I don't mean to go too off-topic, but this would make for an interesting io9 article: sci-fi and fantasy films that break with convention, whether in plot structure or just tropes or presentation of information. You see enough genre movies and they begin to cluster into a handful of clones. But not all of them.

There's dark and then there's dark. Contemporary paranormal romance has genre conventions of its own and is valid within those parameters. Red Riding Hood is not a surreal fever dream of budding sexuality like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders or Company of Wolves, but a paranormal romance about conflicted emotions…

Well said, and do I ever agree. The Chosen One is the most shopworn part of the third of a century old Star Wars (not the originator, but definitely got the bandwagon going) formula.

I can't wait to see Greg Lantern. (Cite: The Onion News Network.)

As always, there are good and bad examples of this trend (more like tradition) of the darker side of fairy tales and modern kid fantasy lit.

The Turkana system of households joining together for war could evolve purely by social evolution, without any need for kin selection, group selection, gene-culture dual evolution etc. Does it really have the hallmarks of a biological adaptation? Hell, for all we know it's not all that adaptive, or is only really…

It's a desperate gimmick to milk the remnant base of buyers of actual comic books as opposed to buyers of trade paperbacks like 'graphic memoirs' and glorified movie storyboards. It's even more baldly gimmicky than typical company-wide 'events' like DC's recurrent crises and Marvel's wars.

I agree; that is totally lame. That kind of minimization of his statements is even worse than if she had said nothing.

Vampires being created by suicide, or as resurrected witches was more common than the infection model in folklore. And the idea that it was spread by a virus (or bacteria, or parasite) is a newer biologicized conception of the vampire rather than spreading through magic, evil spirits etc. (Aside: Infection is a very…

There's no such thing as vampire oversaturation. The more, the better. A vampire movie (or five) for every taste: gothic horror, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, rom com, slapstick, splatter, sci-fi, arthouse ...

The 90 second version:

I used to fancy myself a scientist (that's what years of grad school and prospects of a scientific career will do to you). I know my way around the science blogosphere. In my humble opinion the best (as in most interesting) science blogs are io9 and Cracked. And io9 is more factually rigorous.

I actually thought that The Wolfman was not that bad. Sure, when I saw the trailer with the CG wolfman bounding from rooftop to rooftop I had flashbacks of Ang Lee's videogameish, suspension of disbelief-killing Hulk, but I think the concept worked in the context of 'Hopkins in crazy mode' daddy issues and old timey…

The 'issue one' thing is a desperate gimmick for a giant in an industry that has never been more influential even while the readership of its staple product - its periodical titles - continues to shrink.

I didn't read your comment on Northanger Abbey until I posted mine. My bad!

I don't want to give credence to 'Seduction of the Innocent' vibe of the WSJ article, but there is a point at which a trend (dark, morbid, dystopian) becomes a fad becomes a cliche becomes a serious rut. And maybe YA is starting to get to that point, like superhero comics were by the late 90s with the 'grim and…

The werewolves of Jack Nicholson's Wolf, Werewolf of London, and Skinwalkers were relatively un-hairy. But sure, this one might be the least hairy of all. (Well, except for the first Ginger Snaps, which had a mostly hairless wolflike quadruped.)

The werewolf myth, like the vampire myth, is pretty versatile. A paranormal romance as a venue for the werewolf is as valid as a splatter movie, fairytale, or urban fantasy. Even in folklore a 'monster' can be the object of forbidden desire as well as a bestial force of destruction, or a number of other symbolic…

I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. It's not just another a cash-in on the teen paranormal romance fad (yeah, like you, I Am Number Four) but wittily scripted with artful cinematography.

Hell to the yeah.