gytrash

Justin Long, Jermaine Fowler and RJ Cyler are starring in Night Patrol, an indie horror feature from director and co-writer Ryan Prows.

David S. Goyer and Keith Levine are producing via the duo’s Phantom Four banner. Also producing is Josh Goldbloom, known for the recent V/H/S horror entries. James Harris and Mark Lane of Tea Shop Films (47 Meters Down) are also producing the movie, which wrapped principal photography in Los Angeles this week.

Dermot Mulroney and WWE superstar CM Punk have key roles, while Freddie Gibbs (Down With The King), YG (White Boy Rick), Flying Lotus (Ash) Jon Oswald (Lowlife) and Nicki Micheaux (Lowlife) round out the cast...

... In Patrol, an LAPD officer (Fowler) must put aside his differences with the area’s street gangs when he discovers a local police task force is harboring a horrific secret that endangers the residents of the housing projects he grew up in.

Long plays the officer’s partner, recruited as a legacy into night patrol. Cyler stars as the officer’s brother, who sees what he isn’t supposed to see, while Mulroney plays Long’s character’s father, a sergeant with many secrets. Punk rounds out the cast as the sergeant’s brutal right-hand man...

As international leaders, corporations and NGOs gear up to discuss efforts to tackle global warming at the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, residents in a crucial region for the climate crisis show they have very different priorities.

On Oct. 6, voters in the Amazon chose its mayors and councilors for the next four years, deciding as much about the rainforest’s future as authorities in international forums.

Many politicians who openly oppose conservationism were elected. Two of the seven Amazon states’ capitals elected candidates supported by former President Jair Bolsonaro, a climate denialist who empowered illegal miners and land-grabbers during his government from 2019-22.

“The rise of the far right is very visible in the Amazon states,” Wendell Andrade, public policy specialist for the Amazon at the Talanoa Institute, a Brazilian think tank committed to climate policy, told Mongabay...

... The centrist and right-wing parties also dominated the elections in the municipalities targeted by the federal government as a priority to control deforestation in the Amazon. Of the 70 municipalities, 69 were decided in the first round, and only two went to left-wing parties, which historically favored environmental conservation in Brazil, according to news outlet ((o)) eco.

The 2024 elections happen during the Amazon’s worst drought ever. Large rivers, like the Madeira, Amazonas, Negro and Purus, reached their lowest levels ever, isolating communities, leading to food and water shortages and damaging local economies. Fire outbreaks have burned the Amazon in Brazil and the neighboring countries. This year’s extreme drought followed another harsh dry season in 2023, which was 30 times more likely due to climate change.

“It’s a development agenda that is bringing a lot of destruction, and yet a large part of the population prefers these candidates,” Maureen Santos, coordinator of policies and alternatives in FASE, a Brazilian nonprofit that helps to promote local and community development, told Mongabay. “We need to study this phenomenon to tackle it more concretely in the next elections”...

The director of the 2018 remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Oscar nominee Luca Guadagnino (Bones and All, Challengers) is in final negotiations to direct a brand new interpretation of the 1991 book American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis for Lionsgate, we’ve learned today.

Scott Z. Burns will be scripting the new movie, which is being described as a new adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s aforementioned novel, rather than a remake of the 2000 movie.

The book was previously adapted by director Mary Harron from a screenplay by Harron & Guinevere Turner, with Christian Bale starring in that original (and iconic) movie adaptation.

In the tale, “A wealthy New York City investment banking executive, Patrick Bateman (played by Christian Bale in the 2000 movie), hides his alternate psychopathic ego from his co-workers and friends as he delves deeper into his violent, hedonistic fantasies.”

The new film will be produced by Frenesy Films, executive produced by Sam Pressman, son of Edward R. Pressman, producer of the first adaptation, through his company Pressman Film...

We live in times where Mark Robinson and the Nude Africa porn forums are threatening to become one of the most consequential stories in American history, so you’ll excuse me if I roll my eyes at the folks who believe our reality is not absurd enough to accommodate the potential notion of visitors from another realm. If you want to know why I feel this way, I wrote 6,500 words across two articles explaining why both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and I think there’s something to UFOs (Here is part 1 and part 2).

UFOs are news worth covering simply because so many credible government actors have lent their own credibility to it, and if a fraction of any of this is true, it is world-changing. If it’s all a lie, then why this lie was perpetrated on the entire globe is a question that demands an answer. There’s no route out of this mess that isn’t newsworthy and worth exploring, and there is enough physical evidence of unexplained things in the sky at this point that dismissing it all as mankind’s overactive imagination requires a bigger conspiracy theory than the legend that Lockheed Martin is housing UFOs.

Last summer’s UFO hearing starred David Grusch telling explosive tales of UFO crash retrievals, and while most were quick to dismiss this as the rantings of a lunatic or a huckster, I refuse to go that far. I, like most others, am unqualified to assess Grusch’s credibility and lack the appropriate security clearances. All I can say is that he is not a James Clapper-type who is at the top of an agency and can just lie to Congress all willy nilly and go to fancy D.C. cocktail parties like nothing happened. Grusch is blowing the whistle from the great middle of the Defense Department organizational chart, where the rules still do theoretically apply to normal people.

I don’t know if David Grusch’s testimony was true (The Intelligence Community Inspector General found his complaint “credible and urgent” in July 2022, which should be noted is not an assessment of whether it is true), but I do know that if he did lie, he is in extremely deep shit because he accused some immensely powerful entities of some very serious crimes under oath. That guillotine hovering over his neck is convincing enough to me to at least hear him and any others out who are willing to put themselves on the line to take a leap of faith in our democratic institutions. You can listen to people tell their stories with an open mind without having to make an instantaneous judgement about their veracity, and if they are lying, time will bear that out. If someone wants to go in front of Congress and tell us something they think is important, we owe it to them to listen...

Problematic as his views are today, H.P. Lovecraft is still regarded as one of the giants of horror literature, and his stories have been finding their way to the big screen for decades. But equally interesting are the Lovecraft-adjacent works, movies clearly influenced by his vision of an indifferent universe full of monstrous entities, yet not specifically based on anything the man wrote. John Carpenter, for example, has mined this territory with films like The Thing (1982) and In the Mouth of Madness (1995), while Lovecraft Country addressed Lovecraft’s racism within the context of the cosmic horror he made famous.

One of the best films to derive inspiration from Lovecraft’s work is The Lighthouse, directed by Robert Eggers from a script by Eggers and his brother Max, and released on October 18, 2019. The siblings had discussed the idea around the time Robert was seeking funding for his stunning 2016 folk-horror debut, The Witch, with its success allowing them to finally move forward.

The Lighthouse was initially inspired by an unfinished story fragment, “The Light-House,” by that other early titan of horror and mystery, Edgar Allan Poe. Aside from the title and bleak setting, however, The Lighthouse doesn’t really have any connections to Poe’s tale. As the film opens sometime during the 1890s, two lighthouse keepers arrive on a desolate island off the coast of New England for a four-week tour of duty...

... It’s the more mythic and cosmic aspects that are overtly Lovecraftian, along with the constant stream of ichorous fluids, putrefying bodies, barely glimpsed tentacular horrors, panicked sexual tension, and allusions to gods of the sea, where many of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods slumbered. Some of these merge, as when Pattinson’s Winslow (whose real name, it turns out, is also Thomas, adding the loss of identity to the thematic morass) hallucinates himself beating Dafoe’s Thomas Wake, only for the latter to morph into the Greek sea god Proteus. And then there’s the lantern atop the lighthouse, which will likely remind horror veterans of the “unnatural light” of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” or the “deadlights” from Stephen King’s It.

There’s a lot going on under the hood of The Lighthouse; in addition to Poe and Lovecraft, Robert Eggers has cited authors like Herman Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett, along with playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as instrumental to the film’s flavor and mood. Yet as an original psychological horror in which reality itself is besieged by unseen forces, it remains a Lovecraftian tone poem, an oppressive yet cosmic study of madness, desire, and ancient terror that, minus the author’s more noxious tendencies, could fit easily alongside his best works.

There’s something so unique about Lovecraft. While classic horror tropes like vampires, werewolves, and psychotic serial killers all feel well within the realms of human understanding, Lovecraft’s twisted gods and grotesque monstrosities feel completely alien – comprehensible, yet incomprehensible. It’s a universe I love to see reimagined in videogames, and RailGods of Hysterra is doing just that. From the ominous shadowy Cthulhu in the key art’s background, to the weird train that sports a glowing orange eye and rows of teeth, I’ve fallen for the survival game’s universe hook, line, and sinker.

RailGods of Hysterra is described as a co-op survival game set in a Lovecraftian hellscape. You are a Dreamer, and you’ve awoken bound to your eerie RailGod – the aforementioned living locomotive. As either a five-man squad or a solo traveler, you’ll venture through nightmarish landscapes, abandoned outposts, and cult hotspots, gathering new gear in order to upgrade your RailGod.

Combat looks a little Diablo-esque, with multiple players slinging spells at a poor, unsuspecting crocodile. You’ll have to take down various terrors to fuel your RailGod (or kidnap them, whatever you prefer), helping it transform into the horrific Eldritch fortress that it’s supposed to be...

BERLIN (AP) — A brand-new fire station in Germany, which was destroyed in a fire, causing millions of euros in damage and destroyed equipment did not have a fire alarm system, local media reported Thursday.

The fire broke out early Wednesday morning at the Stadtallendorf fire station in Hesse and destroyed, among other things, the equipment hall and almost a dozen emergency vehicles, German news agency dpa reported. Initial estimates put the damage at between 20 million and 24 million euros ($21 million to $26 million). No one was injured.

Local officials told dpa that no fire alarm system was installed in the building because experts had considered it not necessary — much to the astonishment of many observers now that the station has burned down...

The United States’ secretive Special Operations Command is looking for companies to help create deepfake internet users so convincing that neither humans nor computers will be able to detect they are fake, according to a procurement document reviewed by The Intercept.

The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.

The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos”...

... The Pentagon has already been caught using phony social media users to further its interests in recent years. In 2022, Meta and Twitter removed a propaganda network using faked accounts operated by U.S. Central Command, including some with profile pictures generated with methods similar to those outlined by JSOC. A 2024 Reuters investigation revealed a Special Operations Command campaign using fake social media users aimed at undermining foreign confidence in China’s Covid vaccine.

Last year, Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, expressed interest in using video “deepfakes,” a general term for synthesized audiovisual data meant to be indistinguishable from a genuine recording, for “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns.”

... special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used...

The offensive use of this technology by the U.S. would, naturally, spur its proliferation and normalize it as a tool for all governments. “What’s notable about this technology is that it is purely of a deceptive nature,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute. “There are no legitimate use cases besides deception, and it is concerning to see the U.S. military lean into a use of a technology they have themselves warned against. This will only embolden other militaries or adversaries to do the same, leading to a society where it is increasingly difficult to ascertain truth from fiction and muddling the geopolitical sphere.”

Both Russia and China have been caught using deepfaked video and user avatars in their online propaganda efforts, prompting the State Department to announce an international “Framework to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation” in January. “Foreign information manipulation and interference is a national security threat to the United States as well as to its allies and partners,” a State Department press release said. “Authoritarian governments use information manipulation to shred the fabric of free and democratic societies”...

Brian De Palma’s insouciantly horrible masterpiece from 1976, adapted from the novel by Stephen King, and mixing in tropes and tricks from Hitchcock’s Psycho, is now rereleased. This is the extraordinary exploitation shocker that also conveyed – or anyway fabricated – an impassioned sympathy for a bullied teenage girl with learning disabilities and telekinetic powers. It was a horror classic that didn’t conform to the narrative beats of the genre; it was a scary movie in which the terrifying demon was also the final girl.

Sissy Spacek gives an amazing performance as Carrie, a shy high school student and put-upon daughter of Margaret (Piper Laurie), whose fanatical religious devotion and fear of sex – and fear of Carrie having sex – stems from having been seduced and abandoned by Carrie’s now absent father many years previously. Poor, innocent Carrie still has not started her period, and when this happens in the showers after a volleyball game, she panics uncomprehendingly and the mean girls humiliate her by throwing tampons and chanting: “Plug it up!” Gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) is outraged and – angrily smoking a cigarette and still wearing her PE shorts in the principal’s office – decides to hand out exemplary punishments to this crowd of bullies. This takes the form of a mortifying workout session which so enrages the queen-bee bully Chris (Nancy Allen) that she resolves to take a satanically wicked revenge on Carrie at the prom...

Skyrim, but heavy metal horror. That's how (mostly) solo developer Nate Purkeypile has been pitching The Axis Unseen. And after spending a couple of hours in its Steam Next Fest demo exploring a vast, creepy forest dotted with gargantuan skeletons, while also being hunted down by packs of Werewolves to intense guitar riffs, I can confirm that The Axis Unseen ticks the Skyrim, heavy metal, and horror boxes with ease.

Skyrim's inspiration is immediately obvious when you're first thrust into this mystical open-world, with a trusty bow in hand and the promise of magical powers to come. These similarities perhaps aren't surprising when you learn that Purkeypile is also an ex-Bethesda developer who has worked on the Fallout series, Starfield, and Skyrim itself. While this can make the game look like an ambitious mod for Skyrim at first glance, it doesn't take long for The Axis Unseen's Next Fest demo to unleash its unique folklore-based cosmic horror on you - to terrifying effect...