Before I dive into this week’s blog, I’d like to take a moment to shamelessly promote another project by Drive-In Horrorshow co-creator Greg Ansin and myself. It’s an animated film called Infinite Santa 8000, about a cyborg Santa Claus who fights mutants and robo-people in a post-apocalyptic wasteland...in the year 8000 (hence the title). Immediately after Greg and I finished DIHS (the movie), we created the Infinite Santa 8000 universe as a web series (launched in 2010), and later turned it into a feature film. It’s a realm in which we’ve been happily living for the past few years, and you can check out the film on iTunes, amazon, Xbox, VuDu, Google Play, and Cable On Demand at http://www.infinitesanta.com. Season’s Bleedings!

So, on to the main event. As I mentioned in a previous post, Greg and I wrote a bunch of new tales after the completion of the film in 2009. When I’m making a film, I always like to draw inspiration from books and movies (I watched a lot of hardcore flicks like Cannibal Ferox, Inside and Cannibal Holocaust to prepare to film the brutal “Pig” in the DIHS movie, for example), so this writing period seemed like a good time for Greg and I to catch up on some anthology films that we had missed. We discovered a series of wonderful anthology films from the Amicus studio in the 1970s: Tales from the Crypt (1972, based on the EC comics), Asylum (1972), The Vault of Horror (1973, also based on the EC comics), and From Beyond the Grave (1974). Although only two of the films use stories from EC horror comics, all of the films are so similar in tone and subject matter that it seems like they all do.

These films strongly inspired me, and I wanted to write something to pay homage to their legacy - ideally, if I did my job right, a tale that could have fit right into one of their films. I’m getting into spoiler territory here, so I’m going to tread lightly and save the details for a future post, but suffice it to say that this story fits well within the Amicus films, for reasons that will become apparent as the story unfolds.

I can talk about the setting without giving anything away, though. The frame narrative in From Beyond The Grave is set in a pawn shop, where each tale originates from a character who buys something, which is a pretty great setting for a horror story. There is a sense of mystery to a pawn shop: items come in from all sorts of people, and each item has a “life” and a history. The possible stories are endless. So I started from there, and while I can’t exactly remember my creative process, at some point the pawn shop changed to an antique shop, although it still feels very much like the pawn shop in From Beyond the Grave to me. I think it sets a tone that fits the tale and...well, I’ll save that for another time. Spoiler territory, again.

One other item of note:

I love inside jokes and references in stories, be it in a movie, book, or otherwise. Ideally, it’s something that doesn’t detract from the narrative, but if the reader gets it then it enhances their experience. I thought this page was a perfect place for one, so when The Projectionist says “This one comes from deep in our vault of horror” I was referring to the EC comics line “The Vault of Horror”, which, alongside the “Tales from the Crypt” and “The Haunt of Fear”, is one of the cornerstones of anthology horror. Hopefully, if a reader gets the reference it helps prepare them for what’s to come...and if not it’s just one more creepy phrase uttered by our undead host. And you can never have too many creepy phrases in an EC comics-inspired story.

Trailer for Infinite Santa 8000: