Apostate Café

Looks like it is the season for Christian horror films. Here are some trailers:

The Familiar

First, from Miles Hanon (who worked on End of the Spear and Beyond the Gates of Splendor), comes The Familiar. Sam, lonly and bitter after the death of his wife, again faces his childhood demon when his estranged sister-in-law, Laura, reappears. The sexual attraction between the two blinds him to the fact that his demon is taking possession of Laura an is intent on destroying them both…

Visit the movie Web site at www.FamiliarTheMovie.com.

The Message

Next up is The Message. A young wife and mother of two children is challenged to overcome her passive beliefs on religion after a serious car accident. Receiving haunting images of her past she is forced to make a decision that will decide her fate…

Another post to the Unofficial RedDot CMS blog, this time about quirks and workarounds with the new text editor.

The v9 release of RedDot CMS OpenText Web Solutions Management Server has a killer feature: a new text editor based on Telerik RadEditor.Net. And for the most part it rocks. Our authors and editors love it. But there have been a few quirks. Here are the problems we have encountered, and the workarounds.

Read the full article here: http://www.reddotcmsblog.com/telerik-radeditor-quirks

Shameless self-promotion. New post to the Unofficial RedDot CMS blog by yours truly about using the Adopt Content in Clipboard function from SmartTree.

Have you ever come across a feature in RedDot that has been there forever, but you’d never used it before? Then you "discover" it and think, "if only I’d known about this earlier, it would have saved so much time…" This is one of those. We discovered the Adopt Content in Clipboard action menu item. Nothing groundbreaking — you may already be using Adopt Content in Clipboard on a regular basis. And it doesn’t make the process completely painless, but it is much faster than copying the content manually.

Read the full article here: http://www.reddotcmsblog.com/adopt-content-in-clipboard

The new issue of Rue Morgue magazine has a cover story about Christian Horror as a genre. The authors talked to a number of people active in the genre including T.L. Hines and Mike Duran. There is a also a nice plug for the Christian Horror site at christian-fandom.org, and for Fear & Trembling magazine. I am quoted a couple of times (ego stroke), but I am really glad they were able to interview Scott Derrickson, who addresses the subject with far more intelligence and lucidity. When talking about Christian horror as a genre, Derrickson says:

I don’t know that I accept Christian horror as a defined subgenre… if you include The Exorcist and The Omen in that subgenre I’ll accept the term, because those films, as well as horror films made by professing Christians, are dependent upon Christian theology for their stories. I certainly object to the idea of defining a subgenre by the religious beliefs of the filmmakers and not the films themselves.

And later:

The other day we got a $5 bill back in change, and noticed a big purple numeral 5 on the back. Sunam and I debated for several minutes whether or not it was real currency, then launched into a lively discussion of how cool the differnt Euro designs are, compared to US currency.

At work someone sent me this link http://www.typography.com/ask/showBlog.php?blogID=93 so I guess it was a real $5 bill.

Scott Derrickson, director of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Hellraiser V: Inferno, and the upcoming remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, was the subject of a recent article in Relevant Magazine. Most of this territory has been covered before (like here, here, and here ), but I can’t complain about the author’s closing remark:

In fact, if our God is capable of using anything and anyone for His will, maybe it’s not too much to suggest that God can use horror films for His glory, too.

Read the full article: Can Horror Be Used For Good? at Relevant Magazine.