Folks familiar with Lovecraft know what that means.  For everybody else, I’ll translate.

We’re starting pre-production for new episodes.  Sales have been sluggish, but demand from our actors and supporters is high.  We’re approaching a few people, casting a few roles, giving a couple of scripts a green light.

I can tell you for certain that a story called “Sleepless Days” will definitely be in Volume 2.  Jamie wrote the treatment and approved the script.  Her original premise for it was basically the last vampire in Gilroy.  It got just plain strange after that.  I want upcoming eps to explore the darker places of the Afterhell world, so this story will be a goofy and probably welcome change of pace.

Now if things go really well, we’ll get some studio time before Halloween.  Then again, it might make for a really strange Halloween party….

I’m just ducking in real quick to touch base.  I mentioned some comments on the ‘Salem’s Lot remake earlier.  I posted them in my own LJ blog for those who are curious.

Also, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a work of genius.  It’s more than a political commentary.  Michael Moore pulled all the stops and used every single part of the medium to the full.  Here is a movie film students will be picking apart for decades to come.  And yeah, it’s frightening at times.  Gory in places, too.  There’s some on-the-spot war footage, right down to the wounds.  Caveats a la mode.

Godzilla looms ahead.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  But first, my wrist is getting cranky….

Just a quick little something before I disappear for the weekend.  This is an entry I wrote in another blog for Halloween 2003.

http://www.ujournal.org/users/darkkarma0/2066.html

I was trying to do a major rundown of horror film highlights throughout the month, capping it off with (what I considered) recommendations for a personal Halloween movie marathon.  We were still in the thick of post-production, so the blog idea didn’t work out.

If folks are curious, I can offer a review of the TNT remake of ‘Salem’s Lot.  I’m going to try to catch the whole thing this weekend.  But I’ve got two other movies ahead of it in the queue:  Fahrenheit 9/11 and the original 1954 Japanese version of Godzilla.  Is it a different movie without Raymond Burr butting in?  We shall see.

Or maybe just me and Jamie.  I wasn’t going to speak for anyone….

A quick update for all and sundry:  Afterhell:  “Dark Descent” is now on sale at CD Baby.

It’s an online store run by and for independent musicians yet to be discovered (or resented) by the recording industry.  Its base of operations is right here in the Portland Tri-Met area, and the CD Baby crew are a lot of fun to work with.  Special thanks to CD Baby’s daddy Derek Sivers, Peter Wright (aka Detective Moore), and actor/composer Curt Siffert!

Local folks make good?  We’ll see.

Last night, Jamie and I had dinner with up-and-coming voice actor DJ Chiles.  Loads of fun.  Sometimes we got intimidated by the sheer number of voices, dialects, accents, and gags DJ could do on the fly!  We talked about all sorts of things, everything from cats to his work of late.  He’s part of an improv group and had recently done some voiceovers for a local PBS station.  What he can do is just amazing.

We met him and many more voice actors at a Halloween party put on by a lady in the Afterhell cast.  At the party, we passed around copies of “Damning Praise” and “Sleepless Days”, two scripts Jamie and I had written for the series.  Everyone decided to do an impromptu reader’s theater with “Sleepless Days” where DJ read for a vampire.  He gave the role that perfect hint of a Hungarian accent, expertly avoiding camp.  Every now and then ever since, he’s sent us an occasional note about doing more.

And of course that came up again over dinner last night.  We gave the usual status report and crossing of fingers.  Blah, blah, CD sales, seed money, blah, blah, blah, hopehopehope. 

We discussed ways to promote the show.  Banner exchanges, bugging Fangoria Magazine for a review (I’d link to www.fangoria.com, but the pic on this week’s front page might be too grisly for some–fair warning), online ad space.

Producing new eps, which came into the discussion as well, should be a more streamlined process than before.  Having gone through the process once, I know what we can do better and where.  We should be able to produce two or three eps for the time and cost it took for the pilot.

All this becomes more pressing as time passes.  Any actor involved in the project for a protracted period of time has asked more than once, “When can we make another one?”

Hearing that again last night from DJ has got us wondering.  I think we’ve been bitten by the audio bug again.  The only question now is what to do about it.

I thought I’d bring a question to the AH blog here and find out what people might think.

Earlier I started watching Red Dragon, the 2002 remake based on Thomas Harris’ novel, the basis of Michael Mann’s Manhunter.  Ran out of time this morning.  I’ll start it over and watch it later.  (Yeah, I’m weird.  Either I wake up to a horror flick or CNN.  Is there a difference?)

While wading through one of the slower moments in the flick, I was comparing differences between Manhunter, the original novel, and the film I was zoning out of.  Then I remembered an argument I got into with Kevin J. Anderson at a convention about 10 years ago over the Michael Mann flick.  He thought the movie had steered too far from the book and should’ve kept more from the killer’s POV, including backstory and how it tied into his graphic MO.  I didn’t think any of it was necessary.

“How much horror do you need?” I said.  I was only half-serious, facetious but still curious what he thought was really necessary to make the story work.  He shrugged it off, glowered for a few seconds, clearly annoyed.  We moved on to things , it turned out, we both agreed on.  It ended amiably.  A year later, he even signed a book or two for me and Jamie.

Cut back to June 2004.  My mind’s drifting away from Red Dragon, making comparisons like I said, flitting around that disagreement KJA and I had.  I’d gone back and forth on the use of gore, disillusioned with splatterpunk writing and lame-brained horror flicks until I finally got around to renting Hellraiser.   Between that and Neil Gaiman’s work, I started making a serious study of dark fantasy. ( I’d been dealing with almost a year of constant nightmares, so it gave me a chance to deal with all these dark themes and images in my waking hours.  Kept me sane, got a mini-education.  Doesn’t suck.)

But I came away with a better understanding of gore and violence as storytelling devices.  Until then, I’d seen only the awkward mishandlings of it.  Most slasher flicks lack the skill of Hitchcock, Barker, or Dario Argento.  I knew about public protests against media violence, but only heard smatterings of things like tragedy as drama, catharsis, and Grand Guignol. 

Anyway, it’s gotten wondering what people might say.  Horror isn’t everyone’s cup of tea in the first place.  Graphic violence is the drop of arsenic that only so many have the stomach for.  Is it possible to do a tastefully done gory scene?

Well, we’ve made a few sales and sent out some promo disks for review.  XM Satellite has gotten their copy by now, and we’re still trying to get through to Fangoria Magazine.  Fans will probably see us in horror-oriented search engines.

The inevitable question of course is:  What are people saying about Afterhell?

So far we’ve had only a trickle of feedback, all positive for the most part. All the comments to date have praised the professional quality of the production.  Score one each for Piotr Orloff and Alida Saxon.  Someone thought it wasn’t as violent as advertised.  (I was in danger of overcompensating even before I heard that! 😉 ) 

Meanwhile, our cast is still pulling all the stops for us.  They gave us all thumbs-up on the no-frills contributor copies we burned from our master, and a few have asked for the packaged CDs as well.  And from what I understand, Peter Wright aka Detective Moore keeps the pilot ep on his iPod.

Woo-hoo!  Our disk has been ripped!

Er…wait a minute….

The recent news from Iraq and Nick Berg’s death delivers a painful reminder what horror really is. 

I won’t belabor it or the politics of it here.  But it’s important to note.  Horror isn’t just a genre of spook thrillers and slasher flicks.  We slap the word on books and movies when we should be calling them dark fantasies.  Vampires and black magic don’t happen in the real world.  Horror belongs to the real world.

I’m not knocking horror fiction, dark fantasy, or anything like that.  I wouldn’t have written Afterhell, let alone produced it, if I could dismiss the genre out of hand.  As long as we carve out a place for dreams in our waking hours, our nightmares deserve equal time.  We need the emotional release.

But considering how jaded we are about so many things, in a strange way it’s a relief to know we can still be horrified.

Just got my own copies of the CD this weekend (thanks!) And here’s a quick photo for the curious. I think Cafepress did a real nice job with it.

Afterhell producer here, adding to the messages.

Thank you, Ali, for getting this up and running. It’s beautiful.

To those of you just discovering our dark little corner of the world, welcome. Please do stay … no, really. We mean it. Shared dreams thrive on the contributions of all the dreamers. And the same is true of nightmares.

Feel free to join the community; we’re looking forward to hearing what you have to say.