My name is Zed, and I’m a home haunter. I’ve been approached by the Head Nightmarian to discuss the ins and outs of turning your home and/or yard into something terrifying this October.
For those unfamiliar with the term, the home haunter dwells in the middle ground between person who puts up some decorations at Halloween and the Haunted Attractions which spring up around the end of September. The typical home haunt has detailed props, some of which may use light, sound, and pneumatics to achieve their scares. Some home haunts are large enough that the rival the professionals, drawing hundreds or even thousands of people a night.
If you are thinking “this guy is talking about Halloween already?” then this post might not be for you. Everyone else, read on.
Fairfield Cemetery, Monkton, Ayrshire. Photo by Rosser1954 Roger Griffith. Used under the Creative Commons License.
(Female, 50’s) I had a dream so awful last night that I haven’t been able to think or talk about it without crying, but you asked me to write it down so here goes. The dream was about carrying around some awful knowledge.
I dreamed that my daughter died. She’s grown now and living quite far away. She had some health issues as a child, and in my dream she was very sick again, but none of us knew it. I don’t think she knew it either. And she died. I got a phone call that she was dead.
But we were in the middle of some big, stressful event. I don’t know what exactly, but it was some happening, some convention or presentation that we were preparing for and needed to accomplish.
So I didn’t tell anyone that she had died yet– because knowing didn’t matter. There was nothing that could be done, so I had to wait with my knowledge. I felt very sad and very lonely.
And I knew that I had a lot to do too, but I wasn’t ready to deal with that. I had to make arrangements to get her body home and make plans for what– a memorial? a funeral? I didn’t know. We’d never talked or made plans with her because it hadn’t occurred to me that she could die.
So I was leaving the house and I ran into a neighbor. The dream neighbor was not a real person, sort of a conglomeration of people I know. She was a stocky woman with two little girls running around while we were talking in the front yards. She asked me how I was doing and I had to lie and say fine. Then she asked about my daughter and how she was. Her girls were always talking about my daughter, they enjoyed her company so much and they missed her. Again, I had to lie and say she was fine. I had no idea how to keep going.
It’s not every day that a local horror fiction writer and colleague launches a new short story collection– but this Saturday is such a day.
Ken MacGregor will read from this just-released book, An Aberrant Mind, and sign copies at BookBound at 1729 Plymouth Road in Ann Arbor on June 7 at 3pm.
We first encountered Ken as member of the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers (GLAHW), a group of like-minded authors who share a love of horror, dark fiction, true crime and the like as well as a common goal of supporting local literacy efforts.
We also caught him in a short film which was part of the Three Corpse Circus Festival in 2013. He wrote, directed and starred in The Quirk and the Dead, a love story set in a post-apocalytic world that made us laugh, smile and cringe in quick succession.
From our perspective, Ken is an energetic, creative guy who brings flair, originality and style to whatever he does– so we expect his stories to delight, to surprise, to make us laugh or smile as well as scare us.
We’ll be there to mingle with the horror crowd and applaud the successful efforts of one of our own. Join us this Saturday at Bookbound; costumes optional.
Photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/nerdcoregirl/. No changes made. https://flic.kr/p/4Ypu5U. Used under the Creative Commons License.
(Male, 50’s) This happened at the end of a much longer dream. My partner and I were walking through a dark area, shadowy streets. There was some element of danger, too. We weren’t alone on these streets and it was late enough that the people around were up to no good but largely they ignored us. It was thrilling more than scary, rather fun. We strayed to an industrial area, cement buildings, some abandoned, that stood close enough to each other to make a maze of little roads, each barely wide enough for a truck to fit down. M partner wanted to turn back but I insisted we press on to the end of this alley. It opened up to a dark woods. We skirted the side of building. We passed a silent man who carried fishing gear, bound for a stream hidden somewhere in those woods.
Then we turned a corner and the wall of the factory building disappeared. It was a very dark market, busy with the commerce of death. Maybe a half dozen men, with ragged work clothes milled around the items, some buying some selling. There were at least three coffins, tiny ones. child coffins. Beautiful, hand assembled wood boxes. Antiques. But then how could they be antiques? Old coffins would be in graveyards, wouldn’t they? There was something unwholesome here, like maybe these coffins had been dug up. But I looked at them as if I was interested. The salesman said “You don’t want to put a child in these. They’d get used to being dead.” As if I would use a coffin for a cradle. I told him, “No, I have a special doll that I need to keep safe.” He nodded grimly, as if that was what these were good for, for some kind of black magic. But I was most interested in the metal grave liners. I’d never seen them before, just slightly larger than the coffins, thick rusted metal, industrial but grim, very grim. There’s only one way they could have gotten so rusty, so corroded.
I had the sense that no one walked away from this market without buying something. That if you were ever desperate enough to find this midnight sale, you paid whatever was asked for the item you needed. It was a compulsion, a craving, a need. No one simply browsed here.
Roughly half way through “A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013)” is a prolonged shot of a man fishing on a lake while a rainstorm gently builds around him. The shot is stable with the only movement provided by the boat as it drifts around in mid frame. Raindrops delicately splash in the foreground and, in the far distance, a bolt of lightning flashes too far away to be heard. The shot stretches out for several minutes, and it’s a testament to the transformative power of the movie, that by this point in the movie, I didn’t want this shot to end. “A Spell to Ward off the Darkness” is in a sense a spiritual travelogue, if not a cinematic vehicle for spiritual pilgrimage, best seen in a temporary commune of the like-minded that occur from time to time in movie houses and at festivals like the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Why the hell am I reviewing a “spiritual travelogue” on a horror website? Regular readers of The Daily Nightmare know we examine Midwest Snob Horror as these products reveal the glories and travails of the human condition. “A Spell to Ward off the Darkness” is in no way a genre horror movie, despite the title’s intimation of both witchcraft and cosmic darkness, and despite the final scenes where the central figure dons corpse paint to front a black metal band. This is a movie about the durability of hope and the fragility of its specific expressions. But if you are a horror fan you would do well to see this movie. The endless, brain-eating parade of apocalypse-porn movies of recent years has slowly eroded our will to imagine a better life, a better life together, a better life together that may only appear fragmentarily, temporarily, and from time to time. “A Spell to Ward off the Darkness” examines three possible utopias, strung together roughly by a central figure’s pilgrimage. Sort of. An analysis here is appropriate because horror is best portrayed against a backdrop of hope.
The first provisional utopia is a commune somewhere in Eastern Europe. (End credits reveal it to be Estonia.) Time for these dozen or so members is measured in long moments of reflection, music, naps, sauna baths, cigarette smoking, and the construction of a geodesic dome from plans to a completed structure. The courage of the filmmakers is to let shots run until the magic happens. For instance, in one shot a woman leisurely smokes a cigarette on the porch when, about a minute in, a plume of woodsmoke from the shack felicitously wafts into the frame, revealing beams of dappled sunshine that entirely reconfigure the image, creating a cathedral of light that frames her. These long gazes into the oft overlooked moments of life provide an antidote to the manipulative, barrage of short shots quickly edited that assail us in so much commercial culture.
The central figure is a black guitarist who I believe does not speak a single word throughout the film. He smokes a cigarette in the nearly completed dome before embarking on a period of Thoreauvian solitude that forms the second possible utopia. This second section of the film presents some of the most striking images, one of my favorite being a closeup of an ant colony, miked so closely to detect their thrumming activity. But my double-plus good favorite shot of the entire film lingers on the fire that consumes the central character’s shack at the end of this section. I just LOVE watching shit burn down, something I first realized watching Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. Maybe I should talk to a therapist about that predilection.
The final segment of the film focuses on the central figure as he fronts a black metal band. The camerawork is sinuous — in contrast to the sometimes jerky hand-held footage of the commune sequence — gliding amid the musicians, as the singer wails both plaintive and feral and the guitars and drum pound, complex and intense. The corpse paint on the performers liquefies with their sweat during the performance. Only in this final section are there faces of older people, scattered in the audience. As a middle aged guy myself, I was left wondering if the yearning for hope, for community is a young person’s dream. The central figure does not rest at this utopia either but wipes off his makeup to head out into the darkness, perhaps toward an enigmatically pulsing light.
The key insight I took from the movie was the allusion, made rather early on, to the notion of a temporary autonomous zone, that moment of free-play and synchronicity that sometimes occurs at a good party, or a good rave. Individual utopias emerge and pass away, but that yearning for a better way of life is an enduring ground of human hope.
I can hear the gore-hounds grumbling already. Sure, “A Spell to Ward off the Darkness” could be dismissed as experimental but it’s a successful experiment. In absolutely no way could it be called a thriller, though the sense of wonder and tenuous encouragement it kindles is, I suppose, a kind of thrill. Do not be deceived; it is NOT a horror movie in any sense but for cry it out loud, take a break from watching yet another re-made slasher film or still-born undead re-hash, could ya? See “A Spell to Ward off the Darkness” preferably in the presence of others with open hearts and open minds. If you absolutely have to counter-act its message with a bit of gloom, maybe make a double feature of the evening and watch “Until the Light Takes Us” about the grimmer side of first generation Norwegian black metal.
We’ve had questions about what we mean that submissions should be “inspired by” an actual nightmare that we’ve posted on the site. Fair question. Lord knows, the words “Inspired by True Events” have caused us to roll our eyes so often we’ve suffered permanent brain damage. But even though nightmares are “true events,” sometimes devastatingly real for the dreamer, it can be challenging to get to the facts of the matter.
Clearly we’d like it best if you could travel to the dream-realm and uncover the events. You could merge your consciousness with the original dreamer, allowing you to re-enter the actual dream and craft a tale based on that direct experience. Perhaps via a hypnotic trance. Or hire someone to read the account of the nightmare to you, over and over, while you sleep. Alas, we know how hard it is to find professional dream-whisperers these days.
The next best solution —- and fully valid —- would be to evoke the sensation of a dream while using any element of the nightmare in question. ANY element. This kernel could be an image, a turn of phrase, the mood… We ask that your piece stand on its own because it’s highly likely readers won’t look up the original nightmare to check on how closely your account matches.
Pro Tip: Don’t go with your first thought. Or maybe your second or third. Sharpen at least one point of the literary pentagram: character, plot, mood, theme, setting. Further advice: imbue your piece with a “sense of completion” that grants the reader the same sensations experienced following a satisfying dream or nightmare.
Halfway through the presentation on green burial options, I was fully creeped out but not at all by the practical and creative alternatives presented by Merilynne Rush of After Death Home Care. I was terrified by the fact of my own death in a way that was rather embarrassing. I write horror fiction, review horror culture, heck, I even collect skulls and skull-shaped sculpture. I’ve buried both my parents and, within the past four months, watched my brother-in-law die at home, at peace and surrounded by love. My earliest childhood memories are of family gatherings at the funerals of obscure relatives. I know death, right? But the photo of a hole in the ground ready for a shroud burial, a bare cavity in the earth, one without marker or protection from the elements, and I was side-swiped by the fact of my own fragility, mortality and insignificance. And this reaction really brought home the point of the presentation: how many important decisions do we make based on unexamined fears?
I am also no stranger to green alternatives. I’ve tended a compost pile since I was 7, grown at least some of my own food ever since and the grand “circle of life” is a potent metaphor in my imagination. Except, perhaps too often, I imagine the circle going on around me without fully realizing the realities of my own “passing away.” We don’t simply “pass away;” we leave a very corporeal residue. As a culture, we’ve fallen into certain habits for dealing with these physical remains. Embalming, I learned, became popular during the Civil War as a way to ship soldiers’ bodies home for funerals. Ms. Rush’s presentation taught me, however, that in most cases, dry ice can chill and preserve a body more than long enough for public services. Those services can be very personal affairs. Home funerals were common in this country less than a hundred years ago. The photos she showed of such home funerals– all with the complete consent of family — depicted dead persons surrounded with stuff of their lives, a guitar, a hand-decorated coffin, their own bed. The bodies looked peaceful, oddly wholesome, naturally dead without the professional interventions of a mortician. Bodies can be washed and dressed at home and the presenter noted that the task is often an opportunity for those grieving to understand and accept the reality that their loved ones are no longer there. I was surprised by how few legal requirements are actually involved and there are more in Michigan than in other states. If I understand it correctly, only two signatures are needed for a home funeral but getting those particular signatures on those particular documents during a time of grief can be a challenge. Green alternatives to conventional burial don’t just happen without a bit of forethought. The guidance of an experienced consultant like Merilynne Rush of After Death Home Care surely would be helpful.
The ecological impact of our deaths continues on long after our burial, however. Conventionally maintained cemeteries require continual investments of gasoline and attention to tend the grounds perpetually for visitors who might not ever come. Ms. Rush showed various green alternative burial places including a full conservation site that looked like a prairie dotted with saplings. And I found this image as hard to cope with as the one of a naked grave. Weird, right? I feel most alive when I am wandering that very kind of terrain. I have often joked about wishing to be composted when I die, but that humor must have masked some deeply seated fear of passing away without a trace. I found it oddly comforting that State records meticulously record the precise locations of all burial locations. I might dream of becoming as famous as Edgar Allen Poe, whose grave was visited by anonymous libation-bearing stranger every year on his birthday but seriously, is such a nebulous and unlikely dream really worth the real and predictable costs of a traditional grave? I wonder yet again, how many of my life choices are guided and constrained by such unfounded hopes and unexamined fears.
The presentation was hardly dour and grim memento mori. Merilynne exuded a peaceful, reverent demeanor, very conducive to discussing these hard options. She also played a segment of Caitlyn Doughty’s “Ask a Mortician” video podcast. We at the DailyNightmare LURV Doughty’s Order of the Good Death and have linked to her videos in the past. A little humor and good will goes a long way when dealing with such sensitive, final issues.
Are you intrigued by greener alternatives to traditional funerals and burial? If you’re in SE Michigan, you’re in luck. After Death Home Care is sponsoring a showing of the movie “A Will for the Wilderness” a feature length documentary, at the Michigan Theatre in Downtown Ann Arbor, June 1st at 1:00. The film records one man’s attempts to be treated in death according to the values he held in life. Read more at the After Death Home Care site here. in ways that better align with his values in life
Tucked away in the thumb of Michigan is an old cemetery where my people are buried. I visit it usually once or twice a year, pause in front of the stones like a solitary family reunion. My beloved grandmother who taught me how to bake bread, the grandfather I never knew, my uncle who tucked a baby chick under his jacket, my aunt who had all the cats… and also my mother and father are there. But of course, they aren’t there. They’re in my heart, my oh so perishable heart. In a hundred years, it’s unlikely many will have such memories to attach to these very permanent markers. Merilynne Rush’s presentation certainly got me thinking about how I might better request treatment in death according to the values I held in life. I was startled to find that some facets of this question seriously creep me out, a devoted horror-hound. This terror intrigues me. This Memorial Day, consider your notions of what should happen to your remains after death if for no other reason than such unexamined fears shape our behavior in life.
(Male, 40s) This bad dream came at the end of a night of bad dreams, one right after the other. They weren’t all scary, but they were all disturbing and unsettling, which made for a really crappy night of sleep. Nothing like being locked out to put a person in a fine mood!
In this final episode, I had a dream about living in a big city. I was just about to stand up at a wedding in the park, but at the last minute, I decided that I’d look better in my best suit instead of the jacket and pants separates I was wearing. I excused myself and ran down the rain soaked streets.
I ran past a person who was my girl friend, who was shouting up to me– a different me or an earlier me?– who looked out of a window. She was under the impression that she was invited to the wedding too and had made a cheese tray. The “me” standing in the window didn’t think this was a good idea or didn’t know what she was talking about.
I tried to hurry to my house, a large brick building, but the street had tilted so badly that I had to grab into the cracks between the pavers to pull myself along. It was almost like trying to climb uphill. I was worried that my wife had locked me out, or more likely that she hadn’t given me a key yet to my own house. We had lots of houseguests, I gather, and they each needed a key. I guess she had given someone my key. I was locked out.
DailyNightmare.com is accepting submissions for its second annual anthology of 100-word prose poems based on any of the 350-plus nightmares currently posted on the site (https://dailynightmare.com/category/nightmares/). Payment will be $10.00 made via PayPal and a .pdf of the final anthology in exchange for First World Serial Rights, electronic rights, and reprint rights for posters and postcards. (After one year, rights can be reassigned to the author.) In addition to professional word-rate, this will be a cool-looking publication since we intend to exploit all the tricks of expressive digital typography.
The deadline for submissions is July 1.
A couple extremely specific criteria:
1) All submissions must be “inspired by” one of the nightmares posted on the site. (Hint: Want to submit a story based on one of YOUR nightmares? Then submit a non-fictional account of the nightmare along with the art or story that it inspired. We’ll assign it a Nightmare Number.)
2) Written submissions (stories or poems) must contain EXACTLY 100 words including title.
Email submissions to: anthology @ dailynightmare.com
and include the number of the inspirational nightmare in the SUBJECT line
Include a brief bio (~ 25 – 50 words) with the submission so we don’t have to track you with our hellhounds.
What are we looking for? We at the DailyNightmare groove on the idea of inhabiting each other’s dreams, even the nasty, ooky ones, and this anthology is one step toward that kind of communal nightmare-scape.
100 words aren’t many, so sharpen at least one point of the narrative pentacle: mood, character, plot, setting, theme, and try to imbue your piece with a “sense of completion.” Poetry or prose, matters not; word count does. DailyNightMare.com celebrates literate terror (or “snob horror” if you will), so heighten the language, make every syllable count and don’t be afraid to mean something.
Multiple submissions are AOK, though no more than 13 per author.
Why these rights? Legal rights nomenclature hasn’t caught up with digital realities yet, and we want to cover our tails since we plan to use every corner of the Web to publicize this endeavor. We are also planning to typeset each story “expressively” and hope the resulting pieces will be attractive enough to use as posters and postcards. We will keep the contributor in the loop and, where feasible, contributors will get a free copy of any of these subsidiary creations beyond the initial three publication types: a hoity-toity extremely limited hard-bound, a POD softcover edition and a .pdf and/or ebook edition. If “rights” is, like, “a thing” getting in the way of your submission, let us know which rights you’re reserving at time of submission and we’ll try to work something out.
If you’d like to receive a digital copy of the first anthology, drop us a note and will send one your way.
If you are submitting your own nightmare with your story, be advised that we publish the nightmares under a Creative Commons, attribution license. Basically, other folks can use the nightmares themselves in any way, as long as they note they got ‘em from theDailyNightmare.com. We anonymize the nightmares to binary gender and decade age (i.e. “Male, 30?s”) so please include those… and feel free to embellish or lie. On the internet, no one knows you’re not 200 years old and female.
Swedish buffet Smorgasbord. Photo by bjaglin, used under the Creative Commons License
(female 30s) I don’t remember the rest of the dream, only one strange scene of it– which I would consider a nightmare for sure.
I was in some new place with people I didn’t know, and across the room, there was a huge banquet table spread out, covered with all kinds of food. But something odd caught my eye: a human body, laid out on a huge platter, roasted or something.
I said, “Oh my god, is that a person?”
Someone said, “Yes, she offered herself up.”
“She what?” I asked
“She wanted to be eaten. In our culture, it’s a great sacrifice and a great honor.”
“But that’s awful. How could you do that to her?” I was getting really upset.
“But she wanted it. She volunteered.”
“That still doesn’t make it right!” I insisted, and I got out of that place as quickly as I could.
The creepy, ooky feeling of the dream stuck with me all day. Even now, when I think about it — ugh!
Cornfields, by Dschwen used under Creative Commons license
(Female 20s) I’m not sure if this counts as a nightmare, but here goes. I have a couple of landscapes that reoccur in my dreams. They are like the background to a different story each time, but when I see them, I know things aren’t going to go well. I know I’m lost.
One is a city where I’ve never been in real life. I’ve been there enough in my dreams that it looks familiar to me, but I don’t know my way around and that’s the problem. I’m always lost. Maybe the streets move around or are added or taken away. Whatever the reason, I spend time wandering around, usually trying to find someone or get away from something. Even though I’ve been there before, I am lost anyway, whether I’m walking or driving.
The other place is out in the country. I’m usually driving here. The roads are a big grid. I keep passing junctions where two roads come together at right angles. There are stop signs and cornfield, but there are never any street signs. The landscape just goes on and on, repeating the same cornfields and stop signs. I never get anywhere in this place either. I’m always lost here too.
Godzilla statue in Hibiya, Tokyo, which the monster destroyed in its debut film. (Photo by Wikiodaiba; used under Creative Commons License)
(Female 40’s) This was a crazy dream I had when I was a kid that mixed up those monster movie plots with Nancy Drew-style problem solving. It was about how I used my smarts to save the town from Godzilla— almost.
The dream took place in a small town in Northern Michigan, near a cottage that was owned by a family friend. We went up there for the weekend many times when I was growing up. It was a small cottage-country town on a lake, very pretty and woodsy.
Godzilla was smashing through the town however. We could hear his roar and the screams of people as he chased them.
I had what seemed like an obviously brilliant idea: I would make a trail out of toilet paper to “lead” Godzilla out of town and back to the lake. He would follow the trail because that was part of his dinosaur nature.
I walked along backwards, unrolling roll after roll of toilet paper, humming to myself as my genius plan went into effect.
The only problem was that I didn’t account for how effective the toilet paper trail would be or how much more quickly a Godzilla moved than a human. I wasn’t quite to the lake when I looked up and saw Godzilla trampling down the road, following the trail, coming at a very fast pace. There was no way I could get to the lake before Godzilla would get to me. I was leading him straight to me. I was doomed.
Everyone has one good love song, one good novel and maybe one good movie in them, and the real achievement of digital culture is that more folks– everyday regular folks like you and me– can have the opportunity to record that one good song, write that one good novel and even make that one good movie. I wish I could say that “Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake” was the one good movie destined to the folks at Silver Bullet Pictures. I can’t. It’s crap. But let me celebrate the 3 and half things I really sincerely LOVE about this weird, half-camp/half-bullshit horror movie, okay?
The first thing I celebrate at the top of my lungs to all that will hear, and that’s the poster for this film. The poster for “Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake” is probably the best movie poster I have ever seen in my whole life. The guy at The Lost Highway does excellent work. I have his rendition of a Hellraiser and a Trick ‘r Treat, but he really out did himself with this poster for “Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake.” It does everything a great trailer does: it sets the tone, hits some of the high points and makes you really, really want to see the movie. If you get absolutely NOTHING out of this review, get your ass over to their website and buy the poster. Buy two and give one to your gramma.
The second thing I unabashedly love about “Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake” is that it’s a complete feature length movie, and for that matter, it’s not the only complete feature film made by those weirdos at Silver Bullet Pictures. Digital video means that every idiot with a cell phone can shoot and edit a movie, but to be honest, not many folks do. It’s a drag to shoot enough footage, a severe bummer to edit it down and Lord save me from the drudgery required to produce a DVD, even if I must question if any time whatsoever was spent writing, directing and acting this piece of shit. Most poseurs wimp out long before half way through and never even complete a single film, let alone a full length feature. Silver Bullet Pictures have a half dozen complete feature films including Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake, available on DVD and in some cases even on VHS. I’ve sat through several of them, including “Heavy Mental VHS” which received distribution by Troma– which should give you a really good indication of the aesthetic operating here.
The third thing I abso-fucking-lutely LOVE about “Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake” is that Silver Bullet Pictures are based in the Detroit area. How many kids in Detroit grow up thinking they’d like to, I dunno, work at a casino or move someplace warm. Kids my age thought they’d work for Fords. These folks make goddammed movies, for fuck’s sake. How cool is that? Making a movie is a gazillion times cooler than any stupid party you had planned for Saturday night. These folks actually DO the stuff that you dream about doing.
The half point is that I sort of get “trash culture,” the campy, nearly bizarro weirdness that seems to guide Silver Bullet Pictures. If I squint and drink a lot of beer, I can frequently make it through a whole movie, say one distributed by Troma pictures, without suffering a blast of anal leakage. Lord knows, I’ve championed John Waters since the first time I saw Polyester but honestly, too many folks hide behind John Waters’ coat tail, IHMO without having the authenticity of being gay, outré and stranded in 1970’s era Baltimore. Too many folks borrow Water’s aesthetic and are too afraid to hang their balls on the line and actually attempt to MEAN something. Am I just being Midwest sentimental to think that “Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake” lands a bit on the positive side of that divide?
Saints preserve me, but I have the perverse sense that if Silver Bullet Pictures continue to make movies–and I summon all infernal powers and heavenly forces to help ensure they do keep at it–eventually they will find their own weird and express the uniquely bizarre and disturbing reality that is found in southeastern Michigan. Until then, when they produce that one good movie that I can champion without reservation, at least buy the poster for “Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake,” willya?
Pompe Stevens, from http://www.vastpublicindifference.com/
I checked out the website and the impressive collection of photos of gravestones from before 1825. The list of 101 sayings for “death” include phrases like “Fell Aslep in Jesus”, “Exchanged Worlds”, “Departed this stage of existence”, and “Went rejoycing out of this world”. Also mentioned are less happy endings: “expired”, “hung”, or “Was barbarously murdered in his own home by Gage’s bloody troops.”
Rev Wigglesworth, from http://www.vastpublicindifference.com/
The site recalled for me of a favorite euphemism from now-deceased minister at my childhood church, which was “Graduated to the Larger Life.” I always thought that had a grand ring to it, and now I see how it fits in a long line of pleasant (or sometimes not so pleasant) ways to say “died”.
(Female 50’s) This dream is so obviously rooted in television sit-com culture of the 1960’s, like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and Gilligan’s Island— as are many of my childhood experiences. Now that I think about it, a lot of those shows had brain-switching, or identity confusion, or evil twins as a regular plot twist. It’s no wonder that my nightmare involved having two dads: a good dad and a bad dad.
In my dream, no one believed at first that there were two versions of my dad running around. My older brother tried to warn us. He pointed to the “fake” Dad and said, “That’s not our father! He’s an impostor!” We all thought that was ridiculous and laughed at him. Even Dad– although it was kind of an evil laugh.
The another Dad walked in our house. The Dads stood looking at each other. They both said, “Who are you?” and “He’s the fake!”, pointing at each other. My mom, sister, younger brother and I just looked back and forth. They were identical; we couldn’t tell them apart. Which was the real Dad?
Then my older brother said, “It’s him! He’s the fake one!” and he pointed at the person he claimed all along was the fake dad. Then the fake dad got really angry and attacked my brother. He tried to strangle him by putting his hands around my brother’s neck. My brother fought back and then Dad jumped in too. They beat the fake “dad” and I think they killed him.
Be prepared for a unsettlingly creepy and weirdly gory viewing with The Woman (Bloody Disgusting Selects), directed by Lucky McKee, based on a book by Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee, also titled The Woman. If you expect to be surprised, you’ll be in a good position for watching this seemlingly straight-forward story about a family that takes in a feral woman.
The Netflix description had setup certain expectations for me which the movie destroyed coming out of the gate. The description on the envelope claimed we would watch the family breakdown as they attempted to “civilize” a feral woman, but from the first scene the family dynamics alone sent a shiver down my throat.
A sticky, icky candy-coating shines right from the scene where the family are guests at a barbeque. From his perch on the deck, the father gazes out at his miserable and uncomfortable teenage daughter and scolds his wife. Around the corner, the adolescent son practices free throws, while ignoring a group of boys tormenting a little girl. You can’t put a finger on it yet, but there’s something wrong in this house.
The action gets rolling when the father finds a wild woman living in the woods. He immediately prepares for her capture by putting the family to work on clearing an outbuilding, a project which they all undertake immediately and without question. Back in the woods, he traps the woman, knocks her out, and then takes her to the building and restrains her. He enlists his family in the project of helping “fix” her.
Ultimately, “The Woman” is a film that’s as much about power as it is about horror. The movie delivers both the gore and violence one expects from a horror film, but it packs the emotional punch of a well-rendered drama as it explores the power inequalities within the family and between the sexes. Don’t be surprised if certain dialogues make you cringe just as much as the scenes of bit-off appendages or torn-off skin. Like with any good film, expect the ideas in the movie haunt you in the days that follow.
Photo: Washington & Jefferson College, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
(Female 40’s) I don’t know if this counts as a nightmare, but it was a bad dream. It’s got the same things happening as other bad dreams I’d had, which is kind of funny when you think about it: pain, embarrassment, lots of blood, and not being about to find the bathroom.
I was on a trip at a hotel with some friends. I’d gotten separated from them, and I was wandering around among the common areas of the hotel, like the bars, meeting rooms and reception rooms. I realized that I was breathing strangely, like my breath whistled in my nose and it hurt. I slid my fingers up the skin on the side of my nose, and I could feel it was all lumpy, like something was huge stuffed way up deep inside my nose. At my nostril, my fingers touched the end of something sticking out that felt like a green bean! What the hell? I wondered. How did I get a bean stuck up my nose?
So without thinking too much, I yanked it out. The bean came out in one piece, but it hurt like hell, and my nose began to bleed. I didn’t have a tissue, so I plugged closed with my finger, but it was bleeding hard. I walked around then, trying to find the bathroom.
I came to a bar and looked around the edges of the room, but I didn’t see any signs or arrows. There were some men drinking; I didn’t think they’d know where the women’s room was. I saw waitress and I asked her, forgetting to hold on to my nose so the blood started to pour out again. She said this bar didn’t have a women’s room and I should try another one.
I walked around again and I came to an arcade, a big one, like those arcade rooms a lot of hotels used to have, only bigger. It was full of pinball machines, skeeball, driving car games, everything. Then I saw a pay toilet! That made perfect sense. I almost laughed out loud, but then I realized I didn’t have any change. Plus someone else was just going into the room. So I left again.
I came to a conference hall. I started to walk across this huge room full of people and booths and tables, and I saw a table with a big spread of sandwiches. I was suddenly very hungry. I picked up a sandwich, and my nose began to bleed again, so I held the sandwich in one hand and my nose with the other and hurried away. I had to get some tissue soon or sit down somewhere. I still had a bloody nose and I was starting to feel faint, and then I woke up.
Postcard picture of Eloise Asylum, Wayne County Michigan
Sometimes, when looking for excitement and adventure, one has to go no further than one’s own backyard– or one’s state. Although I am Michigan born and bred, I have been informed that “Pure Michigan” was waiting for me, but I was not fully aware that “Haunted Michigan” was also right here for me to explore.
I have visited only one of the 20 haunted places mentioned. The stunning Masonic Temple of Detroit has been the site of Theatre Bizarre for the last 2 years, and the Doktor and I thoroughly enjoyed bothevents. The space was teeming with all manner of persons and costumes, however, so if I encountered any real ghosts, I simply chalked it up to superior costuming skills.
Where to go first is the real question. Michigan is a big state, and many of the destinations are a good day trip away. Nonetheless, we’ll be making a short list of haunted Michigan places to explore and write about. Which ones catch your fancy?
Jail cells at the Southborough Police Station. Photo by my_southborough. Used under the Creative Commons License.
(Male, 50’s) Just a dark and sad dream. I woke up really shaken so who’s to say this wasn’t a nightmare. I was on a 5-person team, and one of the guys was someone I used to work with at an old job. He was a good guy, creative, diligent, exactly the kind of guy I’d choose to bring along on whatever task we were supposed to perform. It was night, really late at night, maybe 3:00 AM, and we were in the courtyard of a stone building, just inside a tall stone fence that surrounded a large activity yard. It felt kind of like a prison. We weren’t supposed to be there. My job was to circumvent a computer-based lock, but the trick I used was a long metal rod, a mechanical exploit that bypassed all the fancy electrics. I felt pretty proud of the idea. We five were supposed to wait outside until something happened. We’d know it when we saw it. I leaned against the fence and started scribbling notes for a poem I was writing. Yes, I know that’s crazy, but I was writing a poem in my dream. If I had started writing down the dream earlier, I bet I could have remembered what it was about too. I remember that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to read my hand-writing because it was so dark. I looked up from my little black notebook and found the other guys on my team were gone. I was worried that I’d missed the cue.
Just then dozens of men in work shirts and khakis started filing up out of this building in a big hurry. The building was one story tall so the sense I had was that these guys were coming up from rooms underground. Maybe they were prisoners. Maybe factory workers though they “felt” like tough and clever guys, equal parts Marines and engineers. They ran down this corridor then out to the street where there were a lot of cars parked. Each guy knew which car he was heading to. They were rather strange vehicles by the way, half panel truck and half station wagon, weird looking with no windows. Each car could fit maybe 10 guys. I panicked because I thought we were going to take a helicopter out of here. I hadn’t expected cars and didn’t know what to do. I grabbed one of the guys running past me and he said to come along, that they’d find room for me. But there wasn’t any room for me in any of the wagons. I knew it was just a minute or two until the sirens would ring, and I’d be caught. The wagon-cars started racing down the road and I tried to run along behind them. I kept up pretty well.
It was a residential city neighborhood and I watched the car I was going to get in drive away down a street, only to hear it shot full of holes by machine guns. I thought that was pretty crazy, shooting machine guns in a residential neighborhood but there was no chance anyone survived. I ran the other way. I started to like my odds, figuring I could escape through the residential brownstones to escape the trigger-happy officials who were hunting us down. Worse case, I could go back to the woods that were across from the stone building we’d broken into. I’d be safe so long as they didn’t send out dogs. And just then I ran into two motion-sensor machine guns that had been positioned at an intersection. Who the hell puts motion-sensor controlled machine guns at a residential intersection? They pinned me down with crossfire and I couldn’t move, though I didn’t have the sense that I was hit. I hid behind a leafless bush, just some bare branches, trying hard not to move but totally exposed if the murderous officials came looking. It started to dawn on me that no one lived in this neighborhood, that maybe no one lived anywhere anymore. Those may have been the last humans living anywhere, those guys living underground. I hoped at least some of them escaped. Whatever set up those mechanized machine guns to strafe an intersection wasn’t interested in keeping a neighborhood safe. They would only be satisfied by killing every single one of us.
Beloved lycanthropic fiddler known as Violin Monster is reportedly in mid-migration BACK to the streets of Ann Arbor, just in time for the Festifools Parade this weekend. Locals are heartened by this well-known harbinger of spring. A great opportunity to get bitten by a love of fun street performance that requires no full moon to enjoy.
Photo of the Violin Monster, from the Violin Monster’s website
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. Maybe I should talk to a therapist about that predilection.
” about the grimmer side of first generation Norwegian black metal. 
— almost. 
” was the one good movie destined to the folks at 
and a 
, but he really out did himself with this poster for “Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake.” It does everything a great trailer does: it sets the tone, hits some of the high points and makes you really, really want to see the movie. If you get absolutely NOTHING out of this review, get your ass over to their 
” which received distribution by Troma– which should give you a really good indication of the aesthetic operating here.
but honestly, too many folks hide behind John Waters’ coat tail, IHMO without having the authenticity of being gay, outré and stranded in 1970’s era Baltimore. Too many folks borrow Water’s aesthetic and are too afraid to hang their balls on the line and actually attempt to MEAN something. Am I just being Midwest sentimental to think that “Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake” lands a bit on the positive side of that divide?
, 
, and 
— as are many of my childhood experiences. Now that I think about it, a lot of those shows had brain-switching, or identity confusion, or
, directed by Lucky McKee, based on a book by Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee, also titled 
. If you expect to be surprised, you’ll be in a good position for watching this seemlingly straight-forward story about a family that takes in a feral woman.
