zombie

As I've mentioned before in other posts, being a geeky fan means more than just picking up the latest novel, movie, or collectible from the genre and/or franchise of your preference-- anyone can do that. A true fan occasionally goes above and beyond the routine call of geekdom to locate and acquire rare items, items that either didn't sell well upon their initial release or were sold exclusively in another country. This post is about my recent effort to purchase one of my many, many white whales: Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse , a 2008 Wii game that was only released in Japan. Fatal Frame 4 (or FF4 ) holds a special significance for a numbers of reasons. Not only was it designed exclusively with Wii's motion controls in mind, but a group of devoted fans got together to release an English subtitle patch for it back in 2010. If you're an avid survival horror fan who owns a Wii and isn't fluent in Japanese, now is the ideal time to pick up a copy of FF4 . R...

Way back in 2001, Japanese horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa released a film called Kairo (a.k.a. Pulse ). An apocalyptic story, Kairo told the tale of a group of Japanese college students who are investigating the death of their friend and its connection to a mysterious Web site that promised the change for the living to communicate with the dead. As the movie unfolds, it turns out that the site is allowing hordes of dead spirits to invade the world of the living, which in turn causes people to either commit suicide or simply vanish, leaving behind nothing but a shadow-shaped arrangements of ash. The heavy-handed message of Kairo was its metaphorical prediction that the Internet would inevitably cause people's sense of community to collapse. This would lead to an epidemic of depression and dispair as more and more individuals become separated from their fellow human beings because of too much technology invading our lives. Well, it's 2015, the Internet is as popular as ever,...