OK, this is tremendous.
Comedian Dana Gould is apparently quite the Halloween fan, and does a podcast. This year he’s got a nearly 3-hour Halloween podcast which is essentially him geeking out on horror movies, haunted Hollywood history and horror movie trivialities with Patton Oswalt and a cast of all stars.
http://www.danagould.com/bride-of-halloweenery-2/
Has been distracting me from work all day!
I saw Goodnight Mommy last night. I think it’s limited mostly to bigger cities, but it’s worth seeking out. Pretty goddamn freaky.
Bloodsucking Bastards (2015) - Just wanted to mention this show as a funny vampire / horror. I enjoyed it.
Stung (2015) - This was a much better monster movie than it had any right to be. I was expecting total cheese, but it ended up being pretty darn solid.
Oh, nice catch. I’m grabbing it now! Thanks!
Freaks of Nature anyone?
Red band trailer. It made me laugh.
Lots of funny folks (Patton Oswalt, Bob Odenkirk, Denis Leary, Rachael Harris, KM Key, Joan Cusack) chewing (literally) scenery here. Might be fun…or that 2 minute trailer might be every funny thing that happens in it. Have heard zero buzz til today. In fact, weirdly, IMDB has this listed for 2016 in the header, but this comes out October 30 of this year.
Took me awhile to figure out who the lanky tall kid was; it’s Nicholas Braum from Sky High (Zack Attack!) and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Ponytail Derrick!!!).
I would very much like for Freaks of Nature to be good, but as you note we’ll see.
I was in the mood for a little horror last night so I watched The Babadook, which has been mentioned upstream, so no new recommendation there. I just wanted to pop in to say I didn’t think it was all that, so I suppose I don’t like it as much as Tom did. I don’t want to bog the thread down into movie analysis or discussion, plus there’s a Babadook thread if I really wanted to talk about it, so I’ll just leave it at that.
I will probably watch a few more scary ones this season, and it seems like I will probably grab It Follows or one of biosc1’s rec’s above.
Happy hauntings!
I love that the title of Harbinger Down is the distress call for a ship called The Harbinger. When the ship gets blowed up (spoiler?), the chick gets on the radio and declares “Harbinger down!” Who says that about a ship? Titanic down? Exxon Valdez down? Costa Concordia down? What ever happened to a plain old “Mayday”?
-Tom
Oh man a plot summary of Harbinger Down on IMDB says this:
Now the crew is exposed to aggressively mutating organisms. And after being locked in ice for 3 decades, the creatures aren’t about to give up the warmth of human companionship.
I don’t know why but that really tickles my funny bone. I like to imagine there’s someone whose job is to look at the tagline for a movie and write out a paragraph describing it.
The Invitation is a pretty entertaining movie in the sub genre of Strange Dinner Parties.
I also saw The Witch recently and it certainly has its moments, but there’s not a lot to it, particularly if it wants to be ambiguous.
Kiwi horror-comedies have been a surprisingly rich vein to mine lately. Demons & death metal: Deathgasm!, good times.
I think it’s VOD only at the moment, but worth the $5.
Just because this is our horror catch-all for October…(not really movie related…)
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Scholastic had magazines aimed at age groups. For elementary schoolers, it was a magazine called Dynamite. For middle schoolers (ages 12-14 or so) it was a magazine called Bananas.
A lot of the time, Bananas was a lot like a Teenbeat thing. They seemed to alternate. One month, it was Leif Garrett on the cover. The next month, though, Star Wars, or the The Beatles, or The Knack or John Belushi. The latter were the issues I might’ve grabbed.
I’d usually buy the issues that looked like they might be cool. One such issue is one I’ve never seen offered as a collectible, on Ebay or anywhere else. It was called the “Strange” issue, or the Weird issue, or something like that. Weird music (Devo and Boney M prominently featured!) scary movies (nothing THAT out there), and a lot of weird “facts” or strange stories. Those were what got me, and got me good. The magazine presented in matter of fact tones the idea that ridiculous crap like spontaneous human combustion, alien abductions, ghostly voices from beyond the grave, etc. were all REAL and documented. I was absolutely sure I was going to burst into flame at any moment. I was sure that if I stayed out at night after dark that ghosts would chase me home. It was all so well done that it–more than any movie or book I ever read as an impressionable kid–gave me the willies and scared the crap out of me more than pretty much anything else I can think of from that period of time in my life.
In trying to track this issue down from ebay and comic resellers (still haven’t seen it, but I’m pretty sure it was from 1980), I’ve come to learn that Bananas was the brainchild and pet project of a guy named Bob Stine, who in later years would take his ability to freak kids out to more fame and fortune as R. L. Stine.
Anyone else of an age remember this?
I think I vaguely recall Dynamite. But Bananas or that particular issue doesn’t ring any bells for me. I hope you find it, though! I’d love to see scans of some choice scary facts.
-Tom
Tom, you’re of the right age–and I think a lot of folks here are, too–to remember The People’s Almanacs (vol 1 and 2) and The Book of Lists, vol 1 and 2. All four hefty tomes came out sometime between 1972 and 1981.
They were by a single family, which consisted of wildly successful pulp writer Irving Wallace and his son David and daughter Amy. They were a wonderful mix of true facts and really dubious ones, presented side by side. I’ve tracked them all down in the last few years, and from an adult perspective, it’s easy to spot the winking hokum like stories about Pope Joan and stuff of that ilk, but it’s really well done stuff.
And the thing is, my friends and I made sure there was never a copy of these books to be checked out at the local library. We were always getting one of these volumes. There were fun sexy bits in there, but also really scary crap. And it was the presentation–sitting cheek by jowl to a very accurate retelling of the assassination of JFK, you’d have the story of the ghostly elevator operator, and presented AS FACT. Adult audiences rolled their eyes and smiled. We kids were dumb enough to buy that stuff hook, line, and sinker at face value. It was REAL.
That’s how RL Stine did that issue of Bananas. He was just out of college at the time and decided to give free reign to trying to scare the crap out of 12 year old kids like me, who were just gullible enough. The true facts were all the sort of local legend hokum–Resurrection Marys, cattle mutilations, etc.–only presented completely as “This is real, and oh my god…”
I do remember there was a fiction story in the issue. It was about a little girl who simply vanishes one day in her house. The family can hear her talking and crying for help, but she can’t be found anywhere. Her voice is distant, ghostly, and they can talk back in forth, though obviously there’s something supernatural going on. The little girl’s parents have detectives out and priests. They try to find a way to bring the little girl back. She sounds more and more frantic and scared, her voice seeming to come from the walls…but it starts to fade more and more, the more scared she gets. Eventually they never hear her again, or at least not regularly. Occasionally at night, they’ll hear her cry out, or scream or moan, but that’s it. Eventually they move out. The girl or her spirit or whatever linger in the house, scaring future residents.
All of this was a year or two before Poltergeist essentially ran with that idea, but I think it was an early RL Stine original, and there was nothing comedic or goofy about it. It was creepy as all hell. It hit me personally like a ton of bricks. I was never bothered if I was left alone, because I was never lonely. I’d play with friends or listen to records or read a book or build a model or play videogames. This was a story where alone meant lonely, and it freaked me right the hell out.
I don’t remember any of those publications, but the story you’re describing sounds exactly like an old Twilight Zone episode where a little girl goes missing, but her parents could hear her voice and talk with her, but could not locate her in the house. That one had a happier ending though, they figure out there’s an entrance to an alternate dimension in the house (wonder what that does to the resale value) and are able to get her back. Not the scariest episode really, but definitely an effective and moody one.
Interesting. I wonder if that episode is based on a bleaker short story, and maybe that’s the story and Stine just selected it for the issue. Hmm. Looks like the episode is based on a Richard Matheson short story and Matheson wrote the teleplay for the Twilight Zone episode.
This story in Bananas is really similar but not. It’s bleak. They never find the little girl, and she haunts the house forevermore. Which…eeesh.
Richard Matheson wrote that episode of Twilight zone (and part of me is like “of course he did”), and it aired in 1962. Would that predate the Stine story trig (seems like)? It wouldn’t surprise me if it had inspired him. We retell the same stories over and over for reasons. I think that’s another amazing thing about weird/horror; you can retell a story but with even small changes say different things.
The period you are talking about is a bit before my time, though it looks like Bananas ran into my time (looking at images, there’s one cover with “we trip the fall guy” and that’s me squarely in the target demographic, early 80s). I don’t recall it though.
I think Bananas probably fell between the cracks for a lot of folks because of the age range. It wasn’t meant to be offered to anyone under a certain grade level, so if you were in elementary school you didn’t see it…and if you were in junior high, well, they didn’t do Scholastic stuff as much then. I went to a Lutheran grade school for k-8, so this was like 6th or 7th grade. And yeah, the story is definitely different from the Matheson story, but has to have clearly been inspired by it.
I don’t remember that Bananas issue, but I was introduced to gaming by an article about Dungeons and Dragons in Dynamite magazine.
Peeved by Parcheesi! I like the implication that nerdy dudes are going to be playing D&D with no one but a couple of chicks.
-Tom
