DailyNightmareHow exciting would it be to discover great grandfather was a grave robber?
Paul Koudounaris reveals this history and more in an interview in the Hairpin. Koudounaris is an author, photographer and art historian, with an interest in ossuaries, charnel houses, and sex ghosts.
He is the author of The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses
A local gal takes her love of taxidermy and jewelry making to new levels, as seen in this article from the Detroit News. Be sure to watch the charming video too.
Find her on Facebook as well: http://www.facebook.com/detroittaxidermy.
I know where I’m doing my Christmas shopping next year!
A feature length adaptation of this tasty short — courtesy of one Guillermo del Toro — is popping later in January. But the integrity and craft of this original short is exactly the kind of thing we love here at the DailyNightmare.
Dig it!
Had enough of the Holidays yet? Does it ever feel like holiday cheer is drilling into your brain? Then this delicious little clip might be just whatcha need!
Christmas is simply a horrible time of the year for me personally, emotionally, even existentially. I survived this one by seeking solace underground to daub some paint and tinker with tools, emerging just long enough to behave monstrously. The expectations of Holiday Cheer plus the often disturbingly close proximity of loved ones rankles this mysanthropic recluse.
But the holiday was not without its joys. Like last year, a still life of the gifts I received is an apt portrait at least of whom others imagine I am. My young ones are scattered abroad so all items are imported, as fitting a horror snob. From the Great White North come a set of skull shot glasses is posed here with last year’s crystal skull of vodka and a couple creepy novels — Silver
All of us at the DailyNightmare hope your holidays passed with minimal bloodshed and maximal blessing.
(Male, 30’s) This dream was sprawling and pretty epic in scope. It wasn’t so much scary as just menacing, deeply menacing.
I was going about my normal routine, at least this was the normal routine in the dream. And mixed in with all the regular everyday tasks were things done to protect against vampires.
But these were the weirdest vampires. They didn’t have to go back to their coffins during the day and they didn’t seem particularly harmed by sunlight… other than the fact that daylight paralyzed them. Up and down the street, there were these creatures who looked just like humans who were frozen still, presumably vampires who had been caught outside.
They were scary, animalistic in that they would rip you to shreds without a moment’s thought. But on the street, there was just one or two every block, nothing too disturbing.
Then I went into the basement level of this public building. I don’t know what it was, maybe a train station, maybe a movie theatre. And it was crowded with frozen vampires. They were so tightly assembled it was difficult to force my way past them. Their flesh was hard, like stone. It wasn’t clear whether they were conscious or not, that is, whether they were aware of my presence. This crowd of vampires was clearly a threat, not just for me alone. I had to do something… but I also had to get far far away quickly. I had some kind of plan to distract them using an old fashioned baby perambulator. It was black and had lace frills around the basket. It looked like something from the Victorian era, maybe from Mary Poppins. It was as big as I was. I have no idea what I was thinking but somehow the plan involved putting the pram on its side right by the lead vampire so he’d think there was a baby inside. I wrestled the pram on its side and got it into position.
Just then, the lead vampire reached out and grabbed me by the wrist. He’d only been pretending to be frozen. They all had been pretending.
(Male, 40’s) I’m writing this down for you in the middle of the night because I will be DAMNED if I’m going back to sleep. I woke up very rattled and I was afraid even to get out of bed at first.
It was a really classy, arty dream, like everything was significant. I was waiting in line for a favorite restaurant in some city that felt both familiar and comfortable. When I finally was able to get a seat, the prices had all been raised due to an art show that was next door. I decided to boycott the meal so I went to the basement.
My old therapist was there and she had a bag full of pamphlets that belonged to her dad. Evidently he was a harshly fundamentalist preacher, based on the contents of the bag. I felt curious about her personal history but I also felt guilty, naughty, dirty. I felt great compassion oddly for her father whom she seemed to hate.
I strayed into another part of the building which was the art installation in question. Instead of one big room, the pieces were shown in these small, claustrophobia-inducing rooms all linked to each other. The art works were immense papier-macheé sculptures. They were familiar objects all bizarre and wrong. One was an apple that was at least five feet in diameter. It was painted a gory hue of red, more the color of entrails than fruit. On top, there were hateful words scrawled in black letters a foot tall. Vicious graphitti.
And there were zombies that jumped out from around corners. Or some kind of undead. Maybe they were performers… in fact, I seemed to recognize them in the dream, as being members of a death metal band. In the dream, the name of the band was “Zombie Ferox” — which I think is the name of a horror movies, right? The zombie performer was all in black and white, strips of bandages for clothing, frizzy hair, thick gray lips and sunken black eyes. I think it was female. I told her that I enjoyed her music. She — it?– smiled but continued “performning” this bizarre dance that was half attack, half modern art. She kept physically assaulting me then pulling away. It was easy to keep pushing her away but there was something deeply sinister about how she was toying with me.
Then another “zombie” arrived. This one was clearly female, lithe, slender with flowing blondish hair and pale ashy complexion. Again she was both undead and a performer, very clearly a dancer… which made the other zombie feel more like an actor, maybe a martial artist. The second zombie wore a thin grey dress that went down mid thigh. It was wispy like funeral veil and which was the same pale grey as her skin tone. The effect was as if the dress was sheer, that the dancer zombie was naked but not in an entirely sexy way. She would have been rather hot… if she wasn’t weird and undead. This second zombie got a small pitcher of milk from the fridge and also a small vial of vinegar and she made curdled milk. She used it like perfume. She smelled like rancid milk. Like the first zombie, her actions were very physical and very threatening to me but I was able to keep pushing away her advances.
We were then, all three of us, in the house where I grew up. It was night, I don’t know how late. I grabbed the second zombie around the chest and dragged her outside. I can remember how she felt, her flesh so soft and tender. I said something like, “Let’s see how scary you are outside.” I had the sense that I was trying to rupture the frame, that these undead things were only acting — which is not to say they wouldn’t have killed me, they were quite physical in their attacks — and that I could radically change their behavior if I changed the frame of reference.
Outside on the street, there was a small group of young men, wearing black t-shirts with a crudely painted symbol on the chest and back. It glowed lightly in white paint. They were up to no good. The zombie ceased harrassing me and started to drift away down the street. She attracted the attention of the gang who started to follow her. I had no doubt whatsoever that she would be able to rip them apart effortlessly if they attacked her. But they kept coming, these youth. The first in the group were late teens but by the end of the crowd — maybe three dozen in total — they were much younger, maybe 3rd or 4th grade.
They were up to no good, as I said. If it matters, they were all white suburban kids, their boredom made them monsters. I knew they would murder me just to have something to do. I felt a cold, brutal fear, unlike the weird supernatural fear I’d had of the undead performers. These gang members could only kill my body; the zombies wanted my soul… or something even deeper and more comprehensive. There were too many of these punks to fight, though I felt reasonably sure I could hold my own against these younger thugs. I laid down in the flower bed, kept my face down, didn’t move. The thugs milled about, very close to me. If I hadn’t been in a flowerbed, I bet they would have tripped over me.
Then the first zombie seems to have started to lure them into the house. One by one they climbed in through the window until they were all gone, every last one of them.
I was on the roof at this point and the roof was covered in beer barrels, the stainless steel kind. The window led right up to an automated dishwashing machine. I started feeding these barrels onto a conveyor belt into this dishwasher, stuffing them in one after another. I eventually cleaned up the whole roof, thinking to myself “I don’t know which one will kill me first, the Nazis or the Undead but dammit, at least I’ll clean up this mess before I go.” which seems an oddly industrious sentiment for a nightmare.
I awoke as I pushed the last barrel through the window.
Last Saturday night, a dozen folks from the Great Lake Association of Horror Writers gathered for our annual holiday party of eggnog, finger food (which Elsa took a bit TOO seriously) and holiday themed horror movies. There are many to choose from and this year’s selection was Rare Exports (2010), The GingerDead Man (2005) and Silent Night, Deadly Night Part Two. An awesome assemblage.
My thoughts on the delightful Rare Exports are already known and it was fun to watch the film again. Notable highlights for this crowd were our horrifying ignorance of world geography, the revelation that folks above the Arctic Circle subsist entirely on reindeer meat and gingerbread and of course, the anatomically correct monsters. Ah yes, the Europeans. Rare Exports is hardly a “bad” movie so it was somewhat difficult to ridicule — but this crowd certainly rose to the challenge.
The GingerDead Man was far easier to supplement with witty commentary. From what I was able to figure out, it is a heart warming tale of a family-owned bakery threatened by a chain store… and then more directly threatened by an animated gingerbread man. SPOILER: it sucks — but in that charming bad movie kind of suckage. Our refrain became: And exactly why aren’t you leaving the bakery right now? This tale of baked goods gone bad, er, evil was a perfect stinker.
But the highlight of the evening, for me at least, was Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2. By this point in the evening, the crowd was warmed up and raucous so the actual dialogue was difficult to piece out. Assessed as a purely visual document, the work is superb experimental cinema if for no other reasons that the bold acting choices of the spree killer protagonist and the work’s extremely avant-garde story structure. Actor Eric Freeman brilliantly interprets the rigorously non-psychological lead character in an act of pure performance. In particular, Freeman punctuates his lines with a highly mannered, post-semiotic semaphore of eyebrow gestures, often animating every syllable with a separate flick of his brow. The effect is unnerving and erects a portrayal of the unhinged murderer in a way that never resorts to simplistic realism. I checked wikipedia for Freeman’s later work but his whereabouts is listed as unknown. A pity.
Even surpassing Eric Freeman’s tour de force performance is the daring narrative structure of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2. The work forsakes a pedestrian linear narrative, going beyond traditional non-linear tropes to what I would dub an “anti-linear” story structure. This brief post can hardly do adequate justice to its innovation. For the first 50 minutes of the film, the younger brother of the original spree killer recounts the events of the first movie to a psychologist. These incidents are illustrated through scenes purporting to be flashbacks to the first film. If this was a work of psychological realism, we might be tempted to ask why Billy is able to have such detailed memories of events he didn’t witness. This apparent conundrum can only be resolved when these “flashbacks” are read as purely dissociated psychotic fantasies; that is, read Part 2 as is Part 1 didn’t exist. The key to this interpretation involves a sequence where two policemen are called in to apprehend a man dressed like Santa, presumably the Santa killer but who turns out to be a father dressing up for his kids. The only possible explanation for this scene given the wrap-around situation of Billy narrating to a psychologist, is that this whole event is a deranged fantasy, specifically a psychotic power projection. Step aside, Hitchcock; Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is truly psycho.
Elsa and I left warmed as much by the fond friendship and clever repartee as by the glow of the plasma TV — but I’ve come to expect such merriment from the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers. Given the staggering number of scary films with holiday themes, I can only wonder what horrors will await us at next year’s party.
Gingerbread + Ghosts = this cool haunted gingerbread house!
http://www.haunteddimensions.raykeim.com/index500.html
These plans come from the Haunted Dimensions website which the Good Doktor has profiled before. They make fantastic papercraft models of the Haunted House Attractions at the various Disneyworldlands.
But here, the plans are deliciously transformed to gingerbread. Looking for a way to fuse horror and the holidays? Try buttercream frosting!
When the Doktor announced an upcoming party, I was excited at the prospect. I enjoy a social outing as much as the next consort, and the fact that this was a Christmas gathering of the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers meant some stops could be pulled in the creepy-creative snack department. I surveyed the possibilities on Pinterest to get some general ideas. We wanted to bring scary but not cringe-inducing hors d’oeuvres. Delicious snacks were just as important as a pleasing presentation.
Finger food caught my eye– specifically the mini hot dogs made to look like fingers. Some might feel the final products looked too much like digits, but to me they were a little less life-like than I’d hoped. I made several samples for the Doktor to test. Style A won the presentation contest, so a plateful accompanied us to the party.
Our other contribution was born whole from the Doktor’s mind. Upon his request, I did researched but could not find any instance where someone had previously made a Pinhead Cheese Ball. You might recognize Pinhead as one of the cenobites from the The Hellraiser Collection (III: Hell on Earth / IV: Bloodline / V: Inferno / VI: Hellseeker / VII: Deader / VIII: Hellworld)
We set about rectifying this omission using a tried and true cheese ball recipe from our files. I purchased a Welch cheddar which I knew would provide a satisfying taste as well as the requisite pale complexion. Should you plan to make your own Pinhead cheese ball for an upcoming holiday gathering, be sure to do as I did and start the recipe early in the day; the cheeses need to come to room temperature to be combined easily and then well-chilled to give the cheese time to set up and the flavors a chance to mingle.
See the recipes below for preparation details. Feel free to comment or ask questions if they should arise.
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Pinhead Cheese Ball
an originalIngredients:
4 ounces cream cheese
8 ounces sharp white cheddar, shredded
½ teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon onion powder
½ teaspoon saltHave cheeses at room temperature at the start. Combine ingredients in a bowl. Mix well.
Form into a ball, then wrap in cling wrap. Place on a plate so that you get a flat stable surface for the back of the head. Begin to shape the ball into a face. I chilled our cheese ball head for an hour, and then shaped some more, and returned the cheese to the refrigerator for a couple more hours.
Before serving, I scored the cheese head with vertical and horizontal lines, like Pinhead has. I placed toothpicks at the junction of the lines. The effect was pleasing overall, and our cheese ball was immediately recognized as Pinhead by the party guests.
Baked Finger Food Hor d’oeuvres
Just a bit of fussing needed for satisfactory results
1 package of mini hot dogs (contains about 40)
1 package of Pillsbury seamless dough sheets (crescents would work fine, if need be)
1 white onionCut the onion into small pieces, about ½ x ½ and slightly wedge-shaped.
Cut a small slice off one end of each hot dog to serve as the “nail.” Make a little cut lengthwise into the hot dog to seat the end of the onion piece.
Make several small slices about half way down; that will be the knuckle.
Cut the dough sheets into a ¾ inch strip. Wrap the base of each mini dog with a layer of dough and place carefully on an ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake at 350F for about 10-12 minutes until golden brown.
Oh, and it was a wonderful party, complete with good food and holiday-themed horror movies!
This picture comes to us via George Takei’s rather hilarious Facebook feed. George’s only attribution is “from a fan.” Well, thank you, anonymous fan. What an appropriate image for the upcoming festivities!
My internet search yielded the following variation on the Clarice theme.
You can get your own cards, t-shirts, stickers and iphone and ipod cases from Ted Dastick Jr at Red Bubble. Well played, sir!
(Male, 50s’) My dad has been gone for over 20 years so I only rarely dream about him but last night, I woke in a cold sweat.
Dad was dead and we had called the company that was going to bury him. We were waiting outside of large building on the sideway. Dad’s body was just lying there on the grass, still in a hospital gown.
A van pulled up and a professionally dressed woman got out. “First I want to congratulate you on your loss.” she said it very matter-of-fact, as if by rote, but it struck me as odd she said “congratulate” instead of “condolence.” But she continued talking her set spiel about how her company would take the best care of Dad. Before I knew it, she had Dad’s body in a body bag. The bag was made of extremely thick black plastic. It reminded me of Kevlar. Before she zipped it up, the woman put a laptop computer in the bag on top of Dad’s torso. “The computer lets your loved one know you cared about them up until the last minute.” She sealed the bag with an air of finality.
“Now, for a small extra charge we can escort your loved one to the van on a rolling cart.” She had already brought out this low wooden cart. I almost agreed but I asked how much the “small extra charge” would be. The woman replied that the cart would cost $150 and it would show everyone how much I cared. I was confused. Why would I spend that much money to have them used a cart to carry my dad’s body less than 20 feet?
I told her that I didn’t believe this was my father any more, just a shell he’d left behind and that I’d rather spend the money on booze for a party I would hold in his honor. Very well, the woman said.
And at that moment, the body in the bag started kicking. It was subtle at first, the legs just curled at the knees. But then the whole body started convulsing. I looked at the woman in case something like this was normal but the expression on her face said it clearly wasn’t.
“Is he still alive in there?” I asked.
The woman nodded but she stood as if paralyzed in fear.
“Then help me get him out.”
“That’s not possible. Those bags are completely sealed. They’re guaranteed.”
I knelt down by my dad’s body. He was thrashing around. Somehow I was then able to see through the heavy plastic fabric of the bag. His eyes were open. He was gasping for breath. But in addition to having limited oxygen in that sealed bag, it was filling up with liquid. He would drown in his own juices within moments.
“Get him out or I will sue you and your company into non-existence.” The woman clutched her clipboard and contorted her face but did nothing to help my father as he died, a second time lying there on the sidewalk.
If you are scrounging to find reasons to be happy, remember that at least there isn’t a centuries old vampire lurking in yur neighborhood… that is, unless you live in Bajina Bašta, Serbia. A mill that once belonged to a notorious vampire suffered damage due to renovations and now locals fear Sava Savanovic is loosed upon the populace. Sava is the first Serbian vampire, and some experts argue the first vampire. His feeding strategy was to attack those who came to grind grain at the mill, hence the concern that he is homeless now that the mill has collapsed.
Various news outlets tell roughly the same tale:
• The Detroit Free Press (dig the photo of the Vampire Billboard!),
• ABC News,
• The Daily Mail, (great photos, incidentally)
• and the Orange News.
I refrain from commenting about matters with which I have no direct experience, in this case, vampires. We Americans certainly find a fair number of things to be afraid of that folks in other cultures find silly, from serial killers to socialized medicine.
What I learned from this story is that the figure Sava Savanovic is the subject of Leptirica (1973), considered the first Serbian horror movie. A photo of the DVD cover appears above. I have to see if it’s available from Netflix.
In the articles, a rivalry emerges about whose vampire is considered “first” and though I can’t comment on that question, I am struck by the geography of monsters. Island nations seems particularly prone to ghosts (Ireland, England, Japan) while other seem susceptible to demonic possession (Poland, Italy) Certainly different regions of North America seem to favor different malefactors (British Columbia’s Ogopogo, Washington State’s Sasquatch, Texas’ Chupacabra, Pittsburgh’s zombies…) There is a weird cultural alchemy whereby a curse transmutes into a tourist trap. So though you might not have to stock up on garlic and holy crosses like the folks of Bajina Bašta, it’s possible you might want to take other, more regionally appropriate precautions… or explore other folklore to exploit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sava_Savanovi%C4%87
I was in an impromptu workshop. It was as if I was taking a woodworking class. The instructor was a famous wood worker I’ve seen on TV. He was looking at my work. It was some kind of a small box. It was hopeless. He struggled to make some constructive criticisms but then finally said I should clean up my work area and go home. I asked if I could come in tomorrow and try to fix the thing. He said no, there was no time left, that this was the end of the class. I was the last person left in the room. My work area was a board laying across two sawhorses. The surface was covered with old bent nails and staples pried from old boards. I started to pick them up but I couldn’t find anyplace to put them…
… so I put them in my mouth. These old bent nails and staples. In my mouth. it didn’t seem that odd at the time. I thought I’d carry them until I found a trash can. I picked up my failed box and left the workshop. After awhile, I remembered that I had a mouthful of sharp and filthy pieces of metal and it finally occurred to me that it was probably not a good thing. I found a trashcan and tried to spit them out. The nails were easy but the staples had attached to the inside of my mouth. All around my tongue and gums the tiny points of the staples caught into my mouth. I reached in and carefully tried to pull them out, one by one. There seemed to be dozens of them. It didn’t seem I’d ever remove them all.
