Welcome to another horror round-up! This time around, we have the first trailer for the short horror comedy film, The Body, starring Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones, John Wick), an excerpt from Valancourt Books' special re-release of Michael McDowell's souther horror novel, Cold Moon Over Babylon (which is now being adapted for the big screen), and details on who will play the titular role for Fox and Warner Bros. TV's Lucifer pilot (based on the character from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comic book series and its spin-off series, Lucifer).
The Body: "The Body is the story of a contract killer using the cover of Halloween to dispose of his latest victim. As he attempts to drag the dead man's body across London, his gear and body bag get mistaken for a costume, and he is talked into a attending a local Halloween party with a group of revellers.
Events take another strange twist when the killer finds himself enjoying the company of a young partygoer named Maggie, who mistakenly believes the killer is on a scavenger hunt, and recruits her friends to help him bury the body. The group set off in the killer's van to drive to a quiet woodland area where events then take a hilarious and horrifying turn for the worse...
The Body stars Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones, John Wick) and Hannah Tointon (Penny Dreadful, Mr Selfridge, The Inbetweeners), and is directed by Paul Davis (Him Indoors)."
The short film, The Body, is now available on We Are Colony, along with extras including scripts, deleted scenes, bloopers, and behind-the-scenes stills. To learn more, visit:
Cold Moon Over Babylon: Originally published in 1980, Michael McDowell's Cold Moon Over Babylon is now available from Valancourt Books with new cover art by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. We've been provided with an excerpt from the atmospheric horror novel, which you can read below.
"Welcome to Babylon, a typical sleepy southern town, where years earlier the Larkin family suffered a terrible tragedy. Now they are about to endure another: fourteen-year-old Margaret Larkin will be robbed of her innocence and her life by a killer who is beyond the reach of the law.
But something strange is happening in Babylon: traffic lights flash an eerie blue, a ghostly hand slithers from the drain of a kitchen sink, graves erupt from the local cemetery in an implacable march of terror . . . And beneath the murky surface of the river, a shifting, almost human shape slowly takes form. Night after night it will pursue the murderer. And when the full moon rises over Babylon, it will seek a terrible vengeance . . .
Cold Moon Over Babylon (1980), the second novel by Michael McDowell (1950-1999), author of Blackwater and The Elementals and screenwriter of Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas, is a chilling Southern Gothic tale of revenge from beyond the grave that ranks among his most terrifying books. This first-ever reprint features deliciously creepy new cover art by Mike Mignola."
To learn more, visit:
Prologue
One hot afternoon in July of 1965, Jim Larkin and his wife JoAnn were slowly paddling their small green boat upstream on the Styx River that drains the northwestern corner of the Florida panhandle. Having spent the several hours around noon lazily fishing in a favorite spot, half a mile downriver from their blueberry farm, they were bringing back enough bream for themselves and half the town of Babylon besides. Jim’s widowed mother, Evelyn Larkin, was back at the farm, taking care of their son Jerry, eight years old, and their infant daughter Margaret, born only the year before.
JoAnn Larkin, who had pale skin and dark red hair, and always wore dark red lipstick and matching nail polish even when she was working in the patch, had already started to clean the fish, and was idly scraping scales back into the water. Her husband, Evelyn Larkin’s only child, paddled slowly, and kept his face turned away from the sun. He had to be careful about burn, and considered that it was a sore trial for a farmer and his wife to have fair skin.
“What’s that?” JoAnn said curiously, and pointed at something in the water, twenty feet away.
“It’s a croker sack,” Jim Larkin replied, and turned the boat a little so that they would come nearer it.
“It’s not one of ours, is it?” she said. “I don’t think it’s one of ours. Who’d be throwing our croker sacks in the river?”
“I don’t know. We ought to take it back. Good croker sacks are getting harder to come by every day. Looks dry. Must have just fell in from somewhere.”
JoAnn leaned over the prow, and snared the sack. She swung it over the side of the boat, and set it between herself and her husband. The string that held the top together had already come loose in the water, and the sack fell open in her hands. With dampened rattles, five snakes slithered out over the lip of the burlap.
The man and woman drew back in fear, pushing frantically against the rattlesnakes with their feet. Each was bitten several times, and probably would have suffered more had not their thrashing panic overturned the small boat.
Jim Larkin dived deep, and in a few seconds attempted to come up for air. Among the dead bream that floated on the surface of the water, he could see the snakes coiled and waiting. Their tails swaying slowly in the water beckoned him upward. He lost consciousness and drowned.
JoAnn Larkin swam to a sandbar, crawled across it, and fell into a sand-sink, which are as common as leeches along the margin of the Styx. She was sucked in slowly, and all the while never left off calling her husband’s name. But she gave over all resistance to the sinking sand when she saw his corpse rise suddenly to the surface of the water, and bob among the dead fish. His head was thrown back, his eyes wide, and one of the snakes pushed its way into his slack mouth.
Their bodies were never recovered. JoAnn Larkin’s skeleton, white and contorted, still lies frozen in the sand a dozen feet below the surface of the Styx. Jim Larkin was spun a couple of miles downstream, and then wedged into a rocky crevice in the bed of the river; there the normally sluggish black waters of the Styx, rushing through this submerged ravine, industriously pried the rotting flesh from his bones.
Evelyn Larkin had nothing of her son and daughter-in-law to mourn over and bury. The overturned boat, protecting the nested croker sacks and two drowned rattlesnakes, told no plausible story of their deaths. One July morning they had rowed down the Styx and simply failed to return.
Though she had no remembrance of her parents, Margaret Larkin never went swimming in the river, for fear that she would be dragged down to the bottom by her drowned mother and father. And her brother Jerry never after crossed the bridge over the Styx without glancing uneasily among the pilings, dreading to see there his parents’ decayed corpses. Yet they said nothing of these irrational terrors to one another, nor to their grandmother, who never lost the feeling that her son and daughter-in-law were still to be found somewhere in the river’s meandering length.
Eventually, a small cenotaph was raised in the Larkin family plot in the Babylon cemetery. It was marked with the names of the couple and bore the simple legend: LOST UPON THE STYX. 14 JULY 1965.
Lucifer Pilot: It was recently reported that Fox and Warner Bros. TV are moving forward on a pilot based on the comic book character Lucifer from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman and its spin-off series, Lucifer (both of which were published under DC's Vertigo imprint), the latter penned by Mike Carey.
If you were wondering who would play the fallen angel, ponder no more, as Deadline reveals that Tom Ellis (Rush TV series, Victor Frankenstein in Gothicka TV movie, Robin Hood in Once Upon a Time TV series) has been cast as Lucifer.
Tom Kapinos, whose other current pilot, Dead People, is in production at The CW, has teamed up with Jerry Bruckheimer and Len Wiseman (Underworld films, Sleepy Hallow) on the Lucifer pilot, with the latter directing the debut episode.
The series "centers on Lucifer who, bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell, resigns his throne and abandons his kingdom for the gorgeous, shimmering insanity of Los Angeles, where he gets his kicks helping the LAPD punish criminals."
Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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