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Welcome back, dear readers! We’ve nearly made it through another week and December is (quite literally) just right around the corner. And since the holiday season is pretty much upon us, we’re back with another installment of our annual Holiday Gift Guide. For today, I’m celebrating a handful of books that I have either had the chance to check out this year and fell in love with, or several titles that I’m confident genre fans will love that I just haven’t had a chance to check out yet for myself.

To make things easier, I’ve sorted the books into two categories: non-ficton and fiction. And also, just so everything is on the up-and-up, I want to mention that I did include my own latest book in today’s edition of the Hgg just because the artists featured in this second volume of Monsters, Makeup...

Guillermo del Toro's "Cabinet of Curiosities" is full of strange, freaky, and delightful treasures. The Netflix anthology series boasts a treasure trove of horrors that range from the otherworldly and Lovecraftian to the deceptively mundane. But for fans of practical effects, one of the cabinet's residents stands tail and shoulders above the rest: the Rat Queen.

The Rat Queen makes her grand entrance in the appropriately named episode "Graveyard Rats," which is directed by Vincenzo Natali ("Splice") and stars David Hewlett as a grave robber trapped in a cycle of bad luck. Hewlett's Masson is in bad shape by the time he meets the Rat Queen, downtrodden and seemingly doomed to never get the money he needs. Also, he's plagued by rats for much of the episode's runtime. Lots and lots of rats. Needless to say, this is an episode of TV you should skip if you're afraid of the creatures.

Last year, Daily Dead Managing Editor Heather Wixson released Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Conversations with Cinema’s Greatest Artists, the first installment of a four-volume series from Dark Ink that shines an insightful, well-earned spotlight on the special effects artists behind some of the greatest creations to ever stalk the silver screen!

Now, with another Halloween season upon us, we're absolutely thrilled to share the news that the second volume of Monsters, Makeup & Effects will be released on October 26th!

Like its predecessor, the second volume of Monsters, Makeup & Effects features interviews with some of the most renowned and talented special effects artists in horror movie and television history, and it also includes a special tribute to the amazing John Carl Buechler.

We have additional details and a look at the cover art below, and to pre-order Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume 2, visit:

https://aminkpublishing.com/store/ols/products/monsters-makeup-and-effects-volume-2-hardcover https://www.

To kick-off Daily Dead’s Stan Winston Week, I decided to start with Lake Placid, one of my favorite monster movies Stan worked on that I felt never got the attention it truly deserved. Sure, creating a crocodile might sound like an ordinary effects job on paper, but it’s the sheer magnitude of the monstrous croc that is something only legendary effects master Stan Winston could have tackled with such authenticity and dedication.

To honor Lake Placid and Stan’s contributions to the film and the industry as a whole, I recently spoke extensively with the film’s director Steve Miner about his friendship and professional relationship with Winston throughout his career. Miner, the man associated with several other classic genre films like Friday the 13th Parts 1 through 3, House, Warlock, and Halloween: H20 also discussed how Stan was solely responsible for getting Lake Placid financed after creating the monstrous animatronic crocodile.

Though the digital dinosaurs were a significant part of the appeal of the original Jurassic Park as that level of realism had never before been reached in cinema, many of the shots to feature dinosaurs were actually full-scale practical robotic creations, conceived and produced at Stan Winston Studio.

Two key artists at Stan Winston’s side from the early 1980s until his death in 2008 are Shane Mahan and John Rosengrant. Now, the pair of craftspeople is together in a new company called Legacy Effects, but 20 years ago, they were ready to release their most ambitious film to that point – Jurassic Park.

The team at Stan Winston Studio spent a year building all of the practical dinosaurs which would shoot live on the set of the film, directed by Steven Spielberg and photographed by Dean Cundey. After production wrapped, Industrial Light and Magic matched their computer-generated dinosaurs to Sws’ designs and...

The Stan Winston School of Character Arts recently published an article discussing the building of the full size Queen puppet from Aliens. While huge fans of the film may have seen some footage and photos from previously released “making of” features, we have never before seen photos of the Alien Queen being built by Stan Winston Studio.

“Whereas Cameron had relied on stop-motion animation for wide ambulatory shots of his full-body endoskeleton in The Terminator, he intended to shoot his queen alien live and full- size, interacting with the actors as much as possible. “Jim had seen what we could do with puppets on Terminator,” Stan Winston observed, “and so it made perfect sense that he thought of puppeteering techniques when he needed a way to realize the alien queen. But, even so, it was a huge leap of faith to believe that we could build a fourteen-foot-tall, acting puppet.

In this never before seen image behind the scenes of the Aliens movie, creature creator Stan Winston & his lead FX mechanic, Richard Landon, prepare the hero Alien Drone puppet for its debut on set at Pinewood Studios. In this action-packed sequel to Alien, Sigourney Weaver returns as Ripley, the only survivor from mankind's first encounter with the monstrous Alien. Her account of the Alien and the fate of her crew are received with skepticism - until the mysterious disappearance of colonists on Lv-426 leads her to join a team of high-tech colonial marines sent in to investigate. "To make the cable-actuated xenomorph puppet more maneuverable, the Sws crew loaded the cables & controllers onto a wagon so they could quickly reposition the cable-controlled Alien to perform wherever...

We packed the truck that would travel to location in Palenque, Mexico a few days before we traveled via airplane. The set crew: Steve Wang, Matt Rose, Shane Mahan, Brian Simpson, Richard Landon and me. Stan Winston would be with us, supervising the set work, understanding that we would only be gone for two weeks. At least that is what our work visas indicated. Palenque, Mexico was not a location easily reached. It required one flight from Los Angeles to Mexico City, another to Villa Hermosa, and finally a long ride in a Volkswagen bus through miles of rough country until we reached our hotel that was, from what we were told, the best in the area. It sat in a large clearing, surrounded by trees; two wings of rooms branched out from a central building that housed a restaurant/bar. Later, we discovered that Arnold Schwarzenegger had taken over the entire upper conference room and had...

After working with both Mark Shostrom and Sonny Burman on Evil Dead II, I had ended up back at Stan Winston’s studio. Stan and his permanent crew of John Rosengrant, Shane Mahan, Tom Woodruff, Jr., and Richard Landon were back in the shop from England and Aliens, and had just completed the Robert Zemekis episode of Amazing Stories, “Go to the Head of the Class.” The next assignment was a mechanical boar for the Debra Winger/Theresa Russell vehicle Black Widow. No, you didn’t miss anything. The sequence was cut just as we finished the puppet. Alec Gillis returned to the studio in time for the next Amazing Stories episode “Miss Stardust” for which we created three intergalactic beauty contestants. Ironically, it was during the shooting at Universal Studios, that Stan told us what the next assignment was going to be: A cross between The Goonies and Ghostbusters entitled The Monster Squad. Okay...