Jack Ketchum's Offspring Sighted

As someone who's only exposure to Ketchum has been reading The Girl Next Door I was really surprised when I watched Red the other day. It was much more gentle and low key than I expected with many genuinely moving parts. I really loved Cox's final exchange with the reporter. I won't go further so as not to spoil it for anyone but Ketchum has range, he's far more than a gorehound.

All these mean that I too will jump on this as soon as I can.

Offspring's great, as was Girl Next Door. Man, there's some really nasty stuff in Offspring. "The Cow" comes to mind.

I've been a fan of Jack Ketchum's work since I stumbled across Cemetery Dance, probably 10 years ago. That said, I haven't been overly impressed with the film adaptations of his work. I haven't made it all the way through The Lost yet, but neither Red nor The Girl Next Door were films I would likely recommend to anyone. They weren't bad, really, but they weren't very good either. TGND was far more terrifying to read (maybe that's stating the obvious).

It's kind of odd that they are doing Offspring instead of Off Season. When I first read Off Season, Offspring was no longer in print and impossible to find. Looks like it's finally back in print though.

All that said, I'm glad Ketchum's work is being recognized and that the movies have had some success.

This is indeed good news. Not only do I love Jack ketchum's work, but I met him at a screening of TGND (which I liked a lot), and he seems like a great guy. he spent a good deal of time talking to me and my brother as he signed books for us. I thought the film adaptation of The Lost was OK, but I really didn't like the way they treated the characters of the cops. Kind of turned them from genuinely good, dedicated (but occasionally overzealous or mistaken) guys into buffoons. That turned me off, because I thought the best aspect of that book was the constantly shifting perspective Ketchum's switching the narrative focus from one character to another in succeeding chapters. And each character was equally interesting, for different reasons. The film is robbed of a good deal of its depth by so limiting and changing the cops' roles. The ending also seemed a little rushed. But I thought they nailed the character of Ray pretty well; he's a fascinating, in a love to hate sort of way, character. All that having been said, I think there's a lot less nuance to Off Season and Offspring; there's some, but nearly as much as in TGND or The Lost. And that's OK; they're still genuinely entertaining straight up, extraordinarily violent horror tales. A film wouldn't have to have much subtext to get this vibe right, So I imagine it'd be easier to get perfectly dead on than with either of those other 2 films. And I hope they do the violence justice.

I don't use the comments section. So that's two people who didn't love the film.

I like Ketchum as a writer, though. I need to get around to reading more of his stuff.

That looks good. Disturbing but less so than The Girl Next Door. Looking forward to this.

I'm guessing Ketchum was the coroner guy on the scene?

[Squeals with girlish delight after viewing trailer]

OhBoyOhBoyOhBoy!!

[Rubs hands in anticipation]

They seem to just be churning out these Jack Ketchum movies (I've still been meaning to check out Red), what number movie is this one 4 or 5?

Four, I think (GND, Lost, Red, & this one).