Mary Lambert laughed into the phone when I pointed out that, in films and books, there seem to be an awful lot of vampires and hellspawn roaming around Southern California through the years. "Yeah, well, duh. Los Angeles is the natural place to put your soul at risk. It's just like the crossroads down in Mississippi where Robert Johnson met the devil. L.A. is the place you come to if you want to bet your soul.”

Lambert has a Southern drawl -- she's a native of Arkansas -- but the filmmaker is no tourist in L.A. In the world of music video production, she was a pioneering force in the boom days of the 1980s with signature works that include Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” "Borderline" and “Material Girl” and Janet Jackson’s “Control” and “Nasty Boys.” She would go on to work with Sting, Mariah Carey, Mick Jagger and Motley Crue and though her videos were often exercises in narrative in a way that many music videos are not, she was restless to tell stories in longer form.

Lambert made a name for herself among horror fans by directing the 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary” and its sequel. Now, with “The Dark Path Chronicles” on Fearnet.com, she has made a meeting point between her two career paths. The series, which starts Nov. 6, will tell the tale of an L.A. teenage girl and the handsome bloodsucker (literally) that she meets during a hypnotic sequence at leafy Griffith Park.

There's a surge in interest among the American comic book companies in taking their graphic-minded entertainments into mobile devices. Marvel has just announced a Stephen King project, for instance, that was first reported by the Wall Street Journal:

...A previously unpublished story by Mr. King has been transformed by Marvel Comics into an animated video. The 25 episodes will be distributed in a variety of online and mobile channels ahead of the book's publication Nov. 11. Starting Monday, new episodes will be released daily, five times a week, through Aug. 29.

The willingness of Mr. King and publisher Scribner, an imprint of CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster book-publishing arm, to remix the story, "N.," into bite-size video vignettes underscores how eager publishers are to come up with new marketing techniques at a time when book sales are flat or slumping. Five years ago, Mr. King's publisher might have taken the creepy short story and offered it to a literary publication like "The New Yorker" in expectation that a first serial sale would create interest in "Just After Sunset." The story focuses on an unlucky psychiatrist whose latest patient is "infectious."

The WSJ piece by Jeffrey Trachtenberg has a clip from the video, which is called "N." Marvel is hardly alone in trying to ring up the future by squeezing its adventures into mobile devices. Paul Levitz, president of DC Comics, said his company is looking hard at the success in Japan of comics as phone-tainment but said the marketplace there has several advantages over the U.S., such as the general simplicity of images in manga and an audience that has more cutting-edge electronics. "There's things that need to happen here that haven't happened yet," Levitz said, suggesting that it may take a while before the idea of Superman on a cellphone will fly with a significant audience.

After the jump you can find the full announcement about King's "N" and details on accessing it.

-- Geoff Boucher

image from "N," courtesy Marvel Comics