder, “Stuck” (short film)
• Jeannie Bujdos, “Germs” (short film)
• Jessica Walker, “Indulgence” (short film)
• Ashley Samek, “An Unexpected Guest” (short film)
• Brendan Monahan, “Sea of Bones” (short film)
• Jered W. Johnston, “The Nightmare Man” (short film)
• Sarah Last, “Project” (short film)
• Felicia Domasky, “Herrington’s Tragedy” (short film)
• Stephen Ray, “The Voice that was Silenced” (short film)
• Jade Woodridge, “Children of the Night” (short film)
• Kayla Lent, “Decomposed” (short film)
• Holly Reid, “Meat” (story trailer/vid)
• Esther Spurlock, “Murder My Tears” (hypertext story)
• Shelly Decker, “Convening with the Spirits” (hypertext story)
• Allyssa Yanniello, “Choices” (hypertext story)
• Angie LaVelle, “Killing Fate” (downloadable game)

My class had a lot of fun all term, composing all sorts of terrifying and insane tales. You can also see their drawings of monsters online, too, such as their interpretations of the character “X” from Matheson’s “Born of Man and Woman,” or their fun contributions to the Cthulhu mythos, based on the spelling of their last names backwards. I suspect some of their tales will also be published in various magazines and books in the near future for you to read, as well!

I’m presently wrapping up a full semester of teaching Horror Writing to undergrads at Seton Hill University, and we’ve been having a blast doing all sorts of multimedia work — especially work using SoundCloud for audio critiques. Along the way, I’ve been been playing with the site, too, uploading lecture excerpts and strange sound prompts and other weird things. I even recently gave a little presentation about the class experiments for a conference we held on campus called the iTeach gallery.

During the term, I discovered the above excerpt (from my article in the wonderful book for dark authors, WRITER’S WORKSHOP OF HORROR, edited by Michael Knost — who just edited a similar book on Science Fiction and Fantasy coming out next month). The exerpt had been a featured reprint in THE WRITER magazine and therefore available in our college library’s online databases in full text format. The database included an audio player for the visually impaired, so I played it and recorded the robotic voice reading my article so I’d have a copy…then I distorted the file on my computer to give it, well, some kind of aura of the strange. Here’s the result: a mini-lecture by the ghost in the machine, about writing in the horror genre, drawing from my favorite quote by Psycho-author Robert Bloch: “Horror is the removal of masks.”

Arnzen, Michael A. “An Open Book: Writer’s Workshop of Horror” in The Writer (Jan 2010). Excerpt from Knost, Michael, Ed. Writer’s Workshop of Horror. Woodland Press, 2009.

Thought I’d toss up a quick reminder that I’ve been erratically posting Instigation prompts to twitter all month, which are feeding into the new Instigation Showcase page. I conceive of all this as being not only an extension of this department on the blog, but also the recently-released ebook. If you’re on twitter, just follow @MikeArnzen — if you’re not, you can always see what I’m posting to that nefarious site on the archive I keep called “The Nest” right here at gorelets.com/nest. Here’s a sampler of some recent favorites:

“Construct a scenario involving a contemporary equivalent to firewalking on hot coals.”

“Pick an occupation (eg. banker, fireman, etc.). Your title is: ‘Bring me the Head of the [Occupation].’”

“Your character spots a broken scalpel blade, in the corner of library’s restroom floor.”

“The setting: a cannibal food truck.”

“Create a strange gathering of feathers.”

And sometimes I toss out some images, too, like this one, recently posted to my flickr gallery:

The dark side should breed and spread, don’t you think? If you come up with anything based on these and publish it (or post it online), I’ll happily add your name with a link back, to the Instigation Showcase!

In co-celebration of National Poetry Month with my friends at The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly, I’d like to take a moment to put the spotlight on a writer I am becoming fond of lately.

His name is Angel Zapata. He doesn’t know I’m doing this. And I don’t know Angel at all. I only know him from a few pieces of writing I’ve seen online. And I think he’s doing really interesting work.

Angel Zapata strikes me as one of those guys who is writing for the love it. From my review of his website, I can tell that he has had an awful lot of success publishing as a poet on the dark side and in the realm of the short mystery, and he’s earned more than enough cred in my book to be dubbed a real “indie writer.” You can tell just from the blogroll on his website that lists all the places he’s published his crafty, often dark, thinkpieces. He’s widespread and placing little jewels of work in all sorts of little lit zines, so he might not be someone who is on your radar. But maybe that gives him even more cred, because he’s sort of a lone wolf, earning his own bread, bit-by-bit across the internet. He’s steering clear of bandwagons to pilot his own ship, and taking it wherever he wants it to go. But you can tell he’s well read, an aficionado of the genre, and a person who is professional in every way. And he has a great sense of humor.

And I think he’s someone who could use more attention. I like writers like Angel. He’s a writer earning his audience. Some one should pay this man more money for what he does, because he has a lot of talent. Since I am not a Wall Street broker, I can’t give him anything, beyond tossing him a few royalties when I buy the books he appears in. But I can give him a little spotlight by turning you on to his work. So that’s what I’m trying to do in this blog entry.

You see, writers often band together and promote each other, either because they’re affiliated by genre or have a shared publishing history. That’s one of the reasons we need publishers who offer up the pages in their journals and the space on their website to foment a community. Writers and editors and readers all come together at what Germans call the “treffpunkt” — the rendezvous point or gathering place — to traffic with the tribe.

I think that’s why journals like The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly — run by a very generous soul and smart editor/poet named Gerald So — are such cool places to publish and visit. The 5-2 is well-populated by great authors who are delivering the goods for anyone interested in mystery and crime stories. If you’re into the crime genre, you should be into the 5-2. It posts new material EVERY WEEK like clockwork. But it’s also a little bit off. Like any good outlaw, this weekly journal is doing something a little bit off the grid. It’s an indie journal doing indie things. To be more specific: it’s Mr. So’s treffpunkt off the grid for people who are interested in what happens when vice and villainy are put through that unique word grinder known as “poetry.”

Crime…poetry? Is that like gangsta rap? Not quite, but they are sibling subgenres in their own way.

So much of what constitutes the “crime” genre is defined by popular mystery novels, potboiler paperback thrillers, prime time cop shows, and, heck, maybe even the nightly news. But poetry? Believe it or not, poetry has something different to say, because by its very nature it has to say things differently. This frees the subject matter from the conventions of narrative to dance to its own beat. Poetry is an exploration. And I harbor the suspicion that criminals and detectives are explorers in their own right, too. So as a peculiar little subgenre, “crime poetry” is really interesting stuff, and from all I can tell, the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is THE treffpunkt for this business.

Angel belongs there, and I hope to encounter his work in the 5-2 or in a similar meeting place when our paths cross once again.

Back in November of 2012, Angel published a devious little poem on the 5-2, called “Housekeeper.” I should just shut my yapper and let you go read it on the site, but here’s the non-spoiler gist of the poem in a nutshell: the poem is about a man who is tricking his housekeeper into cleaning evidence of his crime up after him, in a very clever way.

I love this idea. It is a case study in the old “hidden in plain sight” trick that the great writers are able to pull off. But more than that, the poem — in just 20 brief lines — gives us a full blown picture of the criminal’s backstory, his psychological motive, and the perverse pleasure he takes in getting revenge. We get hit in the gut with a “perfect murder” scenario, followed by a punch square in the jaw with the poem’s final lines. I’m not sure whether to loather the killer or feel sorry for him, but it doesn’t matter at that point: it’s a knockout poem precisely because it pushes me off balance and resists an easy judgment about the killer’s guilt. Its also one of those poems that deserves to be re-read (my favorite kind), because you start to see more depth and dark irony to it the more you read it. You start to see hidden meanings in the passing mention of “cancer” and the comparison of a trash heap to “volcanic ash”. Though I’d love to keep performing an explication de texte to prove just how good it is, I won’t say anything more, because I want you to read it, study it, and see what makes it such a successful piece of crime poetry on your own.

But if you’re impatient, how about this: One of the (many) great things about the 5-2 is that the site is very active in social networking, tapping twitter, youtube blogging and e-books to broaden the audience for its outlaw poets. Along with every poem, Gerald So includes recitations of the poems via youtube broadcasts, and you can hear Dehant Paul read Angel’s “Housekeeper” here or in the embedded video below. But do go to the 5-2 and read the poem too, and I think you’ll understand why I admire its craftsmanship.

The 5-2 is not the only place I’ve encountered Angel Zapata’s work.

I recently judged the annual flash fiction contest for microhorror.com, which meant reading a bunch of anonymous horror stories having to do with the theme of “art” and picking my favorites. It turned out that Angel’s short story, “The Blood Worms” was one of my top picks and it placed as a winner in the contest. Here’s what I said in my review:

The Blood Worms?! How could anyone not be intrigued by a title like that? The concept of this one is pretty strong, but Zapata’s story really won me over with its chilling imagery — and the sheer insanity depicted here really transfers from the story into the reader’s mind. “Blood Worms” is written with a sure hand, driven to deliver the goods, and it succeeds in depicting an artist’s vision as a disturbed one. The last line stuck with me long after I read it, like an afterburn.

I won’t give anything away, but I know you’ll be hooked if I cite just one sentence from the story — a bit of dialogue uttered by a madman:

‘The worms eat us,’ he said. ‘Now I eat them.’

I love that line. Angel and I think alike.

So do most of the writers over at the 5-2. Head on over and meet me at the treffpunkt. You can read a piece I published there last year if you like, called “This is How I Murdered the Librarian.” Or simply join me in celebrating the 30 Days of the 5-2 for the rest of the month.

Who says National Poetry Month has to be all lovey dove and/or clove cigarettes? These are beat poets of a different kind…check it out and tell Gerald I sent you.

If you’re on twitter, you can also follow @poemsoncrime and use hashtag #30OfThe52 to help promote the site for National Poetry Month. Not into that? Then just remember the name ANGEL ZAPATA and seek out his work. And if you’re not into any of this? Well, then go your merry way and let the worms eat you.

– Mike Arnzen

p.s. In addition to this tribute to the 5-2, I am also celebrating April by posting a new horror poem every day throughout the month on my website at gorelets.com. Come back and read the new pieces as they’re posted. A new one — a poem constructed with The Fridge of the Damned magnetic poetry tiles — will appear tonight!  is now live, called “Zombie Milk”!

I’ve signed up over at NaPoWriMo.net, committing to try to write and post a new poem every day throughout April for “National Poetry Writing Month”. My plan is to mix things up regularly: to post twitter poems, full-length gorelets, some audio recordings, videos, word art, and more Fridge of the Damned magnet poetry pieces. Return to this calendar page for all this, which I’m posting off the main blog to avoid clutter and confusion; things will also be tagged as #napowrimo on twitter or The Nest if you want to search for them. I invite you to join me, too, on the Instigation Showcase (see below)!

Related NaPoWriMo activities I’m indulging in…

+ I’ve joined the gang over at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly for 30 Days of the 5-2. My particular post is going up on April 4th. Update: Scott Emerson posted a kind review of my own poetry on the 5-2 as part of this event too.)

+ I will fit some poetry reading in between the bouts of writing. And if time permits, review it.

+ I’ll post #Instigation prompts to twitter (echoed on the Instigation Showcase) more frequently throughout the month…see below for more details.

+ A new issue of The Goreletter will appear this month. Certainly it will contain a poetry-related contest with some goodies for prizes, so subscribe!

+ DO YOU WRITE? I will continue to celebrate the recent release of my ebook, Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side by posting #Instigation prompts on twitter… these (along with more) are automatically fed into the new Instigation Showcase page, so if you’re a poet/writer looking for dark inspiration, you’ve found the right place! You also can get a meaty sampler from the book of prompts over at scribd.com/Arnzen

ALERT, 4/5: in celebration of #NaPoWriMo Raw Dog Screaming Press is now offering the Fridge of the Damned poetry magnets at a discount for this month (buy yours here for just $10). Remember that I will post photos of all shared #TFOTD work in the amazing fridge fan gallery! Write a fridge magnet poem for Nat’l Poetry Month.
 

Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side by Michael Arnzen:

Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side is a treasury of twisted tips, strange scenarios and disturbing sparks to help ignite the fuel in your creative furnace. Its aim? To push you into the danger zone of your imagination, by thinking in unconventional ways and trying things you never thought — or dared — to try before in your writing, art, or dreams.

See the catalog page for more information.

DIRECT PURCHASE FROM MASTICATION for $3.99:

ALSO NOW AVAILABLE FROM: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes

NOTE: This book is currently only available in .mobi, .epub, and .pdf formats, which are readable in most ebook devices and computers. It will soon also be available directly from more ebook distributors like amazon and Barnes and Noble. A print edition is not currently available (though you can get a large sampler in the hardcover only edition of The Gorelets Omnibus published by Raw Dog Screaming Press).

NOTE 2: Backers of The Fridge of the Damned kickstarter project should have received an email with information on acquiring their complimentary copy. If not, let me know.

Announcing the Instigation Showcase!

From now on, anyone who publishes a response to a prompt or is inspired to write something specifically in response to Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side or the Instigation department on this weblog will be listed on the new Showcase page dedicated to helping broaden your audience.

Over the years, I’ve received numerous emails from writers who produced new work based on the prompts in The Goreletter, and I’m happy to have finally figured out a way to showcase your work. Share your links to work (whether on a blog or in a book) that has Instigation as its source, via e-mail or comments on the blog and you’ll be listed. That easy. And remember to check back from time to time to read the work of others… it’s bound to inspire you to pick up your demonic pen.

[NEWSFLASH: TONIGHT (3/15) is Instigation Eve! Help us get ready to launch the book this evening. Folks are sharing links to masticationpublications.com and tweeting their own bizarro prompts using the hashtag #Instigation.

Don’t forget: subscribers to the Mastication Publications newsletter will get a discount code to use when purchasing Instigation directly from this website!

borrowing from Bond
he brings home the bloated baggie
and scoops out blissful killifish,
dropping one after the other
into his plastic aquarium:
the translucent bucket
of gold paint

these goldfish never swim,
and his net is clotted
from skimming them back out
so often, but he knows
he will find the right species
eventually — there are tens of thousands
and if he knows his evolution,
then only the fittest will survive

Many thanks to my friend, Dr. William Hamilton, Neumann University (near Philadelphia, PA), and Dave Bullis of BullWitt Media for inviting, hosting and producing the video for this lecture last October. It turned out fantastic! You can watch the entire event above or full-screen it directly on youtube.

The video is almost an hour-and-a-half long, but you might find it entertaining. In short, my talk raises the question whether or not icons of the uncanny (the double, the living dead, deja vu, etc.) in popular culture (particularly TV advertising) still have the capacity to frighten, or if they are achieving some other ends? I provide an overview of the theory of the uncanny, an analysis of some quirky advertisements (several of which first appeared here on this blog), and engage in an open conversation with the good students and faculty at Neumann U, during my visit last Halloween season. You can visit my original coverage about this trip or see my photolog for copious weird images captured during my enjoyable visit.

Thanks again to the fabulous folks at Neumann for allowing me to talk about these issues and share them now here in a streaming video. Your comments and shares are certainly most welcome!

Boing Boing recently posted a great link to another vampire oddity that not only appropriates the popular uncanny icon of the vampire, but also that subgenre of “dolls” that for some are beautiful little darlings and for others are just too disturbingly close to real living babies — those uncanny valley dolls known as ‘reborns’. See Spooky’s article, “Vampire and Zombie Reborn Babies” at Oddity Central for coverage, or head directly to the source: The Twisted Bean Stalk Nursery, where artist Bean Shanine’s “Babies Grow on Their own Twisted Little Vines”.

This may be uncanny or creepy, but I really admire Shanine’s art!

While such matters might be termed “uncanny” in the most orthodox sense of that term, one of the interesting elements of these particular reborns is the artistic inspiration drawn from the Twilight series of books. Vampire kids are not an invention of the 21st century — we’ve had them in The Vampire Lestat, and in cinema one is reminded of creatures like the infant monsters from Cohen’s film, It’s Alive! and even Rosemary’s Baby. In the original Dracula by Bram Stoker, there is a classic scene where Lucy herself consumes infants for their blood, in a dark reversal of maternal symbolism. Here we have something of a re-reversal of this anxiety in a representation related to the child that must be nurtured by literally feeding off its mother — here made safe — and inorganic — both dead and yet newly born — through reassuring plastic.

I think this one — a photo of “Gummy Vampires” candy that I took at the grocery store the other day — speaks for itself. I don’t associate gushing or oozing or even “gumminess” with vampires…but with their victims. Indeed, the first thing I think of when I think of vampirism is “teeth” not gums. Although this product is clearly targeting children, it still reflects the typical transference we see in uncanny packaging, where the act of consumerism is projected into the product, fraught with contradictions and fantasy.

This has been in the back of my mind lately. Inspired a creepy twitter poem, even:

“Vampire Gums”: he looked down with strange relief and terror — / a loose tooth left behind / weirdly twitching / still gnawing in her neck

— Michael Arnzen (@MikeArnzen) January 20, 2013

The Onion’s AV Club ran a great list of “23 Ridiculous Horror Movies” called “Night of the Killer Lamp” back in 2007. It’s actually a great list of films that would make for a fun marathon night of creepy-kookie horror films. What it proves, too, is that a) the horror genre is rife with “uncanny” objects at the center of their narratives (e.g. possessed dolls, plants and animals that have human agency, inanimate objects that move of their own accord, etc.), and that, b) the uncanny is often funny…especially when it fails.

One of many on the list is Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive, which is hilarious but in my view also a very important film in the pantheon of the uncanny (see my essay in the book, The Films of Stephen King). For a quick example, here’s the soda machine scene, from youtube.

So how does it fail? Is a killer soda machine not scary? If not, what makes it inherently goofy?

I won’t go into a close reading of this particular scene. It’s easy enough to understand through the theory of the uncanny itself. One answer might be that the uncanny — like all fiction — requires a willing suspension of disbelief…but that the ideas here are so ludicrous that we are unwilling to do so. If our mental mastery remains in charge of our experience, keeping the “belief” in animistic actions at bay, then we invest no autonomous power or agency into the object.

In other words, we know they are puppets on a string. We must genuinely believe that the string has been cut when the puppet starts to dance in order to truly experience the uncanny.

Special effects are always attempting to cut that string. The low budget nature of these films (or simply their datedness, as effects have evolved) may prevent us from believing in their magic.

Even so, it may not be fair to entirely dismiss all the “killer lamp” films as simply “ridiculous.” There are moments in each of them — some more than others — where the uncanny can be experienced due mostly to the power of cinema technology to animate inanimate objects and thereby bring them to life. Hardcore realists might be too steeled up against the ludicrous to really suspend disbelief, but there remains something regressive about these films that might account for their sense of being ludicrous in the first place. They are aggressively regressive. They force us to engage in a childlike belief in the worlds they project. They work hard to resurrect our childish (or as Freud put it, “surmounted”) beliefs in a world where anything can potentially hold life and move on its own. Our laughter may very well be a defense mechanism against this return to our earlier beliefs — an attempt to affirm that our adult selves have surmounted them, in collective laughter.

Freud: “…a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and…there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.”

Last year I wrote about the uncanny aura of “Cinemagraphs” — a.k.a. “animated GIFs” in a posting called “Eternal Moments and Smoking Billboards”. I made the point that these images are “an uncanny artform, because it literally “brings to life” still frames — and while this may in some ways be more apparent in stop-motion techniques (where, I would argue, the jitter produced by editing has as much to do with the uncanny affect as the conceptual “animation” of inanimate objects we see), digital art is offering numerous new ways to trick the eye in uncanny way.”

I was reminded of this phenomena when I came across an article in the current issue of Wired magazine (Jan 2013; not yet online now available at Wired) called “The Everlasting GIF” by Clive Thompson. Thompson interestingly makes the case that these animated GIFs are claiming a resurgence in popularity, and that it’s the “ancient vintage” of the format — the grainy ‘old school’/nostalgic look of them — that may be responsible for their appeal.

One point he makes that struck a real chord with me was his comparison of this form to the “zoopraxiscope” of the 1880s — that pre-cinematic device that was made famous by Muybridge’s classic “galloping horse” moving picture, among many other shots of animal locomotion and beyond. They “capture evanescence,” Thompson writes, “replaying tiny moments of everyday life so we [can] see them in a new way….The animated GIF lets us stop and ponder a single moment in the stream [of image inundation].”

Definitely. And also definitely uncanny, in the same way that all cinema is, in the way it can bring to life the “still life” (aka dead) photograph. We all recognize this, especially if we’re on a website with an image or avatar on it that delays the movement… and just when you move your attention to something else, it gravbs you with sudden movement in the periphery of your vision.

But this is nowhere more apparent than in animated EARLY photography, where the aura of something long gone is long behind us. New media like these cinemagraphs are reanimating dead photos with a new animation that is stunningly uncanny. Here’s an example from a past Wired feature, Hugh Hart’s “Vintage Photos Enter Spooky Afterlife as Animated Gifs” — which brought my attention to the New Media artistry of Kevin Weir. It takes some surprising liberties with history, but that’s the fun of it — but the “fun” is often uncanny in the most orthodox of ways, using tropes of eyes, monsters, dismembered limbs and more. The whole article/gallery is worth a review, but here’s an example of Kevin Weir’s Flux Machine

Look for Thompson’s essay in the January 2013 issue of Wired. Just got mine in the mail this week. Happy New Year!

When I first saw this twisted comedic film, I laughed at its outrageousness. You might be horrified or you might guffaw. It speaks for itself in a mere five seconds. Here’s it is: 5SecondFilms’ “Magic Show Volunteer” (2009):

After I recoiled from the unexpected in this “magic show,” I immediately wanted to share it with others. I had the “you’ve gotta see this” reaction that compels so many of us to share these sorts of things online in social media. I copied the link and was ready to press “send” on my twitter account. But then I realized something. It was a magic show skit. Hadn’t I seen something like this before?

And I had. Many of us have. These kinds of films, which are everywhere on the internet because so many people have access to the technology to make them now, are identical to the very first movies ever made. Here, for example, is a famous example from about 115 years ago, when the early “one reelers” were being exhibited to public amazement: George Melies’ “The Magician” (1898):

Just as early film makers were exploring the creative capacity of the medium, today millions are doing the same thing — with a range of success and failure — using the ubiquitous capacities of phone apps, tablets, webcams, camcorders and similar devices which can point, shoot, edit and share with an audience in a matter of minutes. I have one myself, and I’m playing around with it quite a bit, which is also leading me to start researching this stuff on youtube (subscribe to my channel) more and more. What I’m finding is that the most successful of them exploit editing and sound in order to trick the eye and confound expectations, which give them a foot in the cinema of the uncanny.

In writing about early cinema, film critic Tom Gunning termed this genre the “cinema of attractions” — film’s equivalent to the circus sideshow, where the spectacle is everything and the narrative is scant or completely unnecessary. Before roughly 1906, film had not yet converted over to the dominant narrative format that we know so well in most Hollywood films today, which continues to draw from 19th Century narrative structure. YouTube makes no such pretense (perhaps because when it got started, YouTube would limit postings to 5 minutes in length, which led to widespread sharing of quirky videos akin to America’s Funniest Home Videos — which, incidentally, just aired it’s 500th episode — more than anything else). The bulk of the experience of such shared videos cues its viewers in much the same way as the early cinema of attractions, especially in its reference to the “magic” of what we are shown.

In her essay, “You Tube: The New Cinema of Attractions,” critic Theresa Rizzo does a masterful job both situating such videos into the tradition of this genre, but also exploring what marks online video sharing as unique: “although YouTube clips arrest our attention and encourage us to gawk similarly through novelty and curiosity throughout the course of a day, they also invite us to respond and participate in a variety of ways.” Thus, instead of turning to your neighbor in the theater seats and saying “wow,” we can say “wow” (and much more) right back to the filmmakers in an online comment or foment our own viral marketing campaign through an international form of “word of mouth” advertising on facebook, twitter, and elsewhere. Such shared videos can also be remediated — transported into different media or even remixed. “The cinema of attractions is ultimately about acts of display, or exhibitionism rather than storytelling in a similar way remediation is all about showing off by being clever and creative. It is a self-conscious practice that points to the producer, itself and to the power of the medium.”

I am, of course, fascinated and enthralled by short cinema and all the online activity we see with such texts. I think there is a grand democratization of art happening right now, which is wonderful (despite my skepticism about much of it — see my essay “Mock Band: The Simulation of Artistic Processes” for more on that). But the main interest for me is the role of the uncanny in communicating “the power of the medium”…which often is figured as a technology with autonomous, supernatural agency. This power is interesting to read as a symptom of social or personal anxiety, and often deifies technology in ways intended to either disavow agency or sell products through commodity fetishism (e.g. consumer technology IS a commodity). Melies wasn’t selling anything but himself. His “camera” was a magic wand. Today, magic wands are camcorders in the hands of the masses, available to all — for a price — and if we want, we can “magically” edit our stories, our personal history, our record of events. This is a manifestation of the popular uncanny.

In the Five Second Film about “The Magic Show Volunteer” our spectacular laughter relies on the taboos that are encroached here, regarding violence against pregnant women. It is not so difficult to give a feminist critique to something so clearly gendered in its representation of power. The male magician, a staging of authority, literally appropriates the “uncanny” nature of organic childbirth (“popping” the belly in a horrific way (clearly a balloon is pricked) — almost as if the woman’s body was something artificial, like a doll — before ‘birthing’ the child from his mouth). This topsy-turvy figuration of “male birth” is a common trope in uncanny horror film (and reaches all the way back to Shelley’s Frankenstein). It is an aggressive fantasy that a Freudian might read as an Oedipal nightmare as much as a gross-out joke, with the “father figure” of the fanciful magician responsible for “disappearing” the child, swallowing it off screen and “magically” pulling the newborn from his throat on its umbilical tourniquet. All of this “magic” — the taboo male fantasy of the text — is performed by cinematic technology, and its placement in the cinema of attractions renders it safe, domestic…and perhaps far too easily reproduced and reinforced as a social message.

Or maybe it’s just funny, and we’re invited to laugh at the male fantasy it presents. Perhaps the gimmicky magic it offers up is mocked, and this is a parody of itself. I’m uncertain. That, too, is inherent to the uncanny.

So…with this post I share it.

Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side by Michael Arnzen:

Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side is a treasury of twisted tips, strange scenarios and disturbing sparks to help ignite the fuel in your creative furnace. Its aim? To push you into the danger zone of your imagination, by thinking in unconventional ways and trying things you never thought — or dared — to try before in your writing, art, or dreams.

See the catalog page for more information. Or visit scribd.com for a meaty excerpt. Writers responding to the prompts are already beginning to populate the new Instigation Showcase web page, too — join us!

NOW AVAILABLE for direct purchase from this website! Purchase price is just $3.99 via Paypal to books@masticationpublications.com. Click the button below to order and a password with download information will be provided within 48 hours.

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NOTE: This book is currently only available in .mobi, .epub, and .pdf formats, which are readable in most ebook devices and computers. A print edition is not currently available (though you can get a large sampler in the hardcover only edition of The Gorelets Omnibus published by Raw Dog Screaming Press).

Tonight is Instigation night. Help me spread the word, share a link to this website, circulate by hashtag (#Instigation) on twitter, or just write something instigated by the prompts on gorelets.com and then let me know if you publish it online.

Subscribers to the newsletter at the mastication website can get a copy directly from this website at a discount, once it is available for sale online. Backers of The Fridge of the Damned will all be getting their copies first via email, as their reward. It will also be made available for purchase via paypal here. Then it will begin to appear on amazon, nook, and other ebook providers over the week to come. The circle will be complete. The corruption will spread. The end will be nigh. The four horsemen of the gorpocalypse ride tonight. They’ve got meat wagons hitched up behind them. Climb aboard!

And let me know what you think.

I have also just released the Instigation Showcase page to highlight the work that people produce as a result of working on the Instigation prompts. Let me know if you’re already one of them and you’ll get listed early. I love receiving feedback in reviews, comments, and email as well. It’s no longer my book once it is released this evening. It will then be yours. — Mike Arnzen

Here is Renate Muller’s final cover art for our soon-to-be-published ebook, Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side. She did a fabulous job building all the pitchfork components from scratch — and I love all the little details (like the way it pokes through the “O” in “prompts” and how the ‘pencil’ tip smolders with puffs of smoke made of lettering. The title font, too, is fetching and dastardly.

The book rocks and the scope of it is quite epic. It is in the final editing stages and on time for an early March release. Backers of the Fridge of the Damned (sneak photo of the tins here) will be getting their copies first, in gratitude.

“Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.” — Ray Bradbury

February has been a high production month, to the core.

I’m excited to see how people will respond to Instigation…I want to see a raging inferno come out of it. Assuming everything stays on track, the ebook will be released early March.

Here’s a screen capture of the “corkboard” in Scrivener that I’ve been using to organize the prompts… and this is only a partial, vague, view of what is going into this book.

Raw Dog Screaming Press is sponsoring something called Arnzstigation Days for the second half of January 2013. It’s a neat way to get a glimpse of how a book like Instigation has inspired some of the dark creative writers and artists out there. There’s an event page on facebook and a “hub” page on livejournal collecting everyone’s Arnzstigated writing. If you want to participate, check in with them before Jan 31st!

You may already know that you can reserve a copy of Instigation for as little as a one dollar page on The Fridge of the Damned kickstarter campaign, since it is one of the many rewards for that campaign. And I’m happy to report that the Fridge was “fully funded” this morning, which means that the project was backed and that all pledgers WILL get the ebook come March! If you haven’t made a pledge yet, now’s the time — the chance to get this ebook for a buck (and to support our “stretch goal”) will expire on February 1st! Pledge right now!

Read more about Instigation.

Here’s a glam photo of our test cover art for the Instigation ebook in progress for Mastication Publications (to be published in March 2013). This is NOT the final cover…but it’s close!

Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side is a collection of ideas, questions, and scenarios to help writers, filmmakers and artists formulate new horror or suspense stories… or to give their ideas more crazy levels of conflict and more terrifying twists.

The book is scheduled to be released in March 2013, for a price tbd. But you can reserve your copy for as little as a $1 today. Every pledge to the Fridge of the Damned will get a free copy of this ebook in March, so please back us before the campaign expires on Feb 1st: kck.st/YUsPdL

If you have feedback on the cover, please leave a comment!

ps. Also don’t forget: if you sign up for our newsletter, you’ll get a copy of our Meat Shots e-book NOW totally free!

A higher res image of the Instigation cover is up in the Fridge of the Damned gallery on Flickr.

Today our Kickstarter page for The Fridge of the Damned included a very special reward level: the “Compulsive Chewer”! Pledge $175 or more to the project, and you’ll not only get ebooks and books and CDs and collectables galore, but also a LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTION to all products that Mastication Publication ever puts out in ebook or print format, for as long as you or the press shall live. I’ll even throw in the box our early chapbooks from the 1990s, and a copy of Sportuary.

Act fast, because this pretty awesome offer expires on Feb 1st, 2013!