Author: admin

Categories
Art Comics

Richard Sala – Nightmarish Comics

Richard SalaWhat predicament has poor Peculia found herself in now? The continuing exploits of Peculia were the back up feature in Richard Sala’s “Evil Eye” comic and now are available all together in a creepy-hot collection. Sala’s work is almost exclusively black and white and frankly the examples of his full color work are much less effective than the stark images and textures he conjures from black ink and white paper.

The storylines of a typical Sala comic exhibit the same kind of snaking dream logic of troubled sleep, where one bad situation leads to another bad situation according to some kind of strange rationality. And also like a dream, the conclusions are sometimes weird yet poetically fitting. Their overall feel has been described as “Gothic humor” but the mixture of high-drama elements, like girl-pirates, mad scientists and masked figures retains a matter-of-fact presentation, never slipping into cheap camp.

A brief bibliography would include:

• The Grave Robber’s Daughter

• The Chuckling Whatsit

• Peculia and the Groon Grove Vampires

• Peculia

• Big Book of Horror

• Mad Night, Featuring Judy Drood, Girl Detective

• Maniac Killer Strikes Again!: Delirious, Mysterious Stories

• The Ghastly Ones & Other Fiendish Frolics: A Gallery of Gruesome Creeps

• Little Book Of Horror: Dracula (Little Book of Horror)

• Evil eye

• Black Cat Crossing

• Hypnotic Tales

• Delphine #2 (“Ignatz” Collection, Volume 20)

•

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #99 – The Horror-filled House-Warming Party

(Male) It started out small. My partner and I were moving into an apartment and we were busy doing all the things necessary to make the space our own. I was fixing the frame on a mirror that would hang above the bed and my partner was meeting the neighbors who were a nice bi-racial lesbian couple. I could hear them talking through the open window. It was late spring and there was that lovely sunshine and smell of growth in the air.

The neighbors came over for a drink and I realized that the apartment also had access to a rather large first floor. In this part of the dream, in fact, it felt more like we were living in a sprawling old style farmhouse. Gradually more and more people were there, people who I only vaguely knew: the partner of a work associate, someone I think I might have gone to college with… Someone was expecting a baby so we took up a collection of spare change to buy camp pie makers from the dollar store, some thing we all thought would be a perfect gift for some reason. There was food, beer and even a couple folks off in the corner smoking marijuana, I think. The guests were all wearing somewhat shabby bohemian style clothing. This was turning into a party and I suppose I was the host.

…Then I realized that I must be the owner of the cursed mansion…

The next thing I knew, it was night. The house was now immense and very fancy. The entry way for instance had carved wood columns and carpeted steps like a movie theatre lobby. There was a huge crowd and everyone now was wearing flamboyant if not extreme evening wear, that in some cases verged on Hallow’en costumes. There was a guy there dressed like Marilyn Manson, for instance, sort of like the cover to “Mechanical Animals” but he also wore a tape measure that had been modified to indicate that he was 7’23” tall. I asked him why and he said because that’s the day that Kennedy was shot. The food and drink had also become MUCH fancier. In an alcove, someone I used to work with several years ago was acting as bartender. He gave me a roundish glass of extremely fine Scotch. I can still remember the aroma of it as I write this. The unusual shape of the glass intensified the smell. I happened across my partner who was now dressed in evening wear as well and talking to a friend who had moved down South a few months ago. I offered a taste of my scotch which I was enjoying immensely but when I got the glass back it was nearly empty. I was furious but when I looked up from the glass, I couldn’t find my partner.

I searched the mansion. Down a steep stone corridor there was a rec room that had a ceiling maybe 30 feet high. There were leather couches with brass upholstery tacks, a sumptuous red carpet, interesting stone work on the walls. There were people lolling in here as well. My partner and friend were sitting at a fancy wooden table, each eating a huge bag of potato chips. My partner tried to hide inside the bag to avoid confronting me. I yelled a bit and then stormed off.

Then I realized where I was. I was in the family crypt of a haunted mansion. In the dream, I recalled seeing a home improvement show about how the grave stones had been covered with carpeting and how the whole crypt had been converted into useable living space. I felt very uncomfortable standing on top of what I knew were hidden bodies. I ran up the stone corridor to the main house. Then I realized that I must be the owner of the cursed mansion. The curse involved some monster from beyond the grave that claimed the owner on the first night of occupation. That would be tonight at midnight. All these crowds of people must have shown up to watch me get torn apart by the monster.

I decided to outsmart the monster. I found someone I work with, a timid secretary who at least in the dream was extremely poor. I offered to give her the entire mansion. She couldn’t believe I was making a real offer. We stepped outside. The front of the mansion was covered in ivy and there were many long black cars parked up and along the driveway which was cobblestone. The only paper I could find was the back of a handbill and the only thing I could find to write with was a black crayon. I wrote up the contract and signed it. While I was waiting for the secretary to make up her mind, I doodled on the paper and sketched this angry Aztec demon or something that for some reason I knew would be the monster that would be coming for me. She couldn’t decide. The moon started to rise, bright and full, over the trees. I knew it was too late.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #98 – Driving Blind

This nightmare was really shocking though I don’t know if I can express that sensation. The situation was very matter-of-fact and every day and the images were VERY vivid. It was one of those dreams I realized the next day wasn’t an actual memory.

I was driving my familiar little compact car down a divided highway. It was night and I was alone. A mist started to rise up that was so thick it obscured the edges of the road but I was still able to see the yellow line down the side of the lane so I thought I was fine. But every now and then a particularly dense patch of fog would just wash up over the car and for an instant or two I’d be almost entirely blind. For the most part these patches would pass so I’d just keep driving, stay the course. Then while driving along, pleasantly daydreaming, I realized that I’d been driving blind for quite awhile. In fact, I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen the lane markers. I quickly flipped on the brights and I was able to pick out a yellow line. Gradually I could pick out the general sense of the road. But somehow, I was now driving on a two-lane highway. The trees and underbrush were much closer to the road and every now and then a car would pass. I would politely turn off my brights which would effectively blind me for a moment or two. Then a car passed and I forgot to put my brights back on. I daydreamed more and continued driving, but this time when I realized that I had been driving blind for quite some time, I wasn’t able to regain a sense of the road just by turning on the brights. Everything outside was a dark cottony grey. I couldn’t even see the hood of my car. I slowed down, a little bit afraid that someone would run into me from behind. I came to a complete stop and still could see nothing out any of the windows. It was almost as if I was underwater.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #97- Hiding in the Attic of the Werewolf Spaceship

(Male, 40’s) Last night I dreamed that my wife and I were flying our own spacecraft and since we were in the right part of the galaxy we stopped in at a space station to visit an old friend. The friend seemed both glad to see us and quite worried. It seems that we had visited just hours before their moon came out of hiding from behind some planet. My wife didn’t get what the problem was but it was immediately clear to me. Everyone aboard the space station were werewolves and if we were still aboard when they changed, we’d be torn apart. There was some reason why we couldn’t just get in our spacecraft and fly away so our friend agreed to hide us in the attic of his living quarters. For some reason, we had to remove our clothing so the smell wouldn’t give us away or something. So my wife and I were sealed up in this narrow, triangular space, wearing only our underwear. And for some reason, my wife thinks this whole thing is hilarious so she is laughing uncontrollably which means that it’s really only a matter of time until the werewolf-spacemen find us and tear us to shreds.

Weird, eh?

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #96 – The Long Trip to the House that Wouldn’t let People Leave

(Female, 40’s) My teenaged daughter and I were on a trip to Toronto together. We were staying in a hotel downtown and going to attend a play in which a friend of hers from high school was performing. We were on our way to the play, which was to be held at a big church far from downtown. We got as far as standing outside the huge church, an old fashioned colonial brick-style building that was surrounded by a wide lawn spotted with huge, old trees in full fall colors. My daughter remembered that she’d left something back at the hotel, something she needed desperately, so we started on the trip back to the hotel, hurrying, because we thought that we could make it back again in time for the play.

We walked for a long while, then we took a bus, then the subway. Then we came above ground and I looked around for the streetcar stop, but everything was different. We started walking, thinking that our hotel was nearby, wandering really. We went far enough that I realized we had been heading in the opposite direction. Along the beach, we saw piles of skeletons, a stack of bare white bones on the sand, and I told my daughter that that was from last winter’s storms!!

Then I thought I knew a short cut back to our hotel. We went into a shopping center and across some walkways and made a series of turns, and suddenly we were inside a children’s hospital. I asked a nurse if there was a way out of there. She looked at us very skeptically, and pointed to an elevator. My daughter walked in, though these plastic flaps that were not like real elevator doors, and pushed a button. I jumped in as the elevator started to descend. She told me it was freight elevator, not a people elevator.

…”You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted…

We came out of the building in a parking lot surrounded by a fence. So we went back into the building to go out the front door. We walked a long time, down a bunch of different hallways, looking for an exit. Finally, up ahead, I saw a staircase and a woman carrying a laundry basket. We hurried to the end of the hall, which narrowed as we went. The end was covered with thick wire mesh: you could see those stairs but you couldn’t get to them. I asked the woman, “How do we get over there?” “You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted. So she pointed to a door.

We went through the door and we found ourselves in the basement of a house. We followed the woman up the stairs. She was the mother of the family, now widowed, and she lived in the house with her teenaged son and daughter and another daughter who was 6 or 7. The house was full of all sorts of objects; it looked like a very crowded museum.
The woman began to bring out newspaper articles and programs to show us that she was a very famous musician. We said we had to get going because of the play! But the family looked at each other and smiled. “I’m sorry but there’s no way to leave. We are all trapped here. We never can go out. The house will not let us leave. ”

I looked around. All of the windows were covered with an incredibly thick ivy. They couldn’t be opened at all. The backdoor lead down to the basement, the basement where we’d come in from the hospital basement, maybe, but the door we came through had no doorknob on the inside. I opened the front door and stepped outside. There was a
small cement porch with a short brick wall around the perimeter and a rusty wrought iron gate opening to a sidewalk. I could see the whole city from where I stood. It smelled so good to be outside. I looked over my shoulder and saw the family standing inside the door, watching me. I started walking toward the sidewalk. As I did, the
wrought iron gate reached out and grabbed me and held on. I twisted and pulled, but it wouldn’t let go. It gripped and stretched, wrestling with me, until I was panting and sweating. When I backed up, toward the porch, it let go. If I moved again toward the sidewalk, it grabbed me. I want back inside where the family and my daughter were waiting. “Do you see what we mean?”

We stood there in the hallway, trying to assess the situation. “What about food? How do you get groceries?” “Boxes of groceries get dropped off in the yard.” Their crazy claim seemed to be true. Then I saw a metal switch that I hadn’t seem before, like a built-in key that you could turn. I thought maybe that was the way out. So I turned it. A whole series of gears began spinning like I’d set an enormous machine in motion. There were these shiny columns composed
of hundreds of little gears all turning. A huge rumbling noise came up from the basement and a heavy metal drawbridge covered the front door and held it shut permanently.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #95 – The Jack of Every Fable

(Male, 30’s) I woke heart racing and all I could think was, “Finally, something to send to the Grim Gnome!”

In an earlier thread of the dream I’d developed an unseemly crush on a Japanese lady I’d just met. This had just come to a close and I was feeling rather proud of myself for ceasing the flirtation as I wandered along some quasi-Boston streets that gave off a Venice vibe. The classic brownstones and familiar streets ran into what should’ve been the Charles River, sometimes neatly with sun-dappled willows lining unexpected parkways, other times the pavement and sidewalk terminating abruptly and requiring backtracking to equally unexpected bridges that crossed and recrossed the brown water.

My memory is fading somewhat but it was on this bit of walk that I began chatting with some college girl also walking there. My age hits me a bit; I’m not old, but she’s young enough to be right out as far as flirtation goes. The chatter is very much on the up and up end of small talk and so when we get to her house there’s nothing to read into her invitation for me to come in and meet her family. That being said, I’m constantly pushing to the back of my mind entirely inappropriate thoughts about how hot she is. Hawt. Very. Mm.

And something feels wrong, but I chalk it up to the inappropriate feelings. Still, crossing the threshold into her house, it’s hard to shake, this sense of wrongness. She’s talking about how she wants me to meet her grandmother, her parents, her brother. Something is out of place. The mood has inexplicably shifted.

I’m not kept in suspense long. We walk down the a tastefully appointed hallway and come to a bizarre room. The floor drops off to the right as though partially demolished and one can see the room below. To the left, opening directly onto the hallway are two rooms. As we approach, the contents of the nearest one remain obscured but the further one holds a woman. She’s sitting in a chair, wearing a white shift and as we draw nearer I can see that she’s an aged woman,
starved, with wirey grey and black hair tangled over a seamed face and eyes so sunken in their sockets as to almost be pits. In my shock I realize the girl who’s brought me here has stopped talking. She had been going a mile-a-minute practically since I met her, and now nothing. Am I looking at her grandmother? The horrible sense of wrongness comes over me again.

There’s a sort of noise from the storey below and I look down into the room and see a siamese twin, male and female, connected at the shoulder and torso. Both appear to be imbeciles but in good health – an impossibility given that one of the torsos ends in a twist of vertebrae. The sight is almost comic, like a really bad horror movie prop, but for some reason I know this set of twins is the girl’s parents. There’s something I don’t quite recall about her brother, who I saw next, a memory of something spiderish that’s swept aside as I realize I’ve come far enough to turn around and see the contents of the last room. There, scant feet from me is a creature that (now that I’m awake) I can only assume was inspired by Mattheson’s White Silk. It sat in a Victorian wheelchair, unable to rise. The hands were large, mis-shapen, pocked and clawed. The face was spider-eyed; there were no lips, no cheeks, just long, flat teeth like rodent’s incisors running the whole rim of the upper jaw. This was Grandmother; the other old woman was food.

I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house.

Naturally, I lost my shit. I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house. I made it to a room in which there was a ridiculously small window through which I know I should have been able to make myself fit, but I spent to long considering its smallness. When I quantified it as eight inches by four I knew I’d doomed myself. That’s simply impossible to fit through. The girl came to the room, all wolfish arousal and I tried to get a grip on how I was going to get out of this. As I played along with her entendres my mind scrabbled at my predicament the same way my hands had crabbed at the shrinking window moments earlier. Even though she knew I knew about her family I was still alive, so there were rules to this, if not reason.

I realized I was in a fairy tale. A misbegotten offshoot the Grimm Brothers. Had I actually heard this one somewhere? What were the rules for this story? She was panting and the climax which would either result in my escape or my demise was fast approaching. What to do? Continue? Flee? I was the Jack of every fable and had to come up with the unexpected solution…

And I woke up. Helluva dream.

Categories
Movies Other Haunts

Lycanthropes Only — werewolf-movies.com

My affection for werewolf tales is no secret.  Stories of tormented creatures of one kind who transform into tormented creatures of another kind speak deeply about so many of the profound changes we endure.  Or should I say they *can* speak deeply about such things.  So often, werewolf stories stink.  But that’s never dulled my affection.

So I was delighted to find a blog devoted solely to werewolf movies.  (http://www.werewolf-movies.com)  It doesn’t have the largest collection of reviews or articles yet but it sure seems headed in the right direction.  I also really appreciated the generous links section which has clued me into various different facets of werewolf related culture.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #94 – Mechanical Gorrillas

(Male, mid 40’s) I was a member of a scientific field study, the first to go into an area over run with a strange new creature. This area was an old abandoned amusement park. As part of the initial de-briefing, we were shown a home movie. In the movie, a family is riding on a train that traverses a large open plain. Roaming across this plain are life-size dinosaur robots that are skeletal dinosaurs. They move quite gracefully and effortlessly and are programmed to have interactions like real creatures. It’s sort of like a marionette show with self-directed marionettes that are larger than a house. There are also other kinds of animals living on this plain to make it feel like a real place — jackals, gorillas, etc. Then all of a sudden in this movie, a high school kid jumps out of the train and goes running out into the plain. The lead investigator stops the home movie and comments: He was never seen again. And furthermore, he was her brother. He had been depressed and her family had gone to this amusement park during spring break to cheer him up. This was nine years ago. The scandal had forced the park to close but it had been impossible to close down the plains fully because the dinosaur robots ran on solar powered batteries and they still roamed the area. Plus the living creatures were supported by a self-sustaining ecosphere. We were being sent in to see what was up, I think half expecting that everything would be dead.

…Roaming across this plain are life-size dinosaur robots that are skeletal dinosaurs…

Clearly that wasn’t the case. There were about a half dozen of us and none of us carried weapons, just scientific gear, pens, paper… I was a little concerned that we watched the de-briefing movie while we were inside the plain because it gave the resident creatures plenty of time to come over and size us up. There were jackals roaming around behind us but everyone’s attention was drawn to these gorillas. There were four or five of them. Some had heads with albino hair on bodies of chocolate brown and some that the exactly reversed pattern. For some reason we took that to mean they had been assembled from parts, that these were mechanical. Perhaps the boy who ran away had assembled them. The creatures kept getting closer and closer to the team and everyone just kept standing around taking notes. Finally a gorilla stood up and hammered on his chest threateningly. We realized the danger we were in and started running off down the track toward the amusement park’s offices.

Categories
Movies

Movie: Kwaidan – Gorgeous Japanese Ghost Stories

I’d never heard of Kwaidan (1965) before I checked it out this week. The DVD is released on the Criterion Collection so I knew it had to be nutritional, if not down right crunchy. It’s a pretty darned interesting film especially if you think that Japanese horror started with Ringu.

Kwaidan however, is an anthology, consisting of four separate stories all directed by Masaki Kobayashi, and as such it suffers the drawbacks of most anthology films. That is, at best it’s like a mini-film festival of short films and at worst they’re a bunch of unrelated stuff strung together. Kwaidan is more unified than many anthology films but it does feel really rather long. One suggestion that might sound heretical to cinema-snobs would be to watch each story separately, say, before watching another movie.

But Kwaidan works as a whole piece as well. Speaking personally, the stylistic unity was most effective. There is a gloriously theatrical sense to the movie; that is, it feels like it was mostly shot on a sound stage, one filled with meticulously constructed sets and folks in great costumes. For me, this sense of an artificial frame bolstered the “once upon a time” quality of the ghost stories. It’s a really different sensation than watching a lot of contemporary horror films that feel almost like documentaries and I found it quite refreshing.

I can’t say that Kwaidan is exactly scary but then I don’t find ANY ghost stories scary so much as sentimental. Better to say that it’s creepy and has many very nice, arresting images – exactly what I’d expect from a horror film on the Criterion Collection.

Categories
Other Haunts

Other Haunts: A Devil Museum in Lithuania

DevilStatue  With its finger firmly monitoring the pulse of weirdness, The Fortean Times has a great profile of a Lithuanian museum devoted entirely to depictions of devils.  Like many great collections and for that matter, many other eccentric achievments, the Devil Museum started as the obsession of a single collector.  There are devils from around the world, mostly depicted on their own but frequently the depictions are incorporated into useful objects.

     So ya don’t believe in devils?  The collection is interesting even to a staunch materialist because of its political dimension. During  Soviet times, this collection was illegal because it fell afoul of the prohibition of religion and religious artifacts.  Ironic to think that, say, a nutcracker shaped like a kitschy/folk-arty demon could land you in the gulag which was one of humanity’s better attempts to recreate hell on earth.

Lithuanian Devil Museum 

 

Categories
Book

Book: Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatos

The premise sounds like the stuff of particularly trippy fan fiction: Jack Kerouac squares off against Cthulu but Nick Mamatos pulls off an enjoyable first novel based around this theme. Move Under Ground (2006) is a breezy read, perfect for summer, without the labored prose of Lovecraft and with only a nod at the self-indulgent excesses of Beat literature. Mamatos’ work is a loving pastiche, including appearances by various authors such as Nelson Algren, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs who appears in a blaze of gunfire. I confess that I’m more a fan of the Beats than Lovecraft and more a fan of Burroughs than Kerouac so I was particularly delighted when <slight spoiler> Burrough’s “cut-up” technique was used late in the novel to speed their progress across the country. The text is peppered with with quite delightful allusions to other works and to the later lives of the characters/authors.

I know I should say something critical just to appear intelligent but, heck, taken for what it is, this book is a charmer. The novel can’t really be faulted for not having a taut plot; neither Lovecraft nor Kerouac were particularly tight. Characterization is always tricky when dealing with real-life figures but Beat literature didn’t dwell on psychological characterization so much as a delicious stream of interiority and anyone who’s read On the Road is familiar with Kerouac’s stream. (Someone stop me now–I’m starting to sound like an English professor!) I suppose the only thing that could be said that it isn’t exactly a horror novel but even that isn’t a damning criticism. While not exactly terrifying, I found the long tour of the nightmare landscape quite captivating. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so interesting for some one unfamiliar with Beat literature or the Cthulu mythos but heck, do many American youths escape adolescence without delving into either of those schools of literature?

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #85 – Zombie Farm

(Male) I was at a farm, along with an aunt and uncle of mine and a whole family of people from the neighborhood where I grew up. In the dream, they had just been featured on a television commercial for fast food tacos. For some reason we didn’t stay in the farmhouse but rather in the barn, and mostly in the cement silo. A spiral walkway had been rigged around the outside to allow us access to the living spaces higher up in the silo. When we left the silo, we were always looking over our shoulders, being careful of our surroundings. I walked through the farm yard with my aunt and uncle. My uncle showed me a new harrow he had bought. It looked exactly like his old harrow, which also looked like a toy I had had as a child.

…The area was over-run with zombies, but a kind I’d never exactly seen before…

The reason why we were so conscious of what went on around us, of course, were the zombies. The area was over-run with zombies, but a kind I’d never exactly seen before. They were gray and wrinkly like a prune from top to bottom. When they moved, clouds of dusty dirt flaked off them, like dustbowl golems. They didn’t seem much like animated corpses, though they were humanoid and extremely slow moving. However, the zombies were very powerful and it was impossible to get away if one caught you. The one fact we had in our favor was that the zombies weren’t able to climb, not stairs or ladders or even up the spiral ramp around the side of our silo. We were safe as long as we stayed on the second story. However, we had to keep the zombie population under control like they were an agricultural pest or something.

It was night. I was downstairs in the barn, around the stalls where we once kept cattle. I didn’t see the zombie until I had almost walked into it. He growled, low, deep, elemental. Before I knew it, there was another one behind me. I started to panic but I got out the handgun I carried in the dream and I shot both zombies. The first one collapsed into a pile of gray sand at least a yard high. The second one kept moving. Suddenly, I became aware of other zombies all around me. If I kept my head and kept moving I could likely get around them all. I started running and just as I cleared the barn, my foot slipped. I woke up.

Categories
Other Haunts papercraft

Paper Craft Shambler from Quake

Shambler Papercraft from Quake Yesterday I mentioned the cool papercraft coffins at Ravensblight.com — I’ve got one on my desk as I type this.  And right next to it is another papercraft model that is, if this is possible, even cooler.  It’s a “Shambler” from the video game Quake. Remember that? It was the first papercraft model I ever assembled and it was relatively simple to make.  Just print the .pdfs on heavy paper, ideally from a color printer, cut them out with an x-acto blade, fold and glue ’em up with normal white glue.  I became quite addicted to papercraft for a little while last summer since it’s so cheap and the models can be pretty darned fantastic.

 

 http://cow.mooh.org/paper/

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #78 – Office Anxiety

(Male, middle-aged) You can’t honestly tell me that most of the nightmares that people submit aren’t more like this one. Just painful, realistic work-place related stupidity. And I should probably mention that I’m sitting here in the MIDDLE of my vacation, when my dreams should be about swimming pools and pina coladas and here I am dreaming about the jerks I work with who are miles away.

So in the dream, I’m at work and it’s kind of a strange building. It feels a little bit like a subway station because there’s ceramic tile on the walls and floor. The secretary’s desk is also covered with this gray ceramic tile. I’m in a hallway and the hallway is filled with people going this way and that. A woman I work with — she’s got red hair and a green pant suit — walks up to me and starts accosting me even before she gets very close to me. “There you are! Why haven’t you replied to that e-mail I sent you? I’ve sent you TWO e-mails and you haven’t replied to either one…” But what was really strange is that she didn’t even slow down to yell all this at me. She just kept walking past me until by the very end she was probably 30 feet away, walking backward, yelling louder. The woman didn’t really have any interest in communicating what her problem was much less in getting my help to fix it. It seemed she just wanted to yell at someone for a little while.

I guess the real nightmare is that’s exactly the kind of situation I have to look forward to when I go back to work.

Categories
Double Feature Movies

Creature Double Feature – What’s the Big Idea?

In the town where I grew up there was a movie theatre – the Calvin on Michigan Avenue – that was the perfect high school date spot. For $1.25 you could see two movies – one was some film on its second run so the film was always a little battered and scratched, and the other film, well, trust me, you’d never even heard of the second film on the bill.  They were “straight to video” releases before anyone had videotape players.  Anyway, for not too much pocket money, you could bring a date and hold hands in the dark or heck, just get away from the parents for awhile. And sometimes the movies weren’t too bad.

When I went away to college, I discovered another kind of double feature, one where not only are both movies good but when they are shown together on the same night a neat sort of “discussion” starts between the films. The first one I saw was Casablanca played on the same bill as Woody Allen’s Play it Again Sam.  Though video pretty much killed the little film revue theatres, now we have the ability to make our own homerolled double features. And our double features don’t have to include snotty art house film; they can be horror movies.

The big idea for this column are suggestions for two films that might work really well together, either based on their theme, a common actor, a common situation…whatever.  And the films don’t necessarily have to be “good.” Putting one film in the right context sometimes makes different aspects noticeable, and often this means that a film that might initially be dismissed as mediocre might actually have something more profound going on.  Or for that matter, sometimes a film that’s passable on its own completely falls apart when shown beside another work. That’s the fun here.

We all get to play Dr Frankenstein.  What are fantastic “Creature Double Features” you’ve concocted? How’d they turn out?

Categories
Movies Other Haunts

Grim Reaper in Australian AIDS PSA

From Australia, with love. Imagine this cheery little warning tucked between ads for, I don’t know Quantas airlines and Vegemite.

The whole perspective of this public service announcement is weirdo-creepy, ain’t it? The image of the Grim Reaper as a bowler knocking down human pins in some dank Goth bowling alley just twists and turns in my head like a hungry corpse-worn. Compare and contrast, won’t you? this little video tidbit with the image of death as a chess player in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U219eUIZ7Qo

Categories
Other Haunts

Creepy Merchandise – “PushinDaisies.com”

ChocolateHeartMy suspicion is that anyone reading The Daily Nightmare would also be interested in the creepy-fun merchandise offered at “PushinDaisies.com” My personal favorite is the anatomically correct human heart made from a whole pound of chocolate (dark or milk) — though I’m also attracted to the cupcake tins shaped like skulls. Prices don’t seem too bad either.

http://www.pushindaisies.com/candypress/Scripts/default.asp

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #74 – Robots Attack!

(Female, early 40’s) I was trapped with a group of human survivors inside a school building. We were battling giant robots like nothing I’ve seen before. They were fifteen to twenty feet tall, they had round faces like an analog clock and their heads were part of their round bodies. They had legs with wheels on the bottoms so they could move very fast and their arms were very long and had guns and pinching claws on the end. Their arms reached all the way from their shoulders down to the ground. Some robots look like metal people but these didn’t. They were just heartless killing machines. Did I mention they were trying to kill us in any way possible at any opportunity?

There was a herd of them circling the school.. There was something we could build that could eliminate the robots but they knew about it too. One of the essential pieces was this special rock. It was as big as my hand and it was dark black, like obsidian or something. We had the rock but the robots had killed the people who were carrying the rock. We had to get it back to have any chance of survival. So someone drove a bus around the school building and when it passed by the doors we had to take turns running and jumping into it to get inside. It had to go around several times because we couldn’t all get on at once. The bus couldn’t stop because that would attract too much attention. There were also delivery trucks at the school that were unintentionally helping us because they robots had to avoid them.

We were also trying to separate the robots from each other because one of them had the rock and we knew we couldn’t destroy them all. We got this one robot alone and then we crashed our bus into it. The robot fell over. Some of us got off the bus and grabbed the rock from the claw. But we had to get back in the school then because that’s where the rest of the device we were building was. We started running toward the school but that attracted the attention of the other robots. They started speeding toward us and shooting at us. Before we made it there, I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #73 – Train Station

This was a dream straight out of Kafka. I was visiting another country where I could speak the language but it isn’t my native tongue. My room was right next to the train station, I knew when my train would be leaving and I knew the place was never very busy so I didn’t bother to saunter over there until nearly departure time.  The train must have been something like a commuter train because I didn’t have an assigned seat, I didn’t actually even have a ticket. I thought naturally that I would be able to purchase one and step aboard. But the train station was absurdly crowded. There were people everywhere and long, long line snaking around queues everywhere.  Standing in one of the lines was a colleague from work, actually a bit of a rival. He seemed in charge of a huge brood of schoolchildren who were also waiting for a train and incidentally clogging up the queues for tickets.  I stood in a different lines, several in fact, fruitlessly; once I got to the front I discovered this was, say, a window to buy caramel popcorn not train tickets. I was starting to panic.  I went inside the station which was pitch black.  A young man I know was there, someone who is confined to a wheelchair in both real life and in the dream.  He couldn’t get his chair through the turnstile so I helped him through and got him safely to his train.  But there was no place where I could buy a ticket for myself.  As I remember there was also a display set up inside the station where the history of rail travel was told in dioramas. There were no lights illuminating these displays and I was even more pressed for time. I raced outside again.  The crowds had thinned and I finally was able to purchase a ticket though this itself was a hassle because the agent wanted exact change and wouldn’t settle even when I wanted to pay too much.  Finally with ticket in hand I started running toward the train.  It was a small train, maybe three cars pulled by a steam locomotive.  There were train conductors stepping off the stairs.  It was clearly ready to depart.  I still had a small hill to run down to catch it.  I thought if I could get the conductors’ attention, they might hold the train.  I yelled but my voice was thin and tinny.  I started to take off my hat to wave it and catch their attention when I realized that I had tucked dozens of slips of paper under the brim of my hat and as I removed my hat, they all cascaded to the ground.

Categories
Halloween Other Haunts

Make Magazine’s special Hallowe’en issue!!

 

Make HalloweenOne magazine that is essential for eccentric do it yourselfers is Make. What makes it particularly interesting to a reader of the Daily Nightmare is that Make is putting out a special Hallowe’en issue with all manner of cool creepy projects. Pre-order now and it’ll be shipping in August.

http://store.makezine.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=HALLOW07