Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Why Gore Is Ruining The Horror Movie Industry

Posted: July 9, 2013 in Reflections, Scary Stuff, Writing
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I’m never sure how popular these posts analyzing the horror industry (books or movies) are. But I am a horror writer, so I’m going to take a moment out of your day to let you know that gore is ruining the horror movies we’re seeing these days, and I hope you don’t roll your eyes and say this guy is either loony or one of those angry, self-righteous preachers who feels he knows everything and anyone who disagrees is an idiot who can’t grasp genius.

I’m more the former than the latter, which is very much like Sheldon Cooper.

Horror movies have one aim: to scare people. And they’ve done that in several ways. Usually it involved a monster or a ghost. Rarely did it involve excess amounts of blood, organs and severed limbs that were separated from the bodies in all manner of freaky ways (never had a problem with pushing the boundaries of sexuality, though). The movies that did employ those three I just listed were usually slasher films, and those were very difficult to pull successfully off to begin with. And when they did succeed, it usually led to many low-budget sequels.

But in 2004 a little movie known as Saw came out. And while its sequels could definitely be called slashers, the original was much more than that, a horror, a mystery, and a thriller all wrapped up into one neat little horror film. And if you haven’t seen the film, believe me, it was gory for its time. Bloody bodies and stumps and God knows what else. And it was a box office smash, breaking all sorts of records and winning all sorts of rewards. And so were its sequels, which always raked in several times their very low budgets. And ever since, more horror films have been utilizing gore in order to scare people silly.

Just one problem: gore is a turn-off. Studies show that people are disgusted by bloody scenes, such as car crash scenes or scenes from massacres. So why would you make it the main feature of your horror flick, if it just turns people off? I’m not sure. I really don’t understand the logic of Hollywood executives and filmmakers, except that it involves a modicum of profit-seeking. But I’ve seen too many movies that have used too much gore, Evil Dead being the most obvious example in my mind. And they’ve done badly when they could’ve been better.

Luckily for Hollywood, there are ways to still use gore without being excessive. Ever watch the movie Carrie? For those of you who haven’t seen the movie or read the book (and if you haven’t I feel so sorry for you), a telekinetic girl gets pranked at prom and gets covered in blood. There’s the gore. Now imagine that girl causing havoc with her powers, all while covered in blood and still wearing her burgundy dress. That’s scary, right? But not because of the gore. No. It’s the girl with the telekinetic powers going on a rampage! But the blood all over her does add to the terror.

Adds to the terror. Adds.

And it’s the same with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Say what you want about that movie, but with the hotel’s twisting and turning layout, chairs disappearing between shots, and the changing of carpet patterns within seconds serves to create a sense of unreality, a sense that you can’t grasp the situation, and that’s pretty damn scary in itself. The bloody elevator and the man with the split head just adds to it all.

So if you’re going to use gore, use it as a spice to your true object of terror, a frosting on the cake, an accentuation (I’m running out of adjectives, but you get the point, right?). Using gore to add to the terror is okay, but as a main thrill it just doesn’t work as often as it should.

Of course, I’d prefer that gore not used at all. Take a look at movies such as Paranormal Activity, the original Amityville Horror, or The Haunting in Connecticut, which use no gore at all, but rely on surprise, build-up of suspense, and a spooky sense of things-not-as-they-seem. Add in some special effects, and it’s scary as hell. Little gore, and it’s barely noticeable when you see all the other stuff that’s going on.

And they are the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. Freaks me out! And that’s not easy.

So Hollywood, if you’re reading this, please don’t think I’m trying to tell you how to do your jobs. But I do think that a smaller emphasis on the gore and more use of actual creepy angles, a sense of unreality, and just being scary would do some amazing things for your movies. After all, the upcoming movie The Conjuring looks like it doesn’t use any gore at all, and it’s already expected to do really well, if the reviews and the trailers are anything to go by.

Just a suggestion.

Individual Pages For My Books

Posted: July 7, 2013 in ideas, Living and Life, Writing
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I was reading a post on Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors the other day and one of the authors, Ruth Nordin, suggested that if I were to have a page for my books, I should have individual pages for my books, or at least individual books for each series and each stand alone novel. I decided that was a good idea, so I went ahead and created three new pages, one for short story collections, one for the Reborn City series, and one for Snake.

I think this was a very good idea, and I’m glad I did it. The page for short story collections leaves me a chance to put in more entries if I ever put out another collection of short stories (and there’s always a possibility of that, believe me), and so does the page for Reborn City and its sequels. And as for the page for Snake, I only wrote a fuller description for the entry, but I think it’s more enticing than what I had before, distinguishes the Snake as a protagonist and lets people know what the conflict is without giving too much away. I rather like it.

If you want to read the pages, please scroll up and look at the entries next to Home and About Me. They should be there.

An Idea From A Dream

Posted: July 6, 2013 in ideas, Living and Life, Novel, Writing
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It’s just amazing what you can find on Google, isn’t it?

Last night I went to bed sometime between half-past eleven and midnight, had some trouble falling asleep, had a nightmare or two, needed a drink of water, finally got to sleep, and then I had the wackiest dream. When I woke up, it was past ten and I was late for synagogue. But it was okay. You know why? That dream I had, the wacky one? It ended up being the basis for an awesome novel idea that I refined throughout the day.

The dream involved me and a bunch of wizards in a cabin. I was a young apprentice, and my own master was telling me to get a certain spell book for a spell that would recreate the ten plagues. In the dream, certain phrases kept going through my mind–Divinity of Israel, Vashta Nerada, etc–and in that weird dreamy way they were all connected and relevant and made sense.

When I woke up, I thought it was a weird dream to have and it was going to make me late for synagogue, but I later held onto the details of the dream and figured they were a gift from The Big Guy Upstairs, a little something to metaphorically chew on for the Sabbath. And I did manage to get to the synagogue for the second half of the Torah service. Heck, I managed to catch a few ideas for the novel from the rabbi’s sermon. If that’s not God doing me another favor, I have no idea what is!

And this is my 500th post. What an interesting thing to write about for it. Gotta give the Big Guy His props when they’re due.

Now I’m going to try and finish a book I started yesterday before I go to bed. Tomorrow I’m going to be doing so much writing I won’t know what to do with myself. Wish me luck!

Review: Dan Brown’s Inferno

Posted: July 4, 2013 in Review
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It’s good, but it’s not great. How sad.

Dante’s Inferno has always intrigued me on some level. It’s a very imaginative work, and one could make a case that the many layers of Hell portrayed in The Divine Comedy could be used for today’s society. That’s part of the reason why I was so excited to learn that Dan Brown had released a new Robert Langdon book based around Inferno, the first book of The Divine Comedy. The other reason was that I had loved Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol had cheered up a really uneasy sick day. I wanted to see what Robert Langdon was up to this time around!

Unfortunately, this volume makes it seem that Dan Brown is trying to hard to make a good story for Langdon to run around and save the world in. In what feels like a horrible and barely-believable cliché, Langdon wakes up in Florence, Italy with amnesia and can’t remember what happened to him. Almost immediately he’s into all sorts of trouble as he learns he’s been wrapped up in a confrontation between the World Health Organization and a shadowy operation meant to protect the interests of a dead geneticist who’s concocted something very terrible for the world and is paying for his plan to be carried out from beyond the grave.

At certain points throughout the novel, there are revelations and twists that are meant to be like what happened with the Mandarin in Iron Man 3 but instead leave you thinking it out for five minutes trying to understand what happened before going back through the nearly five-hundred page book and concluding that Brown didn’t even give any hints of these twists where most authors would have done so. And finally when you get to the conclusion things seem to be wrapped up a little too neatly with another twist that makes you say, “That’s nice, but it’s almost too nice. I could almost be okay with it.”

When you’re almost okay with a villainous geneticist’s plot, you know there’s a problem.

On the bright side, the first half of the novel has all the usual thrills of a Robert Langdon novel, and you do feel like you’re learning about a variety of subjects while you’re reading. There are plenty of exotic locales described in breathtaking detail that you wish you could go to yourself to see, and the character of Sienna Brooks as Langdon’s female companion this novel seems like a real person for most of the book, a poor girl trying to deal with her own genius and the pitfalls that have occurred because of it.

(Whatever happens to the women Langdon sees in the novels? We never find out what happened to the yoga instructor/physicist, though there’s hints of an untimely death or a break-up, we’re never sure of what happens to the descendant of Jesus who started to like Langdon, and the Masonic Grandmaster’s sister wasn’t even romantic, so I’m assuming there’s no break-up?)

All in all, I’m giving Dan Brown’s Inferno a 3.4 out of 5. Hopefully he can do better with the next book should there be (and judging by how popular the Robert Langdon books are, I think there will be a sequel. Whether or not there should be one and whether or not it’s any good).

Buried Alive: Finished

Posted: July 4, 2013 in Progress Report, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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This doesn’t happen in the short story, but it gets the idea across.

Today–and especially this evening–was like a writing whirlwind. I sat in front of my computer, at times struggling to finish this short story. But as I kept working and as the story got further along, I started writing faster and faster, not caring about word counts or anything around me. I had classical and opera music in my ears and I was putting words onto the page like there was no tomorrow. And about fifteen minutes ago, at around 11:35 PM, I stopped and looked at the manuscript I’d written.

I’d finished Buried Alive, a short story about a teenage girl who is buried alive in the backyard with her mother and sister by her abusive stepfather. I stood back and I felt a sense of satisfaction.

At 5,550 words, this is definitely one of the toughest short stories I’ve ever written. For one thing, it was in the first person, which is definitely not one of my best tenses to use (even writing in second person for Addict was easier). And it’s not easy to imagine oneself in a coffin, let alone in a coffin with two other people. People are good about not thinking about unpleasant things, even horror writers, so it was tough to get into the mind of a girl in that situation.

But eventually I managed to figure it out and I just started writing. And as the story went on and things got more desperate for the character, I made things creepier and stranger. I think I ventured into a sort of zombie fiction near the end, but I really don’t think you could call this a zombie story. It certainly got interesting, and I’m very proud of this story. I actually think it’s one of my best short stories, and I’m not going to let a high word count get in the way of me finding a home for it.

So tomorrow I’ll see if a certain friend of mine who has read plenty of my short stories wouldn’t mind taking a look at this one. I think he’ll like it, especially since I don’t really explain some of the weirder and scarier aspects of the story. But then again, one thing I learned from The Amityville Horror, you don’t always need to explain the source of the creepiness to make it super-creepy.

If this short story goes anywhere, I’ll let you guys know. Wish me luck.

The Quiet Game: 2 Weeks To Publication!!!

Posted: July 3, 2013 in Progress Report, short story, Writing
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Coming out in two weeks. Who's excited?

Coming out in two weeks. Who’s excited?

As I prepare for a wonderful Independence Day tomorrow, I’m also preparing for something just as great in 14 days. The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones will be coming out in 2 weeks, and I am super-excited. Plenty of people have told me that they cannot wait to read it. You know what? I cannot wait for them to read it!

It’s been a crazy process since December 2012, when I started writing what would become the five short stories appearing in The Quiet Game. I’ve published a few short stories in some magazines and one on Amazon, I’ve learned to use Photoshop and CreateSpace, I’ve waited for copyrights to come through (sometimes very late), I’ve bugged people to get back to me on my short stories and tell me what I should change, I’ve created a book trailer and a Facebook page for the book, and now I’m counting down the days until The Quiet Game comes out.

So what do I hope will happen in two weeks? I hope that I’ll have some decent sales, a couple of good reviews and maybe one or two average or bad reviews to convince potential readers that those reviews weren’t just written by fans who want to make me happy. I hope that friends will come up to me and say, “Oh Rami I read your book” and then give me an honest response on what they thought, rather than saying “Oh I bought a copy, haven’t read it yet though” or “I’ve been meaning to get a copy but I’ve been busy/I forgot.” (I’ve gotten that response once or twice for past works).

But most of all, I’m hoping that people will read the book and tell me what they think. I think that’s every writer’s sincerest desire when their books are published.

Well, we’ll see in two weeks. Until then, I’m counting down the days and spreading the word.

A Conundrum With Resurrection

Posted: July 1, 2013 in short story, Writing
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No, this post is not about me wondering if there’s going to be an end of the world and I’m going to be raised from the dead. I’ve thought enough about it already and concluded that until the Messiah comes, it’s just not worth thinking about.

Yesterday I got an email from a friend of mine who was looking at a short story of mine. The story, titled “Resurrection”, is about a man who is brought back to life from the dead through a cryogenic process, and something of supernatural origin messes it up. It’s nearly five-thousand words, which makes it a very long short story, or a very long short story in the eyes of most magazines. I was hoping I’d get some good feedback from my friend, which I did, but I did not expect this to appear in the response:

“It is very good. Actually, it could be expanded into either a novella, a full blown book or even a screenplay.”

That was the first time I ever used the center-alignment option on this blog. I don’t know why I’ve never done that before.

But that’s beside the point. What my friend said got me thinking, and since then I haven’t been able to stop thinking! I mean, I could see this story being expanded in some form or another, though I don’t think a novella or a full-blown novel is in the works right now, with all that’s going on. A screenplay might work, and heck, other horror writers have written screenplays before, Stephen King being chief among them.

Of course, there’s a couple of problems: I don’t know anything about writing screenplays! And to top that off, I’m still a relatively unknown writer with some short story publishing to my name, a collection coming out in sixteen days, and a novel in November. The way Hollywood is right now, what are the chances my screenplay will make it to the lunch table, let alone to the big screen? And considering how much Hollywood hacks slash, rewrite, and ultimately murder screenplays, would I really want them to do that to my own work?

I’m not so sure.

So for now I’m going to put “Resurrection” on a shelf until I know what to do with it. I may edit it and try to publish it in a magazine. Or maybe I’ll expand it into a different format of creative literature. Or maybe I’ll even turn it into a screenplay. Or maybe I’ll save it for another collection of short stories. Who knows?

Until then, I think I’ll wait and see. Time usually tells, and I’m sure time will tell me the right answer, once I’m ready for it.

Still, I wouldn’t mind your thoughts and opinions on the subject, if you’re willing to give them to me.

The Benefits I’ve Gotten Through Blogging

Posted: July 1, 2013 in Living and Life
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I’ve been blogging here on WordPress for nearly two years (the second anniversary of Rami Ungar the Writer is actually a month and a day away, believe it or not). A lot has happened in that time. I started college, a job, and a new life. I began the publishing process for Reborn City, wrote The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones, which will be coming out in 16 days, I published several short stories and one or two articles, became a writer for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors, met my roommate for the apartment I’m getting in August, read all the Hannibal Lecter books, got into The Daily Show, and a few other things.

And witness to most of this is my blog. I’ve been able to record my musings, review movies, TV shows, and books, update people on my writing, and add links to the places my short stories are published. I’ve made some great friends through the blogosphere, a couple of whom have helped me with my writing my being kind enough to offer feedback on my work (by the way, both of those friends are Canadian, so I’ll give them a shout-out by wishing them a happy Canada Day!). I’ve met people who have offered me wonderful advice, given me their own thoughts, and even sometimes argued with me on this or that topic. I even had nearly two-thousand Anne Rice fans reading my review of The Wolf Gift, and I’m happy to say the majority of them reacted positively to it.

You know, my life has been enriched a lot by blogging. Sure at times I was lucky just to get a single person to read the posts I was writing. But these days I’m proud to say I have a little bit of a following going on, and I’m glad that you all keep reading my posts. Sure I lose a few followers every now and then, but most of them keep coming back (God only knows why) and it touches me deeply that you want to read what I’m writing. Thank you so much.

new TCG cover

I’m about to start on a new but related adventure: publishing and selling copies of a published collection of short stories. I have trepidation, excitement, doubts, and confidence all going through my system. But whatever happens, I have a feeling that my blog, and the people who read it, are going to be behind it every step of the way.

Oh, and speaking of publishing, remember Daisy, the short story I published on Amazon and Smashwords, not only as a promotion for The Quiet Game but also to see if anyone would read it? Well, it looks like 150 people have downloaded and read it, and I even got one review that gave it an “average” grade. Have no idea if that’s an indication of how The Quiet Game will do (I’m personally hoping it’ll do much better), but it’s still got me excited. Perhaps in the future I’ll have 150 downloads on the first day!

Have you downloaded a copy yet?

Have you downloaded a copy yet?

Off to go jog now. Once again, thanks for reading my work. I really appreciate it.

Snake: The Final Draft

Posted: June 30, 2013 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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Now that’s a scary image.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but for some reason it keeps slipping my mind. Might as well write it now while I wait for the Doctor Who episode I’m watching to load.

Well, it’s finally happening. Snake is getting its final draft before I get ready to format it, create a cover, and send it off for a copyright. And helping me with all this is Angela Misri, who goes by the screen name Karmic Angel and writes the blog a Portia Adams adventure (and I so wish she would publish her casebooks, independently or otherwise. They sound really good!). Anyway, Angela’s been looking at Snake and giving me her thoughts. I’m telling you, she’s very good. She’s pointed out several inconsistencies and problems I hadn’t even noticed.

Well, that’s why I like beta readers. They see the stuff I don’t. And Angela’s doing a great job. She’s currently got chapters 9-12, and at the rate she’s going, she’s going to have the whole book done by September, December at the latest.

Angela, thanks for helping so much. You’ll definitely get your own special mention in the Acknowledgments section of Snake, the one I have yet to write but will once the novel is finished.

And speaking of which, I know what the basis for the cover of Snake will be. I plan to use Lilith, a painting by John Collier. It features a humongous snake, and it has parallels to themes within the novel. Of course, I’ll have to use a type of cover available through CreateSpace that covers certain things. After all, I don’t want people looking at this book the wrong way.

I’ll have more as time progresses. Hope you’re as excited as I am, and thanks again, Angela.

My Third Self-Pub Authors Article

Posted: June 30, 2013 in Journalism, Living and Life, Writing
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I managed to abbreviate that even more, somehow.

In this latest article on Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors, I write about what goes into making a successful sequel to your novel. Yes, I know I’ve been one to moan and complain about how there are too many sequels and remakes and reboots out there. And more than once, I’ve bitched spectacularly about how there aren’t enough good sequels out there (or is that horror films? Maybe it’s a bit of both). But I’m about to start writing Video Rage, the sequel to Reborn City, and I thought that I should make a list of what I think makes a good sequel.

If you are interested in reading the article, click here. There may be tips and examples here that you may find helpful in your own writing, particularly I you’re about to start on a sequel of your own and you’re nervous that the sequel won’t be as good as the original. And even if you’re not writing a sequel, you should check out the blog anyway. There are plenty of helpful articles here that can give you insight if you are self-publishing author, both for beginners and for longtime veterans.

I’ve certainly benefited from this blog, and in more ways than one.

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