Showing posts with label Halloween. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Halloween. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Halloween Chemicals Kill Warfare



How about some Slayer to start the day, eh? One of my all-time favorite tracks from them. 




NCBD:

Short week (thankfully):


After that big Silver Coin reread over the weekend, I can't wait for this new issue. 




Watch:

I for one LOVED Halloween Kills. Now, granted, I really dug DGG's Halloween 2018, too, until I rewatched it at home. Not that I hated it or anything, but that second, smaller viewing revealed a bit of a lackluster sheen that was no doubt covered up by the big, opening night, theatrical viewing my friends and I had first with that one (listen to our just-after-leaving-the-theatre review HERE). And I've only seen Kills the one time, again in the theatre, although not on opening day. Still, I dug pretty much everything but the ending, which proved to be a HUGE question mark. It catapults this new requel approach into possibly super-supernatural territory, so I really have to see Halloween Ends before I can make an overall judgment, Either way, this is going to be fun as hell in the theatre come October!


Visceral, to say the least. And call me old-fashioned, but the old hand-in-the-garbage-disposal is always a gag that makes me flinch. 




Playlist:

Bria - Cunty Covers Vol. 1
ZZ Top - Eliminator
Sleep - Sleep's Holy Mountain
Black Pumas - Eponymous
Type O Negative - Bloody Kisses (digipak version)
Ghost - Impera




Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Fast-paced change? CHECK! I love how all my pulls are reflecting the heightened frenzy and complication party of my preparing to move across the country. Batten down the hatches, not long now!!!

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Goblin - Tenebrae



What better way to build up to Halloween than some Goblin, from the 2013 Tour E.P.

**

31 Days of Horror:

10/01: House of 1000 Corpses/31
10/02: Lords of Chaos
10/03: Creepshow Ep 2/Tales from the Crypt Ssn 1, Ep 1
10/04: IT Chapter 2, AHS 1984 Ep. 3
10/05: Bliss/VFW
10/06: Halloween III: Season of the Witch/Night of the Creeps/The Fog
10/07: Halloween 2018
10/08: Hell House, LLC
10/09: Dance of the Dead (Tobe Hooper; Masters of Horror Ssn 1 Ep 3)
10/10: Creepshow Episode 3
10/11: Jenifer (Dario Argento; Masters of Horror Ssn 1 Ep 4)
10/12: Poltergeist/Phenomena
10/13: AHS 1984 Ep 4/In the Tall Grass
10/14: Invasion of the Body Snatchers ('78)
10/15: Rabid (2019)
10/16: Wounds
10/17: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
10/18: Creepshow Episode 4
10/19: Ed Wood/AHS 1984 Ep. 5
10/20: Sinister/Sinister 2
10/21: Uncanny Annie
10/22: Scream
10/23: Simpsons 666: Treehouse of Horror
10/24: Jennifer's Body
10/25: Belzebuth/The Lighthouse/Halloween
10/26: Murder Party
10/27: AHS 1984 Ep. 6/Arsenic and Old Lace/The Fair Haired Child (Masters of Horror Ssn 1 Ep 9)
10/28: May


**

Playlist from 10/28:

Trust Obey - Fear and Bullets
Type O Negative - October Rust
Fields of the Nephilim - The Nephilim
Fields of the Nephilim -
Alice in Chains - Eponymous
Dead Milkmen - The King in Yellow
Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave - Phantasm OST
Goblin - 2013 Tour E.P.
Nachtmystium - As Made 7"
Claudio Simonetti - Phenomena OST

**

No card today.

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

31 Days of Horror Begins!


"It's the most wonderful time of the year..."

That runs through my head pretty much from the time Beyondfest begins at the end of September, all the way through November 1st, and this year it's even more pronounced. Because of the late night at Joe Bob and Tammy and the T-Rex Monday night, I took October 1st off, which in turn gives me a nice head start on 31 Days of Horror. I started with a Rob Zombie double feature: I chose House of 1000 Corpses to kick the entire month off as a tribute to Sid Haig. From there I segued into 31, although that essentially played in the background as I started my writing day. BIG breakthroughs on the second book of Shadow Play, now I just have to work them into my outline, rejigger a few things, and then commence writing.

**

Finally: here's a newly expanded version of that Halloween Playlist I've been listening to for the last year or two.



**

31 Days of Horror:

10/01: House of 1000 Corpses/31

**

Playlist from 10/01:

Blut Aus Nord - Hallucinogen
Ritual Howls - Rendered Armor
Opeth - Deliverance
Claudio Simonetti and Fabio Pignatelli - Phenomena OST
Zonal - Zonal (Single)
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource Vol. II: Philosophy of Beyond
Mark Korven - The Witch OST

**

No Card today.





Tuesday, October 30, 2018

2018: October 30th



From the album Post Everything (great title) and featured in the movie Pyewacket, which I watched last night and absolutely loved. In a way I saw Pyewacket as an updated version of George A. Romero's Season of the Witch, kind of a cautionary tale about messing around with Black Magick. I loved everything about this film, from the camera work, which was diverse and pragmatic in its approach, i.e. if the filmmakers needed to create tension or up the tempo for the viewer, they did so with hand-camera work - never gratuitous - or odd angles. They used the score well, partially by playing with volume to accent moments of tension release or revelation, and they kept their locations tight but aesthetically aligned with what they were trying to do, as in the use of Autumnal colors and rustic buildings. Also, director Adam McDonald certainly knows how to play on the strained relationships of Mothers and their adolescent daughters. Nicole Munoz and Laurie Holden (who some of you will remember from The Walking Dead as Andrea) kill it in their roles, Munoz especially.



I also finished watching Beetlejuice last night. Man, I miss liking Tim Burton's stuff. Unlike his later stuff, Beetlejuice is pure imagination unconfined by the caricature the auteur has made for himself, which really just acts as a prison.


Thanks to my good friend Jonathan Grimm Art for the recommendation!

31 Days of Horror

10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle
10/15) Phantom of the Paradise
10/16) Candyman
10/17) Ghoulies
10/18) John Carpenter's Halloween
10/19) Halloween
10/20) Mandy
10/21) Satan's Playground
10/22) Flatliners
10/23) Jacob's Ladder
10/24) Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10/25) Ghost Stories
10/26) John Carpenter's The Fog
10/27) Suspiria (2018)
10/28) Suspiria (1977)
10/29) Beetlejuice/Pyewacket

Playlist from 10/29:

Trust Obey - Fear and Bullets
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Wasteland
John Carpenter and Alan Howarth - Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Miranda Sex Garden - Suspiria
Exhalants - Eponymous
Trust Obey - Hands of Ash
Trust Obey - The Tides of Sin - EP

No card today. I keep forgetting my decks at home in the morning.

Well, that's almost it, as tomorrow is Halloween! Rejoice, oh you children of the night! The walls grow thin.

Sunday, October 28, 2018

2018: October 28th



A little Siouxsie and the Banshees in honor of Susie Bannion and the fact that we have now entered the final stretch toward Halloween. I still have quite a few movies I want to watch, so I'm going to start working some into the daylight, in the background. This is something I purposely never do, as a way to maintain the sacred reverence I try to hold for movies. That said, I'll look at it as a recreation of discovering horror on television as a kid. I have the original Suspiria on while I'm writing this, just as a counter point to Luca Guadagnino's version we saw last night. How was the new Suspiria?

Not an easy question, as there's a lot to unpack.

Guadagnino's iteration of Dario Argento's classic is not so much a horror movie, as it is a Film that happens to center around horrific events and characters; it's a horror movie in the same way Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is a horror movie, that is to say not  beholden to genre tropes and mores. I know some folks who would say my evening saying that is pretentious, but here's why I disagree.

Before Jaws, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, Hollywood didn't manufacture blockbusters. With the European influence that came in to take the place of the drift that set in after the studio paradigm died, Directors became revered as Auteurs. Films were made with artistic intentions, and this was not considered a bad or pretentious thing. It goes to show how corporatized we are as a society now, with the number of people who roll their eyes to my oft-preached delineation between what constitutes a Movie and what constitutes a Film.

During this Auteur period, the box office was topped by films that got people talking. Think Chinatown, a movie that would most likely never be made by a major studio today. This championing of the Director as Auteur ended after Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate disaster bankrupted United Artists. From that point on, studios began to take control back from Directors, and simultaneously began looking for 'sure-things'.

Jaws, Star Wars, and Raiders provided the template for this.

I liken Guadagnino's Suspiria to the Auteur era; it's artistic yes, but not without purpose. One interesting note, without going into spoiler territory, is that Dario Argento's Suspiria takes place in 1977 Germany, and that makes the setting Divided Germany. This never factors into Argento's film, though. That's not a criticism, just an observation, and one that only ever occurred to me now because the new film hinges on this fact. As Susie Bannion's story plays out in the foreground, the background of the film is set against the climax of the Baader-Meinhoff kidnapping, and this too factors in, as does WWII, for Lutz Ebersdorf's character.

In the end? I thought Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria was an excellent film. Will it garner the fun, cult following the original has? No. Will it incite the same kind of celebratory, rewatch fervor Argento's film does? No. That doesn't mean you shouldn't see it, you definitely should. In a theatre if you can. But it does mean a lot of horror fans who hold the original Suspiria dear need to step around their expectations and keep an open mind.

31 Days of Horror

10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle
10/15) Phantom of the Paradise
10/16) Candyman
10/17) Ghoulies
10/18) John Carpenter's Halloween
10/19) Halloween
10/20) Mandy
10/21) Satan's Playground
10/22) Flatliners
10/23) Jacob's Ladder
10/24) Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10/25) Ghost Stories
10/26) John Carpenter's The Fog
10/27) Suspiria (2018)

After the movie, K and I drove around Hollywood a bit, windows down, marine layer in the air. Closest thing I can remember to Autumn in Los Angeles in some time. The cool, moist air added a certain electricity to the evening that was only amplified when we arrived at the Horror Writer's Assoc. party. Robert Payne Cabeen and his wonderful wife Cecile put on a hell of a shindig - the entire front of the house was lavished with decorations that fit the season, music blared from the inside, and people in costumes strolled around the grounds. It was marvelous.

Incidentally, I finally procured a copy of Robert Cabeen's Stoker-aware winning novel Cold Cuts, so I'll be starting that shortly. I had been picking at short stories for the last week or so because despite beginning Neil Gaiman's much-lauded novel The Graveyard Book, I just cannot get into it at the moment. The plan is to move to Cold Cuts next and then go back to Gaiman.

Completely forgot to post here that the newest episode of The Horror Vision went up last Wednesday. Su nioj for Anthony, Chris, Ray, and my own picks for must-watch Halloween season movies. On Apple Podcasts and The Horror Vision.com now.

Playlist from yesterday was literally only my Halloween Playlist, which you can find on Apple Music if you follow me there. Cities of Dust is on it, as are a lot of other awesome tracks hand-picked to accentuate the Autumn mood I have to manufacture most days here in LaLaLand.

Halloween Playlist:

1) Black No. 1 - Type O Negative
2) Bela Lugosi's Dead - Bauhaus
3) Cities in Dust - Siouxsie & The Banshees
4) Park Around the Corner - Ritual Howls
5) The Monk Song - Miranda Sex Garden
6) The Days of Swine & Roses - My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult
7) Dead Man's Party - Oingo Boingo
8) Graveyard Girl - M83
9) A Dance for the Saints - The Final Cut
10) Mask - Bauhaus
11) Tear You Apart - She Wants Revenge
12) Skin of the Night - M83
13) Zemmoa - Ritual Howls
14) Everyday is Halloween - Ministry

Card of the day:


From the Grimoire, "Balance. Nine = Collected; stable. Cups = Emotion"

Saturday, October 27, 2018

2018: October 27th



New Finn Andrews track! I love everything about this man's music. In the past two years, I've gone to so many concerts, that I've made a little oath to lay off in 2019, in an attempt to start saving some of the money I spend at shows. The two exceptions to this are The Veils, who I've only been into since David Lynch introduced them to me on Twin Peaks, and Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats. Well, I procured Uncle Acid tickets this past Wednesday, so that only leaves The Veils. Would Finn Andrews solo suffice? Of course.

31 Days of Horror was supposed to continue last night with Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, however between decorating for Halloween and baking Zombie cookies, K and I didn't think a 2+ hour film was realistic, so we went with John Carpenter's The Fog, a film I love but hadn't watched since Mr. Brown and I viewed it back in, oh, probably 2003. Jesus, time flies.



Tonight's film is already set in stone - Suspiria, at the Arclight in Hollywood. Excited does not even begin to describe my mindset. I believe this film will not be a remake at all, but a totally new and different film that will sit alongside the original as another fantastic piece of horror cinema.


31 Days of Horror

10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost
10/10) The Convent
10/11) Killer Klowns from Outer Space
10/12) George A. Romero's Day of the Dead
10/13) George A. Romero's Land of the Dead
10/14) The Apostle
10/15) Phantom of the Paradise
10/16) Candyman
10/17) Ghoulies
10/18) John Carpenter's Halloween
10/19) Halloween
10/20) Mandy
10/21) Satan's Playground
10/22) Flatliners
10/23) Jacob's Ladder
10/24) Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10/25) Ghost Stories
10/26) John Carpenter's The Fog

On a bit of a paperback kick right now, and finding that August Derleth's Cthulhu cycle stuff is not nearly as bad as I remembered it being (I say I remembered them being bad, but regardless I've always loved what I've read, just wondered about going back to it, which has been rewarding thus far).


Playlist from 10/26:

Type O Negative - Bloody Kisses (Digipak)
The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro
The Knife - Silent Shout
Fantômas - Director's Cut
Jóhann Jóhannson - Mandy OST

Card of the day:


From the Grimoire, "Culmination." Good, lots of spinning plates and I believe I just implemented something to streamline their results. Ten is also Malkuth, the world, and I guess, in a way, I'm announcing myself to the world today.

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

2018: October 10th



Thought I'd start today off with another under-appreciated Type O track. I know, I know... wrong holiday. Still, it fits the season.

The first episode of The Horror Vision is now available on Apple Podcasts HERE. Also available on The Horror Vision website HERE. The audio is good but not great; tweaks coming for the next episode, which we recorded last night and will land next week. #2 is a discussion of our Halloween go-to watches, from the standards to the more individualized, left-of-center picks we watch every year.

31 Days of Horror continued yesterday. Since I was out doing the podcast last night, K and I opted to continue to push back Mike Mendez's The Convent back, and instead I treated myself to an afternoon viewing of Ti West's first feature film, The Roost. LOVE this one, and it'd been a while. Holds up and then some. K watched The Haunting of Molly Hartley, liked it but said it kinda resembled a Lifetime movie if they did horror.

10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope
10/03) Dreams in the Witch House
10/04) Crash
10/05) The Fly
10/06) Re-animator
10/07) Night of the Demons
10/08) Species
10/09) The Roost

Playlist from 10/09:

High On Fire - Electric Messiah
Nothing - Guilty Of Everything
The Skull - For Those Which Are Asleep
Type O Negative - October Rust
Type O Negative - Dead Again

No card today.



Wednesday, October 3, 2018

2018: October 3rd



Love this song! I love all tracks by Type O, especially from this album, but this is one of the standouts. Also a great example of why they were so great: interesting, non-traditional song structure,  those group vocal accents that give everything a lush sense of good-natured hostility, fantastic two-person vocal melodies, and a sense of bloody humor for Christ's sake, just to name a few elements on display here that I love. No October would be complete without Type O Negative.

I decided to do the 31 Days of Horror movie thing. Not really a challenge, but a commitment for sure. Last night we opened Shudder only to find they'd added a bunch of Hitchcock! Super cool. First up from these was Rope, the adaptation of the play, starring Farley Granger, John Dall, and of course, the inimitable James Stewart. It had been quite some time since I'd watched this one, and while I remembered the big picture, a lot of the nuance - which is where all the fun lies - played for me like a first viewing.

10/01) Summer of 84
10/02) Rope

What will tonight's movie be? Not sure yet. I set a few DVDs out though, fodder for the coming evenings:



And there's a hell of a lot more than that. October is just getting started!


Playlist from October 2nd:

Sisters of Mercy - Floodland
Fields of Nephilim - Dawnrazor
Zombi - Spirit Animal
Zombi - Shape Shift
Sleep - The Science
Type O Negative - Life is Killing Me
Ennio Morricone - Black Belly of the Tarantula OST

Card of the day:


Seeking completion and fulfillment: And I continue to work on finishing my book!

Sunday, June 10, 2018

2018: June 10th: A Banner Year for Horror

It's really shaping up to be a banner year for horror at the theatre. These are the two trailers that made my week last week, the Halloween was a complete surprise, I expected to not give a toss; add to them the surprise of the Suspiria trailer, and I'm psyched (this of course, doesn't even take into consideration all the gooey goodness that Beyond Fest will undoubtedly bring to LA in the fall. Yay!





Playlist from June 9th:

The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night
Otis Redding - Tell the Truth
Ghost - Prequelle
Zeal and Ardor - Stranger Fruit
David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
David Bowie - The Next Day Extra E.P

Monday, October 31, 2016

Halloween Music Playlist

Image by the amazing Dark Town Sally. Link to her store below


Same as the movies but with the tightly curated music I've filled my October with. I'm album-oriented, especially in regards to this particular season, but for sheer pragmatism I'll simply post one song of each in a little playlist I made. All this stuff is from fantastic records though, and I urge you to seek them out!

And note - the image I used above is artwork by the INCREDIBLE Dark Town Sally. I strongly encourage anyone who loves Halloween to seek out her website and order some of her work!




Halloween Movie Playlist



Happy Halloween!

I've been so inspired by Tommy over at Heaven is an Incubator, who has been celebrating all month by posting a horror movie trailer a day, that I thought I'd do something something similar today. So, below are the trailers for every movie I've watched in the last two weeks or so. Most of these are every year October watches, but a few were fleeting dalliances. Enjoy.

Note: First flick I'll mention is the one on the list I refuse to post the trailer to, so I used the movie poster as my lead image. I do this because when I saw May I knew nothing about it and it completely floored me. The trailer gives too much away.















And finishing it up tonight with, of course:

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Anticipation: Tales of Halloween


I realize I'm jumping the gun a bit, after all it is only March. However, after just now stumbling upon this impending release I find myself chomping at the bit for October! Lucky McKee? Neil Marshall? Joe Begos? Darren Lynn Bousman? And the topper - Mike Mendez? Auteur of The Convent, my all-time favorite indie horror flick and one of my favorite movies ever, period? SOLD! And when you consider that, holy crap, it's already March and the first three months of 2015 have already flown by, well then, I guess it's just as good as June then too. And if it's just as good as June, then we might as well call it September, and if it's September, October's right around the corner! Depressing that time flies that fast yes, but at least now we have something to salivate for in the meantime as life hits warp speed on another year. And while I didn't find anything cinches October as the month of release, chances are it's a safe bet.




Saturday, May 17, 2014

Rob Zombie's New Horror Movie?



via Bloody Disgusting. I have NO idea what this will be but despite my dislike of H2 (beautifully shot, and that's the only good thing I can say about it) and subsequent relative disappointment in the Lords of Salem - which looks amazing but I was unable to make it all the way through due to what I perceived at the time to be an amazingly sluggish pace* and next to no plot advancement from the inciting incident into almost the end of the second act, I am excited for this. Mr. Zombie's much touted, "I'm done with horror" scared me. Whether he balks or slams one out of the park, I like Zombie on the Horror hound side. I don't want to applaud what may be a diminutive situation for him - being stuck inside a genre he wants out of - but what can I say? House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects are, in my mind, modern classics of the genre (even if they do wear their influences on their sleeve. So what? It makes it so you can watch them and go, "Oh! Zombie loves House by the Cemetery too! Awesome!) and aspects of the Theatrical cut of Halloween turn what is essentially an over-explained and unneeded remake into a beautifully rendered piece of cinema.

...........

* I intend to give Lords of Salem another chance as a lot of folks whose opinions I respect loved it and in the film's defense, I tried watching it after I'd been up for almost 24 hours, so what I perceived as a 'sluggish pace' may have actually been me nodding off.

Friday, November 8, 2013

Secret Chiefs 3 - Personae: Halloween



So weird. My friend Mike at the best comic book shop in LA, The Comic Bug*just played me this track the other day and now here I find this video. The song is from the just-released Book of Souls: Folio A which you can order on the Web of Mimicry website here.

..............

* Interestingly enough one of my best friends in the world is also named Mike and happens to run the best comic shop in the greater Chicagoland area, Amazing Fantasy Books and Comics.

Sunday, November 3, 2013

David Bowie's Love is Lost



Released the day before Halloween this one was right on time as it is some spooky stuff. Bowie continues to amaze me even when I'm not in the throws of a Bowie-binge. I watched this with the sound low and Blut Aus Nord on in the background and it fit, what the hell does that say?

That Bowie can still go as dark as anybody out there.

Now, what the hell is this video that I found on Gigwise all about -