Following are news items for the fantastic including horror, science fiction, fantasy, and the paranormal for the last few weeks. These items can be accessed daily as they are posted through my Facebook page and Twitter account.

‘Insidious’ review: An old-style horror movie
“Insidious” is a respectable attempt at a type of horror movie they don’t make anymore – that is, horror that is scary and not merely disgusting. From the opening credits, in which the title appears in blood-red letters to the accompaniment of blaring, dissonant music, the movie tries to get under your skin and inside your mind. Sometimes it does.

Insidious review
Insidious is a haunted-house movie that has some of the most shivery and indelible images I’ve seen in any horror film in decades. Yes, it’s that unsettling. Directed by James Wan (Saw) and produced by Oren Peli, the auteur of the Paranormal Activity films, the movie is about a couple (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) whose home is plagued by the usual clanks, growls, and playfully sinister disturbances. Then one of the family’s young sons lapses into a coma. It’s his spirit that’s been hijacked, overtaken by ghosts who have a way of showing their creepy, smiling, old-fashioned nightmare faces at just the right moment to goose you with anxiety. Lin Shaye plays the psychic exorcist who can see into their world, and her fluky cornball intensity lifts the film into a realm of menacing excitement. Wan is better known for severed limbs than subtlety, but here he reaches back to the stately spookiness of the 1962 low-budget classic Carnival of Souls and adds a touch of early David Lynch to conjure up a vision of hell that is terrifying in its dreamlike banality. Like most haunted-house films, Insidious is a contraption, but it’s one that won’t let go of you.

Inside The Minds Of The Creators Of ‘Insidious’
When I was asked to cover the “Insidious” press junket, screening, and Q&A, I had to think twice. I am not the gal that lines up for the latest film offerings in horror and the paranormal. Add the fact that the writer and director are from the “Saw” franchise and I paused even longer. Little did I know that “Insidious” would be a great departure from bloody series of “Saw.” Over the course of three days, I was able to interview director James Wan, writer Leigh Whannell, and actors Barbara Hershey and Lin Shaye.

Will Beall May Write the ‘Logan’s Run’ Remake Starring Ryan Gosling
Warner Bros is all kinds of hot on screenwriter Will Beall’s debut script, Gangster Squad, and now they’ve hired the former LA cop to write some big budget science fiction for Logan’s Run. The remake is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and stars Ryan Gosling, reteaming after the recently-wrapped action film Drive, in which Gosling plays a part-time getaway driver.

‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’: An Uncensored Version of a Scandalous Classic
Little did I know that I was reading a censored version of this work. Wilde first published The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890 and it met with swift, stern condemnation. The Daily Chronicle denounced it as “a poisonous book…heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction” and “a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents” while the Scots Observer opined that it was “false to morality” because the author failed to sufficiently denounce the title character’s preference for “a course of unnatural iniquity” over “a life of cleanliness, health, and sanity.” As a result, when Dorian Gray was published as a book Wilde’s editors cut out quite a bit which made explicit what was only implied in the text I had read. So explicit, in fact, that portions of the 1890 version of Dorian Gray were cited as evidence against Wilde in his 1895 trial for indecency.

Identity and Memory in ‘Dollhouse’
Cogito ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.” These are the founding words of modern Western philosophy. When Rene Descartes famously came to this conclusion more than 350 years ago, he thought it self-evident. At first glance, his argument against doubt does seem foolproof. If I can doubt my own existence, I must be able to think, and if I am thinking, then I must exist. Open and shut case. But there is a vital question that Descartes overlooked: What is the “I”? This is the motivating question behind Dollhouse. Coming out of the gate, Dollhouse appeared to be little more than a well-written retread of Alias or Charlie’s Angels. But by the end of its second and final season, Dollhouse had delved into issues of personal identity more deeply than most metaphysics textbooks. Although subject to network interference and a sadly truncated 26-episode run, Dollhouse maintains a remarkably coherent conception of what it means to be a human being. Furthermore, Dollhouse confronts the difficult questions of moral responsibility and free will that arise from the vision of identity presented on the show.

Rise in demand for exorcism recalls horror trend
An item to be explored in a future post and interview at TheoFantastique: A surge in Satanism fueled by the internet has led to a sharp rise in the demand for exorcists, a trend formerly spiked by the classic 1973 horror film.

RISE OF THE APES Teaser Image Offers a First Look at Ceasar
After debuting the first image of James Franco in the mysterious prequel last month, 20th Century Fox has given attendees of CinemaCon their first glimpse of the film’s real star.

Oscar-winning visual effects house Weta Digital – employing certain of the groundbreaking technologies developed for Avatar – will render, for the first time ever in the film series, photo-realistic apes rather than costumed actors. Set in present day San Francisco, Rise of the Apes is a reality-based cautionary tale, a science fiction/science fact blend, where man’s own experiments with genetic engineering lead to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.

Soylent Green – Blu-ray Review
Soylent Green is presented in a 1080p high definition transfer (2.40:1). Special features, all in standard definition, include a commentary by director Richard Fleischer and Leigh Taylor-Young, the 10 minute “A Look at the world of Soylent Green” which details the futuristic look of the film, a 4 minute featurette about this being Edward G. Robinson’s 101st film (and final film it would turn out) with some famous faces stopping by to celebrate, and the 3 minute theatrical trailer.

‘BFI: Invasion of the Body Snatchers’: Pod People, Redux
Invasion of the Body Snatchers gets a detailed examination that comes in at just around 100 pages in the new volume of the British Film Institutes Film Classics. This series, which to date has included brief studies of everything from Singing in the Rain to The Exorcist, combines a short analysis of the film and an examination of contested critical questions. It also often offers reflections by the authors on their personal response and interpretation of the film’s meaning.

Red Riding Hood Arouses Man’s Inner (Were)Wolf
And now this mysterious figure has come out of our collective dream-world once again, hard on the trail of a no-longer-little Red Riding Hood in Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, released earlier this month.

We may think we know her story pretty well, but that’s not necessarily true—not least because it’s not a single story and, like most folklore, every age imagines it anew.

Jeepers Creepers 3 Shooting in LA Now!
Now we have an interesting scoop from a reader who goes by the name Jordy. He writes to us to tell us that Jeepers Creepers 3 is finally more then just talk and planning. He writes:

They are currently filming the movie as we speak. Just got back from Universal Studios, where I saw the Creeper’s truck driving into a sound-stage.

In pictures: Science Fiction exhibition
A look at the British Library’s first exhibition exploring science fiction.

The Lure of the Dark Side: A Review
The dark side is alive and well in popular culture and has been for millenia. Just as fascinating as the dark side itself is our fascination with it. In The Lure of the Dark Side: Satan & Western Demonology in Popular Culture, Christopher Partridge and Eric Christianson collect a series of essays, many of which were originally presented at a conference in North Wales in 2006, that discuss both “dark” media and our “addiction” to them.Partridge and Christianson divide their book into three sections, music, film, and literature, and each contributor to those sections exemplifies the best of what this hybrid genre (religion and pop culture studies) has to offer. They begin with a brief history of demonology and a 1-2 sentence description of the essays that follow and the ways in which they draw from and contribute to that history. They write, “[…The] widespread fascination with the diabolical and the dark side continues in the West–encouraged, to a significant extent, by popular culture” (12). This pop culture demonology both fills in the spaces left by mainline churches and counters discussions taking place in many conservative congregations.

Chupacabra Legend Inspired by Horror Film Beast: Slide Show
Chupacabra, the third best known monster in the world, turns out to be a fabrication spun by a woman who viewed the 1995 film Species.

SINISTER SEVEN: Q&A WITH ZOMBIE ACADEMIC ANDREA SUBISSATI
Rue Morgue had the pleasure of co-hosting the recent Toronto launch party for Andrea Subissati’s book When There’s No More Room In Hell: The Sociology of the Living Dead. Based on her Carleton MA thesis, it’s an academic look at, in Subissati’s words, “the relationship between Western culture as it is lived and culture as it is depicted in various art forms, including film,” albeit through the lens of George Romero’s zombie films.

The author of this thesis will be interviewed at TheoFantastique in the near future.