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Gregory Lamberson: The Halloween King

For Buffalo's Gregory Lamberson, 'tis the Season

This year, Gregory Lamberson owns Halloween. He’s had a lease on it for awhile anyway. Since relocating to Buffalo from his native Fredonia by way of New York City, the filmmaker and novelist (full disclosure: and occasional contributor to Artvoice) has been responsible for programming a popular series of midnight horror films at the Amherst theater. While enjoying the successful DVD release of his cult classic horror films, especially 1988’s Slime City, he’s been developing other projects based on his lifelong love of horror stories. And this month brings two of them to a bookstore near you.

It’s been a long road for Lamberson’s novel Johnny Gruesome. The story about a head-banging (and severing) teenage zombie who wreaks vengeance on a snow-bound town that sounds an awful lot like Fredonia began as a screenplay idea in the late 1980s.

The novel first appeared in a limited hardcover edition in January, and internet horror aficionados (can’t be any more than 40 or 50 million of those) have been able to enjoy a 10-minute short film adaptation starring Erin Brown (aka scream queen Misty Mundae), an on-line comic, and a heavy metal soundtrack CD for months before the recent release of the trade paperback (from Medallion Press).

Johnny Gruesome is a brisk read that smartly treads the line between satisfying hardcore gorehounds and a general audience that isn’t willing to go too far over the edge. It’s surprisingly and cleverly detailed with everything you might ever want to know about autopsy, embalming, and burial procedures, along with how those might hinder the daily routine of a corpse that has unfinished business to take care of before he rots away. Horror fans will catch quotes to classic and cult films, as well as some witty re-imagining of other references, like Johnny’s use of a famous James Dean line as he battles a pair of junkyard dogs.

You don’t have to be a horror buff to enjoy Lamberson’s other new book, Cheap Scares! Low Budget Horror Filmmakers Share Their Secrets (McFarland and Company). Nor do you have to be a fledgling filmmaker, though if you are Lamberson offers a detailed, no-nonsense guide to writing, developing, producing, and distributing a movie for whatever amount of cash you’re able to scrounge up. He draws on his own experience as the director of three films, though what’s often even more instructive is his stories about the projects that never got off the ground.

Lamberson’s how-to chapters alternate with interviews with other low-budget horror movie toilers. Unlike the usual suspects (Roger Corman, Troma, ad infinitum), Cheap Scares! talks to a new generation of filmmakers, producers, and distributors like Larry Fessenden, J. R. Bookwalter, Roy Frumkes, Brett Piper, and Scooter McCrae. If you’ve ever looked at a low (or no) budget movie and thought, “Geez, I can do better than that!” this book may help you do so. On the other hand, it may impress you with the amount of work and the infinite number of pitfalls that go into getting anything on film. And more often than not, these stories are more engrossing and entertaining than the movies themselves.

Lamberson will be signing Johnny Gruesome and Cheap Scares! next Thursday, October 30, at Talking Leaves on Elmwood from 7-9pm. Other upcoming appearances are at the Book Corner in Niagara Falls on October 31; the Book Nook in Fredonia November 1; Barnes & Noble on Niagara Falls Boulevard, also November 1; and Talking Leaves on Main Street on November 19. For more information and other links to all things Gruesome, go to www.SlimeGuy.com.

m. faust

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