LITERAL REMAINS

Josh and Renai Lambert have moved into a new house.  It’s a big house, with plenty of rooms for them and their three children (the youngest still in-diapers new) and an attic.  The attic proves a little treacherous for their son Dalton, who likes to wear a cape and play superhero.  Dalton takes a spill in the attic from a creaky old ladder, and hurts his pride more than anything else.  It’s quite weird then when Dalton slips into a coma.  The doctors run every test they know, and come up short with no answers to this medical mystery.

With doctor and hospital bills mounting, Josh, a teacher, is working as much, and as late, as he can.  Renai, a songwriter, is taking care of the house and the kids while trying to craft some tunes in between.  Dalton is at home, comatose, on a feeding tube.  With Josh away from home so much, it’s good ol’ mom who notices that things aren’t quite right in their new big comfy house.  There’s too many bumps in the night and one too many angry voices coming over the baby monitor.  Not to mention the other people Renai sees walking around the house.

Renai convinces Josh that they have just chosen a bad house to live in.  So they move again.  This new house isn’t so massive and scary, it doesn’t have that Spooky House look, you know.  So the Lambert family is home free.  That assumption is dead wrong.  Whatever was haunting them at their previous residence, has followed them.  What they soon learn, and what any of us have learned from the movie’s advertising campaign, is that it’s not the house that’s haunted– it’s Dalton.  There are spirits, and a demon, vying for possession of the boy’s body.  I could be wrong, but I don’t think they make a pill for that.

I love this movie.  I don’t know why I waited so long to see it.  I actually got chills watching Insidious, it’s a creepy little movie.  I love a ghost story, and this is one of the best I’ve seen in a very long time.  It ranks up there with Poltergeist, a movie I thought it was going to rip off, and it does borrow from that classic in the last act, but it doesn’t do it in a cheap way.

Insidious is a beautiful film to look at, excellent production design and cinematography.  From the big spooky house at the start of the film to the smaller, ordinary, house the family moves into later, the filmmakers have suffused the atmosphere with true creepiness.  Director James Wann and writer Leigh Whannell (creators of the Saw franchise) have filled Insidious with some really unsettling and scary imagery.  A great movie that tells a great story.

This is a perfect movie for the Halloween season.

5 out of 5
John Jason

Last May the Centers for Disease Control posted this article on their site, Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.  That was all a good deal of informative fun, informing the public what to do in case of a real emergency.  At least I hope they aren’t expecting a zombie outbreak.

Well, the CDC is at it again, just in time for Halloween, releasing a comic.  Its title says it all:  Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.   I’ll have to check that out, and you do the same.  We can never be prepared enough.

John Jason

It’s 1963 and it’s Halloween in an anonymous small Midwestern town.  This little town that appears to be like so many others through the country has one Halloween tradition that no one else has.  For five days before October 31st, families lock their teenage sons in their rooms without food or drink, and then release them on Halloween night, hopefully gas, stoked, and ready to go, and blood thirsty, to hunt for the October Boy.  Whichever lucky young man brings down the October Boy before he can reach the town center and ring the church bell gets to leave town and venture out into the world, and his family is treated like royalty for the next year.

The October Boy, or Ol’ Hacksaw Face or Sawtooth Jack (pick a name), is resurrected every year by a group of men from the community called the Harvester’s Guild.  The October Boy is a scarecrow made of vines, cornstalks and husks, topped with a carved pumpkin head, and stuffed with candy (I wouldn’t lie to you).  His goal is to slash and massacre his way to the church to ring the bell.  It’s the job of the desperate army of young men to stop him, because if he rings that bell, the town and life as the townsfolk know it will end.  Luckily, the October Boy has never succeeded.

This year, Pete McCormick is old enough to hunt.  And he wants to win the hunt at all costs.  He wants to escape the town, his failure father, and the memory of his deceased mother.  The object of the game changes for Pete, though, when he uncovers some truths to the morbid traditions of his hometown.  Hunting the October Boy, being hunted by a villainous cop, rescuing a girl, and fighting off the other guys who want out of the cursed town also, Halloween is a very dangerous night in these parts.

Too bad there’s no real tension to be found.  Dark Harvest is a book I can’t really recommend.  This slender volume is okay, but it’s just too damn silly at times.  The twists are interesting, but things like the October Boy stealing a car and cruising through town…just silly; and it often had a bloated sense of self-importance.  It’s at turns violent, at times poignant, but tries too hard for sentiment.  The overall feel is humdrum and empty, and not really memorable or deep.  I like Norman Partridge’s style of storytelling here, but I wish it was a better story.

2 out of 5
John Robinson 

For his girlfriend’s birthday, instead of buying her an engagement ring, Evan buys Jennifer an old decaying 19th Century plantation house out smack dab in the middle of nowhere.  The crumbling house comes with forty acres, stocked full of antiques, and its own little family cemetery that belonged to the previous owners.  That the house hadn’t been occupied in about fifty years or so, and that it was all available for a bargain basement price, should have clued Evan to the fact that this place had a right frightening, and bloody, history.

They discover that before long, though, don’t worry.  Evan removes a staff from the cemetery that was sticking up out of the ground.  Actually, it was a grave, and it was a ceremonial voodoo staff that was impaled into the crazed, hideously deformed, Leonard, a man saved from death by his French voodoo mama, and it was the only thing keeping the crazed killer dead and buried.  With the staff gone, he rises from his resting place, killing and ripping peoples’ faces off and wears them as a mask.  Thus, the title of the movie.

You’re probably thinking, “been there, done that”, well let me tell you…you’re right, but don’t completely dismiss Mask Maker.  This is a slasher movie that you’ve seen, probably, a thousand times or more.  Out of all those other movies that come to mind watching this one, such as Halloween, Friday the 13th, Scream, and especially The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Mask Maker isn’t as good as some of those movies (or some of their sequels), but it is a lot better than some of them.  This was actually an enjoyable and diverting little cut’em up, which was a surprise considering it has the uninspired tagline of “Meet your maker”.

Terry Kiser, forever to be remembered as Bernie of Weekend at Bernie’s fame, plays an unstable local who helped dispose of Leonard all those years ago, and his performance is wonderfully unhinged and over the top.  Genre vet and fan favorite Michael Berryman displays some nice acting chops as another local who knows the town’s, and Leonard’s, dark past.  The principal cast of college kids gathering at a farmhouse for the weekend to be killed off is actually pretty good, too.  These actors can actually act.

Mask Maker doesn’t raise the bar or forge into new ground, but I think it does set a standard for low budget filmmaking, I think we horror fans can use it to issue a challenge to other filmmakers.  This is professional filmmaking, this is a good work, a quality production on a small budget.  Even the music rocks.  I think a lot of independent filmmakers can look to Mask Maker as an example of what can be accomplished.  It’s a good time.

4 out of 5
John Jason 

Materials Needed
2 braids of 12 inch brown crepe hair (found at craft supply stores)
A pair of werewolf ears
A set of werewolf teeth (or any kind of fake fangs)
1 elastic dog nose
1 pair of old jeans
1 old shirt
1 pair of brown gloves
1 pair of brown socks
1 set of long fake black fingernails
A pair of old work boots
Brown and black face paint
Hot glue gun
Adhesive for skin
Fake blood
Hair gel
Large plastic bone (optional)

Costume Instructions
Shred the bottom of the jeans and tear a few random holes in them; glue some of the hair to the holes.  Shred the arms of the shirt and tear a some holes in it, then glue hair to those holes.  Hot glue the fingernails to the fingertips of the gloves, then glue some hair the back of the gloves.  Glue some more hair to the socks.  Try to cut some holes in the boots and glue some hair coming out of those holes.  You might have to stuff some socks in the boots so they will fit better.  Spike hair up with gel.  Glue some hair to the ears to look like sideburns.  Put black paint around your mouth and eyes, and some brown paint on your cheeks.  Glue a little hair to the dog nose.  Glue a little bit of hair to cheeks, chin, and on top of your eyebrows.  Carry the bone in your hand or in your back pocket.  Put a couple of drops of fake blood dripping off your chin.

Photo and directions originally found at Disney Family.

From the beginning of his literary career, Machen espoused a mystical belief that the humdrum ordinary world hid a more mysterious and strange world beyond. His gothic and decadent works of the 1890s concluded that the lifting of this veil could lead to madness, sex, or death, and usually a combination of all three. Machen’s later works became somewhat less obviously full of gothic trappings, but for him investigations into mysteries invariably resulted in life-changing transformation and sacrifice. Machen loved the medieval world view because he felt it combined deep spirituality alongside a rambunctious earthiness.

Stephen King is quoted as saying that Arthur Machen’s horror story The Great God Pan is “maybe the best in the English language.”  When it was published in 1894, it was criticized for it’s subject matter and sexual content.  Not surprisingly, it sold well, and has become the story for which he is most famous.

Arthur Llewelyn Jones was born March 3rd, 1863, in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, Wales.  His father, John Edward Jones, a vicar, took the maiden name of his wife, Machen, for inheritance purposes.  Arthur, later in life, dropped the Jones-Machen hyphenation when he began his writing career.  Machen’s family was relatively poor, which meant he could not attend university after his childhood education.  Having failed the entrance exams to medical school in London, Machen worked as a jounalist, a publishing clerk, and a tutor, all the while writing and living in his own poverty, though some inheritances from Scottish relatives helped somewhat financially.

In 1884 Machen published The Anatomy of Tobacco, his second published work following the 1881 poem ”Eleusinia”.  The Anatomy of Tobacco helped secure him work with George Redway, a publisher and bookseller.  There, he worked as a magazine editor, among other things including a French translator.  Machen married Amy Hogg in 1887.  Through Amy, a music teacher, he met the writer A. E. Waite, who was also a noted occultist, and would be a considerable influence on Machen.

Following the success of The Great God Pan, Machen next published The Three Impostors in 1895.  Thanks to Oscar Wilde and his then scandalous escapades, certain works of horror went unpublished, of which Machen was a victim.  Machen continued to write, though, and these works wouldn’t be available on the shelves until years later.  In addition to meager publishing, Machen’s wife died of cancer in 1899.  His recovery from the loss was due in part to his close friend Waite who brought him into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (though he would only have a fleeting membership) and his change of career to actor.  Travelling with the theater troupe allowed him to meet Dorothie Purefoy Hudleston, who would become his second wife in 1903.

He returned to journalism full time in 1910 only as a means to provide for his family.  He had a return to publishing fame in 1914 and remained prominent with the public through the end of World War I thanks to “The Bowmen” and the ”Angels of Mons” legend.  It wasn’t until 1921 that there was a major rediscovery of Arthur Machen as a serious writer.  The Twenties also saw Machen finding an American audience.  This new success peaked around 1926.

Until his death in 1947, Machen produced very little new work of his own, but found employment in and out of the publishing world as editor, essayist, and manuscript reader.

For further reading please consult The Friends of Arthur Machen and Wikipedia.

Free works available at Project Gutenberg

John Jason

A young boy, his older brother Jim, and his younger sister Mary, become witnesses to strange happenings in their 1960s Long Island neighborhood.  There is a Peeping Tom roaming the streets, looking in the windows of the unsuspecting; a neighborhood kid goes missing; and a elderly man from down the street is eventually found dead.  Most strange of all, though, is the cardboard recreation of their neighborhood, what they call Botch Town, the brothers have in their basement:  whatever changes little Mary makes to it seem to happen in real life.

The siblings, though, pick up on the strange things occurring and decide to investigate most likely out of a desire to get away, even for a little while, from their home life.  Their father works two jobs and is most always absent, their mother is an alcoholic artist who can’t cook, and their grandparents, who show them the most love and affection, live in the converted garage.  The main protagonist, the middle child (who I can’t remember his name, or if it was ever given, sorry), isn’t the most popular kid in school, and is very often tormented by his older brother.  Jim can be a bully, but deep down looks after his brother and sister, and little Mary talks to imaginary people who help her plan the changes to Botch Town, and, though still in elementary school, has a smoking problem.

This sleuthing trio is peculiar, and experiencing the strange year of dangers and mysteries they face, from the close of Summer, through Halloween, a treacherous Winter, to the next end-of-school break, is a marvelous read.  The Shadow Year is one of those books, funny, delightful, nostalgic, and full of wonders, that begs to be read more than once.  If I were to read it a second time, and I will at some point, maybe then I’ll be able to ignore why it’s just a shade shy of being perfect.

Author Jeffrey Ford gets most everything right in The Shadow Year.  What isn’t right, and what doesn’t sit well, or fit into the puzzle well, is the ending.  The character of Ray, a teen who moved away from the neighborhood with his family, shows up late in the novel, and he just feels too convenient.  I think Ford could have written him into the story better.

The Shadow Year has a similar vibe as Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and just misses the mark of being that good.  For it all, though, I have included this book on the October Countdown because it stirs up certain feelings in the reader, at least it did me.  It may not be pure horror, but it’s a tale of weird fiction that has a certain haunting quality.  The passing of time, the old giving way to the new, growing up, looking back, facing the unknown.  There is a timelessness to The Shadow Year.

4.5 out of 5
John Jason

For a lot of people nothing defines creepy crawly, or simply soil your pants terrifying, quite like spiders.  The arachnid.  Oh, yeah, they can look plenty scary, what with all those legs, those webs, that scurrying.  And some hop.  And, dear God, they’re fast.  Now, I dislike spiders as much as the rest of the world, but I’m not squeal-like-a-girl-run-away-and-hide scared of them.  But, just like I will a clown, I’ll kill’em.

For whatever reason, I guess their appearance and heebie-jeebie inducing nature (plus they’re so damn fleet footed), they became associated with witches and pretty much with evil in general sometime around the Middle Ages.  That bad reputation has persisted to this day, for the most part, and I’ll admit that Halloween decorations do look a little creepier with some spiders thrown into the mix.

Like many things, though, the spider could just be misconstrued and misunderstood.  Native Americans honored and admired the spider as a sacred symbol, both of creativity and as the weaver of fate.  Spiders are also thought to be good omens.  If you find a small spider spinning its web in your house, that’s considered to be good luck; if you let the spider crawl on your hand, that’s supposed to increase the luck.

That could explain why I don’t have a lot of good luck, though.

John Jason

For further information, please read Gerina Dunwich’s book A Witch’s Halloween.

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When a scientific expedition to Antarctica is announced by Miskatonic University, geologist William Dyer sits down and writes them a letter.  His letter reveals the horrendous, and secretive, accounts of an earlier expedition to Antarctica of which he was a part, and of which he was one of the few survivors.

The Dyer-led expedition discovered ancient ruins on the cold, isolated, continent.  Ruins that had been built a millenium, or longer, ago.  One of the parties that had scouted ahead is found slaughtered, the camp trashed.  They also find the remains of what they believe to be Elder Things- ancient beings from beyond space mentioned in the nefarious book Necronomicon.  As Dyer and his colleagues explore further, they discover a long lost city that seems to have had some recent activity.  They also discover in one of the caves, equipment from the devastated camp.

Something unknown is lurking on the desolate, frozen, continent.  Something old, powerful, and malevolent.

At the Mountains of Madness is one of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories, and one of my favorites of his Cthulhu Mythos.  He nails the environment, creating paranoia and loneliness, and desperation in the bitter cold so far from the rest of the world.  He makes you believe anything could happen, and you half expect anything will happen.  This is a chilling novella that should not go unread by any true horror fan.  First serialized in Astounding Stories in 1936, and would later be echoed in 1938 by John W. Campbell in his novella Who Goes There?, which would be adapted to the screen as The Thing From Another World and John Carpenter’s remake The Thing .   At the Mountains of Madness still holds up well today; it’s ripe with tension and fear.

John Jason

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“Daisy” is a simple little story about love and loss.  It came about because I was trying to write something else, had to stop and think on it, and then wrote “Daisy” instead.  Sometimes, I guess, you just have to exercise your writing muscles some.  Or at least it’s that way for me:  I gotta write one thing so I can write another thing.  Plus, it was something to help get me back into a routine of writing.  I’ll stop before I ramble too much.  Enjoy the story.

Peace.

John Jason

1 cup butter, softened
1 cup powdered sugar (= icing sugar = confectioners sugar)
1 egg
1 tsp almond extract
1 tsp vanilla
2 2/3 cups flour
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup almonds, whole, blanched or sliced
1 tube red decorator gel (optional, not pictured)

In bowl, beat together butter, sugar, egg, almond extract and vanilla. Beat in flour and salt. Cover and refrigerate at least 30 minutes. Working with one quarter of the dough at a time and keeping remainder refrigerated, roll heaping teaspoonful of dough into finger shape for each cookie. Squeeze twice along finger length to create knuckle shapes. Press almond firmly into one end for nail. After arranging on the lightly greased baking sheets, make slashes with a paring knife across in several places to form knuckles. Clusters of three slashes for each knuckle looks best.

Bake in 325 F (160 C) oven for 20-25 minutes or until pale golden. Let cool for 3 minutes. Lift up almond, squeeze red decorator gel onto nail bed and press almond back in place, so gel oozes out from underneath. You can also make slashes in the finger and fill them with “blood.” If you are opting for less gore, you will still need spare icing to glue the almond nails to the cookies after baking, since otherwise they fall off too easily during storage and serving.

When cool enough to stay intact, remove fingers from baking sheets and let cool on racks before storing. Repeat with remaining dough. Baked cookies will keep in an airtight container for at least two weeks. Unbaked mixed dough can be kept refrigerated for at least a week. Arrange for serving attractively on a plate, reaching up out of an urn of chocolate cookie crumb dirt, or crawling out of a basket.

Yields 5 dozen.

Picture and recipe originally found at Britta Blvd.

D4 is an action/horror film that integrates those two genres nicely.  It has the same testosterone-fueled energy that made the original Predator so much fun, and I enjoyed D4 more than that movie’s sequels, remakes, and knock-offs.  It is an independent film that knows its audience, knows where it wants to go, what it wants to do along the way, and doesn’t hold back in getting there.  It’s a two-fisted, gun-toting, good time monster movie.

D4 is a long out of use government facility with a considerable amount of mystery surrounding it.  Think of Area 51, and you have some clue.  Set out in the woods in the middle of nowhere, with a fence encompassing it to keep conspiracy theorists and amateur investigators at bay, it has become the stuff of legend.  It is suggested that the government is still doing top secret work at the military complex, and all sorts of other wild ideas abound.

A doctor with plenty of money to spare believes her son has been kidnapped and is being held at the facility.  For what purpose, she doesn’t know, but she’s pretty sure it isn’t for mere rehab.  What’s a mom to do?  Well, with the money she has access to, she hires a band of ex-special forces operatives to go into the D4 facility and rescue her son.
It seems easy enough for the team members, until they arrive at D4 anyway.  They are packed with enough firepower to take down a small country, but there’s something bigger than them, and a lot more resistant to bullets than them, roaming the secret facility’s grounds.  Whatever this science experiment gone wrong is, one thing for sure is that it’s mean and likes to kill.

D4 has won several festival awards, and for good reason.  Writer/director/star Darrin Dickerson put a lot of love and craft into D4.  What could have been a derivative and formulaic exercise, Dickerson and his team have made feel fresh, fun, and exciting.

To purchase a copy of D4, please visit www.7-7-10.com

John Jason

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Supplies and Tools (for one favor box):

One 2-inch paper mache box
7 inches of 5/8 inch dotted ribbon, optional
4 Chenille stems cut to 6 to 8 inches, black
Glitter, examples use black, green and purple
Tacky glue
Two 10mm wiggle eyes
Two 1/2 inch black pompoms
Black spray paint
Wire cutters
Scissors

Directions

1.  Spray paint box and lid.

2.  For legs: Make one small hole on each opposite side of box near bottom. Poke chenille stems through holes in box, extending out both sides. Shape legs and make small loop at end for foot.

3.  Spread glue on lid top and top of feet, sprinkle with glitter; set aside to dry.

4.  Glue pompoms to lid, then glue eyes to tops of pompoms.

5.  Fill boxes with favorite treats.

Picture and directions originally from Savvy Halloween

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“My fundamental interest, I suppose, is signs and proofs of other powers that lie hidden in us all…. I believe it possible for our consciousness to change and grow, and that with this change we may become aware of a new universe.”

-Algernon Blackwood as quoted in The Supernatural In Fiction

Algernon Blackwood was born March 14th, 1869, in Shooter’s Hill, Kent.  He was born to the upper crust of society, and would later say of his father “ ”though not devoid of genuine good-heartedness, had appallingly narrow religious ideas”.  Both his parents were converts to a Calvinistic sect.  From an early age, Blackwood had an interest in the occult and supernatural phenomena, and various religions religions from around the globe, all of which would later influence his writing.  He would eventually become a member of both the Ghost Club and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

As diverse as his interests were, so were his jobs early in life, working at different times throughout his younger years as a model, a farmer, a journalist, a bartender, and even a violin instructor.  It wasn’t until he was nearly forty years of age that he moved back to his native England (having traveled abroad, including parts of Canada and New York) and began his writing career as the 20th Century’s most prolific writer of ghost stories.

Blackwood was almost instantly a success.  In addition to the classic short stories “The Willows”, “The Wendigo”, and “The Damned”, he also wrote fourteen novels (including Jimbo and The Centaur), plays, children’s books, at least ten short story collections, and essays.  He became a prominent radio broadcaster and television personality.  His novel A Prisoner In Fairyland he later turned into the play The Starlight Express.

But it’s the stories that keep him legendary.  H.P. Lovecraft referred to “The Willows”, about campers who find themselves set upon by something mysterious and questionably from a different reality, as possibly the best weird tale ever written.  His story collection Incredible Adventures has been hailed as the ultimate example of collected speculative fiction.

Algernon Blackwood was the definition of a Renaissance Man.  As editor Jack Sullivan said of him,  ”Blackwood’s life parallels his work more neatly than perhaps that of any other ghost story writer. Like his lonely but fundamentally optimistic protagonists, he was a combination of mystic and outdoorsman; when he wasn’t steeping himself in occultism, including Rosicrucianism and Buddhism, he was likely to be skiing or mountain climbing.”

Algernon Blackwood died December 10th, 1951, at the age of 82.

For further reading please visit Wikipedia, The Literary Gothic, and Fantastic Fiction.

Suggested reading:  Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood

Free stories on-line: Project Gutenberg and Blackwood Stories

John Jason

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I am an ardent admirer of Clive Barker.  I will tell you that he is my favorite novelist.  I think he is a great artist, a superb practitioner of the fantastique.  His work often blurs the lines of reality and dreams, pain and pleasure, horror and fantasy.  He is responsible for the films Candyman, Hellraiser, and Nightbreed.  It would not be a Halloween countdown for me without including his work here on the list.  If you look back to last year’s countdown, you’ll find my suggestions for some of his short stories.  This year I thought I’d like to look back and choose one of his, probably, lesser known works for the countdown.  The Damnation Game was Barker’s first full length novel, and remains one of the best debut horror novels to ever be published.

Marty Strauss is fresh from prison when he gets a job as a bodyguard for a the very wealthy Joseph Whitehead.  Marty has a background as a boxer (and a thief and gambling addict, but he’s reformed) and sees this job as a new start to a new life.  But things aren’t as cozy as they appear on the surface with Mr. Whitehead.  The old man’s financial empire may be on unsteady legs; he keeps his daughter, Carys, to whom he feeds heroin, pretty much under lock and key on the estate; and then there is a mighty mysterious stranger lurking around, a creepy guy named Mamoulian.

It seems Mamoulian just may be the devil in the flesh.  Seriously.  Marty learns that just after World War II, Whitehead made some kind of deal with this Mamoulian character in exchange for success.  Now Mamoulian has come to collect what is owed to him, and he won’t take a raincheck.  And really, when someone possesses the power to raise the dead, you don’t really want to renege on a deal with them.

The Damnation Gamee was published just after The Books of Blood, and is a great example of Clive Barker’s early work.  It is a gut-churning work of pure horror.  That’s not to say it isn’t elegant and executed with style.  This forgotten classic is what drives nightmares.

John Jason

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