California actor and producer John McGarr, attending the Horrorhound convention in Indianapolis, was walking to breakfast when a car swerved out of the traffic lane and killed him. The Indianapolis Star reports the driver was taken into custody on preliminary charges of driving while intoxicated causing death.
McGarr, the executive producer of House of the Wolf Man, was 45. Friends have created a tribute site here.
[[Thanks to Steve Green for the story.]]
Online voting has begun for the 8th Annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards.
Nominees for Best Article of 2009 include two tributes to the late Forrest J Ackerman.
Steve Vertlieb’s “The Most ‘Famous Monster’ of Them All” originally appeared on his own Thunder Child site and was recently added to the newly-relaunched Famous Monsters website.
Daniel Kirk’s “How I Met the Man Behind Famous Monsters of Filmland” reminisces about the day Ackerman’s 1963 cross-country tour stopped at his house in Columbus, Ohio. His article ran in Scary Monsters #70.
Up for Best Book of 2009 is Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies, American Science Fiction Movies of the 1950s, the 21st Century Edition, the revised and expanded edition of the classic film study.
Any fan can vote. Send an e-mail containing your name and your picks to David Colton (taraco at aol.com) by April 3.
[Thanks to Steve Vertlieb for the link.]
This weekend Visioncon in Springfield, MO offers Artist GoH Alain Viesca, author GoH Shane Moore, Comic Guest of Honor Javier Saltares and a flock of other guests.
Chief among them are horror writers Cullen Bunn, Wrath James White, Mike Oliveri, Brian Keene. The quartet is being trumpeted as the competition in an “Author’s Gross Out Contest” Saturday at 10 p.m. Cullen Bunn has won the World Horror Convention Gross-Out Contest four times, you know, so the bar is set pretty high.
I think we had that contest at a Worldcon once, except we called it the Sunday session of the 1987 Business Meeting, held in a room that had just hosted an all-night beer tasting, and then the floor cleaned with an ammonia solution before the chairs were set. The smell of the place is forever branded in my memory.
[Thanks to David Klaus for the link.]
People appreciate Edgar Allen Poe now. When he died in 1849 only 10 people came to his funeral, but on October 11 when the Poe House and Museum staff give him the sendoff they think he deserved 350 mourners will attend each of two services. The macabre tribute is part of a year-long celebration of the 200th year of Poe’s birth.
A coffin holding a replica of Poe’s body will be the centerpiece. John Astin, best known as Gomez Addams on TV’s “The Addams Family,” will serve as master of ceremonies:
“It’s sort of a way of saying, ‘Well, Eddie, your first funeral wasn’t a very good one, but we’re going to try to make it up to you, because we have so much respect for you,'” said Astin, who toured as Poe for years in a one-man show.
I think if Poe wasn’t dead already when they put him in the coffin, waking to discover Gomez Addams presiding over his funeral would finish the job.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]
Steve Green reports: “Leading UK horror magazine The Dark Side has reportedly ceased publication after more than 15 years. There’s no announcement on the website, but the links for the current and next issues no longer work. This might be temporary, of course.”
At Cult Movie Forums one contributor wrote:
Got a letter through the post today saying that my subscription to ‘Dark Side’ magazine was being suspended due to the current financial climate forcing the magazine to cease publication until they hope sometime in the new year, when a relaunch is planned in a ‘brand new’ format…something similar was said about the ‘Hammer Horror’ magazine, which vanished forever into the ether…so doesn’t sound very optimistic, does it?
Brian Showers’ The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories has won the Dracula Society’s “Children of the Night Award”. (The official site has yet to be updated at this writing.)
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]
Having been passed under the harrow for publishing a major collection of interviews with horror writers that failed to include any women, British Fantasy Society chair Guy Adams has posted an apology:
When James [Cooper] brought the manuscript to me with a view to our publishing it I know he intended no sexism in his selection of the authors but I feel deeply sorry that I didn’t flag the omission at the time.
It is disgustingly simple for a man not to notice these things, a blindness to the importance of correct gender representation that I feel embarrassed to have fallen into.
The next two volumes in the series are considerably more balanced in their table of contents but that doesn’t change the fact that I dropped the ball on this initial volume.
Adams has also told Alison Flood of the UK Guardian that he’d like to do a second collection to balance the score:
Speaking this morning from Spain, Adams said he would ideally like to publish – “by way of apology” – a book of interviews with female horror authors. “It seems the only viable alternative but the difficulty is that I don’t know if we can afford to,” he said. “I do feel embarrassed and I’m happy to stick my hand up – I took my eye off the ball.”
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]
Actor Robert Quarry, 83, who died February 20th, starred in the title role in Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and sequel The Return of Count Yorga (1971). His other films, all horror, were Deathmaster, Dr. Phibes Rises Again (both 1972), Sugar Hill (1974), Mind Twister (1994), and The Prophet (1999).
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]