Even the most original movie plot is inspired by something, usually a book, comic book franchise, or another movie. Biopics are based on real people. Horror films, as we've seen, often follow old and timeworn plots and details that are used over and over. But some are inspired by mysterious but real news items. Yes, they are changed a lot to give some kind of explanation and backstory, but the basic premise is ripped from the headlines -and the legends that sometimes grow up around those headlines. You might be surprised that even the 1958 movie The Blob was inspired by a news item.     

Premise: A mysterious alien life-form terrorizes a small town and consumes everything in its path as it grows bigger and bigger.

Real-Life Inspiration: Believe it or not, The Blob is based on a New York Times article from 1950 titled, "A ‘Saucer’ Floats to Earth And a Theory Is Dished Up." The story followed four Philadelphia police officers who came into contact with a strange gooey material, which is now believed to be "Star Jelly," a transparent gelatinous substance. When one of the officers tried to move the goo, it started to dissolve and evaporate, so there was nothing to show the FBI when they arrived on the scene except a spot on the ground.

Read about eight more such news stories that inspired horror films at Mental Floss.

Once you read this comic, you can go back and look at the color highlights in each panel to see all the little things that gives him a reason to keep on keepin' on. This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.

Cat owners know that weird feeling of seeing their cat watch something that isn't there. Can they see ghosts that we can't see? Cole and Marmalade seem to.

(YouTube link)

Watch these two go ghost hunting around the house. There must be a lot of ghosts hanging around, so good luck sleeping tonight. -via Laughing Squid

Scarlette Tipton is three years old. Her family celebrates Halloween in a big way, and Scarlette gets as many costumes as her imagination can handle. See, Scarlette's left arm was amputated when she was less than a year old due to cancer. She's in remission now, and her mother Simone Tipton is teaching her to embrace her difference.

Tipton told Mashable, "We just want to make Halloween extra special for her. It’s my husband and I’s favorite holiday and she had her amputation the day before her first Halloween. She spent it intubated, on all kinds of pain meds, but she was a survivor! So now Halloween means something more to us."

See more of Scarlette at Mashable.

Mike Powell and Jürgen Horn brought us a performance of Vietnamese Water Puppets in Ha Long Bay last spring. The art form left them wondering what the mechanics of such a show looked like on the other side of the set, so they went backstage to see.    

As it turns out, and as you can see in our video, there’s no great secret — these guys are just highly proficient at their job, and use clever tools to create their illusions. More than the poles being pushed about, and the strings being pulled, the biggest trick seems to be the crew’s highly synchronized organization. There’s not much room backstage, and they’re all standing in waist-high water, so retrieving and storing the right puppets is almost an art form in itself!

See the video of the water puppet show from the other side, and read how they managed to get it, at Hanoi for 91 Days.

Every year as trick-or-treat approaches, we see lists of ranked candy going around the internet. Most are opinions, hoping to draw comments. Some are based on sales or some other concrete metric. But now Walt Hickey did some real research. First, the website FiveThirtyEight staged a poll where people would select the better of two kinds of candy at a time, in order to rank their popularity. Then he crunched more number to determine why some candies rose to the top. Neither the expense nor the sugar content explained the rankings.

So if it’s not price or sugar, there must be something about what’s in the candies that make some better and some worse. With the fervency of a stay-at-home dad who recently learned of a child’s mild peanut allergy, I scoured the internet for descriptive ingredient data about all the candies in our data set. Were they chocolate? Did they contain peanuts or almonds? How about crisped rice or other biscuit-esque component, like a Kit Kat or malted milk ball? Was it fruit flavored? Was it made of hard candy, like a lollipop or a strawberry bon bon? Was there nougat? What even is nougat? I know I like nougat, but I still have remotely no clue what the damn thing is.

A statistical analysis of ingredients in the ranked list indicates that we indeed have preferences that are common across the population. Duh. So Hickey proposes designing a Frankenstein bar, if you will, that includes all the popular ingredients. I disagree. The Reese's Cup proves that often the simplest ideas are the best. Read the ranked list and the nuts-and-bolts research that went into it at FiveThirtyEight. -Thanks, Tim!

(Image credit: MBisanz)

Belief in the ability of the dead to rise up and vex the living as vampires came to us from Eastern Europe. An archeological excavation of a cemetery in Drawsko, Poland, reveals some of the lengths that the villagers went to to make sure the dead stayed dead when they were buried. Anthropology professor Marek Polcyn from the Lakehead University in Canada tells us about the beliefs that lay behind some of these burial rituals.

Polcyn’s work describes one female body discovered with a sickle across her pelvis, a rock on her neck and a coin in her mouth. Four other bodies were found with sickles strewn across their throats. While Polcyn said in one study that sickles have been discovered in excavations in other countries like Slovakia before, burials with sickles across the throat are rare during this period. He says the practice could corroborate with historical knowledge of folk tales and beliefs about creatures that rise from the dead to commit evil deeds and bring misfortune to the living.

“Throughout the world, people believe that sharp tools, iron—anything that was created by fire, by hammering, had anti-demonic properties,” Polcyn says.

Some of the earliest beliefs surrounding vampires came on the heels of the conversion of Slavic people to Christianity sometime between the 7th and 9th centuries, says Christopher Caes, a lecturer in Polish at Columbia University who has taught classes on Slavic vampires. Before Christianity, Slavs predominantly cremated their dead, in the belief that a person’s soul would only be released with the burning of their body. When missionaries converted them, the new practice of burying the dead would have horrified some.

So then the burial practices had to be adapted to accommodate some of those older beliefs. Not everyone had the potential to rise again as a vampire, and there were some clues in the living to indicate who might. Read more about the excavation and what we've learned from it at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Slavia Field School in Archaeology)

There are so many horror films, they start to all look alike after a while. That doesn't really matter, because people will watch them. If something works in one film, you may as well use it to some degree in the next film. Check out some rules that horror movies follow that aren't necessarily obvious.

If horror movies had victim job fairs, they would feature only three occupations: photographer/media, fiction writer, and caretaker.

Booth number one would undoubtedly brag about Get Out's picture-taking protagonist, but the hard truth is that most people who pursue this career will end up being vivisected on grainy found footage. The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity 3, [rec], Diary Of The Dead, Grave Encounters, The Visit, Willow Creek, and The Sacrament benefit from giving the people a realistic, documentary-related motivation for keeping those dumbass cameras rolling. Other times, it's simply to make them curious or to cause a good scare. The Ring's main character is a journalist so she will pursue the tape. In Shutter, the ghost shows up in photos, so naturally she haunts a photographer. Oddly enough, it doesn't even have to be a visual medium. Pontypool, The Fog, and Lords Of Salem all feature radio DJs and are great films.

It makes sense, though. Journalists and photographers can be anywhere at any time, and are looking for something interesting. Writers don't punch a clock, and seek solitude to do their work. Caretakers have a reason for being alone in a scary place. I don't know why DJs are in horror films, but some of them are really scary people. But that's just one trope that occurs in (almost) all horror movies, because producers will go with what's worked before. Read the rest of them at Cracked.

Every year, Josh Sundquist (previously at Neatorama) comes up with a delightfully clever Halloween costume that incorporates the fact that he has one leg. For Halloween 2017, he returned to his early love of trampolines by becoming the bouncy Tigger!

Here’s my Halloween costume! pic.twitter.com/KhgcfP1exO

— Josh Sundquist (@JoshSundquist) October 27, 2017

See Sundquist's costumes from previous years.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story, first published in 1894, about a country doctor named Ripley who found that a second doctor had set up shop in the village of Hoyland. He goes to the new office, wanting to meet and greet his competition. Dr. Ripley is shocked to find that Dr. Smith is a woman, so shocked that he dropped his hat. She questions his attitude toward her choice of profession.

"Ladies are in danger of losing their privileges when they usurp the place of the other sex. They cannot claim both."

''Why should a woman not earn her bread by her brains?''

Dr. Ripley felt irritated by the quiet manner in which the lady crossquestioned him.

''I should much prefer not to be led into a discussion, Miss Smith."

''Dr. Smith," she interrupted.

"Well, Dr. Smith! But if you insist upon an answer, I must say that I do not think medicine a suitable profession for women and that I have a personal objection to masculine ladies."

It was an exceedingly rude speech, and he was ashamed of it the instant after he had made it. The lady, however, simply raised her eyebrows and smiled.

"It seems to me that you are begging the question," said she. "Of course, if it makes women masculine that would be a considerable deterioration. "

Ripley grew to greatly resent Dr. Smith and her work. The story echoes attitudes that are still around 123 years later, although half of the students who entered medical school in 2016 are women. You can read the entire story of Dr. Ripley and Dr. Smith at Stanford University. -via Metafilter

Tom BetGeorge always goes all out for his Christmas light shows. This year, the neighbors are being treated to the same attention to detail in a Halloween light show! This house in Tracey, California, tells the story of The Nightmare Before Christmas, starting with the song "This is Halloween."

(YouTube link)

With tons of LED lights, projections, computer-controlled sequences, music, and a drone to record it, this is a step beyond in Halloween decorating. I have two ceramic pumpkins with a string of orange lights stuck inside each. -via Geeks Are Sexy  

Elephants and giant pumpkins come together in an orgy of destruction during the Oregon Zoo's annual Squishing of the Squash! The crowd was impressed by both the huge elephants and the huge pumpkins. The elephants like the pumpkins as both playthings and a snack. And they know smashing pumpkins is a crowd-pleaser.

(YouTube link)

The Squishing of the Squash kicks off a series of 'Howloween' events at the Oregon Zoo. -via Tastefully Offensive

This Norman Rockwell painting graced the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in May, 1920. The Ouija board session reminds us of the parlor games that young people used to play to get close to each other in a socially acceptable way, like the apple-on-a-string game in this post. Really, look at this couple: their knees are touching, their fingers are touching, and they are both blushing. You can imagine the questions they asked the Ouija board, and the effort they put into produce the answer they wanted. Read the story of how real-life couples inspired Rockwell's painting. Found at Weird Vintage.

No one would serve a cake with glass shards in it -at least no one you'd want to know- but these just look like glass. Food artist Hellen Die (the alter ego of TV writer Tye Lombardi) shows us how to make this gruesome cake that should only be served at adults-only gatherings.

This cake is dangerously delicious.  A deep dark buttermilk chocolate cake wrapped in thick white marshmallow fondant stabbed with shards of sweet sugar glass, topped with a white chocolate skull, and drizzled in sweet raspberry blood is a showstopping way to say Happy Halloween!

Learn to make all the components of this Halloween dessert at the Necro-nom-nom-nomicon.

Mark Hamill is almost as famous for being the voice of The Joker as he is for playing Luke Skywalker. In this Justice League Action short from Cartoon Network, Hamill does all the voices: the Joker, Trickster, and "famous actor Mark Hamill," which is a younger and somewhat steroid-enhanced version of Hamill -as you would expect in a comic book character.    

(YouTube link)

The plot proves to be weirdly meta when "famous actor Mark Hamill" saves the day by using his unique superpower- his voice acting skills! -via Laughing Squid