It is a beautiful summer Tuesday, and this is the Long Live the New Flesh roundup of news from the indie horror world for the week.

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• Big news from The Cutting Room podcast – the boys are embarking on a really ambitious new project called Experiments in Podcasting, which will not just chronicle the development cycle of an indie film, it promises to let listeners interact and help shape the outcome of the project. Listeners of The Cutting Room have already weighed in and chosen between two proposed films to make and settled on EXPERIMENTS IN KILLING, a promising new take on the found footage genre. Throughout the show, the audience will get to help make decisions and influence the final product as well as be treated to brilliantly candid behind the scenes commentary from the crew (including Joseph Christiana, Thomas Dettloff and William Bourassa Jr). This is pretty much must-listen podcasting here for anyone truly interested in indie horror. Win or lose, this will make for amazingly compelling listening. Succeed and they might have the 21st century HEARTS OF DARKNESS on their hands. Fail, and it’s the podcasting MAN OF LA MANCHA. Whether it be dragons or windmills the boys end up tilting at, I’m in for the ride, and you should be too. Hit up The Cutting Room page on the Horror Palace podcast network and subscribe to the show. You can also check out The Cutting Room fan page on Facebook for updates. You can also check out some of Joseph Christiana’s work in my very first installment of Long Live the New Flesh and a fantastic two-part interview we did shortly after.

• Toronto After Dark Summer Screenings are back tomorrow night with DETENTION and V/H/S at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema! If you are in the greater Toronto area, come on out and see two highly anticipated movies in the company of hundreds of your twisted peers. DETENTION kicks off at 7p.m., and I think it will end up being a lot of fun.

After DETENTION, stick around for the Canadian premiere of the much-hyped anthology picture V/H/S! People in the know are saying this is the scary movie of the year and it has the proper pedigree – six stories, six directors and one terrifying night. I can’t wait to dig in for this one!  Buy your tickets in advance for this one mutants, because I predict everybody is coming out. Check out Toronto After Dark for showtimes, advance ticket sales and other info.

To calm the nerves after the intensity of V/H/S, I also invite you to join us a the Paupers Pub just across the street from the Bloor Cinema for Pub After Dark. Share a drink with film fans, filmmakers, producers, writers, festival staff and the various malcontents and hangers-on. It’s a good night out with a lot of really awesome people so please, don’t be shy and come out for just one drink. One drink I promise. Okay, maybe two but two is it. That’s my limit. I have to be up early in the morning. Three? Oh shit, here we go…

• People send me things. Some of these things I like immensely. Some of these things, I do not. Others still have interesting aspects I want to share. I was sent THE 28th DAY: LIZ LUCKY AND THE AMULET OF ZASULGROUND recently, and it falls squarely into the latter category. I’m not even entirely sure what to make of what I saw, but let me try. First though, check out the film:

Expository text at the beginning: This rarely works and usually only in brief. Using this trick in a short film less than 15 minutes long is probably a sign you are trying to squeeze too complex a premise into too small a space. The best shorts I know are totally self-contained in that they explain themselves through what unfolds on the screen and/or allow the audience to fill in many of the blank spaces.  What really irritates me about thi is that the story of Zasulground could have been told much more effectively visually within the short. Cave paintings. Hieroglyphs. Tablets. Film is a visual medium and requiring a bunch of text to make sense of your movie is a tiny white flag of surrender.

Set a tone and keep it: LIZ LUCKY is all over the place. It can’t decide if it’s a pulp adventure film as suggested by the title, the Indiana Jones-style getup sported by Liz Lucky herself and the dramatic chase music plucked from a classic sound library; or if it’s a horror film as suggested by the zombie creatures, the gore and other supernatural elements. I get that it can be both, but the texture isn’t right. Waiter, there are some chunks here in my TOMB RAIDER/EVIL DEAD smoothie! Director Zack Scott has to keep blending that sucker until it is nice and consistent and pours languidly over the audience and immerses them.

Ask questions about your story: Why is the film called THE 28th DAY? What does that mean? Is the whole Lord Zasulground backstory even necessary to tell a story of a high school archaeological dig which uncovers ancient horrors? Lord Zasulground and his woman-butchering ways are never really a part of the story after the opening text crawl, so I’d ask why bother? You could cut the backstory and have plenty left to work with. In fact, I’d submit you have a stronger short without the backstory and the action seeded with hints at the terrible crimes of this ancient menace. You could do it all visually and it would be much more effective.

I don’t say any of this to discourage director Zack Scott. I applaud him for getting up and doing something and I look forward to seeing him grow as a filmmaker. That is the beauty of these times, we are now able to see a filmmaker grow and progress as a public act. We are in this together so let’s help each other out.

Join me Thursday when I will bring back the goods on V/H/S! Be it, don’t dream it.

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