I might never live down missing Astron-6’s FATHER’S DAY at Toronto After Dark 2011. By all accounts from sources I trust, it was the highlight of a festival filled with highlights. With so many great movies to see and personal commitments that not even FATHER’S DAY could get me out of, I really had to prioritize and see what I thought would be most relevant to readers of Long Live the New Flesh.

I take a lot of comfort in the fact that I didn’t miss Astron-6’s MANBORG.

The two films I ended up being most excited for, among the amazing line up at this year’s Toronto After Dark Film Festival, were both made by Winnipeg collective Astron 6: FATHER’S DAY and MANBORG.  With all due respect to the rest of the pack, festival director Adam Lopez appears to have done a stellar job once again in curating the 6th annual showcase, but those were the two that really spoke to me.

On a cold day in March 1314 in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral, Templar Grand Master Jacques De Molay was slowly burned alive at the behest of the Holy Mother Church under pressure from King Philippe IV. He refused to confess to any crime or heresy, even to spare his own life. It is said that as the flames engulfed his body, he laid a curse upon the family of King Philippe IV. He swore the king would be called to stand before God before the year was out, and so it was that Philippe died within that same year.

EDITORS’ NOTE: When David came to us and suggested going to Toronto’s Fan Expo 2011 convention in costume and doing a gonzo piece on what it is like to attend such an event, we really did not know the extent to which he was prepared to get into character. What follows is what we managed to assemble from handwritten notes which had been faxed over to us…

One cannot talk about the New Flesh without acknowledging the larval sac that birthed it. As much as my eye is turned to the future, I’m of a generation that will always have one foot firmly planted in this idyllic past we all imagine. The place we all started to learn the language of media, the place that captured our imaginations.

The retail video outlet.

In my last blog, we saw a gory little slice of social commentary in Waylon Bacon’s HELP WANTED. If you haven’t caught the film already, do yourself a service and check it out. It is mind-bendingly fantastic and as I pointed out previously, I think it has a lot of interesting things to say about us as a society.

I’m writing this week’s column from a beach on Lake Erie where my family and I are on a brief holiday. Now some might wonder how you write about horror from a sunny beach. Kids playing in the surf, the smell of suntan lotion and the chip stand in the air.