Tales to Astonish!

Well, it’s been quite a month, hasn’t it? This year marked my personal return to the season, after two years of not celebrating it at all, and I have to say that it’s nice to be back. My love for Halloween has only increased, and really being able to show it again is wonderful.

In truth, though, I’m sort of glad it’s over. I had a lot of concentrated Halloween in the past couple of months, and blogging every day does take its toll; it’s a lot of work to sit down and pull all that out every night. There are TONS of ideas that I had for this month that I just wasn’t able to get around to, including the complete Universal Monsters LOL Series, and my definitive critical analysis of “The Monster Club.” I guess that’s what next Halloween is going to bring. For now, though, I think it’s about time to put my skeletons back in the closet and send the ghosts back to the grave.

I’d like to thank everyone that visited and commented during this time, and give a special thanks to all my fellow Halloween-bloggers out there for sharing their love of the holiday, and further inspiring madness and creativity in us. I’ve found so much Halloween stuff through their sites that I probably won’t finish getting through it until next year — not that I mind. Thanks for helping keep the spirit alive!

Before I sign off on the season, there is some business to wrap up, namely:

THE WINNERS OF THIS YEAR’S
TALES TO ASTONISH HALLOWEEN CONTESTS!

The first contest, the Hard-Boiled Horror Story Contest, was an awful lot of fun for me, because it combined two of my favorite things: horror and pulp. You can read about the details HERE, but first I’d like to announce the winners (yes, plural):

Mr. Lefty of Long Relief

AND

Mr. Shawn of Branded in the 80s

Getting a prize for being creepily knowledgeable about horror TV themes via CONTEST NUMBER THREE is the ghoulish:

L. Rob Hubbard of Mimezine

As for that bastard child CONTEST NUMBER TWO, I’m just gonna let it run and see if it ever does finish up; I can’t put a deadline on collective genius, can I?

As for their Mystery Prizes, each will be receiving terrifying $13 gift codes for Amazon.com! I tried my best to find a decent horror outlet that sold gift cards, but in the end I figured that the best way to award prizes was with Amazon. There are plenty of scary delights to be found on their pages, some of them cheap enough to be purchased with thirteen bucks. The winners will receive the email notifications of their award as soon as they either email me or THIS LINK to send me their preferred email addresses.

Before I post the winning fiction entries, I’d just like to give one last wave of thanks to everyone for making this season so fun to come back to. Even though I need a break, I can’t wait until next year. Now go and take one last haunting stroll through Halloween with some good, old-fashioned horror tales:

Lefty’s “Sternwood Manners” can be found HERE!

I’ve spent my 2007 Halloween season doing as many horror-related things as I could, watching movies I’d missed the first time around, digging up ancient Halloween CDs, and amassing a collection of Halloween-themed TV episodes… but I always came back to my old favorites. No matter how many cool new things I happened upon this year, I still ended up watching the 1985 TV-movie “The Midnight Hour” about a dozen times. While I loved a lot of the new stuff I saw, nothing captures my feelings about the season more than this one movie that relatively few people have ever seen.

I don’t remember watching “The Midnight Hour” when it premiered, but luckily my parents had hit the VCR stage of technological advancement and had become recording and archiving fiends. Thanks to them, I grew up with dozens of weird TV movies and specials on VHS that are probably all but lost to obscurity now — I’m sure that this, plus “The Spirit” TV movie, altered the course of my life. At the very least, they stole countless hours from my adolescent development, making me the awkward malcontent I am today!

Over in the stereotypical New England town of Pitchford Cove (aka “Pitchfork Cove”), Phil and his friends Mitch, Vinnie, Melissa, and Mary make the genius decision to break into the town’s historical museum to steal some authentic period costumes for that night’s Halloween blow-out. While sneaking around the basement of the archives, they find a mysterious little box that contains Phil’s greatgreatgreatgreatgreat- grandfather’s belongings — the leftovers from his crusade as the town’s resident witch hunter. Also included in the box is a sealed scroll that apparently belonged to one of the witches, who was coincidentally Melissa’s greatgreatgreatgreatgreat- grandmother. Being 1985 TV-movie teenagers, they make the most obvious choice: take the scroll to the cemetery and have the witch’s descendant read the spell.

Before you can say klaatu barada nikto, the spell raises “all manner of demons, all manner of dead,” and slowly begins to take over the sleepy little town with its collection of vampires, werewolves, and zombies. Also, it inexplicably awakens a 1959 cheerleader named Sandy, who doesn’t crave flesh any more than your typical 1959 cheerleader, if you know what I mean. Soon enough, it’s down to Phil and Sandy to brave the night and send the monsters back to the grave — before the midnight hour, when the spell becomes unbreakable. Throw in some Wolfman Jack, a little tragic romance, a zombie dance number, and what we get is a perfect little Halloween gem.

It’s got the budget, feel, and cast of a TV-movie, so it’s without any gratuitous gore or violence; there’re no boobies, and no moaning from anyone other than the undead. Despite its television DNA, it’s still not a kid’s movie like many other Halloween TV projects — it’s got quite a few genuinely creepy moments that scared the hell out of my when I was a kid, but none that terrified me. It’s lighthearted, but not mocking; it’s like a safe distillation of all the proper Halloween ingredients. The reason why I love this movie so much is that it really captures the essence of what I find wonderful about the season, and doesn’t forget the most important aspect: fun.

There are plenty of monsters, and although there are a bunch of gags involving revived zombies “fitting in” at the Halloween party, they’re all pretty scary creatures. Lucinda Cavendish is the ancient witch (turned vampire), and Jonelle Allen plays the role with a really chilling sort of detachment. She’s cold, and hungry, and ultimately believable as evil. The zombies — while not of the flesh-eating variety — were surprisingly scary to me; what they lack in munching skills, they make up for in really brutal beatings. I was a little shocked to watch one of them bloodily bashing on a dude’s head with a big rock. The werewolves get shafted a little, because by definition they’re slashers, which you can’t really show much of on network TV. They still get to jump around a lot and tear up convertible tops, which is exactly how I’d spend my evil afterlife.

Aside from the creatures, the thing that really makes the movie work for me is the relationship between Phil and Sandy. Phil is the typical high school geek that happens to look like a male model except for those darned glasses. He has a thing for Mary, but Mary ignores him — a feeling I can certainly relate to as a geek that happens to look like a male model. Being rejected yet again, Phil leaves the party, and ends up in the arms of Sandy — who is amazingly not evil like most real cheerleaders and zombies. Sandy seems to vaguely understand that she’s back from the dead and not destined to be around for very long, so she tries to use her limited time to do the one thing that she never had a chance to do in her own lifetime: fall in love. Unfortunately, when the rest of the undead go, she goes with them. Romeo and Juliet never had such problems.

Their romance doesn’t last very long, since the whole ‘end of the world’ problem keeps coming up, but it’s actually very sweet. Phil’s just such a nice guy that it’s sort of a cosmic comeuppance that the geek gets the cheerleader, even if she’s dead and no one will ever believe his stories about the hot chick he was with the night before. They slow dance to some great fifties music, she brings him out of his geeky shell a little, and they save the world — I wish all romances were so heartwarming. I’m not afraid to admit getting a little teary-eyed as a kid during the very last scene.

Of the few people that have actually seen this flick, the one thing that none forget is the “Get Dead” musical interlude, in which vampire Shari Belafonte leads the party in a strangely-choreographed dance number. While it makes sense considering that Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” had just come out, it’s totally out of place in relation to the rest of the movie, which is decidedly non-musical. And yet, I can’t help but love it. It’s strange and unnecessary, but really catchy and cheesy fun. (I’m also amused by the fact that it’s pretty obvious that not everyone is really committed to the scene, as evidenced by the limpness of their ‘zombie hands.’ Props to Ms. Belafonte for really giving it her all.)

I wish that everyone could have seen this movie when they were the same age I was when I first did — heck, I wish everyone could see it now. It’s available on VHS and DVD, but both versions are incredibly rare — reportedly only a thousand DVDs were printed — and therefore incredibly expensive. Then again, there’s always bootlegs, right? This is one of those films that really mean a lot to me; it’s my favorite Halloween movie of all time, and we all know how important Halloween is to me.

Initially, I wrote a rather long post about the Munsters versus the Addams Family, and how I vastly prefer the Addams clan, but it just turned into a meandering mess. I had a lot of trouble figuring out what it was exactly about the Addamses that inspired such a giddy sense of macabre amusement in me (and why the Munsters failed to do that), so the post ended up not really going anywhere. And then in my research, I found the Addams Family Credo:

“Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc.”

Translated, that means:

“We gladly feast on those who would subdue us.”

I think that pretty much sums up every fundamental reason why Gomez and his brood fill my heart with so much joy.

Every year, I round up my very favorite Halloween and horror-related songs to help get me into the spirit of the season — and I bet you’re all thinking, “How can I also get a piece of Retro’s Halloween spirit?” Well, I don’t know if this is the answer, but it sure can’t hurt! Here’s a CD’s worth of the music that I have in constant rotation during each October! It’s only small fraction of my Halloween music collection, but it’s some of my absolute favorites that I’ve culled from all sorts of movies and games and TV shows and wherever else my haunted hunt took me!

ENJOY!

(Zip file, 86MB)

At some point during the past couple years, I reached a turning point: I became a big pansy when it comes to scary video games. I used to love playing scary games, because they had the special power to put me in their world better than any movie ever could — there’s no hiding behind the screen and hoping that the actor made the right decisions. Instead, it was all up to me to not get myself killed by monsters, zombies, aliens, or whatever. This also made it an awesome thrill when I finally survived each level, because I knew that it was my skill and reflexes that were to be praised. I was having such a great time, and then…

…the games got too scary. Graphics got to be too good, producers started using non-MIDI music, and games started to become more like movies. I must’ve fought thousands of zombies in my video-game-playing career — and been killed by thousands of them as well — but only in the past few years has it actually felt like I was truly surrounded by my personal fears. That’s why I eventually lost my taste for the genre, and went back to pre-industrial revolution pastimes like reading and having sex with women.

One of the games that I did manage to play before I went on my self-imposed horror game exile was Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Long title! It’s a role-playing /action game taking place in White Wolf’s World of Darkness, better known for its series of tabletop RPG games. I’m a sucker for a good vampire video game, so I picked it up last year on the cheap. The bottom line is that it’s a good game that could’ve been a great game with a little more work and a lot more polish (and patches), but the tilt value is really high; it’s got amazing music by Rik Schaeffer, and a lot of other small touches that really add up to more than the sum of its parts.

One of my favorite hidden gems in the game is the use of radios. Your character gets a series of apartments over the course of the game, and whenever you stop there (or anyplace that has a radio sitting around), you can flip it on and listen to whatever’s broadcasting. I’m not sure if the radio ever actually plays music (the game had a licensed soundtrack, too), but every time I listened to it, it was a nighttime talk program called “The Deb of Night,” hosted by, as you might guess, Deb. They actually put together over twenty-five minutes of this show, consisting of talk segments of Deb and crazy call-ins, and funny commercial parodies (“Books: The Original Internet!”) It sometimes referenced the actual events in the game, but mostly it was just for fun if you even noticed it at all.

I recommend the game if you can find it (and patch it), but in lieu of that, I’d like to share with you all five parts of… The Deb of Night:

[audio:deb1.mp3]

[audio:deb2.mp3]

[audio:deb3.mp3]

[audio:deb4.mp3]

[audio:deb5.mp3]