The Art of Pulp Horror

Broadcast were an English rock band formed in Birmingham in 1995 by Trish Keenan (vocals, keyboards, guitar) and James Cargill (bass). Their musical style blended elements of 1960s American psychedelia with experimental electronica, incorporating samples from various sources, and earned the band a cult following. Collection includes: Work And Non Work (1997); The Noise Made By People (2000); Haha Sound (2003); Tender Buttons (2005); The Future Crayon (2006); Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age (2009).

Meeednight Pulp Presents, Steve Niles's renaissance of horror pulp fiction for a modern age, continues with The Lurkers. Los Angeles detective Jack Dietz is having one of the worst days of his life. One body is bad enough, but when another turns up with human bite marks, he knows his world has just turned inside out. Hector Casanova provides art for this hard-bitten chiller.

The debut film of director Joel Coen and his brother-producer Ethan Coen, 1983's Blood Simple is grisly comic noir that marries the feverish toughness of pulp thrillers with the ghoulishness of even pulpier horror. (Imagine the novels of Jim Thompson somehow fused with the comic tabloid Weird Tales, and you get the idea.) The story concerns a Texas bar owner (Dan Hedaya) who hires a seedy private detective (M. Emmett Walsh) to follow his cheating wife (Frances McDormand in her first film appearance), and then kill her and her lover (John Getz). The gumshoe turns the tables on his client, and suddenly a bad situation gets much, much worse, with some violent goings-on that are as elemental as they are shocking. (A scene in which a character who has been buried alive suddenly emerges from his own grave instantly becomes an archetypal nightmare.) Shot by Barry Sonnenfeld before he became an A-list director in Hollywood, Blood Simple established the hyperreal look and feel of the Coens' productions (undoubtedly inspired a bit by filmmaker Sam Raimi, whose The Evil Dead had just been coedited by Joel). Sections of the film have proved to be an endurance test for art-house movie fans, particularly an extended climax that involves one shock after another but ends with a laugh at the absurdity of criminal ambition. This is definitely one of the triumphs of the 1980s and the American independent film scene in general. –Tom Keogh