Friday Links: Riddle Room, The Bat and the Brain, and The Lady Vampire

It’s time for an escape, and I can’t think of a better way to do that than bring you the Friday Links, where we look back at the world of the bizarre, disturbing, and speculative:

At Rely on Horror , Jorge Bocanegra talked about his 20-year relationship with the Resident Evil game franchise: “I first met Resident Evil with the release of Resident Evil 2. It was only after going through Leon and Claire’s scenarios a multitude of times that I finally backtracked all the way to the original game that started it all. As a bowl-haired 10-year old, I was ready to finally experience the horrors briefly glimpsed in Resident Evil 2’s intro (that zombie really scared me!).”
You never know for sure what’s going to happen when you open Zombos’ Closet , but you can be reasonably certain that it’ll be awesome. This Mexican lobby card of the 1971 flick The Blood on Satan’s Claw is no exception.
A murderer in Cape Town claimed that he was possessed by demons : “The case had closed, and nothing demonic had been mentioned throughout the trial. Three psychiatrists and a psychologist had also found no relevant abnormality regarding his mental capacity. Peculiarly, his lawyer then suddenly announced that his client was infested by “demonic forces”. He requested that the court facilitate an exorcism in prison, which he would videotape and show to the judge during argument about sentencing.”
Breakfast in the Ruins talked about a Japanese vampire film released in 1959: “Whilst we’ve already seen some pretty curious mash-ups of Eastern and Western horror tropes in this ‘Nippon horrors’ review thread, you’d be hard-pressed I think to find a more determinedly oddball example of the phenomenon than ‘Onna Kyûketsuki’ (‘The Lady Vampire’), another low budget quickie produced for Shintoho studios by J-horror pioneer Nobuo Nakagawa.”
Nev Murray reviewed Kyle M. Scott’s Consumed Volume 2 at his Confessions of a Reviewer!! : “What you have here are six tales that, at times, could not be more different. You have strippers and clowns and bouncers and babies. You have laughs and sexy stuff and blood and guts. You have more blood and guts. You have tension. A lot of tension. That tension invariably leads to horror.”
Fascination With Fear showed us the art of Amalia Kouvalis: “American artist Amalia Kouvalis captures the world we want to see when we look at old Victorian portraits. In the flash of an imaginary camera she captures ghosts, demons, departing souls, and other things that we can only catch a glimpse of out of the corner of our eye.”
Robert E. Howard’s Western-style Conan story was deconstructed by Sean Eaton at his inimitable R’lyeh Tribune : “But there is a lot more going on in Beyond the Black River than a bloody battle between cowboys and Picts.  Howard applies the geographical history worked out in his The Hyborian Age (1938) to conditions on the ground near the Black River….There is considerable philosophizing about the wisdom of spreading civilization to the undefended edges of a frontier, and a grim conclusion about the nature of humanity and its struggle against barbarism, summarized at the very end by a survivor of the Pictish onslaught.”
The Cathode Ray Mission brought us a series of movie posters from the 1977 film Rabid. “Pray it doesn’t happen to you!”
Killer Fish, an old UHF favorite starring James Franciscus, was the subject of discussion at The Horror!? : “As long-time readers among my imaginary audience might remember, I’m predisposed to like any old crap Italian director in every genre known to Man and some known only to Italian cinema Antonio Margheriti did, so it’ll come as little surprise to these chosen few that I did indeed like, as well as deeply enjoy, this somewhat misbegotten mixture of heist film, post-Jaws something-in-the-water horror, men’s adventure, and disaster movie that mixes so many genres it’s no wonder it can’t do any single one of them terribly well.”
At The Slaughtered Bird , the Blue Took reviewed the bizarre film Decay: “Writer-director Joseph Wartnerchaney’s debut feature, Decay, is fundamentally a character study of a tragically damaged, troubling individual which cleverly takes a subject that would normally serve as an excuse to deliver trashy clichés and injects some interesting concepts; loneliness being the main theme tackled head-on in a way rarely seen, as we follow the trials and tribulations of a man on the outskirts of society harbouring a ghoulish secret.”
Have you heard of the 2016 movie Riddle Room? Neither have I, but Hayes Hudson’s House of Horror reviewed it: “One thing I really liked about this film is it starts out immediately in the middle of the action.   The woman is already kidnapped and locked in the room.  We don’t have any slow parts leading up to this, we just jump in to the immediate action.”
The Horrors of It All uploaded the entirety of the comic book tale The Bat and the Brain for your viewing pleasure.
We learned the two best ways to avoid demonic possession : “Father de Meo, for his part said that he has been leading a school of exorcists for the past 13 years to address the need but his endeavour comes with the blessing of his bishop as handling cases of demonic possession is very sensitive. Still, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure and so he advises that to protect oneself from demonic possession, the best and safest way is to refrain from engaging in occult practices which he feels have grown at an alarming rate in the past years and resulted in a “pastoral emergency.””
Here, I pointed you to a review I wrote of Erik Hofstatter’s Katerina , and told you about the five people you meet on Facebook .

Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu’s S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters.