TOD 064 Brian Hauser: Filming Monsters Beyond the Edge of the Frame

In this podcast Anya Martin interviews Brian Hauser about his novel Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows (Word Horde) and his picks for the best Weird/horror movies he watched in 2019, plus Gordon B. White reviews new novellas by Michael Wehunt and Jayaprakash Satyamurthy. The interview and reviews were recorded on Sat. January 11 and Sun. January 12, 2020.

Show Notes

In this podcast, Anya Martin begins with an update on The Outer Symposium on the Greater Weird 2020, followed by Reviews from The Weird by Gordon R. White featuring Everything Is Beautiful and Nothing Bad Can Ever Happen Here (Nightscape Press) by Michael Wehunt (0:04:00) and Strength of Water by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy (0:10:00).

(0:17:20) Then Anya interviews author/filmmaker/film scholar Brian Hauser beginning with the road to his debut novel Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows (Word Horde) including the roots of his fascination with lost films and found footage when he followed in the footsteps of a young professor Wes Craven to teach at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY, and unearthed the true Weird tale of Craven’s first stab at filmmaking in the late 1960s. Brian next tells how he developed, wrote, pitched, and sold Memento Mori to Word Horde publisher Ross E. Lockhart and why he decided all three of his protagonists should be young women. Discussion then dives into Riot Grrrls, Final Grrrls, Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), masked characters in film and fiction, why Memento Mori may particularly appeal to readers who enjoy going down the rabbit hole, the oblique ‘double tap’ dread of Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, writing as conversation, achieving his ‘secret goal’ that Memento Mori would inspire fan art, expanded cinema and punk rock, the narrative challenge of the Weird novel, dining in Berlin with Joseph S. Pulver, the prominent role of psychedelics and ethnobotany in the novel, serving post 9-11 and his Nontraditional (2013) feature film about a woman combat veteran returning home to college, transformative experiences at H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival (HPLFF) including screenwriting awards, the current Renaissance in short horror films, his forthcoming projects including his next novel The Hermit, and his recommended Weird authors including Ed Kurtz, Craig Laurance Gidney, Carrie Laben, Michael Cisco, and Lost Films anthology edited by Max Booth III and Lori Michelle, especially Betty Rocksteady‘s ‘Elephants that Aren’t’, as well as groundbreaking women film directors Aislinn Clark, Vanessa Ionta Wright, Jennifer Trudrung, and Gigi Saul Guerrero.

(1:26:35) The interview concludes with Brian’s picks for some of his favorite Weird/horror movies he watched in 2019, including some late 2018 entries that got wider release in 2019. Scroll down for many more Additional Links related to this podcast.

The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird is the only annual conference centered around contemporary Weird fiction. Our mission is to foster conversation and connect communities among the diverse slate of creators and audience members under the umbrella of speculative fiction—inclusive, safe and welcoming to women, LBGTQ+, and writers of color. The fourth annual symposium will be held March 26-27, 2020 at Silver Scream FX Lab and Hotel Indigo-College Park. Find out more, including links to purchase attending memberships and reserve your hotel room at the symposium link at TheOuterDark.org.