October 2011
50 posts
Happy Hallowe’en, everybody!
Go to a haunted house! Pass out trick-or-treat candy!
Provide a soundtrack to your Hallowe’en with my podcast: M.T. Coffin’s Weird-O-Matic Wax
And tune into NeverEndingWonder Radio!
Aaand watch as many horror movies as you can!
Hulu has a bunch running for today only:
...
Images:
Selections from Jack Hill’s Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told (1964)
Virginia plays “Spider”.
A young Sid Haig ogling/grabbing at an off-screen Carol Ohmart.
The incredible Jill Banner and Beverly Washburn.
Creighton Chaney winds down.
Hey, look. My banner.
The clever spider’s method.
Carol Ohmart impassioned.
The AV Club has a few nice Hallowe’en-time articles up.
24 Hours of Horror With Edgar Wright
-continuing their annual tradition of having a horror-literate artist design a 24-hour horror movie marathon. Edgar Wright’s is, in my opinion, by far the best (above Brendan Small and Eli Roth).
and The AV Club staff pick their favorite scary movie moments.
Chicago-based Sound Opinions have their annual Hallowe’en show. Listen to them cover the scariest tunes in rock history:
Stream it, or
download it.
Images:
Selections from Dario Argento’s Opera (1987)
The Three Stooges:
Behind the scenes with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff:
Oh-kay, Now it’s time for Disney Hallowe’en cartoons, yes. I’ll just get right to it:
Now, with this next one, I’m cheating. It’s not a Disney cartoon, but it was drawn by Ub Iwerks, who did ^The Skeleton Dance.
This sing-along video used to be on our VHS copy of Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Man, my brother and I wore out that...
Also!
The great under-appreciated under-appreciated film review site, Not Coming to a Theater Near You, has been killing it with awesome horror film reviews this month.
Also!
Check out their great stills series (<—-click a-here), featuring great grabs from great horror films, like this one from Nobuhiko Obayash’s 1977 bat-sh*t masterpiece, Hausu:
Seriously, if you’ve...
Here are two very neat things brought to my attention by two very neat people
1. Ian J. found this sweet animated short
Gawper from A Large Evil Corporation on Vimeo.
2. Jennifer H. (check out her amazing art here—-> Woman in a Shed) found this fun post about an important lesson that horror films can teach us: Don’t Be a Babysitter
Enjoy !
Here’s a great article in the New York Times that highlights the incredible(ly bizarre) career of filmmaker-provocateur José Mojica Marins, aka Coffin Joe. Mojica managed to nearly single-handedly create a horror film scene in Brazil. Combining shock value and an amazing DIY, hyper-macabre aesthetic, his films are engrossing, gruesome events; they are fascinating for their sheer audacity...
Images:
Selections from Paul Naschy’s Panic Beats (1983)
WatchHey now! Watch Stuart Gordon’s great, gruesome, and goofy Lovecraft-inspired 1986 film, From Beyond.
Posters from various Amicus Productions films, gathered from the incredible “horror, sci-fi, exploitation, cult, trash, [and] B-movie” poster archive, Wrong Side of the Art:
MSN’s 50 Scariest Movies of All Time
Click the image to check out the photo-article.
This is a pretty cool list; lots of great horror films on it. However, it’s typical of most “__ Scariest Movies of All Time” lists in that the choices, as far as scariness, seem pretty arbitrary. Some of the movies on this list are scary, some are kind of creepy-ish, and some are...
Don’t forget:
Get some Hallowe’en ambience going with M.T. Coffin’s Weird-O-Matic Wax!
Listen early!
Listen often!
Har-har, yet another Hallowe’en-time movie suggestion:
This one is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 kind-of-talkie/kind-of-silent Vampyr.
Made shortly after his brilliant but commercially-disappointing Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr follows a young man, Allan Grey,
who, while staying a country inn, is given an envelope by a mysterious stranger, marked “open upon my...
The Monster Channel
Click the image to visit:
“What is The Monster Channel?
The Monster Channel is the first 24/7 interactive horror movie channel, featuring classic horror movies and TV series, retro trailers and commercials, features hosted by the nation’s new generation of horror hosts and you!”
Internet Archive (archive.org) is an incredible online resource; it’s a free digital library of seriously mammoth proportions. And so they have a seriously mammoth collection of public domain horror movies that you can either download or stream.
So if you like horror movies and have a decent internet connection, here’s a new way to make your October even shorter:
Internet Archive:...
Boy Meets World Hallowe’en Special
Bruce Campbell hosts AMC’s 20 Scariest Movies.
Poster art for Dracula’s Daughter (1936):
Horror movie music
Stephen Thrower (see: this post) wrote a very cool article for the Guardian regarding the effectiveness of horror movie music: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/18/horror-film-movie-music
Also, visit the long-running and fantastic blog Monster Movie Music, which has been cataloguing pretty rare, rare, super rare, and not-so-rare soundtrack bits from classic and obscure...
Totally awesome rendition of The Tell-Tale Heart with Vincent Price.
Okay, so for tonight’s recommendation, I picked a film that is available on Netflix Instant. It’s by Mario Bava, a brilliant Italian filmmaker whose unique artistry elevated and amplified the horror film to another level completely. And actually with any genre he tried: spaghetti western, spy, crime, etc. He is known to have inspired filmmakers like Fellini, Lynch, Scorsese, Argento,...
Okee-dokee, kids. It’s time for a Nickelodeon Hallowe’en!
I was television-lucky enough to grow up in the late 80s and 90s, when kids TV was creative, funny, and often bizarre; they gave children credit, and didn’t talk down or coat morals in fluff like most shows do today (with the exception of a few like Flapjack, The Regular Show, Adventuretime). So this is in honor of those...
Here’s a very cool tune by Tarantula Ghoul...
Courtesy of koavf, here’s Atlas Obscura’s amazing 31 Days of Hallowe’en Map
http://atlasobscura.com/blog/31-days-of-halloween-map
“On Atlas Obscura this month, every day is Halloween. Stop by the blog every day this month for true tales of the unquiet dead. Come for the severed heads, stay for the book bound in human skin. Every story is true, and each one is a...
WatchFun little short involving the character Sam from Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat.
Vampira, the first horror host ever.
Also, don’t forget these two great horror releases by Criterion this month:
Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968):
“In this poetic and atmospheric horror fable, set in a village in war-torn medieval Japan, a malevolent spirit has been ripping out the throats of itinerant samurai. When a military hero is sent to dispatch the unseen force, he finds that he must struggle with his...
Next movie recommendation is a great, atmospheric British film called The City of the Dead (1960).
The City of the Dead was put together by the two producers that would later form Amicus Productions (Amicus was a production house made to capitalize on the success of Hammer Films. They actually put out a good number of awesome horror films, often using Hammer cast and crew members.).
It’s...
Contrary to popular belief, books are still cool and effective. Like real books, though. I have here some excellent Hallowe’en-time reads (and looks). I also put Amazon links to each book on its picture, so just click the book cover if you’d like to trade $ for it.
…
Haunted Air by Ossian Brown
First up is a (look) book I just ordered earlier this year, called Haunted Air....
In 1933, before Orson Welles’ notorious War of the Worlds broadcast made thriller radio more commercially viable, a man named Wyllis Cooper, a writer for NBC pitched an idea for a program, “a midnight mystery serial to catch the attention of the listeners at the witching hour.” Radio with a chilly, prickly Grand Guignol flavor; it’s something that had never been done...
So I’ve gathered together some great horror-themed cartoons (non-Disney category). Nothing rockets me back to memories of Hallowe’ens-past like these do.
The amazing Chuck Jones is responsible for all the Merrie Melody ones (of course); the Tom & Jerry is classic Hanna-Barbera. And in this particular Betty Boop cartoon, a young woman named Bonnie Poe lends her voice to Betty. You...
http://celluloidscares.blogspot.com/ →
Check out my friend Ferox’s awesome new blog covering all sorts of lovely, trashy cinema! You’ll find plenty of perfect October watches on here, too!
I thought another function I might serve is suggesting some October-worthy horror movie watches. First up on the chopping block is one of my personal favorites from Italian horror master, Lucio Fulci. His most well-known work, Zombie (aka Zombi 2 [also aka “that movie with the zombie vs. shark battle in it”, which you should YouTube if you’ve never seen]), while pretty awesome,...
http://weirdomaticwax.podomatic.com/ →
It’s time again for that pumpkin ale, and another tall cool glass of Hallowe’en tunes via my podcast, M.T. Coffin’s Weird-O-Matic Wax. If you didn’t check out Volumes 1 & 2 last year, please do (or be sorry)! Then, check out Volume 3, brand new, dripping with fresh…
Well, you get the idea.
Get goin’!
Good evening,
Tonight, we’ll get your hound howling with some early Hollywood Hallowe’en promo shots. These were quite popular; too bad the tradition has fallen away.
Flickr user ghostofhalloweenspast has gathered a very cool collection of these old photographs. You may recognize:
Judy Garland,
Yvonne De Carlo (aka Lily Munster),
or perhaps Betty Grable!
Well, without...
Also, be sure to set the mood with NeverEndingWonder Radio’s October-long Hallowe’en monstro-thon!
www.neverendingwonder.com
If you listen often, you’ll probably hear me doing one of the bumpers!
Tonight, we’ll travel back to the 1950s. Kids all over the country had their noses buried in pulpy horror comics, much to their parents’ dismay. A decade of anxiety, the collective fear of the content of these horror comics got the best of the adults, believing that they were turning the country’s children into mindless delinquents (kind of like rock ‘n’ roll, you...
WatchThis fun short film was written and directed by special effects legend Greg Nicotero. Nicotero has worked on countless amazing films; he got his start working under Tom Savini on Day of the Dead, and has since done effects for Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, Misery, Boogie Nights, and Mulholland Drive, among others.
You should probably either follow the link through to Dailymotion, or watch it...
