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Ending slavery wasn't the only thing Abraham Lincoln did when he was President of the United States. He also saved the Republic from vampires.
Behold the new trailer from Tim Burton's movie, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire
Hunter, starring Benjamin Walker and directed by Timur Bekmambetov based
on the novel
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Laughing Squid
Vampire Bottle Opener – $5.95
Valentine’s Day is almost here. Are getting ready to hunker down and watch your favorite vampire love story over and over again? Make sure you are well prepared with the Vampire Bottle Opener from the NeatoShop. This great bottle opener is shaped like a vampire’s fangs. Even werewolf fans will appreciate this fantastic kitchen gadget.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fangstatic Barware & Cocktail items.
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Bite Me Vampire Fangs Bottle Opener – $9.95
Halloween is just around the corner. Are you looking for a spooktacular way to open your favorite beverage? You need the Bite Me Vampire Fangs Bottle Opener from the NeatoShop. This fangstatic metal bottle opener is shaped like a vampire’s fangs. Your friends will be dying to know where you got such a cool bottle opener.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more frighteningly fabulous Cocktail & Barware items!
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a hugely successful television series on WB and UPN from 1997-2003. Writer and producer Joss Whedon, long heavily constrained by the requirements of others, finally had the opportunity to create a series that was completely his own. Whedon had worked on it for years, first selling the screenplay in 1988 for a film version which was released in 1992. The story had been shredded and reworked into a campy, funny movie that Whedon loathed. After five years, he was able to launch a darker, more dramatic, but still funny television series which captured the imagination of a generation of fans. Here are eighteen facts that you might not know about that show:
1. Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia, was Whedon’s original pick for the role of Buffy. Sarah Michelle Gellar was slated to play Cordelia. Gellar had to lobby Whedon heavily before he would allow her to read for the lead role.
2. When she was five, Sarah Michelle Gellar starred in a Burger King commercial that disparaged McDonald’s burgers. She was promptly named in a lawsuit by McDonald’s and had to give a deposition in the case.
3. If you were watching US television during the early 1990s, you may have spotted Anthony Stewart Head (Giles) in a series of 13 commercials for Taster’s Choice coffee which imagined Head as the wooing paramour of a new divorcee. The role somewhat typecasted him, so Head came to Los Angeles during “pilot season” in order to find a very different sort of role.
4. The name “Giles” came from Barbara Giles, Whedon’s housematron when he attended a private high school in the UK.
5. Nicholas Brendon (Xander) has a stutter.
6. James Marsters’ (Spike) first role was in a fourth-grade production of Winnie the Pooh. He played the role of Eeyore and fell in love with acting. His professional debut came years later in a stage production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He had a nude scene in that play and has been comfortable performing unclad ever since. Marsters later broke into television as a bellhop on Northern Exposure. He returned the next season to play the role of a priest.
7. Can you imagine Spike with a deep Southern accent? Because that was Whedon’s original plan before casting Marsters.
8. Sunnydale’s ZIP code would place the town in Morgan Hill, California.
9. Sarah Michelle Gellar has a pronounced fear of cemeteries.
10. Whedon was inspired for The Gentlemen in the episode “Hush” from, in part, Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. This episode, a fan favorite, received two Emmy nominations for writing and cinematography.
11. The Sunnydale weatherman in the episodes “Amends” and “Hush” is a real-life weatherman — Mark Kriski of KTLA in Los Angeles.
12. Buffy occasionally made favorable references to Xena: Warrior Princess. The writers of Xena returned the favor by mentioning a play called “Buffus the Bacchae Slayer” in their episode “The Play’s the Thing.”
13. The show was the central metaphor that terrorism expert Anthony Cordesman used in a major 2002 treatise called “Biological Warfare and the Buffy Paradigm.” Cordesman explained that Buffy was “about a teenage vampire slayer who lives in a world of unpredictable threats where each series of crises only becomes predictable when it is over.”
14. The Simpsons was a leading inspiration for Whedon’s work in Buffy. Whedon wrote “If I could write for any show, it would be The Simpsons and Twin Peaks…As much as you could say that Buffy is a cross between 90210 and The X-Files, you could say it’s a cross between The Simpsons and Twin Peaks.”
15. The episode “I Was Made for You” has Warren building a robotic girlfriend who goes crazy and becomes destructive. The role was written with Britney Spears in mind, but she turned it down.
16. “Graduation Day” was delayed and rewritten due to the Columbine school shooting. The story involves the destruction of Sunnydale High School with explosives by the show’s heroes. That central element was kept, although certain statements by them were removed.
17. The musical episode “Once More, With Feeling”, lasted 68 minutes during its first run. It was edited down for subsequent rebroadcasts. Much of the episode is sung. Even the mutant in the Mutant Enemy trademark at the very end of the credits sings. That name, by the way, comes from a line in the song “And You, And I” by Yes.
18. Vera Wang designed Buffy’s wedding dress in “The Prom”, as well as the dress that Sarah Michelle Gellar wore to her own wedding.
Sources:
Topping, Keith. Slayer: A Totally Awesome Collection of Buffy Trivia. London: Virgin, 2004. Print.
—–. Slayer: An Expanded and Updated Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. London: Virgin, 2002. Print.
Tracy, Kathleen. The Girl’s Got Bite: The Original and Unauthorized Guide to Buffy’s World, Completely Revised and Updated. New York: St. Martin’s, 2004. Print.
Images: NY Post, Fox Studios, Warner Bros., Renaissance Pictures
Move over, Twilight! Here’s the best vampire scene ever, from the amazing martial arts film Kung Fu Beyond The Grave
The second I heard "Count Dracula, come to my AID!" / "I’m COM-I-I-ING!" I knew it’d be a big hit!
Team Billy Chong FTW: Link [embedded YouTube clip]
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Lil' Vampire
Pacifier - $4.95
When milk is not enough, here's the Lil' Vampire Pacifier from the NeatoShop for your favorite bloodsucking baby: Link
Or if that's not for you, how about:
More: Fun and Unusual Pacifiers
Gin
and Titonic Ice Tray - $6.95
It's going to be a scorcher this summer, so be sure to get yourself some ice cubes. These unusual ice cube trays from the NeatoShop make for great gifts and ice breakers at BBQ parties:
Cold
Blooded Ice Tray makes ice cubes shaped like vampire fangs! $7.95
See many more cool ice trays over at the NeatoShop: Link
An unnamed woman in Colorado backed her car into a canal near the town of Fruita Sunday night. She told police that she saw a vampire in the road and was so scared she put her car into reverse and backed away, ending up in the canal.
She was not injured. Her husband arrived on the scene and took her home. Troopers do not suspect alcohol or drugs to be factors in this accident.
They added that they found no evidence of a vampire.
Link (with video)
Cold Blooded Vampire Fangs Ice Tray – $7.95
Need to add a bite to your beverage? Take a look at the Cold Blooded Vampire Fangs Ice Tray from the NeatoShop. Perfect for Bloody Mary and other spine-tingling drinks for the vampire lovers in your family: Link
In 1954, Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis (The City of the Dead) was the scene of a series of bizarre events in which local children gathered to hunt the Gorbals Vampire.
Hundreds of children aged from four to 14, some of them armed with knives and sharpened sticks, were patrolling inside the historic graveyard. They were, they told the bemused constable, hunting a 7ft tall vampire with iron teeth who had already kidnapped and eaten two local boys.
The children’s behavior resulted in a “moral panic” among adults, who blamed American comic books – especially Tales From The Crypt.
The government responded to the clamour by introducing the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 which, for the first time, specifically banned the sale of magazines and comics portraying “incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature” to minors.
Now several participants in the 1954 vampire hunt are reporting that when they were children, some Glasgow parents threatened children with an “Iron Man” bogeyman, and the only monsters with iron teeth were in the Bible (Daniel 7:7) and in a school poem; when they were students they didn’t even have access to comic books or to television.
National Geographic shows us a 330-year-old book that describes the fear of what we would call zombies or vampires. De Masticatione Mortuorum, Latin for “The Chewing Dead”, discusses the customs of the time for preventing corpses from rising up and eating the living. A portion is translated to English:
Our Common People attempt to avert the danger of chewing by placing under the chins of the dead a portion of recently excavated earth, lest they perhaps open their mouths and chew on the attached bands…
Others, who do not consider this a sufficiently safe measure, before the mouth of the dead is closed, also place a stone and a coin in the mouth, so that in the event that it begins to chew within the grave, it would find the stone and coin and would abstain from chewing. Which fact was witnessed in its time in a multitude of places in Saxonia by Gabriel Rollenhagen: Book IV Mirab. Peregrinat chapter 20, n. 5 in Kornmann.
The book is part of this Tuesday’s episode of National Geographic Explorer called Vampire Forensics. Link -via Buzzfeed
Got a Twilight Mom? Etsy seller meekssandygirl crocheted the perfect necklace for her: a Vampire Bite silk cashmere necklace.
Link | More unusual Christmas gift ideas by our very own Jill Harness over at Inventor Spot
Illustration by Travis Pitts
Dr. Monster (Travis Pitts) created this illustration for his Flickr ‘Stream. Pitts calls it “we’ve got some work to do now,” and it clearly tells a dramatic tale. Note the R.I.P. S+F+D (Shaggy, Fred & Daphne). Link
What if all our favorite pop culture vampires got together in the same room? Pretty much what you’d expect.
Having done novels, short stories, and web-serials, Stephen King is branching out to … comics. He’s agreed to co-write the first five issues of American Vampire by Scott Snyder, a new series for DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint:
So what lured the master of horror to comics after all this time? He certainly hasn’t been lacking for work, with a new novel, Under the Dome, due out November 10. He also released a novella, Ur, exclusively for the Amazon Kindle in February. But apparently, the promise of a fresh take on vampires was enough to entice King to make the jump.
Link (Illustration by Rafael Albuquerque) – Thanks Brian Ries!
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The article above, written by Matt Soniak, appeared in Scatterbrained section of the Mar - Apr 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine (the excellent "The 25 Most Powerful Books of the Past 25 Years " issue). It is reprinted here with permission. Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today!
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The Rockin’-R-Ranch in Columbia Township, Ohio hosts a haunted house and conducts haunted hayrides during October. This year, they also hosted a vampire wedding! Jack Holsinger was carried in a coffin to the alter where he met his bride Connie Spitznagel. Both were dressed as vampires. The best man appeared as pirate Jack Sparrow and the maid of honor was decked out as the Bride of Frankenstein.
Minister Greg Kopp got into the spirit of things as well. The couple vowed to love each other, haunt with each other and howl at the moon together till the end of time.
They promised to forsake all other ghouls and goblins and grow in love and “other body parts” until – you guessed – death parts them.
Instead of a first kiss, Holsinger was ordered to bite his new bride on the neck.
Many of the wedding guests were also dressed as vampires or other Halloween characters. Patrons of the haunted house were welcomed to the wedding as well. Link -via YesButNoButYes
(image credit: Alicia Castelli/The Chronicle-Telegram)
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In 1920s, mutilated bodies of murdered children turned up in the streets of New York City. The crimes were so horrific that they were quickly attributed to a boogieman.
The truth was more mundane but much more disturbing – the murders were perpetrated by a man named Albert Fish, who aptly earned the nickname of the Vampire of Brooklyn:
At this time, Albert H. Fish was working at the nearby YMCA and the center for mentally challenged children. He was fired when “things about these children came out”. He was quoted as saying he “liked killing disabled and black boys because no one would miss them”.
February 11, 1927 Billy Gaffrey was snatched from a hallway in an apartment building. A witness said “it was the Boogieman that got him”. Albert Fish had taken the boy back to the boarding house he was staying at and got right to work. Using a saw, knife, and cleaver he dismembered and drained the blood of Billy Gaffrey. He drank the blood and saved the meat for food. He took the ears and face and made it into a stew with carrots and onions and his behind was roasted in the oven.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.
Residents of the small town of Forks, Washington is being invaded by vampires. No, not real ones – these vampires are far worse: they’re teenage fans of the movie Twilight!
The logging town has been transformed, says Mike Gurling of the Forks Chamber of Commerce. "Two years ago we did not have a cash register or credit card terminal. Now our sales of anything that says ‘Forks’ have increased dramatically." A literary symposium was held last month in Forks high school, including – unusually for a symposium – "an actual, real Prom". Chris Cook, editor of the local paper and author of guide book Twilight Territory, says the school’s principal was mobbed at a Seattle airport when a teenage fan spotted his Forks Spartan jacket and started yelling, "He’s from Forks, he’s from Forks!" The fervour is such, Cook says, that a local evangelist, Hallelujah Bill, has started preaching to fans about the dangers of becoming cult followers of the books.
While some don’t like the attention Twilight has brought, others are enjoying the kudos. Cook says that "traditionally, Forks has been considered by Seattle folks as the sticks, the home of loggers and simple rural ways. Now it’s a bit of a status symbol."
They’re screwed down though, which makes them safer but rather counterproductive.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by ant8627.
An exhumation of a mass grave of plague victims in Venice, Italy yielded the skeleton of a woman who was probably considered a vampire in her time. She was buried with a brick in her mouth. The skeleton was found by Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence.
At the time the woman died, many people believed that the plague was spread by “vampires” which, rather than drinking people’s blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying. Grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them doing this, Borrini says.
The belief in vampires probably arose because blood is sometimes expelled from the mouths of the dead, causing the shroud to sink inwards and tear. Borrini, who presented his findings at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Denver, Colorado, last week, claims this might be the first such vampire to have been forensically examined. The skeleton was removed from a mass grave of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576.
(image credit: Matteo Borrini)
