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Fangoria Presents: Badasses of Horror: Part One

From Fangoria.com:  If you want to talk about badass crap, you really can’t do a hell of a lot worse than the horror genre. Whether it’s crazy Eastern Europeans with slicked-back hair and overly developed canine teeth chomping down on the necks of scantily clad maidens or demented, murderous psychopaths running around in body armor made from human skin and carving X’s into the chest cavities of wayward coeds with gasoline-powered gardening implements, horror never seems to disappoint when it comes to violent homicide or paint-bombing dungeon walls with a thick coat of crimson substances. Therefore, in an effort to promote my new book BADASS: A RELENTLESS ONSLAUGHT OF THE TOUGHEST WARLORDS, VIKINGS, SAMURAI, PIRATES, GUNSLINGERS, AND MILITARY COMMANDERS TO EVER LIVE (in which I talk about such real-life badasses as the notorious Vlad the Impaler; see the trailer here), I will attempt to discuss some of the toughest heroes and villains the genre has to offer.

Now, I would never for a moment presume to try and dictate a definitive list of anything horror-related to a fan base as rabid as FANGORIA’s, so please allow me a brief caveat before I get too much further along in this process. I will say only that these are among my own personal favorites, and in no way an attempt to quantify or rank horror-movie badasses in any order other than chronologically. In the presumably likely event that you disagree with my decisions, I strongly encourage you guys to utilize the comments section below to express how brain-crushingly unfathomable it is that I didn’t include your favorite movie, character, fictional person, artificial construct, clothing article or food product on this list.

Abraham Van Helsing (DRACULA, 1897)

badassesofhorror1vanhelsingThese days, it seems like you can’t chuck a crucifix into a crowded room without accidentally impaling some crappy vampire-centric romantic comedy/drama about a dark, brooding, impeccably dressed blood-chugging metro douchebag flitting about in the woods with his whiny high-school girlfriend and talking about forbidden love ad nauseum, until pretty much everyone watching wants to barf up whatever is left of their rapidly shriveling brain cells. Well, back in the day (and by “the day,” of course I mean the late 19th century), everybody just thought vampires were complete bastards good for only one thing: getting pointy wooden stakes rammed through their chests at high velocity by Abraham Van Effing Van Helsing. This grizzled, hardass old Dutch physician/cryptozoologist/crazy occult genius dedicated his long and single-purposed life to training his mind and his body in the fine art of murdering the undead with extreme prejudice all the way up their cadaverous asses, and he was so good as his job that nowadays, his name is pretty much synonymous with stomping vampires’ balls into a thick marinara-like sauce smelling faintly of garlic and failure.

via Badasses of Horror: Part One.

Final Girl: When Serial Killers Go From Real to Reel

From Horror Hacker @ AMC Blogs:

One of the foremost arguments against horror movies is that they desensitize people to real-life violence. There may be some truth to that, but not for me.

While man’s inhumanity to man depresses me, I find the aberrant human mind fascinating. I’ve spent years watching Jason Voorhees go nuts with his machete, but I don’t want to be “entertained” by footage of real-life murder. I watch some crime shows, I read some true crime books and I talk with people who like the remake of April Fool’s Day better than the original. It’s sociological: What makes these wackadoos tick? That may be an unanswerable question, but filmmakers have tried for years to open a window into the serial-murdering mind. While the accuracy and inspiration may vary from movie to movie, there’s no denying that these reel killers are more frightening than Freddy Krueger could ever be, because they’re all real.

Ed Gein

“The Butcher of Plainfield” may have inspired more cinematic psycho killers than any other murderer, and with good reason: When police searched his property in connection with the disappearance of a local woman named Bernice Worden, the first thing they found was her body strung up in his barn, gutted like a deer carcass. More horrors waited inside Gein’s farmhouse: He’d been stealing corpses from a local cemetery and… well, literally decorating with viscera. Lampshades, masks and shade pulls made from human skin, skulls used as soup bowls… Gein was judged insane (you think?) and committed to a Wisconsin psychiatric hospital. He died of cancer-related heart failure in 1984.

Films: Psycho (1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Deranged (1974), Ed Gein (2000), Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007).

Click the link below for more.

via AMC – Blogs – Horror Hacker – Stacie Ponder – When Serial Killers Go From Real to Reel.