Time for a new horror series on FEARnet.com! This one's called The Dark Path Chronicles, and it comes from director Mary Lambert. And if I have to remind you that she directed the first Pet Sematary, then I question your legitimacy as a horror geek. So far they've posted two episodes and a pair of behind-the-scenes clips. All I know is that it's got vampires in it!

...and the journey of Mandy Lane continues. Screen Daily reports that Sony has acquired the video rights to all of Senator's upcoming releases, and that also includes Clock Tower, Splice, and the Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Informers. Also from Screen Daily: News on the excellent Paranormal Activity, which is getting sold all over the planet and (yes) being remade.

Curious about that Jason Voorhees documentary you've been hearing about? Get the scoop here. Also, Twitch indicates that the sequel to the fantastic [REC] begins shooting next week. Did you miss the trailer for the next Clive Barker adaptation. Jessica covered it yesterday: Book of Blood.

And frankly there are so many random little tidbits floating around thanks to all the horror geeks' coverage of the American Film Market ... I don't even know where to begin. Instead of linking to each news niblet individually, I'll link you to the AFM ONLY pages at Dread Central, Bloody-Disgusting, and Shock. Lots of random goodness to click through there, horror nerds.

Random question for the experts: Which is the scariest video game?

Despite having previously established my feelings about this weekend's Quarantine, I must confess a new willingness to give it a fair shot later tonight. Regardless, this week's Cinematical Seven is all about first-person horror movies, with a couple of oh-so-subjective stipulations:

• We're leaving The Blair Witch Project (1999) out of this. It might not have been the first of these movies, but it was undeniably the most successful and influential. There are only seven slots here, and I feel like everyone has already made clear whether they find this scary or just stupid (I fall in the former grouping, though I say this having not seen the flick since my teens). If you still feel the need to take BWP to task, comment away.
• Also omitted will be The Last Broadcast (1998), which drew mild controversy at the time of its release for its similarity to Blair Witch. I'm only not writing about it because the copy of it sitting just over on my shelf here has remained unwatched. My bad.
• The previous film by the guys behind Quarantine is The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007), which -- being in the hands of the Weinsteins -- has not yet seen the light of day beyond a couple of festivals. Having not attended any of said festivals myself, I'll just sit here and guess that it'll get dumped to DVD (probably under the Dimension Extreme label), and not any earlier than next year at that.

Now, on with the list...

Each of the trailers we're looking at this week are for a film with an element of the fantastic. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Fantastic Five.

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army
As excited as I was after seeing the teaser trailer, this new preview for Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy sequel has me wanting to see the movie right now. There are tons of supernatural beasties on display here, making this kind of look like Pan's Labyrinth on steroids. We hear Abe Sapien talk, and I still miss David Hyde Pierce's voice, but I imagine once I'm in the thick of the film it won't be a problem. Here's what Eugene thought.

Paranormal Activity
The trailer is shown from the perspective of a home video camera, though I'm not sure how much of the film uses this first person perspective. The whole thing looks awesomely creepy. A woman believes she has been followed all her life by a supernatural entity, and her husband sets up his camcorder in hopes of proving or disproving the phenomenon. The idea seems kind of like The Blair Witch Project meets The Entity, and I'm anxious to see this one. The official website for this low budget scare flick carries some promising review excerpts, including one from Cinematical's own Kim Voynar, and you can read her full review right here.

I have a big "Park City genre report" on the way, but here's some good news that has forced me to jump the gun just a little bit. One of the coolest surprises I saw last week was a Slamdance entry called Paranormal Activity. Now, being that I'm a ravenous horror nerd, I'd already heard (and read) a little bit about the flick -- and I was aware that there was strongly positive buzz from the hardcore horror hounds -- but I wasn't really prepared for how quietly, confidently creepy the flick would be.

I won't spoil anything, but I will say that Paranormal Activity is a great little horror flick, and it sure looks like the people at DreamWorks agree with the horror press. According to Variety, DW has acquired all domestic and remake rights to Paranormal Activity, which basically means we'll see a solid DVD release for the original, and a glossier remake that's not bad, but not as good as the original. The horror fans get two movies, everyone involved gets paid, and it's a nice story all around. Score one for the little guy who made a good movie. (Feel free to check out Kim's review here, and my full review right here.)

Congrats, Oren!

When it comes to mockumentary type films, there are basically two kinds: good and bad; there's just not a lot of middle-ground with this particular type of filmmaking. Paranormal Activity, which showed at Slamdance, the wild and crazy drunk cousin to the Sundance Film Festival, falls squarely into the "good" camp -- particularly if your definition of "good" includes "will scare the pants off you" and "I had to sleep with the lights on after watching it."

The central idea of the film is that it purports to show actual footage of, well, paranormal activity, in the home of the two protagonists, Katie and Micah, who are living their normal lives until weird things begin happening in their home. Katie, who believes she's been haunted by an invisible, malevolent being since childhood, fears it's followed her to her new home. Micah isn't quite convinced there's anything unexplainable going on, but he purchases a video camera to record their room at night, in an attempt to capture on film any paranormal activity and try to make sense of it. When the camera actually does capture some weird happenings, Micah is at first rather excited by what they have on film; as things escalate, through, both Katie and Micah fear that the entity haunting Katie could turn violent -- or even deadly.

In her latest column for Variety, Anne Thompson details the production histories of Cloverfield (due for release from Paramount Pictures on January 18) and Paranormal Activity (pictured; screening soon at Slamdance and looking for a distributor). She says that both "borrow admiringly from the 'Blair Witch' playbook," which she defines as: (1) "casting unknowns who can improvise," (2) "scare [audiences] with a homevideo documentary style," (3) "build suspense by not showing everything." The entire article is well worth reading, but raises the question: Does the "playbook" for The Blair Witch Project deserve imitation?

I know some people were genuinely spooked by The Blair Witch Project, believing it to be "real" found footage, but according to my admittedly unscientific investigations, for every person that was scared there were three people who were irritated by the horrible "improvised" performances and/or nauseated by the 'shaky cam' photography. The film's incredible financial success -- especially compared to its tiny budget -- spawned dozens of (creatively) cheap imitations, like a copy of a copy (with apologies to Multiplicity). Frankly, if I never see another poorly-made 'shaky cam' horror film I will be quite happy. And I reserve a special place in Cinematic Hell for crap masquerading as "the real thing" just to try and shake a few coins loose from horror junkies like myself.

The third point -- "not showing everything" -- actually hearkens back to "pure classical horror," as acknowledged by Paranormal Activity co-producer Steven Jay Schneider. He doesn't list titles, but the classics must include the Universal Studios monster flicks of the 1930s and the superb, atmospheric pictures Val Lewton produced for RKO in the 1940s. Of course, Steven Spielberg's Jaws is probably a bigger influence on today's younger filmmakers as far as creating suspense without showing everything (right away); Cloverfield director Matt Reeves directly references him in the article.

I admire filmmakers who try to be inventive, so I hope Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity turn out to be good, suspenseful pictures. But an interesting story, characters I care about, and a dark atmosphere are what make things genuinely creepy in my ideal horror playbook, not big-budget studio productions pretending to be homemade indies or homemade indies pretending to be "real."

You thought that with all the love we've been throwing at Austin's Fantastic Fest we'd probably forget all about good ol' L.A. Screamfest. Not with me on horror watch! The event runs from October 12 to 20, and if you happen to be located anywhere near the legendary Mann's Chinese Theater -- you just might want to duck inside to see what sort of murderous mayhem is going on.

And the Screamfest looks to be starting off on the right foot this year: Last night's opening night film was George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead! After much praise from the audiences at Toronto and Fantastic Fest, the master's latest zombie opus will hit the west coast with much excitement and gore. And the fun doesn't stop there. The festival will also offer Robert Rodriguez's director's cut of Planet Terror (which is awesome) and a 25th Anniversary screening (and cast reunion) of Friday the 13th Part 3. Yes, in 3-D!

Attendees will also get to check out the long-awaited DVDquel Return to House on Haunted Hill, a screening of the great-looking 30 Days of Night (and the video prequels Blood Trails), David Arquette's festival fave The Tripper, and a variety of genre titles of various shapes, sizes and nationalities. Of the Screamfest flicks we've seen, we've already given a strong seal of approval on the quiet but creepy Alone, the robust zest of Wrong Turn 2, the Pakistani lunacy known as Hell's Ground, , the freakishly ferocious Inside, and the apocalyptic awesomeness that is The Signal. Plus I keep hearing that Shrooms is pretty amusing, Buried Alive is gruesome, and Storm Warning is really solid.