Crease Magazine

Fright Night Part 2, Return of the Living Dead Part II, and An American Werewolf in Paris by Dax Silver There are sequels that arrive like emperors, wrapped in studio confidence, announced by trumpets, billboards, lunchboxes, and the trembling knowledge that the public has already been trained to need them. Then there are sequels like these. They arrive late, under-lit, misfiled, mistrusted, half-apologizing from the corner of the video store. They come with the wrong timing, the wrong tone, the wrong cast member missing, the wrong technology, the wrong decade sneering at them from the doorway. They inherit beloved originals and immediately get punished for not being miracles twice. This is not a night for the canon winners. This is a night for the films that got sentenced without trial. Fright Night Part 2. Return of the Living Dead Part II. An American Werewolf in Paris. Three horror-comedy sequels. Three cursed inheritances. Three movies carrying the family name while ev...

CREASE MAGAZINE Buzz Drainpipe reviews The Failed Escape Cycle , The Relic Interrogations , and Gideon Voice by Buzz Drainpipe, Senior Correspondent for Haunted Arrangement There are trilogies that arrive with maps. There are trilogies that arrive with bloodlines, forged swords, magical committees, prophetic infants, disputed crowns, and one ancient sentence everyone keeps mispronouncing in a stone hallway. Then there is the Gideon Void trilogy, which appears to have crawled out of a broadcast tower, stolen a folding table from a church basement, stacked six films, four relics, and four albums upon it, then asked the human race to explain why all its escape routes smell faintly of coffee, dust, panic, and old plastic. This is not a normal trilogy. Good. Normal trilogies tend to know where they are going, and that is often their first mistake. The Gideon books do not move forward so much as burrow inward. They begin with planetary exit strategies, proceed to cultura...

Everybody thinks they know the house. That is the trouble with famous bands. The public version becomes a floor plan printed on cheap paper: here is the front door, here is the famous staircase, here is the one room everybody photographs, here is the room where the hit single still sits under glass, smiling the awful smile of a taxidermied animal. Black Sabbath means doom. Aerosmith means scarves and leer. The Clash means punk with a conscience. Blue Öyster Cult means cowbell and death refusing to fear itself. Cheap Trick means power-pop sugar. The Kinks mean Britishness in a cracked teacup. Alice Cooper means theatrical horror. Thin Lizzy means twin guitars and boys back in town again. None of this is wrong. That is what makes it dangerous. The obvious truth can become the most effective disguise. A band’s reputation is not a lie, exactly. It is more like a movie poster left in the sun. The colors remain, but something has burned away. The public image hardens....

WSTX CHANNEL 68 PRESENTS This Sunday, WSTX Channel 68 lowers the lights, pours the last drink, and opens the locked room at the back of the American family. First, Long Day’s Journey into Night , Eugene O’Neill’s thundercloud masterpiece of memory, morphine, resentment, foghorns, old wounds, and people who love each other too much to stop destroying one another. Then, stay seated, because the bar is not closing. The Iceman Cometh follows, dragging us into Harry Hope’s saloon, where every broken dream gets another round and every lie has its own stool. The old boys are waiting. Hickey is coming. Hope is a tab nobody can pay. Together, they form one long Sunday descent into the national hangover: family, booze, failure, illusion, tenderness, poison, and the terrible mercy of finally saying what everyone already knew. Hosted by Buzz Drainpipe , broadcasting from a barstool that has achieved consciousness. WSTX Channel 68 Presents: Hangovers of the American Soul Long ...

. The High Goblin Curriculum Comes to the VFW: A Review of an Evening of Sound, Myth & Revelation There are concerts, there are lectures, there are community dinners, and then there are those rare civic disturbances where all three are stacked on top of each other until the fire marshal begins reconsidering Plato. Saturday night’s High Goblin Curriculum event, held in the rented back hall of a VFW that looked as though it had hosted both wedding receptions and paranormal committee meetings, was billed as “an evening of sound, myth & revelation.” This was accurate in the way a weather report saying “possible rain” is accurate before the river comes through the floor. The room itself had been transformed, or at least cornered, into a kind of working-class Eleusis. Folding tables. Brown paneling. Flags. A faint smell of floor wax, cigarette ghosts, and tomato sauce. At the far end, beneath fluorescent lights that seemed personally opposed to transcendence, a turnta...

East Boston, MA — WSTX Channel 68 is proud, worried, and legally advised to announce its all-summer seaside programming block, Surf, Snobs & Sandworms , a three-feature beach broadcast designed for viewers who believe summer should include sun, social tension, obsolete technology, and at least one unexplained subterranean digestive event. Beginning this summer, WSTX viewers are invited to draw the curtains, ignore the nice weather, and tune in for a coastal triple feature of suspicious leisure: Computer Beach Party A sun-baked collision of bikinis, development schemes, and early computer optimism, proving once and for all that the beach can only truly be saved by the youth, the weirdos, and whoever knows how to boot the machine without losing the file. Beach House A salt-air class-war rental comedy where vacation becomes a battleground, the rich kids bring attitude, and the working stiffs bring the only thing that matters: absolute refusal to let snobs ruin the ...

Across time and place, surveillance usually enters through the clean door: safety, welfare, sanitation, borders, crime, taxation, public health, military defense, fraud prevention, or convenience . Then it spreads through the service tunnels. The key move is rarely “let us surveil everyone.” It is usually: “We already collected the data for X. Why not use it for Y?” That is the spell. That is the little bureaucratic demon in the fuse box. 🗂️⚡ Below is a deeper world map of how surveillance expands beyond its stated purpose. I. Empire and colonial administration 1. Colonial passes and internal passports Where: British Empire, French Empire, Dutch colonies, South Africa, Rhodesia, colonial India, settler colonies. Original purpose: Labor control, taxation, vagrancy control, “public order,” racial zoning. Expansion: Passes became a whole regime of movement control. They did not merely identify people. They decided where a person could live, work, travel, gathe...

Paul Zaza, Brad Fiedel, Fabio Frizzi, and the Sacred Art of Cheap-Screen Synth Dread By Dax Silver There is a certain kind of film score that does not sound composed so much as summoned from the back panel of a broken appliance . Not symphonic. Not respectable. Not wearing a velvet jacket and asking for an orchestra pit. I mean the other thing. The beautiful thing. The music that crawls out of a rented VCR at 1:17 in the morning, all pulse, hiss, keyboard fog, and civic unease. The score that sounds like a shopping mall after closing. The score that sounds like a corpse learning binary. The score that sounds like someone plugged a Casio into the afterlife and forgot to ground the cable. This is the kingdom of the synth-score masters. Not merely “electronic composers.” That sounds too clean, too museum-label, too fond of grant money. These were night electricians . They wired dread directly into genre cinema. They gave cheap movies expensive shadows. They proved that a singl...

Startup Glass-Box Dread / Corporate Monster Gore / Server-Ghost Horror By Volume 10, the machines have learned etiquette. That makes them worse. Uncanny opens in the sterile glass box of startup futurism: small-scale, precise, and quietly poisonous. AI consciousness, attraction, manipulation, and the dreadful intimacy of being studied by something that may want you, may be using you, or may not know the difference. Its horror is clean, almost polite. That is the trap. Death Machine then kicks the glass box into a furnace. Corporate tech hubris explodes into mechanized monster gore with all the restraint of a forklift driven through a board meeting. Not obscure to cult-heads, no, but far too gloriously excessive to omit. It is loud, nasty, overbuilt, and righteous: the machine as executive culture’s true face finally given claws. Finally, Debug floats the nightmare into space, where convicts, hackers, and haunted AI turn a spaceship into a server-room séance. This is bargain...

Video-Store Cyberpunk / Mutation Goo / Damaged Android Fever Volume 9 crawls out of the tape return slot wearing combat boots and leaking green fluid. Cyber Tracker is direct-to-video cyberpunk in gloriously concentrated form: Don “The Dragon” Wilson fighting android enforcement in a future made of wet pavement, muzzle flashes, shoulder pads, and pure video-store destiny. The budget is part of the architecture. The limitations are the flavor. This is the kind of cyberpunk that smells faintly of plastic clamshell cases and late fees. Proteus moves the infection into the damp zone between machine panic and mutation goo. Biotech experiment, creature-feature atmosphere, cyber-horror condensation dripping from the ceiling. It is less about the clean terror of artificial intelligence and more about the wet horror of research that has forgotten the difference between invention and infection. Then 964 Pinocchio detonates the entire program into degraded bio-mechanical freakout. If ...