Song Kang Ho in Thirst

SEOUL (Reuters Life!) – One of South Korea’s most bankable stars will return to the red carpet of the Cannes International Film Festival next week with a blood-soaked morality tale of a Catholic priest turned vampire.

    Actor Song Kang-ho teams with director Park Chan-wook, who won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004 for his film “Old Boy,” in a film in competition called “Thirst” which offers a new-fangled Korean take on the staple Hollywood vampire horror genre.

   Song, 42, dubbed by local media as South Korea’s version of Tom Hanks, is known for his stellar work in some of the country’s most critically acclaimed and commercially successful films.

   He said he found the role of a vampire all in a day’s work.”I think an actor should always try to interpret whatever type of character through a new perspective and in a provocative way,” Song said. “There isn’t too much of a difference in my mindset between playing a North Korean soldier and a priest.”

    The actor first gained prominence as a stuttering lowlife in the 1997 movie “No. 3″ and starred as a bumbling, down-on-his-luck parent in the 2006 film “The Host,” the first South Korean movie to top $100 million at the local box office.

    In “Thirst,” Song plays a priest who becomes a vampire after receiving a blood transfusion in a medical experiment. He meets a temptress in the form of a bored housewife, played by rising star Kim Ok-vin, who plots murder.

  “This is a story about a human, of course a priest here, who is forced to the extremes,” said Song.

  The movie called “Bakjwi” in Korean opened last week in South Korea and has already topped 1 million viewers, which is considered a barometer in the domestic market for a blockbuster.

  “Thirst” was also the first Korean film to receive production funding and a distribution deal from Hollywood studios with Universal Pictures and Focus Features investing in the project in a vote of confidence for Song and director Park, U.S. entertainment trade publication Variety reported.

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This is a funny and nformational video, created by Steven Holmes and Derrick Smith, on how to survive a zombie invasion.  ..  more like this at  GoreMaster.com

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ighzKQDJSoM]

Night of the Living Dead

–Christopher Shea- Boston Globe

On Monday night April 13, Science on the Screen at the Coolidge Corner Theatre will sponsor a showing of the classic zombie film “Night of the Living Dead,” preceded by a talk by Dr. Steven Schlozman — zombie enthusiast and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

George Romero, the man behind “Night of the Living Dead,” may not be a neuroscientist, but he and the zombie-auteurs who followed him have an uncanny understanding of the brain works, according to Schlozman. The first part is fairly intuitive. Zombies are humans whose own brains have regressed to the level of a crocodile’s, the filters between primal urges and action entirely erased. (See flesh, eat flesh.) In contrast, the protagonists in zombie films, the survivors, retain the brain functions that tamp down primal reactions before passing them on to the higher cortical regions. They think before they act — at first.

And that’s the crux of one of Schlozman’s arguments: The story changes as the situation grows grimmer. Here, the professor draws on “mirror neuron” theory, which holds that humans are hard-wired to reflect the psychological states of the people around them. (Show a test subject a short film of a face displaying disgust, or pleasure, and regions of the brain associated with those feelings activate in the subject.)

Unable to relate to the hordes of undead, the survivors in zombie films enter a spiral of despair, feeding off the panic and hopelessness of the uninfected people around them. At the bottom of the spiral comes a crucial psychological moment, Schlozman tells Brainiac, one that you’ll find in most zombie flicks:

The protagonists rush out of whatever symbolic structure they happen to be walled up in (churches, malls, etc) and rather than letting the Zombies simply devour them, they try to kill as many Zombies as they can even though they know it’s useless! They fully expect to die.

Since not even Romero has a bleak enough vision to annihilate all of his characters*, the psychological bottoming-out is followed by a shameful reawakening.

Schlozman will present the fully-fleshed-out version of his zombie spiel at 7 p.m., at the independent Brookline theater.

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El Chupacabra

An Eastwood N.Y. resident claims there’s a giant skunk terrorizing the James/Midler area (and its dogs). He said his neighbors have named the elusive critter– “El Chupacabra.”

“That’s what we have named a skunk that is, no lie, the size of my 35-pound dog, from nose to tail,” he wrote. “This thing is huge. I don’t let the boys (his two English springer spaniels) out at night anymore without doing a quick scan of the yard with a spotlight.”

((El Chupacabra, literally “The Goat Sucker”, is a cryptozoological animal — a beast that appears in myths, legends, or undocumented sightings like Big Foot or the Loch Ness monster. It is blamed for attacking any kind of small creatures, from chickens to children. It supposedly favors goats, sucking their blood out. The chupacabra was first heard of in the early 1990s, mainly from the island of Puerto Rico. Since that time, there have been undocumented reports of it from Mexico and other Latin American countries)).   What more information about El Chupacabra?  Click Here!

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El Chupacabra & Friends!

Wolfman

South Wales – AMMANFORD police hunting the so-called “Wolfman” of Pantyffynnon tips have vowed: “We’ll get him sooner or later.”

The man – who is living wild in the thickly-wooded area – is wanted for questioning over a string of minor thefts from parked vehicles. But all efforts by the police to apprehend him – including a patrol by the Dyfed-Powys police helicopter using heat-seeking equipment – have so far drawn a blank.

“Although we’d like to speak to this man we’re also here to help him,” said Sgt Charles Gabe. “If being made homeless was not his intention then we can perhaps point him in the right direction and ensure he gets the support he needs. These offences seem to have stopped for the moment but we will get him sooner or later. But we’re not talking a one-man crimewave here. While I don’t wish to minimise what’s been happening there are more serious things happening in and around Ammanford.”

The man is aged 34, 5ft 11in tall and described as “extremely unkempt”. Local opinion on the issue remains divided. “Haven’t the police got any dogs? It’s not exactly the Outback up there,” one caller told the Guardian. Yet others have expressed sympathy.
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Vampire

Vampire rumors spur alert at Boston Latin – on bullying
By Megan Woolhouse and Maria Cramer, Globe Staff | March 27, 2009

Boston Latin School headmaster Lynne Mooney Teta issued a notice to parents and students yesterday quashing rumors of vampires at the school. An odd move for the head of a historic elite preparatory school, but Teta and Boston public school officials declined to elaborate on what triggered the unusual message.

They did, however, adamantly offer assurances that no one at the school has been hurt, arrested – or bitten.

“The headmaster believes that the outrageous rumors had reached a point where she had to say something to families to ensure that all students felt safe and respected,” said Chris Horan, School Department spokesman.

While the episode sounds like something out of “Twilight,” last year’s hit film about a high school girl who falls in love with a vampire, it may be closer to the movie “Mean Girls.”

Two law enforcement officials with knowledge of the incident said a group of girls at the school had been bullying at least one other student who likes to dress in Goth-style, a vampirish look popularized by musician Marilyn Manson. The officials said the girls began spreading a rumor that the student was a vampire who had cut someone’s neck and sucked the blood.

When Boston police went to the school Wednesday on an unrelated matter, their presence fueled yet another rumor: that a vampire was being arrested, according to one of the law enforcement sources.

Several students and parents of students said police officers were posted at the school’s main entrance Wednesday but it was unclear why.

Eddy Chrispin, Boston Police Department spokesman, said police spoke with several students at the school Wednesday “to quell the rumor” of vampires.

“The whole thing kind of took on a life of its own,” Chrispin said.

The officers determined that the situation was an internal school matter.

Horan said in reference to the rumors that when you’ve got “an $800 million budget and 212 layoffs, this is not really a priority.”

Teta issued her notice to parents in an e-mail sent yesterday at 8 a.m.

“It has come to my attention that rumors involving ‘vampires’ began spreading through the building yesterday,” it said.

“I am very concerned that the safety of certain students may be jeopardized as targets of rumors and speculation,” she wrote. “Please alert any adult in the building if you feel that any student is being harassed or targeted.”

Teta denied requests for an interview yesterday, referring all questions to the School Department spokesman. But the memo appeared to raise new questions and rounds of speculation.

One student who contacted the Globe said a male student, rumored to be a werewolf, had threatened on Facebook to bring a gun to school because he was being harassed. Other students at the school yesterday said they had heard that a student had been bitten.

John Maguire, who was picking up his 13-year-old at the school yesterday afternoon, said he didn’t know there was an issue about vampire rumors until his son told him yesterday. He said he laughed it off.

“C’mon, a vampire in the school? Don’t you think that’s a little woo-hoo?” he said, pointing to his head.

Yet images of vampires are common in books, television programs, and movies, from “Twilight,” the book series by Stephenie Meyer, to HBO’s “True Blood.” Susanne Toomajian, president of the Massachusetts School Psychologists Association, said middle school students might be drawn to romanticized vampire images in films like “Twilight” because they depict an outsider who finds love. But the issue is more about acceptance.

That’s something “that early adolescents struggle with,” she said. “The vampire themes are really ancillary to other themes of fitting in.”

Students leaving Boston Latin yesterday said rumors about students claiming to be vampires, or more specifically “half-vampires,” have been circulating for months. Several said two or three female students at the school carry umbrellas in all weather to avoid exposure to the sun.

Myles Friedman, a junior, said that after police appeared at the school yesterday, the rumor mill kicked into full gear. “I’ve never heard any rumor spread so fast.”

Some at the school yesterday said they believed a student had been bitten. No one had heard about a problem with bullying.

Seventeen-year-old Davis Murphy said he heard that some students claiming to be half-vampires were draining their blood to make their skin paler or had claimed they could fly.

“No one bullies them,” he said, laughing. “We just want to know why they’re vampires.”

Victoria Browne, a senior, said many of the rumors are so outrageous they make older students laugh.

“[I] heard people were biting people, but that vampires only bite the willing,” she said with a smile.

Browne, who has been involved with the school’s antibullying campaign, said she had not heard any reports of bullying.

In recent years, public schools have attempted to crack down on bullying because of its link to teen depression and suicide. Boston Latin has taken steps to make sure all students feel comfortable, she said.

“There’s no bullying here,” Browne said. “It’s just that everybody is really weirded out.”

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This is a real message board from a highway near Austin Texas.

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