Six Reasons Why You Should Support the Kickstarter for the movie adaptation of Brian Keene's The Cage

BLOT: (01 Oct 2013 - 04:55:49 PM)

Six Reasons Why You Should Support the Kickstarter for the movie adaptation of Brian Keene's The Cage

I'm excited about the potential movie adaptation for The Cage, based on Briane Keene's story of the same name (see, from Amazon: The Cage). Electronics store workers are kept in a cage in their backroom as a madman holds them hostage. One by one, they are taken upfront to an unclear fate. What the men in the cage do know is that the madman started out shooting some of the workers, so he is capable of murder. Which is worse, the gun or the thing in the front of the store making the weird throbbing sound? The known death or the unknown one?

Why should you be excited about it? Well, here are six reasons. Pick any or all as you please.

1. Check out its cast and crew list. You can see the cast at the above link to the Kickstarter, or on "Kickstart The Cage", a post on Keene's blog:

2. One of the KS perks could possibly involve forcing him to talk to me on the phone. One of the Kickstarter perks is a 15-minute phone call with Keene. Now, I'm not sure I can afford such a perk, but if I could, wouldn't you just delight in the horror (not a pun) of forcing such a great man to have to talk to me? I'd just ramble on about the history of anti-cannibal agitprop, for 15-minutes, and he'd have to listen. That's the gift that keeps on giving.

3. It's a good story. The intensity of the initial gun-blasts contrasts well with the long-wind-down as the dwindling survivors try to discover what's in store for them based purely on their tiny camera obscura glance outside of the cage. It is kind of like a story about someone being inches from the surface of a lake, having dived in to escape an explosion, able to take breaths as the water dips and splashes, but knowing that if they ever look down at what is holding their leg then it might be worse than not knowing. It doesn't take too long to read, and its ending is satisfyingly mythic, weird, and hopeless. Your tastes may vary.

4. Keene's Labyrinth Mythos deserves more public recognition. While Keene's use of a mythos-structure is not a new trick in horror circles, he has managed to bring in some of the best bits of a post-Derleth mythos structure with a comics-like multiverse, and then drenched it all wih a sweet, horrific glaze crafted out of a recipe involving water, darkness, fire, and a zesty theme of "It's all gonna go bad, one day". Plus I like Labyrinths. There's that, too.

5. Supporting Indie Horror is always a good cause. Sure, horror continues to churn out hits with low budgets, but as a genre it always could use new blood (still not a pun) to keep it running. There was a time where everything was a rip-off of "Pretty Young Things Have Sex and Die, Probably on Vacation or In the Woods". And a time, kind of still going, where most movies are "Haunted House Found Footage Or Is It a Demon" or the slightly moribund "Zombie Outbreak And This Time It's Personal!". Once we get trapped in our cliches (see: Zombie movies) we start turning out crappier and crappier and less inspired films. Films with a specific paranoid bent, like AM1200 and Pontypool and The Signal, all of which blend technophobia, isolation, and their own various dashes of weird, are an exciting sub-genre. Not sure if The Cage will be quite in the same vibe, but again new blood keeps the sub-genres blurred the the tactics fresh.

6. It helps Keene to finish his mansion made of pure money. Rumor has it that Keene has a house built nearly entirely of money and high-quality Brazilian shellac, but that he is holding off on the bed because nothing sleeps as well as gently crumbled $100 bills stuffed into a silk mattress. Who wouldn't want to help a man sleep better?

Brian Keene

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: October 2013