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This Valentine’s Day why celebrate in a warm and cuddly manner when you can get twisted? Sweet Tooth from the Twisted Metal video game franchise is back, and he’s looking for love in all the wrong places, like from a kidnapped victim in an abandoned building.
He’s dark and scary and completely mental, just like love can be at times. Enjoy the true horror of Valentine’s Day with this dark little tale!
–via Destructoid
These classically-styled statues of classy ladies with a grisly twist are the products of Jessica Harrison’s twisted imagination. She performs minor surgery on ceramic statues, removing an arm or skullcap or sometimes the entire head, then she modifies the statues to tell a dark, murderous tale.
If Hummel ever started making statues like these, I’m sure a Brony-esque trend would follow.
Link –via SuperPunch
If you happen to be planning an Evil Dead themed wedding or birthday party, then this Necronomicon shaped cake was made just for you. Entitled the Necronomicnom, if you ingest a slice of this scary pastry, it’s sure to bring out some inner demons. Makes for one hell of a good time!
This is one movie parody trailer that is not for children. -via Buzzfeed
The following is an article from Bathroom Readers’ Institute’s Uncle John’s Great Big Bathroom Reader.
The werewolf is one of the most recognized movie monsters in history, thanks in large part to the 1941 film The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney, Jr. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the making of that classic film.
FRIGHT FACTORY
The early 1930s was the golden age of movie monsters. In 1930, Universal released the classic Dracula, starring Bel Lugosi; a year later it had another huge hit with Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein. Inspired by their success, Universal decided to make a movie about a werewolf. In 1931, they handed writer/director Robert Florey a title -The Wolf Man- and told him to come up with an outline.
A few months later, Florey submitted notes for a story about a Frenchman who has suffered for 400 years under a witch’s curse that turns him into a werewolf during every full moon …unless he wears a garland of wolf-bane around his neck.
The studio approved the idea and scheduled the movie as a Boris Karloff vehicle for 1933. A shooting script was written …and rewritten …and rewritten several more times. By the time it was finished, the script was about an English doctor who was bitten by a werewolf in Tibet, then turns into one himself on his return to London. Universal renamed the pictures Werewolf of London.
BAT MAN
By now, however, Boris Karloff was too busy to take the part …So it went a Broadway actor named Henry Hull. Werewolf of London hit theaters in 1935.
The movie wasn’t very good: One critic has called it “full of fog, atmosphere, and laboratory shots, but short on chills and horror.” That was largely because Hull didn’t look scary. He refused to cover his face with werewolf hair, complaining that it obscured his features. Makeup man Jack Pierce -already a legend for creating Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein- had no choice but to remove most of the facial hair, leaving Hull looking like a demonic forest elf. Werewolf of London was a box office disappointment. It was also Hull’s last werewolf film.
SECOND TRY
In the early 1940s, Universal launched a second wave of horror films featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, and other classic monsters. They decided to give the werewolf another try, too.
This second werewolf film started the same way the first one did: with the title The Wolf Man. This time the scriptwriter was Curt Siodmak. He started from scratch, researched werewolf legends himself, and used what he learned to write the script. The story he concocted was about an American named Lance Talbot who travels to his ancestral home in Wales and is bitten while rescuing a young woman from a werewolf attack.
Once again, the studio wanted to cast Karloff in the lead …and once again he was too busy to take it. They considered Bela Lugosi, but he was too old for the part. So they gave it to newcomer Lon Chaney, Jr., son and namesake of the greatest horror star of the silent movie era. Chaney, Sr. was known all over the world as the “Man of 1000 Faces,” for his roles in The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Chaney, Jr. had recently starred in Man Made Monster, and Universal thought he had potential in horror films.
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Some of the most over-the-top horror films are based on real-life stories, though you wouldn’t know it to watch them. For example, the story in The Exorcist was based on the exorcism of a 12-year-old boy named Robbie Mannheim.
According to the attending priest, the boy attempted to contact his late aunt using an Ouija board, after which paranormal activity started in the home including unexplained noises and an occurrence of a poltergeist-like event involving blankets flying around of their own accord. Robbie then began to show signs of possession, speaking in tongues and blisters and cuts appearing. He was taken to a mental institute in St. Louis where he was treated both mentally and spiritually. It was here that a group of priests started to perform various exorcising rituals to try and extract the demon. After a staggering total of 30 attempts, the priests were satisfied that they had successfully banished the demon from Robbie’s body.
After the ceremony he went on to have a very normal life, including a successful career at NASA. If my mother only knew that demon possession could lead to working for NASA, I’m positive that she would have made me play with Ouji boards every night.
Each of the 13 horror stories has a video clip from the film, and many have documentary clips from the stories that inspired them. Link
Atlas Obscura continues with their 31 Days of Halloween, featuring a new and gruesome post every day about the world’s ghosts, goblins, legends, and death rituals. This post deals with the widespread fear of being buried alive, whether by mistake or by evil intent. That fear has a long history.
Being buried alive is a fear that has been with humanity for a long, long time. As early as the Greeks one can find stories of people being prematurely pronounced dead and accidentally burned alive on their funeral pyres. At various moments throughout history, this fear, this Taphephobia, has actively gripped the Western mind. The terror wasn’t without it’s basis in reality.
One circumstance in which live burials are thought to have often taken place were during outbreaks of disease such as the black plague. Due to the rapid spread of the disease victims were buried almost immediately after death, and sometimes beforehand. These circumstances would repeat themselves again with the cholera outbreaks throughout Europe.
Throughout the enlightenment, doctors were learning more about the human body and death. As they learned to revive people who were previously considered dead (such as drowning victims via the recently invented mouth to mouth resuscitation) doctors began to question if all the people they were burying had truly been dead. With increasing reports of premature burial, by the late 1700s the fear of being buried alive had fully taken hold of the Western mind.
And then folks dreamed up many ways to avoid this horrific fate, which you can read about. Link
(Image credit: Illustrator Harry Clarke)
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, big-budget movies were classy affairs, full of artful scripts and classically trained actors. And boy, were they dull. Then came Roger Corman, the King of the B-Movies. With Corman behind the camera, motorcycle gangs and mutant sea creatures filled the silver screen. And just like that, movies became a lot more fun.
Escape from Detroit
For someone who devoted his entire life to creating lurid films, you’d expect Roger Corman’s biography to be the stuff of tabloid legend. But in reality, he was a straight-laced workaholic. Having produced more than 300 films and directed more than 50, Corman’s mantra was simple: Make it fast, and make it cheap. And certainly, his dizzying pace and eye for the bottom line paid off. Today, Corman is hailed as one of the world’s most prolific and successful filmmakers.
But Roger Corman didn’t always want to be a director. Growing up in Detroit in the 1920s, he aspired to become an engineer like his father. Then, at age 14, his ambitions took a turn when his family moved to Los Angeles. Corman began attending Beverly Hills High, where Hollywood gossip was a natural part of the lunchroom chatter. Although the film world piqued his interest, Corman stuck to his plan. He dutifully went to Stanford and received a degree in engineering, which he didn’t particularly want. Then he dutifully entered the Navy for three years, which he didn’t particularly enjoy. Finally, in 1948, he set his sights on something he did want -to make his mark in Hollywood.
Rising from the Ocean Floor
Corman’s career began at the bottom. He started in the film business as an entry-level reader for 20th Century Fox, wading through the worst scripts at the studio. The job was thankless, but the incompetent writing inspired Corman to give screenwriting a try. He moved to Paris to focus on his craft and eventually sold a script to Allied Artists Pictures. However, the resulting film was so awful that Corman vowed never to let a studio meddle with his work again. From that point on, Roger Corman was determined to make his own movies.
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Sure we usually think of horror movies as a Halloween treat, but movie makers don’t limit themselves to just one holiday. Flavorwire has a slideshow featuring horror movies that feature just about every major holiday of the year.
From Black Night (Chirstmas) to Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill!, they’ve got them all covered. I’m a little disappointed that Silent Night, Deadly Night, but they only used one movie per holiday.
Personally, I haven’t seen any movies on their list, but some of them certainly sound entertaining. Have you guys watched any of these?
The following article is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John’ Bathroom Reader.
The original Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t Boris Karloff -it was (believe it or not) a character created by a 19-year-old author named Mary Shelley …more than 190 years ago.
BACKGROUND
In the summer of 1816, 19-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her 24-year-old husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Switzerland “It proved a wet, uncongenial summer,” she wrote some 15 years later, “and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.”
To pass the time, the Shelleys and their neighbors -28-year-old Lord Byron, his 23-year-old personal physician, and his 18-year-old lover- read German ghost stories aloud. They enjoyed it so much that one day, Byron announced, “We will each write a ghost story.” Everyone agreed, but apparently the poets, unaccustomed to prose writing, couldn’t come up with anything very scary.
Mary was determined to do better. “I busied myself to think of a story,” she recalled, “One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror.” Yet she couldn’t come up with anything. Every morning, her companions asked: “Have you thought of a story?” “And each morning,” she wrote later, “I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.”
A FLASH OF INSPIRATION
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
One evening, Mary sat by the fireplace, listening to her husband and Byron discuss the possibility of reanimating a corpse with electricity, giving it what they called “vital warmth.”
The discussion finally ended well after midnight, and Shelley retired. But Mary, “transfixed in speculation,” couldn’t sleep.
“When I placed my head on the pillow,” she recalled, “I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arouse in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw -with shut eyes but acute mental vision- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together …I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy half-vital motion.
“Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of light which he had communicated would fade; that this thing would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery eyes…”
THE PERFECT HORROR STORY
At this point, Mary opened her eyes in terror -so frightened that she needed reassurance it had all just been her imagination. She gazed around the room, but just couldn’t shake the image of “my hideous phantom.” Finally, to take her mind off the creature, she went back to the ghost story she’d been trying to compose all week. “If only I could contrive one,” she thought, “that would frighten people as I myself had been frightened that night!” Then she realized that her vision was, in fact, the story she’d been reaching for.
As she recounted: “Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. ‘I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.’ On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began the day with the words, ‘It was on a dreary night in November,’ making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.”
THE NOVEL
The first version of Frankenstein was a short story. But Mary’s husband encouraged her to develop it further, and she eventually turned it into a novel. It was published anonymously in three parts in 1818. “Mary,” notes one critic, “did not think it important enough to sign her name to the book… And since her husband wrote the book’s preface, people assumed he had written the rest of the book as well… It was not until a later edition of Frankenstein that the book was revealed as the work of a young girl.”
________________________________
The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!
Got
a spoiled brat? When scoldings and time-outs don't work, scare 'em straight
with the horror train.
Yes, that's right: here's the Yokai Train, a scary summer "attraction" in Kyoto, Japan, featuring creepy monster aboard a train.
As the Yokai Train leaves the station, a spooky sounds can be heard coming from the speakers, and the monsters make their entrance. Some are dressed in white kimonos and wear white masks and triangular white crowns (which means they are dead), while others sport creepy masks and torn rags. Some of the older kids react pretty well to the yokai, but the younger ones cry and scream while their mothers and the other adults watch and smile. It sounds a bit cruel, but by the last station of the tour most children make friends with the monsters.
Actually, this explains a lot about Japan: Link
Yes, it’s a bowling ball. It just looks like the head of a zombie! Artist Oliver Paass painted a set of these balls that were then placed in German bowling alleys to advertise a TV channel specializing in horror films. Link -via @johncfarrier
As I’m sure all of you already know, Comic Con took place last weekend and as always, there were hundreds and hundreds of costumed convention goers. This year Zeon Santos and I took over 200 pictures of people in costumes and here are the best of the bunch, starting with the Oogie Boogie Man and Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas.
Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers was the most popular couples costume this year, but what set these two apart was their great accessories.
Perhaps the biggest (and in my opinion, the coolest) trend this year was turning male characters into adorable female versions. I can’t think of anyone that better epitomized this trend than this adorable Toy Story pairing.
Here’s another delightful gender-bending costume, this time a female Doctor Who. Of course, those familiar with the show know that he just might become a female during his next incarnation.
While this isn’t quite what I was talking about when I mentioned turning traditionally male costumes into adorable female versions, I doubt any of you have ever seen a more girly Master Chief.
Have you ever found yourself wondering about the layout of the Overlook Hotel while watching the Shining? No? Well, me neither, but film analyst Rob Ager sure has, and he’s made an unusual little film about it, in which he uses a Duke Nukem mod as a virtual tour guide with a gun.
‘They’re not going to be pushed around any more’
You know how horror movies are sometimes designed around a lack of budget? In this short film, the bloodthirsty killers are shopping carts! Once you get past that bit of silliness, this actually resembles a sequence from feature films you’ve seen. -Thanks, Anthony Carpendale!
Spiders Are Wonderful is a story by Toby Vok, labeled as non-fiction for children age 4-6. So I didn’t expect much, until I got to the page you see here. The tale veers off into a delightfully scary direction after that point. Link -via My Own Private Book Club
A classic in modern literature, “The Lottery” did more in nine pages than most novels do in nine chapters. Here’s how Shirley Jackson outraged a nation with fewer than 3,500 words.
Spoiler alert: this article reveals the ending of “The Lottery”. If you haven’t read it, hop to it! It’ll take 15 minutes, tops.
In 1948, The New Yorker published the most controversial short story in its history: “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, a 31-year-old wife and mother living in Vermont. The simply told tale covers a ritual lottery in a sunny, rural town. But what starts out bathed in warmth and charm grows eerier and eerier, until the horrific purpose of the lottery is revealed in the story’s final paragraphs. Soon after the piece was published, angry letters poured in to The New Yorker. Readers canceled their subscriptions. And while many claimed they didn’t understand the story, the intense reaction indicated they understood it all too well.
“The Lottery” was published at a time when America was scrambling for conformity. Following World War II, the general public wanted to leave behind the horrors of war and genocide. They craved comfort, normalcy, and old-fashioned values. Jackson’s story was a cutting commentary on the dangers of blind obedience to tradition, and she threw it, like a grenade, into a complacent post-war society.
LUCK OF THE DRAW
Shirley Jackson was not the kind of person you’d expect to be a literary firebrand. Shy and high-strung, she dropped out of the University of Rochester in 1935. Her second stab at school was more successful. At age 20, she enrolled at Syracuse University, where she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. Together, they published a short-lived literary magazine called The Spectre.
After graduating from Syracuse, the two got married and moved to New York City, where Jackson gave birth to the first of her four children. Soon after, in 1945, Hyman got a job teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. The family moved to North Bennington, a tiny, rural town that later became the setting for “The Lottery.” While Stanley taught, Jackson wrote. She penned a few offbeat stories for The New Yorker, but mostly she produced mainstream pieces for women’s periodicals such as Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal. After several years of living in Vermont, Jackson had another child and was carrying a third. From a distance, her life seemed tranquil and wholesome. But something darker was brewing inside.
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Happy Alfred Hitchcock Day! In honor of the great filmmaker, here are five things you may not know about the legendary director, courtesy of Stephen Rebello, the author of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.
1. Alfred Hitchcock never won a Best Director Oscar, yet sixteen of his films garnered fifty nominations, his 1940 classic Rebecca won Best Picture, and he was nominated as Best Director for Rebecca, Suspicion, Spellbound, Lifeboat, Rear Window and Psycho. “Always a bridesmaid,” he philosophized, “never a bride.”
2. Although Hitchcock, who once called actors “cattle,” was not considered an “actor’s director,” such stars as Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Robert Walker, Grace Kelly, Doris Day, Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren gave some of their finest performances in his films.
3. Hitchcock admired the work of fellow directors F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, but he also repeatedlywatched guilty pleasures Smokey and the Bandit and Benji; the latter 1974 stray dog hit reportedly made the dog-loving Hitchcock cry.
4. Hitchcock married his screenwriter-editor-assistant director wife Alma in 1926 and they remained constant companions and working partners until he died in 1980. Their only child, actress Patricia Hitchcock appeared on Broadway and in her father’s Stage Fright, Strangers On a Train and Psycho.
5. Hitchcock was famed for his wry, very British sense of humor which often expressed itself in practical jokes: pretending to lose the key to the handcuffs that bound together for an entire day his The 39 Steps stars Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll; giving an elegant dinner party at which every course, from soup to dessert, was bright blu
e; and switching off the lights on the set of Strangers On a Train and stranding his daughter Patricia for three hours at the top of a Ferris wheel.
Stephen Rebello is a screenwriter, journalist, and the author of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, which has been bought by Paramount Pictures and The Montecito Picture Company for production as a dramatic feature film. Get more Hitchcock news from Rebello on Twitter at @HitchandPsycho.
The right music makes a world of difference. In this remixed movie trailer, the family musical The Sound of Music turns into a zombie Nazi thriller! -via Buzzfeed
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Shain Erin uses dolls as an art medium. These creepy dolls are fashioned as zombies, ghosts, mummies, skeletons, and monsters! People like them; many of the dolls featured in his gallery have been sold, but there are some available in his Etsy store. The ghost shown is named Cecilia. Link -via Daily Dumper
What do you get when you mix Chatroulette with an ad for the horror movie The Last Exorcism? A brilliant viral marketing, that’s what!
IZ Reloaded has the video clip of some unsuspecting Chatrouletters chatting with a sexy girl that turned out to be more than they bargained for: Link [embedded YouTube]
On June 16th, 1960 -fifty years ago today- moviegoers were treated to a new Alfred Hitchcock film that would change the idea of horror films forever. It was the release date for Psycho, the psychological thriller that introduced us to Norman Bates and The Bates Motel. The simple act of taking a shower become a frightening experience for those who saw the movie. Open Road Media selected this anniversary date to release an ebook version of the nonfiction masterpiece Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello, which takes a deeper look at Hitchcock’s masterpiece.
Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is a behind-the-scenes look inside the classic suspense shocker—and the creative genius who revolutionized filmmaking.
Author Stephen Rebello explores the creation of one of Hollywood’s most iconic films, from the story of Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for the character of Norman Bates, to Hitchcock’s groundbreaking achievements in cinematography, sound, editing, and promotion. Filled with insights from the film’s stars, writers, and crewmembers, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is a riveting and definitive history of a signature Hitchcock cinematic masterpiece.
The ebook (available now) covers every step of the story of Psycho, from the crime that inspired the novel and then the movie, financing, casting, filming, special effects, trivia, to the reception the public gave the film. Read about the many versions of the story Hitchcock rejected and the writers tweaked, the careful planning that allowed shooting to be completed in just a month, and the trademark suspense Hitchcock used to hype the unveiling of the finished product.
Reprinted here with permission is the very first chapter, the story of murderer Ed Gein, which inspired novelist Robert Bloch to write the story that became the movie Psycho.
THE AWFUL TRUTH
There was a young man named Ed
Who would not take a woman to bed
When he wanted to diddle,
He cut out the middle
And hung the rest in a shed.
ANONYMOUS, 1957
In late November 1957, no one would have marked Plainfield as unlike any other hardscrabble, rawboned Wisconsin farm hamlet. That winter was especially raw. Ask any of the friendly townies of third- and fourth-generation German and French stock. In flat, laconic tones, they recite litanies of burst water mains and permafrost; of nights spent hunkering down against slashing winds and rains that blew east along Canada’s border. But that November also saw Plainfield mentioned in newspapers across the country. Remind these dairyland types about that little bit of business and their open faces wall up. They begin to study their shoes or make excuses before they beg off. That month, in 1957, Plainfield police smoked out an oafish fifty-one-year-old, odd-job-and-errands-man named Ed Gein (rhymes with mean) as one of the grisliest mass murderers America ever spawned.
Long before the headlines were to brand Gein as a bogeyman, his rural, God-fearing community of seven hundred had chalked him off as a crank. A perpetually grinning, unmarried recluse, Gein rambled over 160 ruined acres once farmed by his parents and brother. Even locals who never gave a second thought to hiring Gein for errands or baby-sitting had wearied of his harebrained theories. He liked to rag on the whys and wherefores of criminals who fouled up, or yammer endlessly, and pitifully, about women. Plainfield-ers recall his clinical obsession with anatomy and with the sex-change operation of Christine Jorgensen. But there was more to Gein than loony talk. That came home with a vengeance with the discovery of bloodstains on the floor of Bernice Worden’s general store on November 16.
Hanako-san is a girl ghost who haunts school toilets. The urban legend goes back decades. No one knows for sure how the story got started, but artists and pop culture outlets are happy to feed the fear.
It is not uncommon for schools to have a toilet permanently occupied by the mysterious girl, who is known in Japanese as Toire no Hanako-san (lit. “Hanako of the toilet”). She is often found in the third stall in the restroom on the third floor — usually the girls’ room — but this can vary from school to school. Details about her physical appearance also vary, but she is usually described as having bobbed hair and wearing a red skirt.
Hanako-san’s behavior also varies according to location, but in most cases, she remains holed up in the bathroom until an adventurous student dares to provoke her. Hanako-san can be conjured up by knocking on the door to her stall (usually three times), calling her name, and asking a particular question. The most common question is simply “Are you there, Hanako-san?” If Hanako-san is indeed present, she says in a faint voice, “Yes, I’m here.” Some stories claim that anyone courageous enough to open the door at this point is greeted by a little girl in a red skirt and then pulled into the toilet.
See more possibly disturbing pictures of Hanako-san at Pink Tentacle. This story is part of a series on Japanese urban legends. Link
How many times have looked in a mirror and saw someone you didn’t realize was there with you? Never? Well, it happens a LOT in the movies. -via FilmDrunk
Bunchland Magazine, a digital magazine that features awesome and
creative families from all over the world, received this submission for
our food section, called Munchland. In this section, families send us
videos of themselves cooking or talking about food.
This video, entitled The Dessert of Frankenstein, came
from dad Eric Woolfe, a brilliant playwright/actor who creates
deliciously macabre horror-inspired puppet shows.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Factorbot.
The way to get more mileage out of a monster is to make him/her the hero. It’s been done quite a few times, sometimes resulting in more confusion than entertainment.
We’d love to say that we can’t blame Dell Comics for trying to cash in on the Batmania of the 1960s by turning Dracula into a superhero, but… Well, it’s Dracula as a superhero. Even worse, it’s a modern-day Count Dracula as a scientist who accidentally swallows some formula that allows him to transform into a bat and then decides to fight crime in a purple jumpsuit. Seriously, in what world is that a good idea?
I thought for sure this list would include Godzilla and The Terminator, but it is limited to classic Halloween-type horror monsters. Link -via Digg
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The Itchy & Scratch Show is a “show within a show” featured on The Simpsons. If you are at all familiar with it, you’ll enjoy today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. See if you can decide which title is an episode of Itchy & Scratchy, and which are actual names of horror films. It’s not easy! I scored only 50%. Link
Quick, think of a piece of music from a scary movie.
If you could think of seven different themes, chances are a few of them are on Cinematical’s list.
One of the seven is one of my favorite movies of the genre, Poltergeist, music by Jerry Goldsmith.
Jerry Goldsmith previously contributed a classic horror theme with his score for Richard Donner’s Omen, but this one, not unlike Komeda’s work on Rosemary’s Baby, runs counter to expectations that horror movie music needs to be naturally dark or heavy to be menacing. That said, the children’s chorus that sweetly and innocently provides a theme for the film’s young protagonist – ironically, sort of the conduit for both its “monster” and heroine – is at once wholesome and terrifying, creating a similar sense of unease and eventually terror as the kids embody the film’s themes of childhood swallowed by a mysterious and terrifying world.
More great themes at Link.
Screenwriter John Cox posted a guest blog at Frankensteinia about his search for the site of the only location shot in the 1931 movie Frankenstein.
Where did Universal shoot the famous Maria meets the Monster scene in the classic 1931 Frankenstein? For years I could never get a straight answer. Some claimed it was shot on the Universal backlot along with the rest of the movie. But it’s clear from the size of the lake and the rugged mountains in the distance that this can’t be true.
Cox found that the scene was filmed at Malibou Lake and set off to find the exact location of the scene, despite the knowledge that it was now in private hands, and that after almost 80 years, it might not look the same. But he was surprised at what he found! Link -via Metafilter
You can learn a lot from science fiction. For example, you should not try to bring someone back from the dead because they will try to kill you. Proof comes from seven different stories that send chills down our spines.
Pet Sematary: Any dead creature buried in the ancient Micmac burial ground comes back to life, just not quite the way you put it in. After losing his young son Gage, Louis buries his son in the graveyard. Sure enough, Gage comes back — and promptly murders his mother.
That’s only one of ten reasons not to resurrect dead bodies. Link -via Gorilla Mask
