(YouTube Link)

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

Fiona (2010) by Jessica Harrison

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!

Link

This is one movie parody trailer that is not for children. -via Buzzfeed

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.

THE MAKEUP

Jack Pierce was still the makeup artist at Universal, and he welcomed the chance to use his original designs; a hairy face complete with fangs and a wolfish nose, plus hairy hands and feet. The makeup took a total of four hours to apply, most of which was spent applying tufts of fur -authentic yak hair imported from Asia- one by one, and then singeing them to create a wild look.

Chaney’s wolfman didn’t talk -all it did was grunt, growl, and howl- and that was no accident: when Chaney was fully made up, he couldn’t talk and he could only eat through a straw. As he recounted years later, the only thing worse than wearing the makeup was taking it off.

What gets me is when it’s after work and I’m all hot and itchy and tired, and I’ve got to sit in that chair for forty-five minutes more while Pierce just about kills me ripping off the stuff he put on in the morning! Sometimes we take an hour and leave some of the skin on my face!

THANKS, DAD

Most actors would probably have refused to wear such difficult makeup, but Chaney (whose real first name was Creighton) had no choice: he was desperate to make it in the film business.

When he was alive, Lon Chaney, Sr. had fought Creighton’s attempt to become an actor. He even forced his son out of Hollywood High and into a plumbing school when he asked to take acting lessons. As Chaney, Sr.’s career soared to its heights in the late 1920s, Chaney. Jr. was working as a boilermaker.

The elder Chaney died of throat cancer in 1930; Creighton Chaney signed with RKO Studios two years later. After moving from bit part to bit part for more than two years, he reluctantly changed his name to Lon Chaney, Jr. to cash in on his father’s fame. “They had to starve me to make me take his name,” he groused years later.

Finally, in 1939 -only days after his car and furniture were repossessed by a furniture company- Chaney scored a hit in a stage version of Of Mice and Men. That led to a starring role in the movie version, and in 1940, a contract with Universal.

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II

The studio had modest hopes for The Wolf Man. They scheduled its release for December 11, 1941, right before Christmas. But on December 7, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. Universal was sure the movie would become a box office disaster. After all, who was going to take time out for the movies when they were going to war?

Good vs. Evil
To their surprise, it was hit. The film played to packed movie houses all over the country, and was the studio’s biggest money maker of the season.It established the Wolf Man as an important movie monster, along with Dracula and Frankenstein. It almost singlehandedly made werewolves a part of the popular culture, and it turned Lon Chaney, Jr. into one of the best known actors in the country.

World War II probably had more to do with making The Wolf Man a hit than any other factor. What Universal had failed to realize was that the war fueled a need for the kind of escape that horror films provided. Inside a darkened theater, moviegoers could forget their troubles, at least for a while, as they watched ordinary mortals triumph over seemingly insurmountable evil. As David Skal writes in The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror:

Talbot’s four-film quest to put to rest his wolf-self is, in a strange way, an unconscious parable of the war effort. The Wolf Man’s crusade for eternal peace and his frustrated attempts to control irrational, violent, European forces… The Wolf Man’s saga was the most consistent and sustained monster myth of the war, beginning with the first year of America’s direct involvement in the war, and finishing up just in time for Hiroshima.

WOLF MAN FACTS

* The hardest scene to shoot was the final “metamorphosis” scene, in which Chaney turns from a werewolf to a human as he dies. Chaney describes the process:

The way we did the transformation was that I came in at 2:00 a.m. When I hit the position, they would take little nails and drive them through the skin at the edge of my fingers, on both hands, so that I wouldn’t move them anymore.

While I was in this position, they would take the camera and weigh it down with one ton, so that it wouldn’t move when people walked. They had targets for my eyes.

Then, they would shoot five or ten frames of film in the camera. They’d take the film out and send it to the lab. While it was there, the makeup man would come and take the whole thing off my face and put on a new one. I’m still immobile. When the film came back from the lab, they’d put it back in the camera and then they’d check me.

They’d say, “Your eyes have moved a little bit, move them to the right…” Then they’d roll it again and shoot another ten frames. Well, we did 21 changes of makeup and it took twenty-two hours. I won’t discuss about the bathroom…”

* For the rest of the cast and crew, the worst part of filming The Wolf Man was breathing the special effects fog that was used in the outdoor scenes. “The kind of fog they used in those days was nothing like the kind they have today,” cameraman Bill Lathrop remembers. “It was greasy stuff made with mineral oil. We worked in it for weeks and the entire cast and crew had sore eyes and intestinal trouble the entire time. Besides that, we were all shivering with cold because it was necessary to keep the temperature below 50 degrees when using the fog.” Female lead Evelyn Ankers fainted on the set after inhaling too much fog during a chase sequence.

* The Wolf Man made a lot of money for Universal, but not much of it filtered to the writers and actors who actually brought it to life.  “My salary was $400 a week,” scriptwriter Curt Siodmak recalls. “When the picture made its first million, the producer got a $10,000 bonus, the director got a diamond ring for his wife, and I got fired, since I wanted $25 more for my next job.”

LON CHANEY’S WOLFMAN SEQUELS

Chaney made four wolfman movies for Universal during the war years …more than Universal made of Dracula or Frankenstein. The others were:

* Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943). Chaney travels to Castle Frankenstein to see if he can find a cure for his wolfman condition in Dr. Frankenstein’s notes. All he finds is the Frankenstein monster, played by Bela Lugosi, who had turned down the original Frankenstein in 1931 because there wasn’t any dialogue.

Movie Note: Lugosi played a particularly stiff Frankenstein, not just because he was growing old, but also because in the original version of the film, Frankenstein is left blind and mute after a botched brain transplant. In the version released to theaters, all references to blindness, muteness and the brain transplant were removed, so he just looks old.

* House of Frankenstein (1944). Mad scientist Dr. Gustav Neimann (Boris Karloff) escapes from an insane asylum with the help of his hunchback assistant Daniel (J. Carrol Naish) and flees to castle Frankenstein. There he teams up with Dracula (John Carradine), Frankenstein (Glenn Strange), and the Wolfman (Chaney) to terrorize the countryside until they are finally killed by villagers.

* House of Dracula (1945). Dr. Franz Edelman (Onslow Stevens) finds a way to cure Dracula (John Carradine) of his vampirism, but Dracula refuses to submit. Instead, he bites Dr. Edelman and turns him into a vampire; then Edelman raises Frankenstein from the dead, just as the wolfman arrives on the scene.

Movie Note: Originally titled The Wolfman vs. Dracula, the movie had to be renamed because the Wolfman and Dracula do not actually meet in the film.

* Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Bud Abbot and Lou Costello team up with the Wolfman to prevent Dracula (Lugosi) and a mad female scientist (Lenore Aubert) from transplanting Costello’s brain into the Frankenstein monster. Critics say the film is symbolic of the decline of Universal’s horror classics in the late 1940s -fans say it is one of the best films Abbot and Costello ever made.

THE END

Chaney would reprise the wolfman role in movies and television for the rest of his life, including appearances on The Pat Boone Show, and Route 66. He also played the Frankenstein monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Count Dracula in Son of Dracula (1943), and the Mummy in three Mummy movies.

A heavy drinker, by the 1960s he was reduced to appearing in low-budget schlock like Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1965); Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967); and Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1970). He died of a heart attack in 1973. But the wolfman lives on.

______________________________________

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Great Big Bathroom Reader

This 1998 edition is so big it covers topics from your own backyard to the farthest reaches of the globe, such as the world’s tallest buildings, the world’s strangest beer, and more.

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!

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

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.

It was a bold statement at the time. Because Hollywood studios owned all the theater chains, movies couldn’t be shown without studio backing. But in 1948, the Supreme Court decided the system constituted a monopoly, and it forced studios to sell off their theaters. Suddenly, every Ed Wood with a camera could get his movies on the big screen. But without big stars or big budgets, indie flicks had to find other ways to attract audiences. And so the “exploitation movie” was born. The films shamelessly drew in crowds with shocking subjects, jazzy titles, and special effects -three things right up Corman’s alley.

In fact, part of Roger Corman’s legend sprang from the fact that he could create an entire movie out of a single good special effect. One of his earliest films, Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), was conceived when Corman posed as a major producer and convinced inventors to lend him their new, one-man submarine for his “next project.” With a spiffy prop secured, all Corman needed was the little stuff -a title, a story, a screenplay, actors, and money. After scrounging up $12,000, he concocted a film about a man-eating, mutant sea creature that terrorizes good-looking tourists until a dashing marine biologist rams the beast with a submarine. (clip) Then he sold the movie for $100,000. All in all, it provided Corman with his trademark recipe for success -cheap production values, a wild sense of humor, and pulp-fiction plots all whipped briskly into a hefty profit.

Little Shop of Hormones

It wasn’t long before Monster caught the attention of American International Pictures (AIP), a production company that believed in the then-revolutionary idea of marketing movies to teens. And Corman fit right in with their mission. With AIP’s backing, Corman began churning out an unbelievable six movies a year. At that pace, logic and continuity went out the window. Vikings appeared on screen wearing sunglasses, and actors were reused in multiple roles. In one Western, a cowboys shoots at himself dressed as an Indian. But with the cheapskate director behind the camera, it wasn’t just the actors being repurposed; it was also the scenes. Corman liked some of his footage so much that he used it in other movies, again and again.

Corman also ruthlessly jettisoned elements that bogged down big-budget Hollywood films -elements such as nuanced characters and storylines. Instead, Corman focused on bells and whistles. In Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), he drew on his engineering background, meticulously placing a horror scene every five minutes throughout the film. (trailer/full movie) With a running time of 62 minutes, only the basics of plot and humor survived. The final product wasn’t art, but it wasn’t boring, either.

Surprisingly, the faster Corman made his movies, the better they turned out. Another cornerstone of his legend is the making of The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which he reportedly conceived, wrote, and filmed in less than one week to take advantage of a leftover stage set before it was torn down. The result (which included an early Jack Nicholson appearance) was one of Corman’s finest movies. (trailer)

Tripping Ahead

Roger Corman aspired to make more than just cheapo flicks. In the 1960s, he began directing bigger-budget films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories, starring Vincent Price. These became instant classics of gothic cinema. The success encouraged Corman to flex his creative muscles further and make what his peers thought impossible -a serious film. The Intruder (1962), starring newcomer William Shatner, told the story of a man fighting racism in the South. (clip) The movie was shot on location in Missouri, but when the locals discovered that the script addressed the evils of segregation, they physically chased the crew out of town. Although the film played well to critics and was hailed as a masterpiece in Europe, U.S. audiences hardly got a chance to see it. American theaters refused to show the incendiary film, and the movie flopped. The director learned his lesson and never made another “message” film again.

Not one to sulk, Corman reverted to what he knew best -fast, cheap entertainment. His assembly-line productions required a huge amount of manpower, and in the process they attracted an entire generation of young directors and actors. Martin Scorsese, Peter Fonda, Robert De Niro, and Sylvester Stallone all apprenticed under Corman, accepting minimum-wage work in exchange for the opportunity to study his low-budget ways. As legendary director James Cameron once put it, “I trained at the Roger Corman Film School.”

But the younger generation provided more than just cheap labor. They also gave Corman a window into America’s growing counter-culture of motorcycle gangs, hippies, and LSD. The result can be seen in his definitive LSD movie The Trip (1967). The fact that he dropped acid before filming (to create a more “authentic” experience) only added to the lore. (trailer)

Through the years, Corman’s films became increasingly anarchic, putting him at odds with the older producers at AIP. The final straw was his 1971 flick Gas-s-s-s, in which  mysterious gas wipes out everyone over the age of 25, and wild subcultures dominate the Earth. (clip)  AIP re-edited the entire film without Corman’s permission, dramatically decreasing its grooviness. Corman retaliated and formed his own company, New World Pictures, where he continually refined his aesthetic. In his own words, he aimed to produce “contemporary dramas with a liberal-to-left-wing viewpoint and some R-rated sex and humor.”

How B-Movies Joined the A-List

Working with Hollywood’s future luminaries, New World raised trashy cinema to an art form during the 1970s. Ironically, Corman’s company also brought legitimate art films to the masses. It distributed the works of critically acclaimed foreign directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Roberto Rossellini to drive-in theaters. Corman knew the films’ casual attitude towards nudity would appeal to the drive-in crowd, while their artistic merits would draw in the intellectuals. Bergman, for one, never decried the crass commercialization of his work, but rather rejoiced at the thought of drunken teenagers necking to his brand of existential dread.

During the 1980s, Corman’s empire slowly dwindled, as companies such as Miramax muscled him out of the foreign-film market. His movies also suffered as VHS killed off smaller theaters, meaning his exploitation films were forced to go straight to video. Worst of all, he lost his pool of talented young directors and writers to the big studios, which were replicating his style of action movies, emphasizing thrills and humor over plot and character. The only difference was that instead of calling them “exploitation movies,” the studios called them “blockbusters.”

In fact, Hollywood’s obsession with blockbusters originated with the success of one movie. The plot? A man-eating sea creature terrorizes good-looking tourists until a marine biologist hunts it down. The movie was Jaws. But it sounds an awful lot like Monster from the Ocean Floor, doesn’t it?

Bonus: Roger Corman’s Frugal Hall of Fame

The Movie: Waterworld (1995)
The Problem: Upon reading the script, Corman famously announced, “We can’t do this. It’ll cost $5 million!”
The Solution: Corman sold the screenplay to Universal Studios, which produced it for $175 million. The movie bombed at the box office.

The Movie: The Terror (1963)
The Problem: After completing The Raven ahead of schedule, Corman had a leftover set and actors, and nothing to do with them.
The Solution: Make another movie. Written in five days and shot in two, The Terror makes absolutely no sense. Corman let his crew take turns directing it, so in the end, the film fell into the hands of Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill (one of Quentin Tarantino’s greatest influences), and even Jack Nicholson -thus earning it the “Most Great Directors Ever to Make One Bad Movie” award. (trailer/full movie)

The Movie: Cockfighter (1974) Tagline: “he came into town with his cock in hand, and what he did with it was illegal in 49 states.” (trailer)
The Problem: The sport of cockfighting was a source of shame in the South, and many people were uncomfortable seeing a movie about it.
The Solution: Corman downplayed the cockfighting by adding sex scenes to the film’s trailer, despite the fact that those scenes didn’t appear in the movie. When Cockfighter‘s director, Monte Hellman, argued that this was false advertising, Corman simply inserted the sex scenes into the film. Cockfighter turned a nice profit.

The Movie: The Big Bird Cage (1972)
The Problem: Women in prison make for great exploitation movies, but it costs money to film in a prison. (trailer)
The Solution: A little barbed wire and some bamboo huts in a Philippine jungle helped Corman invent an entirely new (and incredibly cheap) genre -women in prison camp! The increased sweatiness didn’t hurt sales, either.

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The above article by Ian Lendler is reprinted with permission from the September-October 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!

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?

Link

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

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.

Sucker Punch was another popular subject for costumes this year, but hers was just detailed enough to make her the best Babydoll at the convention.

While there may have been more authentic looking Wonder Woman costumes, this woman’s confidence made her the most impressive of the bunch.

Personally, I think this might be my favorite costume at the convention. She took a gorgeous Victorian-styled silk dress and managed to be the most regal and feminine of all the TARDIS costumes I’ve ever seen.

Of course, these three showed just how much variety you can have when designing a TARDIS dress. I’m thinking we should throw a Neatorama Dress Like the TARDIS contest one of these days to see what you guys would come up with. What do you think?

Although I generally try to avoid adding images of kids to these galleries, this mother-daughter steampunk pair were just too cute to resist. And of course, I did still get her mother’s permission before posting her up here.

As a huge fan of Roy Lichtenstein’s artwork and the fact that she incorporated one of his trademark speech bubbles into her costume made her the ultimate living incarnation of his work.

This woman was spotted waiting for the Family Guy panel. While there are a lot of people who won’t recognize Consuela from the show, I think most of us who do can’t help but giggle when we see her.

I think steampunk peaked in popularity last year, but there were still plenty of people sporting the vintage-futurist style. This was my favorite of the bunch though.

Although these two ladies also had extraordinary dresses with a perfect balance of brass accessories.

And these two chaps did an excellent job with their costumes, which look like an explorer and a mad scientist, respectively.

This Red Queen costume was simply perfect with the amount of detail she incorporated and when paired off with some pink flamingos, I can easily say it was the best Red Queen costume I’ve ever seen at the convention.

One of my favorite sights of Comic Con has always been the delightful costume mash ups, the majority of which involve Star Wars characters. Whether it’s an Elvis Stormtrooper, a Sherlock Jedi or Darth Mario, these costumes are always fun.

This little one is most certainly the most cute and lovable version of Darth Vader I’ve ever seen. If this is how the Dark Side represented itself, how could anyone resist?

Here’s another great Star Wars mash up, showing exactly what happened to the veteran stormtroopers of Endor. What a sad, sad tale.

If you’re one of those people who thinks geeks and sports don’t mix, then I’d like you to meet Darth Marino of the Miami Dark-phins. Yes, it is a terrible pun, but it is an awesome costume.

By the way, if you like the “That’s How I Roll” shirt the girl in the left of the photo (me) is wearing, you can get your own in the Neatoshop. Yes, now you too can dress like a Neatorama author. Lucky.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a costume that’s 100% authentic to the series… particularly if that means being a victim to one of the show’s many deadly monsters.

As I said, there’s nothing wrong with the classics. Especially when you get the whole crew covered in your cosplay group.

This Power Ranger was running (literally) around the whole convention with his giant knife and a smaller blade in the other hand the entire weekend. If you went to Comic Con and didn’t see him, you must have been doing something wrong.

My apologies for how risque this picture is, but I know that anyone who loves The Venture Brothers will most certainly enjoying what the sexy couple of Brock Samson and Molotov Cocktease look like in real life.

On a less risque, but equally fun note, here’s how young Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy would look like if they weren’t cartoons.

Howl’s Moving Castle

As much as everyone loves The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, you almost never see hobbit costumes. If you want to know why, consider the fact that this guy has to walk around in dress shoes covered in prosthetics all day.

On the other hand, the relative comfort of Harry Potter costumes mean there are always ample eager Gryffindor students running about the convention. It was this Sirius Black costume that really got my attention though.

Similarly, there are always plenty of women adorned in skintight vinyl Catwoman costumes, but the fact that this one decided to go for the newest incarnation of Catwoman in Arkham City is what made her stand out.

I’ll be honest, on their own, I don’t know that I would have really noticed any of these costumes, but where else but Comic Con will you see Superman, Wonder Woman and Princess Leia hanging out together?

If there’s anything creepier than The Observer character from Fringe, it has to be having three of them next to each other.

I always thought Waldo was a little too classy to hang out with Charlie’s Green Man from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but I guess I was wrong.

The only thing that could have made this Jack costume even more accurate would have been if he were giving away free cheeseburgers all day.

Here’s the part where I start getting in some murky water. The rest of the costumes are ones I don’t recognize, so if you know what they’re from, leave a note in the comments and I’ll add it in the article.

I believe she’s just a fancy Victorian lady, but if you recognize her from something, leave a comment.

He seems like a video game character, but I’m not sure which one. Help me out here people.

To be fair, I do recognize the three people on the left, Hit Girl, Kick Ass and Sailor Moon, but I don’t know who the girl in blue is supposed to be. Do you?

Again, I think she’s a video game character, but I have no idea what game or what character.

This gorgeous girl looks like an anime character, but she might be from a video game. I don’t know, do you? Thank you Niño nerd for pointing out that she is Lightning from final fantasy XIII-2.

I love this girl’s facial expression, but I don’t know who she’s dressed as. Any tips are appreciated. This gorgeous girl is Alice from American McGee’s Alice video game. Thanks OTB!

Either this guy is a generic military character or he’s from a video game. Let me know if you know. Niño nerd was right again, explaining that he was from Resident Evil Mercenaries. Anyone know the character’s name? Does he even have one?

If you just can’t get enough of these galleries, you can always check out over 200 more costumes from this year’s Comic Con over at my blog, Rue The Day. Also, Geeks Are Sexy posted four galleries of costumes, for Day One, Day Two, Day Three, and Day Four of the con.

Also, you can enjoy pictures from the 2009 and 2010 conventions here at Neatorama or check out Rue The Day’s 2008, 2009 and 2010 costume galleries, along with great pictures of hot cosplay girls from the 2008, 2010 and 2011 conventions. And this year, there’s even a gallery of hot gents for the ladies out there.

And, if you have your own galleries from the convention, feel free to include links to them in the comments.

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.

Link

‘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.

On a sunny June day in 1948, while taking a long walk, that darkness emerged. Several months pregnant and pushing a baby carriage loaded with groceries, Jackson found the trip more difficult than she’d anticipated. The entire time, she couldn’t stop thinking about the book her husband had shown her on ancient rites of human sacrifice.

As soon as Jackson got home, she wrote the 3,378 words of “The Lottery.” It took her just two hours, and seemed to flow out of her nearly perfect. “Except for one or two minor corrections,” she remembered later, “It needed no changes.”

Her husband quickly recognized the story was genius, and Jackson sent it on to her editor at The New Yorker. Soon, her life would change.

THE RULES OF THE GAME

The tale begins pleasantly in a small, unnamed town. The day is “clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day,” and the people are gathering the square, children first. “Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones,” we’re told -the first vague note of menace in the story. Soon, the adults arrive, joking, gossiping, and “speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes.” This is Everytown, USA, Jackson implies. But something is off. The villagers are piling up rocks.

Then the lottery begins. One by one, the head of each household draws a slip of paper from the box. Casual dialogue and deadpan description mask a building sense of danger. Only the occasional unexplained reference hints at the macabre. “Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn will be heavy soon,’” says Old Man Warner. It seems that whatever is taking place has been going on since time immemorial.

One of the townspeople, Bill Hutchinson, draws the unlucky slip of paper. Bill, his wife, and their three children must now draw from the box in turn. This time, Bill’s wife, Tessie, gets the marked paper. “All right, folks,” says Mr. Summers, the man in charge, “Let’s finish quickly.”

It’s only in the final short paragraphs of “The Lottery” that the story turns to outright horror. “The children had stones already,” Jackson writes. “And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.” As the stones hit Tessie, she screams “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right.” The story ends with six infamous words: “And then they were upon her.”

WINNING THE LOTTERY

The editors at The New Yorker were taken aback when Jackson submitted “The Lottery,” but they also appreciated its literary virtues. In the end, the decision to accept it was one vote shy of unanimous.

The public wasn’t quite as accepting. People were outraged. The story’s reception came as a surprise to Jackson. But mostly, she was appalled by the readers who wanted to know where they could find a lottery to watch themselves.

Good or bad, “The Lottery” had everyone talking. Shirley Jackson had made a name for herself in fiction. Her publisher, Farrar Strauss, hurried to capitalize on the buzz by publishing a collection of her work, The Lottery and Other Stories. To promote the book, Strauss circulated rumors that Jackson had used voodoo to break the leg of publishing rival Alfred J. Knopf, billing her as a practicing witch. In truth, Jackson was known to dabble in mysticism and the occult. She read tarot cards and collected books on witchcraft and magic.

Today, the rumors surrounding Jackson’s life and the vitriol over her short story have been largely forgotten. What remains is “The Lottery” itself -the paradigm of a perfectly crafted narrative. While the tale begins on a sunny, summer day, it builds at a ferocious pace, from daydream to nightmare. The writing is tight and compelling, and the story is impossible to forget. As author Jonathon Lethem puts it, “It now resides in the popular imagination as an archetype.”

Just as those initial readers were drawn to the piece in spite of their indignation, generations of readers have since been simultaneously horrified and touched by the tale. Authors including Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, Richard Matheson, and Neil Gaiman all credit Shirley Jackson as a source of inspiration, and for decades, “The Lottery” has been taught in middle schools and high schools across America. As author A.M. Holmes pointed out, the story is introduced to students when they are “just waking up to the oddity of things, and the terror that is in everyday life.”

Until her death at the age of 48, Shirley Jackson kept writing short stories and novels, including The Haunting of Hill House (1959), which sparked multiple film versions. But it’s “The Lottery” for which she’s best known. The story has been adapted for radio, television, film, and even ballet. It’s been written about and dissected in countless theses, dissertation, and books. And its warnings about the danger of conformity are still relevant. “The Lottery” revealed an uncomfortable truth about the human psyche and, in doing so, became a classic piece of American literature.

(YouTube link)

__________________________

The article by Dan Saltzstein is reprinted from the January-February 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Subscribe today to get it delivered to you!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

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 blue; 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

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

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]

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.

Customers had marked it as odd that Worden’s store had been closed since before noon that Saturday, her busiest day. No one had seen the steady, well-liked storekeeper since the previous day. Her pickup truck was missing from its usual spot. Concerned, Worden’s deputy sheriff son, Frank, let himself into the store. A late entry in Worden’s sales book (“1/2 gall, antifreeze”) triggered Frank’s recollection of Ed Gein’s loafing about the store the previous week. Gein had asked whether Frank would be out deer hunting on Saturday. When Frank answered that he would, Gein casually mentioned he might be back for a can of antifreeze.

On Frank Worden’s tip, Sheriff Art Schley and Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster made tracks for Gein’s lonesome, decaying hermitage. The hand of death had first passed over the stark farmland when Gein’s father succumbed to a stroke in 1940. Four years later, a fire claimed the life of Ed’s older brother, Henry, and, the following year, Gein’s hellfire-and-brimstone-spouting mother met her maker, too. Now, Gein lived alone—or so it had seemed.

Gein was elsewhere when the law came to call. Schley and his officers lighted the way with kerosene lamps and flashlights; the old house was only partly jerry-wired for electricity. The lawmen picked their way through a rat’s nest of browning newspapers, pulp magazines, anatomy books, embalming supplies, food cartons, tin cans, and random debris. Upstairs, five empty, unused rooms slept under blankets of dust; by contrast, the bedroom of Gein’s late mother and a living room, both nailed shut, were kept pristine.

Raking the rubble of Gein’s kitchen and bedroom, the officers uncovered sights for which no highway wreck or Saturday night special shoot-’em-up had prepared them. Grinning, loose-toothed Ed Gein did not live alone, after all. Sharing his abode were two shin bones. Two pairs of human lips on a string. A cupful of human noses that sat on the kitchen table. A human skin purse and bracelets. Four flesh-upholstered chairs. A tidy row of ten grimacing human skulls. A tom-tom rigged from a quart can with skin stretched across the top and bottom. A soup bowl fashioned from an inverted human half-skull. The eviscerated skins of four women’s faces, rouged, made-up, and thumbtacked to the wall at eye level. Five “re-placement” faces secured in plastic bags. Ten female heads, hacked off at the eyebrow. A rolled-up pair of leggings and skin “vest,” including the mammaries, severed from another unfortunate.

In the adjacent smokehouse shed, police found what they would later identify as having once been Bernice Worden. Nude, headless, dangling by the heels, she had been disemboweled like a steer. Sitting atop a pot-bellied stove in the adjacent kitchen was a pan of water in which floated a human heart. The freezer compartment of the refrigerator was stocked with carefully wrapped human organs.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it. I just heard about it while I was eating supper,” mumbled Gein when Frank Worden located and confronted him about the discovery of Bernice’s corpse. Worden arrested Gein on the spot. In no time flat, Plainfield’s Caspar Milquetoast underwent a lie detector test, a murder charge, and psychiatric examinations at Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Until then, no one had credited the mutterings of a shiftless crank about his “collection of shrunken heads.” No one paid any mind to his inside knowledge of the area’s many unsolved disappearances of women. The Gein farmhouse offered testimony not only to man’s fathomless capacity for the barbaric, but also to the ability of an entire community to deny its very existence. “It can’t happen here,” insists the satiric lyric of a Frank Zappa song, “Help I’m a Rock.” The “here” in question is the human heart and mind.

Gein met the probing of his examiners with barely audible, monotone ramblings. His memory was murky. He admitted to only two murders, claiming he was “in a daze” during both. No law officer, psychiatrist, or court examiner could penetrate Gein’s motivations. Yes, he admitted to dismantling Bernice Worden’s cash register and removing $41. Yes, he had also exhumed his first cadaver with a farmer crony, Gus. Yet his rationale for both was identical: He liked “taking things apart” to see “how things work.”

Deep in the night, while his hard-working neighbors made love, snored, studied the Good Book, and fretted over bills, bland, simple Ed Gein delved into the mystery of “how things worked” by traipsing around the farm with the skin, hair, and face mask of newly exhumed corpses strapped to his naked body. Authorities discovered that Gein’s first graveyard visit led to forty-odd other digs—always graves of females—often just a stone’s throw from the final resting place of his mother. He told his examiners that he and Gus (who had died several years earlier of natural causes) buried the bones and incinerated less-interesting body parts in the Gein stove. When newspapers reported that Gein claimed “I never shot a deer,” how many locals shuddered at the memory of plastic bags packed with tasty “venison” given them by Gein?

Gein made his first kill in 1955 when, late one bitter winter night, his .32 rifle drew a bead on a bosomy, fifty-one-year-old, divorced tavern owner. Using a sled, Gein dragged the body of Mary Hogan to his “summer kitchen” shed. Police suspected Gein of torturing and murdering at least ten other victims between Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden. He never owned up to them before being judged criminally insane and sentenced to life at Central State Hospital.

Local newspapers, some of which dubbed Gein “the mad butcher,” reported only his murders and alleged cannibalism. Transvestism, grave robbing, and, as some speculated, an incestuous relationship with Mom apparently went beyond the limits of even big-city reportage of the 1950s. For “America’s dairyland,” such topics were literally unspeakable. But what the newspapers suppressed, back-fence rumors and sick jokes spelled out. The press and the ambulance chasers attached themselves to Plainfield like piranha on a drowning sumo wrestler. Cars packed with the curious drove miles to aim Brownie cameras and to stone Gein’s “murder house.” Outraged locals circled the wagons and closed their minds. Yet many natives were known to drive miles out of their way to bypass the Gein farm. Inevitably, there were cracks in the wall of denial. Physicians throughout the state found their offices packed with patients complaining of gastrointestinal symptoms. Local psychiatrists treated many ids scrambled by Gein’s penchant for “spare parts.”

Sick jokes, “Gein-ers” the locals called them, ran rampant. Setup: “How were Ed Gein’s folks?” Payoff: “Delicious,” Or “What’s Ed Gein’s phone number?,” which drew the response: “O-I-C-U-8-1-2.” And this to defuse another unspoken terror: “Why could no one ever keep Gein in jail?” Punchline: “Because he’d just draw a picture of a woman on the wall and eat his way out” Bar hounds roused boozy yuks by ordering Gein Beer (“Lots of body, but no head”), and corn-fed tykes with faces like Campbell’s Soup can kids jumped rope, chanting:

’Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the school,
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a mule.
The teachers were hung
From the ceiling with care
In hope that Ed Gein
Soon would be there.

To the day of Gein’s quiet, uneventful death on July 26, 1984 in the asylum, hospital workers described him as “tractable,” “harmless.” His awareness of the outside world was minimal. Of his crimes he was virtually an amnesiac. Perhaps hoping to purge Plainfield of the Gein legacy, unknown persons torched the farm over two decades ago. To this day, the morbid, the crime buffs, the thrill seekers, and the marginals make pilgrimages to the ruins. And locals admit a Yuletide never passes without some child’s warbling, “Deck the halls with limbs of Mollie.”

No one can measure the shock waves unleashed by Ed Gein’s monstrous acts or the anguish he inflicted upon his victims or their survivorso In 1957, most Americans preferred to perceive themselves as God-fearing, clean-living men in gray flannel suits, or perfectly perfect Doris Day wives, or wholesome kids next door like Shirley Jones and Pat Boone in April Love. We elected a president named Eisenhower, twirled hula hoops, and watched “Ozzie and Harriet.” But in a town less than forty miles from Plainfield, at least one man stared hard into the bathroom mirror while shaving. He brooded over Gein, thought of himself, and shuddered.

___________________________

Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello was first published in hardback in 1990. A film adaptation of the reference work is now in development, with Rebello as screenwriter. You can download and enjoy the new ebook version at a fraction of the original hardback price at the Sony Reader Store.

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.

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

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

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.

YouTube Link

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

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

Check out this award winning short film (it’s only 3 minutes long). It’s a nice shoutout to the gothic horror films of the 20s and 30s. Simple but effective.

Plot Synopsis:

A leasing agent prepares an apartment with a mysterious past for an
afternoon viewing. While awaiting the arrival of the prospective client
the leasing agent learns that she’s not alone in the apartment.

– via fightingowlfilms

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Gukbe2000.

I’ll tell you what it equals…it equals awesome, baby! A mighty and fitting homage/tribute to the gruesome blood chilling movie The Thing using GI Joes and crazy Disco-Dance music from the Parisian band Zombie Zombie. If you don’t enjoy the music I suggest hitting the mute button though I do believe the music lends this clip a certain sense of anxiousness and suspense similar to that felt throughout the John Carpenter movie.

via BoingBoing – Link
Zombig Zombie band – Link

Poking around Fangoria‘s site I stumbled upon something seemingly out of the ordinary – a short film review of an unknown film by an unknown filmmaker.

The short called "The Night Shift" is an adventure/comedy/horror/sci-fi film about a cemetery night watchman whose nightly job is to keep the cemetery’s residents from escaping. Citing Fangoria’s positive review I gave the 23 minute film a view and thought it was fantastic. It’s truly a unique and out of the ordinary concept that makes for a very entertaining film. I hope everyone can set aside 23 minutes and give this wonderful film a chance. You won’t regret it.

Meanwhile, I checked out the filmmaker’s website (www.fightingowlfilms.com) and learned they’re a Mobile, Alabama (where?) based low-budget filmmaking group aspiring to make a feature film. I wish them the best of luck and with a film like "The Night Shift" on their resume I look forward to their future endeavors.

I’ve posted Part 1 of the film as found on YouTube. Part 2 and 3 are also available as well.

– via fangoriaonline

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by Gukbe2000.

Ever wonder how a Barbie could have less brains? Zombie Barbie is a sexy, creepy and totaly modern woman. The link has photos to help you figure out how to make your own.

Link Via BoingBoing