Month: February 2008

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #135 – Turf Wars

(Male, 30’s) I’m an art teacher. Let’s just leave it at that. In the dream, I went to school one day and I entered my classroom as usual when someone jumps me. This person gets me in a head lock, bends me over and starts questioning me. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I choked out some answers but the answers didn’t satisfy my attacker. Then I realize that the person who has me in this choke hold is another teacher, one of the business teachers in fact. I try to explain “This used to be my room. This used to be my room!” When I woke I could still feel the hands around my throat… because I had my own hands on my throat. Weird. I must be worried about layoffs or something.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #134 – Endless Toil

(Male, 30’s) I don’t know if I can explain how disturbing this dream was, amusing too but disturbing. Maybe if you’ve ever had to evaluate a large amount of someone else’s work it might make a bit of sense. I was reading and grading a very large stack of high school English papers. This part isn’t strange because I’m a high school English teacher. I was writing a lot of comments on each paper, nearly a page handwritten for each paper. But I must have mixed up the stacks of which ones I’d finished, or maybe I put the finished papers on the bottom of the stack but for whatever reason that graded papers got mixed up with the ungraded papers. Pretty soon I found myself writing comments ABOUT MY OWN COMMENTS. I discovered that half way through the stack so I figured I should finish the whole set. But I lost track and pretty soon started commenting again on my own commented comments. Clearly this was going to keep going on for quite some time.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #133 – The Slashed Horizon

(Male, 40’s) I was chasing someone through these very dark, black streets that were also slick with rain. I had lost the trail and was a bit lost when I realized I wasn’t in a city at all. What I thought all along was the city scape of buildings was actually a long backdrop painting. The canvas was stretched all along the side of a large semi trailer. Then I looked around me and realized that everything I had been running through, everything that had felt like a city was actually just cutout flats on a very very small stage. How could I have ever taken that to be the street I was running down?

I looked back at the back drop and noticed that it had been slashed with huge long cuts running lengthwise. The truck was in the middle of a field. It was the middle of the afternoon. There was nothing else, absolutely nothing else as far as the eye could see. Then there was a young woman. She had very straight, plain blond hair about shoulder length… and a HUGE knife, easily a foot long that she waved around like she was very comfortable with it. It was clear that she was the one who had sliced up the backdrop. She wanted me to stay and talk but I said No I had to head back to town because I had to pee. She laughed and said “You’re in a field. Just go ahead and pee here.” I replied, still eager to get the heck away from her “You just want to see my penis.” She replies by grabbing the back of her t-shirt and pulling it off in one smooth movement so she’s standing there, topless and bare-breasted still brandishing this immense knife. I am absolutely terrified — I don’t want to piss her off but I don’t have a clue what to do.

Categories
Book Comics Movies

The “30 Days of Night” Franchise

(The Grim Gnome) I don’t like vampires, generally speaking. The whole rule-bound / old-world / invitation-only aspects make them about as scary as a supernatural Certified Public Accountant. Except for the ones in “30 Days of Night.” If you haven’t heard of this series you either have been moldering away in a casket or you’re metaphysically immune to the effects of horror-culture. A few years back, writer Steve Niles and artist Ben Templesmith wove together a freshly twisted premise with spattery exuberant artwork and pumped life back into the genre of the horror comic. The fresh twist on the vampire rules that gets “30 Days of Night” rolling is obvious from the title; if vampires hate sunlight, then what if they attacked a place that didn’t have much of it, say, a city located near the Arctic circle? What if a whole ragtag clan of vampires threw a party of sorts during the month of darkness and attacked the whole town. Add human hero. Stir well. Garnish with a nasty skewer at the end and, heck that’s what started the juggernaut. I really have to recommend it. Quite highly.




A sequel picked up the storyline and propelled it forward, again ending with a sickening little twist. And a third, completing a classical trilogy, right? If I understand the chronology correctly, the movie started development around this time and the comics kept coming. A collection of tales appeared, including a rather dumb one about vampires in space. Some of these feature artists other than Templesmith and honestly, I feel cheated with those issues, especially cheated when the artist is attempting to make work that sort of / kind of / almost resembles Templesmith’s art. So though I can’t highly recommend them all — one reason I can’t is because they’re STILL making new ones — I still have to confess I’ve bought and savored every one of them.

Niles’s other comics are nothing to ignore… but for the moment I WILL ignore them, or to be more exact I’ll postpone looking at them until another post. Who knew that comics would work so well for horror? I sure didn’t. I thought the EC’s Crypt Keeper was just weird and, OK, so I was afraid of “The Tomb of Dracula” but I was kid back then. I even thought “Dark Shadows” was scary.

And then there’s the “30 Days of Night” movie. I admit that I felt an actual quiver of excitement when I first heard Sam (“Army of Darkness”) Raimi’s name connected with the project. Alas, it was only as a producer. There are parts of the movie that are very good. For instance, some of the shots are very haunting, like an aerial tracking shot that shows the carnage of the initial attack. And throughout the movies human faces seem to have unusually de-saturated color which makes everyone look cold .. and then also makes the blood really pop out. And I really appreciated that at least a couple times when humans were standing outside in sub-zero temperatures that there were clouds of condensation when they breathed or spoke. As curmudgeonly northerner, I can’t STAND fake winters on screen. My comments don’t sound like a love-fest, though do they? Perhaps I’m grumpy for paying good money to see the movie in the theatre. I’m a stingy curmudgeon. But furthermore, I can’t help but thinking that the comic book was scarier. There was a LOT of back story in the comic book that was simply removed for the movie, so much that there doesn’t seem to be much possibility for a sequel. I was honestly pretty shocked that so much editing was required because I don’t usually consider comics to be that dense when it comes to story line.

“30 Days of Night” – the movie – comes out on video this week. Though I don’t feel unusually COMPELLED to see the movie again when it comes out on video, if I’m honest with myself, I’m pretty sure I will. If for no other reason than it will remind me of how much I loved the original comic.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #132 – A Chase to a Strange, Terrible World

(Male, 20’s) I had a partner, a woman with medium length blond hair, and we were running after a man. We were in a long corridor and every so often, there was a set of doors. We’d run through them and we’d see him just going through the next set. We kept running and chasing him. Finally, we saw him going through a set of doors that opened into bright daylight so we knew he was going outside. When we went through those doors we were on the roof top of a building and we could see the man over by a smokestack. He was climbing up a ladder on the side of the smoke stack and when he reached the top, he pushed aside a lid that was on the smokestack and he climbed inside. We followed.

Inside the smokestack was a vine. We started climbing down the vine, still in pursuit of the man. We climbed for what felt was like hours, even though I know it must have just been a couple minutes. It was a dry brown vine and eventually we reached the end of it. There was a little gap and then another vine started. We though we could easily jump from one vine to the other one but we didn’t know that gravity changed between the two vines. What was “up” became “down” so halfway through our jump, we were jumping “up.” But we were able to grab the other vine and continue the chase UP a vine. Again we climbed for hours and at the end of the smokestack, we pushed aside the lid and found ourselves in a very dense jungle.

Then something else must have happened but the next part I remember, I was in the dense jungle and the man I was chasing was yelling at me, saying “Come on. Come on! We’ve got what we came for.” A dark and scary looking cloud was bearing down on us. And I was holding the decapitated head of my female partner, tucked under my arm like a football. I had no idea what had happened but the man was very insistent. We started climbing down the smokestack again back to the normal world. Once we had gone a little way, once I was sure that the cloud wasn’t following us, I said “We’ve got to go back.” The man took the head I was holding and pushed back the hair to reveal the scalp. There were eight things there, though I can only remember one. There were some Mardi Gras beads woven in between the tufts of hair. “See, we’ve got what we came for.” We continued climbing, climbing back to our world.

Categories
Movies

Movies – “Dark Place” (Episode 2)

(The Grim Gnome) A couple weeks ago I linked to the first episode of Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, a delicious satire on horror TV. Here’s episode two.

Garth Marenghi’s “Dark Place” Episode 2

Categories
Halloween music

Halloween Party Playlist – Progressive Rock

Music provides a solid foundation for the best parties and Halloween parties are no different. But there are so many different kinds of “Halloween” oriented music – it would never be appropriate to put them all on the same party tape. And furthermore, some songs might be obvious to one person but obscure to another. So I wanted to start this thread about various different kinds of music for different kinds of Halloween parties.

Different kinds of Halloween? Why not? There are clearly different styles of music and a whole party could be designed around these themes to create a distinctive Halloween party that isn’t just the same old costume party.

Progressive Rock (70’s Era)

The obvious choice here is “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield, otherwise known as that creepy music from “The Exorcist.”

But only slightly farther afield is pretty much anything by Goblin. They did the soundtrack work for Dario Argento’s weird nightmare slasher movies, like Suspiria. Some of their work is a little hard to find but I stumbled across much of it on eMusic, that cool DRM-free download site or also discs can be got at Amazon. There are a couple nice collections CDs available on Amazon if not elsewhere, for instance “Fantastic Voyage of Goblin: Sweet Sound of Hell” that I have linked below. Goblin’s music is also available from the iTunes music store so you can check out their weird, disturbing sounds before purchase. The advantage of prog-rock is that the track play on and on for hours it seems, just adding a layer of mood.

The campy glory of “Phantom of The Paradise” and Paul Williams likely belongs on this list too:

Since I don’t know where else to put him, I think that the demented genius of Alice Cooper stands up pretty well here. The songs are shorter, MUCH catchier and they all have lyrics. Alice was more like a song-and-dance performer than a really true rock and roller in my opinion anyway, hence not all of his work, though is really very creepy but he’s GOT to put in an appearance. Must have tracks would include: “Welcome to My Nightmare,” “Billion Dollar Babies,” maybe even “ How You Gonna See Me Now” or for some slightly edgier stuff, maybe “Cold Ethyl,” “Alice Cooper Goes to Hell“… what other Alice just screams Halloween to you?

A Halloween party themed on this 70’s Progressive Rock playlist would look a lot like that party sequence in Roger Corman’s “The Masque of the Red Death (1964)” – very trippy, a psychedelic masquerade with lurid colors, veils, bells, smoke, European style commedia masks… Weird appetizers on silver platters. Maybe a hooka, tassels, pillows, brocade.

Other ideas? Chime in!

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #131 – Finger Torture

(Female, teenage) In this nightmare, I was one of several people who were being held hostage and tortured by this evil creature that strangely enough looked like Sarah Michelle Geller, you know, Buffy? She was holding us hostage in this town house surrounded by other houses. We could see other people living their lives and having fun next door and they probably would have been able to notice that we were being tortured if they stopped to look closely enough. Someone next door saw me through the window and waved. I waved back and I dared to walk up to the window and I talked to this person through the window. Then the Sarah Michelle Geller-creature noticed me and came over. She threw a hand-grenade out the window at the family I was talking with. It was some strange kind of hand grenade that only blew up the people and left everything else standing. Once they were killed, the Creature moved us all next door into their house.

…I was one of several people who were being held hostage and tortured by this evil creature that strangely enough looked like Sarah Michelle Geller..

There was a pool in this area. One of the people who was trapped with us was a little girl. She jumped in the pool and started splashing around. All of a sudden a dog, like a terrier, came up out of the water and started pulling her underneath. We all rushed over to try to pull her out but the harder we pulled, the larger the dog grew. It eventually became as large as a bear. It tore her apart and pulled her under. We yelled at the SMG-creature, why did you do that? “Because she was having fun.”

There was a bowl and for some reason I thought that if I could fill this bowl with water from the pool, I would be free. So I started walking over to the pool, dipping my hands in to get them wet and then walking back to the bowl and shaking the excess water off into the bowl. All without drawing attention to the fact that was what I was doing. But one time, when I returned to the bowl, the sides of the bowl had grown incredibly tall, far taller than me. I sat down, depressed. Then I looked down at my hands and I saw that my index finger had been chopped off, raggedly, at an angle. It was bleeding but it didn’t seem to hurt. The creature laughed, “You won’t be able to fill up the bowl now.” She was holding a metal spatula, like the kind you use on an outside grill. It must have been especially sharpened or something. Then one by one she cut off all my fingers. There was nothing I could do to stop her.

Categories
Halloween

Halloween Party Playlists – Moldy Oldies

Music provides a solid foundation for the best parties and Halloween parties are no different. But there are so many different kinds of “Halloween” oriented music – it would never be appropriate to put them all on the same party tape. And furthermore, some songs might be obvious to one person but obscure to another. This thread is about various different kinds of music for different kinds of Halloween parties.

Different kinds of Halloween party? Why not? There are clearly different styles of music and a whole party could be designed around these styles to create a distinctive and memorable Halloween party that isn’t just the same old costume party.

The signature piece for this style of Halloween party would be the Theme Song to “The Munsters.” There are two totally different songs, the first one is fine but the one from the second seasons totally rocked. Another obvious track would be “You put a Spell on Me” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins… or heck, for that matter, just about ANYTHING by this master of bone-through-the-nose crooning. Other tracks to include would be any version of “Dead Man’s Curve” by Jan and Dean. There is also a whole crop of new psycho-billy bands that would fit with this category quite well.

If the Moldy Oldie playlist was extended out to a whole Halloween party theme, costumes should be restricted to 50’s era horror movies or perhaps any horror movie that could have been seen in a drive-in theatre. For instance, any monster or noun that completes this phrase: “I was a Teenaged…” Snacks could be popcorn and that chalky orange pop that all the drive-ins used to serve.

Here is a short list of songs but please, help me out here. What are other essential tracks for a “Moldy Oldie” Halloween Party? What are other snacks or decoration ideas?

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #130 – Death and Disposal

(Female, 20’s) Last night I dreamt I killed someone, and then I did something worse. I lived in a tall house surrounded by farmland and someone had broken in. I fought with him at the top of a very tall circular staircase. Finally, I pushed him backward and he fell, over and over down the stairs, until he was dead.

“The dogs will know. The dogs will smell him and they’ll know.”

I was horrified by the thought I was now a murderer, that I had committed murder. I needed to get rid of the evidence so I dragged his heavy body to the bathroom and put him in the tub… where I proceeded to cut him up into pieces so I wouldn’t get blood everywhere — This gets a little grisly here — And then I figured that still there was too much blood left in these pieces so I put them in the oven, at least as much as would fit, and baked him until the pieces were dry. Then I sewed these parts into a scarecrow that I put out in the field, all the while thinking “The dogs will know. The dogs will smell him and they’ll know.” I still had to get rid of the rest of him. I figured I could take little pieces of him out to various parts of the farm and bury them where no one would ever find him.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #129 – Beach Attack

(Female, early 30’s) This is a nightmare I remember from my childhood. My parents had rented a cottage in the Irish Hills, a resort area near where we lived where there were many lakes and woods.

…This strange little man took out a knife and he threw it at me…

In the dream I was down by a lake playing in the sand near the water when a taxi all of a sudden drives up, onto the beach and down to edge of the water. A man gets out, a weird little man with a big hat and a long overcoat. He was oddly mis-shaped too, overly round almost like that character Grimace from the McDonald’s commercials. This strange little man took out a knife and he threw it at me. I move fast enough that I duck out of the way. The knife whizzes past me, but it keeps going. It travels all the way around the world. In about 20 seconds, I looked up and the knife was flying at me again, this time too close to avoid.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #126 – Clown Town

(Male, 40’s) Bruce is out of town for some reason, so I decide to go see a movie alone. I drive into Detroit in a long black luxury sedan of some kind. The movie is long, a kind of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and it gets out late. As I leave the theater, some kid with a straw spits a soggy wad onto my windshield. As I turn out of the lot, I’m suddenly on foot. No problem. I know I have to walk a few blocks to the highway to catch a.. or to where I parked..? Whatever. But I’m walking in the late afternoon sun through a grassy back alley. Broken concrete slabs and tall abandoned condos with narrow streets to my left.

…This particular clown is tall, about 7 or 8 feet. Dressed in a white outfit, billowy collar and stovepipe hat. But his eyes are strange…

No one is around. I pass a street, and walking towards me in the middle of the road is a clown. This must be Detroit’s famous Clown-Town, I realize. I didn’t know I was so far South. I should have known by the graffiti. This particular clown is tall, about 7 or 8 feet. Dressed in a white outfit, billowy collar and stovepipe hat. But his eyes are strange. They’re perfectly round and large, like white tennis balls. Black dots in the middle like they’ve been drawn on with a marker. There’s no one else around, yet he’s performing. His step is light and he skips every other step or so. He’s looking side to side, waving and nodding to unseen crowds. There’s no sound but the highway hum ahead. I move on. Behind me I hear the scuff of someone walking, skipping. I look back and Stovepipe has turned the corner. He’s behind me waving with his hand high in the air. He stops and there’s and tumble of color and cloth as another clown cartwheels out from a hedge Stove pipe catches his ankles and slows him. They both pantomime a happy greeting and then turn toward me. I start to feel like I have a long way to go before the safety of the on-ramp. I don’t know why, but I’m nervous. Clowns have never been seen to leave the few blocks the city has reserved for them before, but these two seem pretty mobile- and coming up fast. Also, it’s never been reported that our clowns have ever hurt anyone. I’ve never heard of it anyway. Still. On the next block there are two, no three more happy, skipping, staring clowns heading my way. Then the dream logic, the feeling that this is all an everyday situation falls away. Stovepipe is taller than any human I’ve ever seen and his unblinking eyes are just dry balls of plastic. I’m outnumbered and I can’t seem to get any faster than a stroll. The clowns are up to about 8 now, and still completely silent, still coming after me. I try to drag myself along the pavement and to get moving faster. The air is like water and I’m fighting the current. I find that I’m laying on the cement, trying to crawl away. My hands feel gravel and glass, and grass in the cracks of the sidewalk. I hear the horrible scuffing of a dozen big shoes just over my shoulder.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #128 – Aliens in Quarantine

(Female, early 30’s) I remember this dream from when I was a child. I must have just seen the movie “E.T.” which is a charming movie except for the part at the end where E.T. has been captured and is in quarantine. He seemed so sad and in such distress. My dream takes off from there. The wall paper in my childhood bedroom was covered in tiny dolls, each probably 3 or 4 inches tall. In my dream, each one of them was a space alien, a space alien as cute and vulnerable as E.T. The walls themselves were transformed into some kind of quarantine for the cute little space aliens. I tried to close my eyes so I didn’t have to see them anymore and it felt like there was a little alien floating over both of my eyes.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #127 – My Chest Erupted in Terror

(Male, early 30’s)

…It’s almost like something has burrowed inside my pajama top, looking for someplace warm…

This is a dream I remember from when I was a kid and I went through a period of sleepwalking. In the dream, I’m lying down in bed, trying to get to sleep when I feel something on my chest. At this point it’s not in my chest yet, just on the surface, just on the skin. It’s almost like something has burrowed inside my pajama top, looking for someplace warm. Then all of a sudden, this something tears through my pajamas and pops out. Then I realize that it actually came OUT of my chest. And then another one crawled out. And another one. I jumped out of bed and ran to tell my parents, yelling “There are babies coming out of my tum-tum!” But in fact I was just sleepwalking. My mother threw a glass of water in my face — the family treatment for sleepwalking — and I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #125 – Attack of the Dayglow Trolls

(Male, early 30’s) When I was just a little kid, I went through a period where I sleepwalked and this was one of the really intense dreams I remember from that time. My house was surrounded by trolls, monsters with knobby faces and weird tufts of hair. And if that wasn’t strange enough, these trolls were all very vivid colors, like day-glow fluorescent type colors of green and pink and yellow. They completely surrounded the house and then they started throwing things at me. It was fruit. I was being pelted my fruit thrown by trolls. They threw so much fruit that the house was starting to fill up. I thought I should warn my parents. I ran into their bedroom and tried to explain about the day glow trolls and fruit but in fact, I was just sleepwalking. My mom threw a glass of water on me to wake me up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #124 – The Lodge, Hunted

lascauxdeer
(Male, early 30’s)

…There was no way out and nowhere really to run…

I was in a hunting lodge out in the woods. The standard log cabin kind of lodge with a big stone fireplace and everything. I was alone but it wasn’t the peaceful feeling of being alone in the woods; it was a more sinister, lonesome, vulnerable sense of being alone. Then I realized what was wrong. The animals that were mounted on the wall were alive. There were some pretty serious animals here too, like bears and cheetahs. At first I thought if I just didn’t move around very much that maybe the animals wouldn’t notice me, that maybe they wouldn’t attack me. But they did notice me. The animals started to chase me around the lodge. There was no way out and nowhere really to run.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #123 – Mad for Shoes

(Female) I’m afraid this dream won’t make any sense or that you won’t find it scary at all. It was frightening to me, the person having the dream, so I think it qualifies as a scary dream, because I felt like maybe I was losing my mind. So if it’s not a scary dream, at least it’s a weird dream.

I was meeting my best friend at a retreat centre of some sort out in the country. She was there for a meeting of some organization of which she’s a board member, and so I came to see her and spend some time with her after her sessions were done—something that we’ve actually done several times in real life. I was so very excited to get together because she lives very far away hence our real life meetings are far between.

We were staying in a little two room cabin, sort of rustic and woodsy. The place had a sort of Japanese style, with few furnishings and wooden cabinets, a very peaceful Zen atmosphere. She came into the room, and we hugged and greeted each other and talked about our lives and our families. It was so nice to see her again and so cozy in the cabin. We were going to have a good time.

…I’m afraid this dream won’t make any sense or that you won’t find it scary at all…

Then we were going to go out, I think, to dinner so we started to get ready. She got her shoes and her jacket and stepped out on to the porch to wait for me to come outside. I went to the closet where I’d left my coat and shoes, and I took my coat off a hangar and put it on. Then I slipped my foot into one of my shoes, but I couldn’t see the other one. I looked around in the closet, which was basically empty, but my shoe wasn’t there. It wasn’t like my closet a home that’s full of stuff so a shoe could be hiding under something else. No, this closet was basically empty but I still couldn’t find my other shoe. Still, I looked from one end of the long narrow closet to the other and back again, because, after all, where could my other shoe be?

Wearing just the one shoe, I limped out to the other room and threw open the closet doors there. There were shoes in the bottom of this closet, maybe a dozen, left behind by previous guests, I suppose, but my shoe wasn’t there. There were a lot of single shoes in fact which seemed like a strange situation. I rummaged around and found a shoe that would fit me, but it didn’t match my other shoe at all and it had no mate. I couldn’t go out to dinner wearing two different shoes! I was starting to panic—what was I going to do? How could I have lost a shoe in a closet?

I started back into the bedroom because I was certain my shoe was in there, but I couldn’t find the door. It was a two-room cabin– How could I get lost? How could I not find a door in a two room cabin? I could feel myself getting more and more panicked, and a blush of shame spreading across my cheeks. What was going on? Was I going insane, or was the cabin trying to confuse me? I turned around slowly, three or four times, studying each of the walls, looking for the door. Oh, there was the right door over there. I went back into the bedroom and opened the closet. There were different things objects inside the closet now, a set of folding chairs that hadn’t been there before. But still not my shoe.

My friend was outside on the deck, talking on a cellphone and waiting patiently for me. She waved at me through the window, unworried and unaware of my trauma. I turned toward the closet again and got down on my hands and knees, and systematically began to search through the almost empty closet once again. I started at one end and moved to the other, looking at each item on the floor of the closet, and then going back to the other end again. Over and over, I kept looking for my missing shoe until I woke up.