FEARnet's original scripted series, Holliston, is coming down the chimney with a very special Christmas episode.

The most wonderful time of the year quickly turns into “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” when a blizzard strikes the town of Holliston, trapping Adam, Joe, Corri and Laura inside with no power. To make matters worse, a crazed serial killer has just escaped and is said to be lurking somewhere in the area. Fearing for their lives and having nothing but flashbacks to entertain them, the gang reminisces about the moments in their past that brought them all together. Derek Mears (Friday the 13^th) guest stars.

The Holliston Christmas special will premiere on December 18th, capping off an all-day season one Holliston marathon. Enjoy these stills, and get all the deets on Holliston. You need FEARnet to get Holliston - find out how to get FEARnet with your cable or satellite provider.

Last month we told you about a zombie movie shot entirely in the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, and now it is the setting for the nerdiest zombie movie ever. The film follows a small group of students (played by physicists) after a disastrous malfunction in the world’s biggest particle accelerator. As they try desperately to escape from the underground maintenance tunnels, they are hunted by the remains of a maintenance team, who have become less than human.

The 75-minute film is available for free under Creative Commons License. You can download the film legally from a variety of torrent sites, as well as a number of free, legal streaming sites.

Or, you can just stream the entire film right here:

The Walking Dead doesn't return until February 10th, but AMC knows that Dead withdrawls can be tough (especially since season three has been the best yet.) The Governor has lost his eye and his zombie daughter, so he is ready to go scorched earth (so to speak) on everyone and everything. The survivor groups are all mixed up; brother is pitted against brother; and stands will be taken. 

Enjoy an extended trailer for the second half of season three, followed by a clip from the next episode.

It’s been quite a while since John McNaughton directed a horror movie. (Unless you include Wild Things, which was kind of an on-screen massacre.) 1986's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was his acclaimed and nuanced profile of the deeply disturbed Henry, who was loosely based on Henry Lee Lucas.

McNaughton’s new project The Harvest sounds very promising and Variety reports an impressive lineup of actors has already signed onto the project. Michael Shannon, Samantha Morton, and Natasha Calis will star in this story of  “a married couple with medical backgrounds and a sick son who lives secluded in a controlled environment until a young girl (Calis) moves in next door and gives him hope of a better life. As the teens grow closer, the tight-knit world his over-protective mother has created begins to unravel.”

McNaughton shared a few more details about his new project. “This is the first horror script I've been interested in in 25 years, so it's kind of cool to return to the genre. I got the script a few years ago and loved the story, which is dark and has a great twist. It's like a cross between 'Hansel and Gretel' and 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," he said.

Via Variety

James Wan’s sequel to Insidious just keeps getting better and better. Hot on the heels of the news that Barbara Hershey will return for the sequel, our friends over at Bloody Disgusting just received word that  “Leigh Whannell, Angus Sampson and Andrew Astor have officially joined Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Lin Shaye, Ty Simpkins” have also signed on for the next chapter.

More from Bloody Disgusting:

“Whannell and Sampson return as Specs and Tucker, respectively, the two ghost hunters in Wan’s first Insidious. Astor also returns as the young Foster Lambert, the boy whose body is ‘haunted.’

As she did in the first Insidious, Oscar-nominated Hershey will play the role of Lorraine Lambert, the mother to Patrick Wilson’s Josh Lambert and the grandmother to the demon-possessed boy Dalton. We’re told we’ll be seeing flashbacks of various characters in the film that lead up to the events in the first.

Insidious Chapter 2 is scheduled to hit theaters on August 30.

Were you a bit let down by Paul W.S. Anderson’s Alien vs Predator? You weren’t alone. Creative fan Stephen Taubman decided to tell the real story of who would survive in a battle between these two killers. Hint: It’s not going to be the humans.

Check out his breakdown below and some helpful survival “do’s and don’ts” as a guide for how to react when you come face to face with a facehugger or predator.
 

Browse more data visualization.

How many fans have dreamt of resting their heads on Simon Pegg’s soft, gingery chest? Well, this Shaun of the Dead pillow is the next best thing. It’s a custom-made replica of Shaun’s zombie blood-covered Foree Electric uniform from the movie. So close your eyes, relax, snuggle up, and let the zombies swarm.

Horror Décor offers a number of other horror- themed pillows including Captain Spaulding, Deputy Grimes, and my personal favorite, a Dr. West pillow.
 

$15 at Horror Décor

A swing and a miss.  My cricket bat whiffed harmlessly past the snarling zombie’s brainpan as he lurched forward, toppling me to the ground as he began his morbid meal.  The loading screen floods the television with a mosaic of CCTV monitors, which give way to reveal my next avatar, a middle-aged woman with a bobbed haircut who lurches awake, only to spy a moribund reminder projected across the floor: ZombiU is survival horror.

Survival horror is a diluted phrase in 2012.  Resident Evil has long since made the shift from the slow, ammo-sparing days of the original to white-hot action, and all of its contemporaries have followed suit, empowering players with high-powered weapons and a plentiful cache of ammo to fuel their monster-slaying rampages.  ZombiU hearkens back to the gritty days of survival horror, with players managing a meager inventory as they face seemingly impossible odds.  To many, this brutal level of difficulty may be considered unfair, but for me it was nostalgic.

The nostalgia of old-school survival horror is virtually the only nostalgic aspect of ZombiU, which uses the new technology of Nintendo’s Wii U console to give players a richer experience past its simple FPS mechanics.  The Wii U’s GamePad, basically a tablet embedded in the middle of a controller, becomes a Swiss Army knife of tools to aid you in your quest to escape a zombie-plagued London.  During most of the game, the GamePad screen shows an automap of your surroundings—a simple, yet unbelievably appreciated gesture—with a one-touch radar to scan the area for “blighters.”  The radar has the obnoxious tendency to capture any movement, which leads to some nail biting tension until you find out that the red blip was little more than a false positive in the form of the game’s many rats.

Other functions are far less subtle.  You can hold the GamePad up like a camera to scan your environment, use it to control in-game gun turrets (a maniacally fun moment), pick locks, ransack boxes for equipment, and hack security systems.  All of these interactions, however, leave the game active and your character vulnerable.  Trying to pick a lock on the GamePad while looking back up at your screen to make sure that no zombies have snuck up behind you  adds a level of tension that would not normally be present in such a mundane task where, in other games, events around you all but shut down as you rotate tumblers.  This vulnerability extends to inventory management as well, making the game seem oddly authentic…if that can really be a quality attributed to a game about the zombie  apocalypse.  This vulnerability will come to a head time and time again due to the game’s unique take on death.  Death in the game takes a unique permanence, where your character will die if bitten.  No amputation.  No miracle cure.  You get bitten, you die.  The game then rolls you a new character to pick up where your previous character left off, albeit without whatever equipment they may have had.  The solution?  Hunting down your now-zombified predecessor and bashing in their brainpan in order to loot their backpack.  It’s logical, but you never develop enough of an attachment to your short-lived avatars in the game for it to have any true impact or weight, reducing it to an amusing, cyclical exercise.

The other bit of inventiveness stems from the London setting, which should please (and depress) many an Anglophile.  Setting the game in England allows for some novel ideas, like the omnipresent CCTV cameras providing eyes and ears to your faceless taskmaster who doles out the various missions, as well as a Shaun of the Dead-referencing cricket bat as your main melee weapon.  Sadly, the game doesn’t see fit to include other British staples as weapons like exploding meat pies or sharpened Doctor Who DVDs.  The British setting also allows for a more historical background for the plague, tying it into past figures and biblical prophecy.

There’s also a fun-as-hell local multiplayer mode called King  of the Zombies, with one player acting as the “King of the Zombies” and using the GamePad to strategically drop blighters on a map to kill any other local players who are either trying to capture waypoints or simply try to stay alive.  It’s more fun than it sounds as you can watch your hapless opponents react to the zombies you’re mercilessly dropping on the map, manipulating their fears and keeping tension high.

Being a launch title for the Wii U, ZombiU does fall prey to the curse of many a launch title: inability to really squeeze performance from the hardware.  The graphics range from bleakly gorgeous, with snappy lighting effects and well-rendered zombies, to downright hideous, with some muddy and blurry textures seemingly on loan from the original Xbox.  They aren’t a complete failure, but what the game’s visuals do right stands out in stark relief to what it does very, very wrong.

ZombiU may seem like little more than a tech demo for the Wii U and its promising GamePad technology (it is really, really cool), but it actually aspires to be more than that.  For the most part, it succeeds, even if the campaign is woefully short (around 6 hours by my clock) and the novelty factor of the GamePad integration is so high.  However, it’s still a simple, raucous romp through not-so-jolly Old England that could polish itself to near perfection in sequels.

Holliston creators Adam Green and Joe Lynch appeared on G4's Attack of the Show with Paul Scheer to pimp out their upcoming Holliston Christmas special. The boys discuss how the show is like Friends for horror fans, what we can expect from the Christmas special, and hint at what is coming up in season two.

Without further ado... the official trailer for Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim.

Official Synopsis: When legions of monstrous creatures, known as Kaiju, started rising from the sea, a war began that would take millions of lives and consume humanity’s resources for years on end.  To combat the giant Kaiju, a special type of weapon was devised: massive robots, called Jaegers, which are controlled simultaneously by two pilots whose minds are locked in a neural bridge.  But even the Jaegers are proving nearly defenseless in the face of the relentless Kaiju.  On the verge of defeat, the forces defending mankind have no choice but to turn to two unlikely heroes—a washed up former pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and an untested trainee (Rinko Kikuchi)—who are teamed to drive a legendary but seemingly obsolete Jaeger from the past.  Together, they stand as mankind’s last hope against the mounting apocalypse.

Pacific Rim hits theaters July 12th.

The FEARnet cable network will join with dozens of other networks in airing 12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy.

The concert begins tonight at 7:30pm ET with performances by Dave Grohl, Bon Jovi, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Alicia Keys, Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Roger Waters, Eddie Vedder, Chris Martin, The Who, Kanye West, and more. The concert is a benefit for those affected by Superstorm Sandy, which decimated the East Coast just before Halloween this year. New York and New Jersey were hit especially hard.

Donate to the Sandy relief here.

Don't have FEARnet? Find out how to get it, then watch the concert stream online:

Surprisingly, my search for zombified Christmas wreaths turned up more than almost any category - even tree ornaments. Many of them are DIY, so consider some of these as fun holiday craft projects.

DIY: Monster Fur & Eyeball Wreath

DIY: Tatters and Skulls "Halloween" Wreath

DIY: Spider Wreath

For the less crafty among us...

Black and orange mesh wreath

$65 at Etsy

Bloody body parts wreath

On sale! $32 at Etsy

Cthulhu wreath! (is there anything Cthulhu can't do?)

$32.99 at Amazon

Orange skull wreath

$18 at Etsy

American Horror Story: Asylum Episode 209
“The Coat Hanger”
Written By: Jennifer Salt
Directed By: Jeremy Podeswa
Original Airdate: 12 December 2012

In This Episode...

This will come as a surprise to no one, but Lana is pregnant with Thredson’s demon spawn. Sister Mary Eunice “assures” Lana that they are well-equipped to deal with her “little miracle.” Lana, naturally, wants it aborted - not likely to happen in a Catholic mental asylum. So Lana does the next logical thing: she steals a wire coat hanger from a rack of dry cleaning and aborts it herself. Lana still has a bloodlust for Thredson, and she goes to Kit (who has been draining his sedative IV drip into the bedpan when no one is looking) to help her. He refuses to kill Thredson until they get him on tape confessing to the murders.

Lana has an idea. She goes to Thredson and shows him the lab report stating she is pregnant. Being the good little sociopath that he is, Thredson is jubilant and promises all sorts of changes in the hopes of raising the baby. He grew up in an orphanage and doesn’t want the same fate to befall his spawn. She doesn’t believe him and threatens to abort the pregnancy - she even produces the coat hanger and removes her panties. Thredson allocutes to three of the murders and Kit reveals that he has been hiding and recording the entire conversation, and that she aborted last night: “It really wasn’t that bad.” Kit and Lana scurry back to where they are supposed to be, but after her bakery shift, Lana tries to steal a kitchen knife. One of the orderlies catches her and makes her turn it over. Surprisingly, no punishment comes to her. She goes quietly back to her room, and as soon as she is alone, she removes the coat hanger, bends it around a bit, and practices on her pillow. Plenty deadly. She sneaks out of her room with ease and heads down to where Thredson was being held - only Thredson isn’t there. His binds have been cut and left on the floor. Lana is terrified. Sister Mary Eunice catches her creeping in the halls, and Lana accuses her of releasing Thredson. Sister Mary Eunice responds by taking Lana’s coat hanger and assuring her that her fetus is still alive - and is a boy.

Sister Jude is now just Judy. She has been stripped of her nunly duties and committed to Briarcliff for life. Everyone from the Monsignor to Dr. Arden to Sister Mary Eunice to Lee Emerson testified to a judge that Sister Jude had gone off the deep end, that she was taking on the delusions of the inmates, and that she had killed Frank. The Monsignor brings Lee to visit Jude. He has been cleaned up, his neck wound bandaged, and shuffles in full chains. He apologizes to Jude for attacking her and forgives her for the cruel treatment she bestowed upon him. With a gentle kiss on the forehead, Lee shuffles off. The Monsignor finds him later in the chapel, praying. He insists he is a changed man, that he wants to be saved. The Monsignor, who dreams of being pope one day, thinks that Lee could be the miracle he needs. Believing Lee to be saved, he baptizes Lee. The private ceremony is scarcely over when Lee - no longer shackled - grabs the Monsignor and forces him face-down into the baptismal pool. Later on, the janitor finds the Monsignor in the chapel, still alive and crucified above the altar. He runs for help and Death strolls in to offer her services. Meanwhile, Jude is a changed woman. She goes into the common room and sits with Lana, offering sincere apologies and admitting she did horrible things. Lana is wary until Jude goes to the record player, breaks her beloved French recording into pieces, and calmly sits down again.

Dr. Arden has gone back to the tunnels and discovers strange, two-toed footprints in the dirt. He takes a cast and brings it back to Kit, telling him he believes him. Arden theorizes that there is something special about Kit to the aliens. Both Grace and Alma were abducted after Kit had sex with them. Arden supposes that they are using him for some sort of eugenics experiment, and believes the aliens will do whatever it takes to protect their lab monkey. He wants to “kill” Kit (inject him with potassium chloride, from which he can be revived within two minutes) to see if it lures the aliens back. Desperate for the chance to see his wife one more time, Kit agrees. Arden injects him, Kit seizes, then goes quiet. Moments later the bright lights flash through the hallways, and Arden goes to investigate. He finds Pepper, caring for a very alive, very pregnant Grace.

Dig It or Bury It?

I am quite impressed with the alien storyline. When I first heard about it, I laughed it off. When it was first introduced in the show, I kind of dismissed it as a passing fancy. But as they have delved deeper into the alien subplot, I have been surprised at how not-hokey it comes across. It certainly could get hokey at any second, but at this point in time, I do not immediately want to laugh when aliens are mentioned. Maybe it is because it is a show about insanity. Maybe it is because there is so much other weird stuff that aliens seem a very normal part of this world. 

Bloody Face

We open in the present, but instead of those obnoxious newlyweds, we find John Morgan meeting with a therapist. She advertises in the Pennysaver (so you know she good) that she specializes in compulsive disorders. She initially thinks his compulsion is masturbation, but it is skinning cats. Dead ones at first, then moving on to killing living cats. His foster family kicked him out and he learned to hide it better. But the voices and the compulsions grew and John was having a hard time ignoring them. It got even worse after he discovered his father was Bloody Face.

At the episode’s end, Dr. Gardener’s next appointment comes in and finds the office a mess. Dr. Gardener is dead, and John (Thredson, we now know, not Morgan) is standing behind the woman, covered in blood.

Prophecies?

Even Briarcliff gets a holiday reprieve. The show returns in January with Jude slipping deeper and deeper into the crazy.

Geeks and nerds, rejoice! Gillian Anderson, who will forever be known as Agent Scully on The X-Files, returns to American television this spring with a recurring role in Hannibal.

Anderson will play Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier, the therapist of titular killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Right now she is booked for a three-episode arc. In the decade since The X-Files ended its nine year run, Anderson has appeared in a number of shows and miniseries for the BBC, as well as a handful of independent films. She reprised her role as Agent Scully in 2008's theatrical The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

Hannibal follows an FBI agent (played by Hugh Dancy) who enlists in the help of noted profiler Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) to help him track an elusive serial killer. Of course, it turns out that Lecter is the killer they are chasing. Others in the stellar cast include Laurence Fishburne, Gina Torres, Eddie Izzard, Molly Shannon, and Ellen Greene. Bryan Fuller (Mockingbird Lane, Pushing Daisies) the executive producer. NBC has not set a premiere date, but I would guess it would be some time in late March.

Source: EW

Can you make it through the holidays without a new episode of American Horror Story: Asylum? If the thought of this is to much to bear, you can keep watching this promo for Episode 10 'The Name Game' over and over again until the episode airs on January 2nd at 10:00 pm. You're welcome. Don't forget to read our recap of American Horror Story: Asylum Episode 209 - 'The Coat Hanger'. What are you most looking forward to when American Horror Story: Asylum  returns in 2013?

The Golden Globe nominations were announced this morning, and a number of genre and genre-adjacent projects were nominated.

Helen Mirren picked up Hitchcock's lone nomination, for Best Actress for playing Hitch's wife, Alma. The other Hitchcock project this season, HBO's The Girl, was more successful (likely because the miniseries category is less competitive), with nods for best miniseries, actress (for Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedren) and actor (for Toby Jones as Alfred Hitchcock.) Horror TV was shut-out of the series categories, but Jessica Lange received a now-expected nod for Best Actress in a Miniseries for American Horror Story: Asylum.

The animated feature category has nominees for not one but two kid-friendly fright flicks: Frankenweenie and Hotel Transylvania. I'm a little disappointed that ParaNorman didn't make that list.

Also deserving of a mention is Django Unchained. While not strictly a horror film, it promises to be hella violent, and I've never met a horror fan who didn't like at least one Quentin Tarantino film. Django picked up nominations is almost all the drama categories: Best Picture, Best Director (for Tarantino), Best Screenplay (Tarantino again), and two Supporting Actor nods to Leonardo DiCaprio and Christoph Waltz. Interestingly, Jamie Foxx was passed over for Best Actor. Let the speculation on racism begin.

The Golden Globes ceremony will take place on January 13th, hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Pohler.

I love puns. And I love this "Michonne: Impossible" tee. The Walking Dead doesn't return until February - seems like waiting is your own impossible mission.

$24.54 at Red Bubble

Warm Bodies is a unique take on the zombie tale: it is told from the point of view of the zombie. As you can imagine, we are psyched for a new take on a classic genre. We have to wait until February 1st for the film to hit theaters, but enjoy these new character one-sheets until then.

A funny new twist on a classic love story, WARM BODIES is a poignant tale about the power of human connection. After a zombie epidemic, R (a highly unusual zombie) encounters Julie (a human survivor), and rescues her from a zombie attack. Julie sees that R is different from the other zombies, and as the two form a special relationship in their struggle for survival, R becomes increasingly more human - setting off an exciting, romantic, and often comical chain of events that begins to transform the other zombies and maybe even the whole lifeless world.

Some people enjoy zombie movies as fictional escapism. Some people believe that a zombie-like virus could lead to an outbreak of near-apocalyptic proportions. And some people truly believe that the zombie apocalypse is not a matter of "if" but "when" - and they are ready.

Discovery Channel will explore these zombie survivalists in a new unscripted special called, simply, Zombie Apocalypse, which airs on December 18th. The show will focus on a quartet of people who have formed the Kansas Anti-Zombie Militia. They are training for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. But these extremists are not the show's only focus. Given equal time are a couple of doctors who believe that a virus that causes zombie-like symptoms is possible - even likely - and could turn into an apocalypse really fast.

During a recent "town hall" with Sirius XM radio, director Quentin Tarantino answers the question, "What three films inspired you the most?" His answer: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; Mario Bava's Black Sabbath; and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. Check out the clip below, where Tarantino waxes poetic on how Bava taught him how to line up shots.