It’s been spooky around home lately. It could just be Halloween season and too many horror movies before bed or it could be the cold weather making the house creak, but I swear I’ve been hearing odd noises in the middle of the night. Noises things make moving around blindly in the dark. You know the ones where you get out of bed stumbling for the light while your left brain tries to rationalize everything away but the right brain is convinced there something creeping around your house in the dark and waits for you…
Tuesday night I was about to watch It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown when I saw that the fire department was in my parking lot and there were flames in one of the windows of the apartment building across from me. Everyone was okay, but it was rather nerve wracking for a while.
Here's a link to some very short spooky stories. Check out Neil Gaiman's short.
http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/programs/2007/10/27/_ten_tales_of_terror.html
Books to read:
The Dark Descent - ed. David G. Hartwel. A thick brick of book. A horror anthology spanning the literary traditions of ghost stories from literary fiction to modern horror traditions.
The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson. Probably THE greatest haunted house novel, ever.
Clive Barker's A to Z of Horror – Clive Barker. Based on his television show for British TV, Barker examines the history of horror from American Psycho to Zombie in this thoughtful companion book.
Movies:
The Haunting (1963) based on Shirley Jackson’s book.
Any of the old Universal Horror movies for the 1930s: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy etc
The original Wicker Man from 1973 with it’s nasty little ending
Werner Herzog’s dreamy remake Nosferatu the Vampyre
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, both the 1956 film and the clever 1978 remake
John Carpenter's brilliant Halloween
Hitchcock’s The Birds, Psycho, Vertigo
Les Diaboliques from French director Henri-Georges Clouzot about a wife and her husband’s mistress concoct a plan to bump off the abusive husband, but his body won’t stay put
A lot of films by Mario Bava (Black Sunday), George A. Romero (Dawn of the Dead) and producer Val Lewton (Cat People).
In the meantime, here are two goblins from last year.
Have a save & Happy Halloween!
