The Curfew Tolls the Knell of Parting Day...

Horror Icon Vampira has passed.

Such beauty and talent will surely be missed.

Rumored to have been kicked off a Broadway production for upstaging Mae West and a muse to the infamous Ed Wood in his film Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), even non-horror fans can recognize her trademark black talons, arched eyebrows and wasp-thin waist. Her persona, modeled after Charles Addams' Morticia, would appear again in the 1980s in the form of Elvira.

Purported to be the world's first horror host, her influence on horror and television is still being felt today, helping to usher the first wave of 1930s American horror to new audiences. What resulted was a renaissance of horror that further established the genre as an everyday part of American life. And to that, we owe her a debt of gratitude for her part in the movement.

RIP, Maila Syrjäniemi.

Goodnight sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest...

Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman has died.

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” -Bergman

Nothing could be any truer.

I can still remember seeing the knight playing chess with Death, an image that's been burned on my and the collective unconscious' brain. It's a theme culture has readily snatched up to parody, mock, and reproduce, but that distilled, laconic image still haunts us with Bergman's personification.

I know it has deeply affected my art. The incorporation of death imagery with the cerebral is powerful, yes, sometimes morbid, but filled with too much pregnant meaning to be ignored. I unconsciously must have thought, if he can do it and make it genius, make it loved by critics and audiences, then there must be some validity to it.
So I trudge on, hoping for a small sliver of the insight and prowess he achieved.

He will be missed.