The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen

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The theme of this horror anthology is that each of the stories has something to do with movies or the movie industry.

Some of these stories take the mission and absolutely click. My favorite story in the anthology was Kim Newman's “Illimitable Dominion.” I listened to the collection as an audiobook and I found the narration to be absolutely brilliant, and the story laugh out loud funny, as the narrator explains how his world was taken over by the vengeful spirit of Edgar Allen Poe as a result of the American International Pictures (“AIP”) chance discovery of The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Roger Corman and starring the velvet-shirt clad Vinnie Price. Newman knows film history and I was surprised a how much of the silliness, such as AIP producing “Rocket Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women of Blood” and Vinnie “hawking Sears-Roebuck art selections and cookbooks on the side,” is legitimate history. This story redeemed the anthology in my opinion.

There were other good stories. “each thing I show you is a piece of my death” starts slow, has an epistolary structure and ends with a maxed-out creep factor as we learn that an urban legend about a figure that keeps appearing in the background of movies, television shows, and music videos is explained in gory detail. “Occum's Ducks” by Howard Waldrop wasn't really horror or fantasy, but dealt with an interesting piece of movie history involving “race movies” and the forgotten actor Mantan Moreland. “The Constantinople Archives” was an oddball story about the film industry in Constantinople at the time of the Muslim conquest in 1452. It was weirdly aimless, but caught my love history and attention. “The Hanged Man of Oz” is another story involving a film urban legend, in this case, a brief image in the Wizard of Oz showing a hanged man. “Dead Image” - involving the possible re-incarnation of a James Dean character - was good, as was “The Thousand Cuts” which asks the question, “What if we are the movie?”

Some of the offerings were disturbing, particularly when they focus on the obsession of fans with the torture of slash film. “Final Girl Theory” is what sounds like a snuff film or slasher film, definitely a cult film, that fans obsess over, and one fan discovers the “final girl,” the survivor. The story doesn't go anywhere, but the imagery is grisly. “Bright Lights, Big Zombies” pictures a Manhattan under siege from the walking dead. Horror films are censored, ownership of horror films can lead to jail time, and fans treat horror films like illegal drugs. “Tenderizer” is an odd story about an odd campaign to sell an odd film about a massacre of high school students.

In short, the stories are uneven, but overall the good outweighs the bad.