The box

It's time for Horror Bites -- your (semi) daily round-up of blood, guts, and torturous mayhem from around the web:

Sad... Vic Mizzy, the Composer of The Addams Family theme, passed away over the weekend. The Vault of Horror shares the theme and a clip in his memory.

Variety reports that the Pastor brothers are returning with the thriller Strange But True, where a girl claims to be carrying her dead boyfriend's child 5 years after he dies.

It seems Zombieland isn't the only blood Jesse Eisenberg has been busy with -- Bloody Disgusting reports that he's got another all wrapped called Camp Hope.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that Mike Mitchell (Sky High) will direct Monster Squad. But don't worry, it's not a remake -- just a new name for the long-in-gestation Nightcrawlers.

Elias Koteas gets to comfort Milla Jovovich in new stills for The Fourth Kind over at Dread Central.

TV names Rhys Coiro, Mia Kirshner, and Harold Perrineau lead the cast for the direct-to-DVD 30 Days of Night sequel, according to Bloody Disgusting.

Arrow in the Head shares some new The Box stills ... and hopefully we can definitely see it all next month.

As anyone who's read my stuff at Cinematical knows, I tend to mind release dates quite a bit. Real people have fantasy football, I have this armchair slate shuffling. (Don't judge me.)

Last February, I wondered out loud what Warner Bros. had in store for Richard Kelly's The Box, seeing as it had endured countless release date changes for the better part of a year. I like the moral dilemma at the film's center, and I trust Kelly -- yes, even after Southland Tales -- to expand Richard Matheson's short story in ways clever enough to justify the length of a feature.

After The Box settled down on November 6th, Universal ended up bumping back The Wolf Man from that date and replacing it with the alien abduction thriller The Fourth Kind. I wasn't all that thrilled by the trailer, but I can't deny that it always seems to get people talking when it plays before a movie.

By Monika Bartyzel

I sometimes wonder if the best way to enter Hollywood is with the littlest splash, whether that be with a terrible feature one can look back at with humor, or a moderately good film -- one that pleases without setting up terribly high expectations. Would Richard Kelly's path had been different if Donnie Darko wasn't his introduction to the cinematic world?

After being juggled back and forth like an angry pinball, and almost getting a breath of relief with a Halloween release date, Bloody Disgusting reports that The Box has been bumped again. It's not going back to the Thanksgiving release it once had, but rather November 6 -- up against A Christmas Carol, Precious, Men Who Stare at Goats, Pirate Radio, and The Fourth Kind. Will this date stick? Your guess is as good as mine. Once a film gets shot around, anything is possible.

Of course, this doesn't bode particularly well for the feature, which already has the cards stacked against it. Donnie Darko hit the scene and grabbed the love of many, but Domino, Southland Tales, and even the director's cut of Darko didn't grab the same admiration. Domino is a bird of a different feather, since it isn't Kelly's own story. The D.C. Darko lost a lot in translation -- all of the explanations taking the fun out of it.