Cryptid – Nicholas Diak's Homepage

Personal / Website News

Dark Dead Things #2

Issue two of Dark Dead Things is officially out!

This issue contains my essay, “Correlating the Contents: Mimetic Desire in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.” It can be purchased at the Dark Dead Things website or at Amazon.

BlueSky

I have an account at BlueSky now. I can be found at: @nicholasdiak.bsky.social. I’ll try posting there concurrently with Facebook and Twitter. And maybe Post and Tribel, but I don’t see many folks on those last two.

IMDB Profile

I have a profile at IMDB now!

Granted, there is not much there, but I think it’s pretty cool I’ve got to be in a few things. Here is a frame capture from Best.Work.Weekend.Ever. that you can kinda see me in:

I am in front of the T-shirt, way in the back. Michele and I also play dead bodies in There’s No Such Thing as Vampires – you can’t miss us in that.

Anyways, if you want to help me grow my acting CV, I am totally available to appear in documentaries, supplemental features on blu-rays, you name it!

CoKoCon Schedule

The schedule for CoKoCon 2023 is online. You can find Michele and I on the following panels:

Saturday Sept 2 9pm – Fiesta Ballroom 2: From EC Comics to Shudder: Horror Comics That Excite and Scare Us
Sunday Sept 3 6pm – Coronado: Creepy, Crawly, Otherworldly Bumps in the Night, or Cosmic Horror Films
Monday Sept 4 1pm – Coronado: 1pm: Weird West in Popular Culture

I’ll be on premises the entire con, so feel free to hunt me down to say hi! Michele and I will also have a table we were sill be selling and signing books.

Scholars from the Edge of Time

New episode of Scholars from the Edge of Time is now online.

In this episode, Michele and I discuss the 1999 Highlander/Mortal Kombat hybrid film, G2: Mortal Conquest. Check it out on YouTube!

Publishing Recap

Below is a recap of my publishing endeavors so far in 2023.

Published in February, this collection contains my essay “Dance or Dēcēdere: Gladiator and Industrial Music Sampling.”

Vernon Press Product Page

Published in May, this issue of Weird Tales contains my essay “When the Stars are Right.”

Weird Tales Product Page

Published in late March, the first issue of the zine Footage Fiends, contains my essay “Analisi Della Cosa: Found Footage in Caltiki and Italian Theater Going Practices.”

Limited to 50 physical copies.

Order via Patreon.

Published in early August, Dark Dead Things #2 contains my essay “Correlating the Contents: Mimetic Desire in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.”

Order via Dark Dead Thingswebsite.

Miscellaneous Tidbits

Autograph Roundup

These past few months I’ve gotten into the habit of sharing some of my autographed items (mostly DVDs right now) on social media. Figure I can share them here too because I think I have some rad stuff.

First up is my copy of Contamination signed by director Luigi Cozzi. I remember first getting into Italo-horror and exploitation films being exchanged with the poster art. It looks so ominous. When I finally watched the movie, it turned out to be amazing. The beginning is just like Zombi but then you got all the exploding alien eggs. The final 1/3 of the film is like a spy-fi movie. Simple film that aims big and succeeds. I snail mailed my DVD sleeve to Cozzi way back in the aughts and he was gracious to sign it for me.

Next up is Nightbeast signed by director Don Dohler’s son, Greg Dohler, who acted in his dad’s films. Dohler was the king of 80s creature features. Another sleeve I snail mailed to Dohler asking for an autograph (always include as SASE folks!).

Abominable is a damn fine cryptid film full of cameo actors, both old guard and (then) new school. My copy was signed by Lloyd Braun himself, Matt McCoy, at a Hollywood Collector’s Show in Burbank in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

I remember being super hyped for the first Transformers movie when it was released and enjoying it. I saw the second one and was really disappointed, and have not seen any since. I might give Transformers: The Last Knight a watch because of the Arthurian/peplum elements.

This special edition of Transformers came out in the 2000s, back when super crazy special editions were all the rage. The DVD comes housed in am Optimus Prime that folds out. It’s pretty cool!

I had my copy signed by Mark Ryan who voiced Bumble Bee. He was a guest at a tiny comic book convention in Seattle back in the 2000s. Over time the silver ink from the booklet got a little stuck to the plastic box. Doh!

In the latter half of the 2000s Michele and I became Oliver Gruner super fans and were buying as many films as he was in as possible. Once of those films was Velocity Trap and boy is it a fun film. Basically a Die Hard in space. I have my DVD signed by a lot of folks: Gruner himself (his signature is in ballpoint pin and hard to see, but it’s under Bruce’s name), Bruce Weitz, James C. Burns, and Jaason Simmons.

There was a small, tiny window in the mid-2000s, after MST3K concluded, but before Film Crew, Rifftrax, and Cinematic Titanic, that Mike Nelson was doing solo commentaries for Legend Films. So, if you wanted MST3K-like content, this was the way to go. One of those releases of a colorized version of Plan 9 from Outer Space that came pre-signed by Nelson and also with an air freshener (because the movie stinks?). Great version of the cult film.

Apparently the North American region, Blu-ray release of Dawn of the Dead is super rare and OOP. Licensing issues I believe? I don’t have a Blu-ray of that classic film, but I do have this huge digipack edition Anchor Bay put out. There’s a few different versions of Dawn of the Dead in this edition. I had Ken Foree sign ming.

Can’t have Dawn of the Dead without following it up with Day of the Dead. Another digipack edition put out by Anchor Bay, mine is signed by Howard Sherman (Bub!) and Terry Alexander. I believe I met them both at a Crypticon in SeaTac back in the late 2000s.

And that is a recap of the last week or so of autographed stuff I shared across my social medias. If you want to see more of them, give me a follow!

It’s the summer of ‘92 and you’re off for a long break. You and your family live in the woods outside a small, rural town. Life consists of exploring the forest by day and staying up late playing Sega Genesis by night. It is the perfect time to be a kid before Eternal September. One night you catch an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, one where they are recreating encounters with Bigfoot. The iconic ominous music and real-world reenactments give you the heebie jeebies. You go to bed, turn off the lights, and look out your window to the dark, starlit forest outside. Eyelids heavy, you almost fall asleep –crash! What was that? You peer out the window. Was that movement just at the treeline? You think back to the show earlier that night. Could it be – a Bigfoot right outside your house?

If the above scenario ushers in a sense of nostalgia, then Robert P. Ottone’s short novel, Nocturnal Creatures, is a perfect flashback story for you. Set during the tail end of the Gulf War in rural New York, Nocturnal Species is a cryptid story with elements of the siege genre.

The story is told through the perspective of Cassie Albero, a middle schooler whose family owns an orchard. Hard times have fallen on the Albero family as an unseasonably cold late spring/early summer threatens their apple harvest. Their problems are compounded when their home is besieged by a family of Sasquatch-like monsters, who have been driven from their home in the nearby caves and woodlands.

Nocturnal Creatures is similar to the animals run amok narratives of the 70s: as civilization pushes into nature, nature fights back to survive. This puts Cassie and her family and the cryptids in the same moral boat as both groups are trying to survive each other, thrust into a situation that is neither’s fault. The Albero family, coming from a generation of immigrants, contrasted to the mysterious cryptids adds another level of complexity – strangers in strange lands trying to eek by in a rapidly globalizing world. Readers will certainly identify with the humans, and yet, while the cryptids are portrayed as menacing and near unstoppable, there’s a sympathy for them as well.

Taking place in the early 90s, Nocturnal Creatures has many callbacks to the era: a ChatBoy (a stand in for the TalkBoy from Home Alone 2), discontinued soda, listening to grunge bands on cassette, the Gulf War in the background, and no internet. These sentiments cater to the Oregon Trail generation, a refreshing break from the 80s nostalgia that has been enjoying a wave of popularity for the past decade.

The characters of Nocturnal Creatures are incredibly fleshed out with backstories, motivations, and worries. If anything, the Albero family embodies the idyllic nuclear family found in 80s and early 90s sitcoms. This is contrasted to Azura and her son, Darwin, immigrants from El Salvador, also chasing the American dream. Azura is a total James Cameron character, a cross between Sarah Connor from Terminator 2 and Vasquez from Aliens. She acts as a mentor to the Albero family, teaching them how to use firearms and survive the cryptid siege, but also as a role model to Darwin and Cassie. Everyone looks up to her.

The stars of a Bigfoot-style story are, of course, the cryptids themselves. In terms of placement on the Sasquatch spectrum, they are a little folky like the Fouke Monster from The Legend of Boggy, but much more cunning and violent like the Sasquatch in the 2006 film Abominable. They are completely believable humanoids that are also frighteningly strong, able to tactically plan their attacks, and near invulnerable due to their super thick skin. They are also presented as a family, functioning no different than the Alberos.

This is the heart of Nocturnal Creatures: different types of families, all looking to survive and make their way in the world, wrapped up in a cryptid horror story with a dollop of early 90s nostalgia and coming of age. The formula works, no doubt to its relatable and fleshed out characters along with menacing, multifaceted monsters.

Nocturnal Creatures can be purchased at:

Amazon

Robert P. Ottone can be found at:

If you’ve enjoyed this review, please check out this related content: