This Halloweeny season

Halloweeny Season is a part of the Portal Clique's Merry Thanksgivoween Celebrations that start around August 18th and last until sometime in February. Halloweeny is part of the High Celebrations because it includes Pery's birthday as well as All's Hallowed Eve, more popularly known as Halloween. Also because more than a handful of my friends make the month of October as much a celebration as I do.

Map by Rustbelt Cartography

This year, I reckoned to do the following:
 15. Read "Batman: Haunted Gotham." It's a little tough, the comic is really hammy.
  14. Play along with whatever in the World Ben Lathrop's werewolf thing is. over at his blog
  13. Watch some Casper, the Friendly Ghost, Wendy, the Witch, and Hotstuff cartoons.
  12. Re-watch the Scooby Doo movies from the early Aughts.
  11. Play Betrayal At the House On the Hill.
  10. Write a major Crawlspace event specially for the season.
  9. Check out Troll 2. 
  8. Finally visit one of the big haunted houses that own abandoned strip malls these days.
 7. Find the movie about Count Down, Dracula's son, the one with Ringo Starr as Merlin in it.
 6. Read "The Devil And Daniel Webster."  
5. Watch any new IFC "After Midnight" or of the new Hammer Horror flicks that I come across.
4. Re-watch The Fearless Vampire Killers. It'll be nice to see how it sounds in English finally.  
3. Listen to a radio theater episode of the Shadow.
2. Watch an old Hammer Horror flick with Peter Cushing and Christoper Lee in it.

Here's what I've done to date.

#2-#5 were easy ones for me. Peryton has helped me find more than six Hammer Horror flix featuring Peter Cushing, if only one with Christopher Lee. An old pulp fan, like me, can listen to the Shadow any time that he wants, I have cassette tapes as well as internet based programming. Netflix was more than obliging at providing both The Fearless Vampire Killers and plenty of IFC horror movies-- A person should watch European horror flix because they're the way horror should be, just a little more than a little campy.

#10 had been being worked on since mid-September. The "rough" final was released last Friday, Oct 18 just before midnight locally. Please check it out and share the news with friends.

#14 Ooops, I forgot one. I had better get on that. 

Well back to Halloweenying.

Oct 3rd: Weird Science

As part of my Halloween checklist, I listed "Watching a Hammer Horror flik with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in it." Well, I can't say that I've done that just yet, but what we have watched is Worldwide Pictures's "The Creeping Flesh." While for Pery it was her first time watching the movie, it was like my third time watching a totally different film that I had seen before. It was still a good time, despite the release having edited out of the more disturbing parts (I'd call them insightful) of the work and some post-production scenes added, prolly tens years after it really released. 

I could go on about how Lovecraftian the flik is, or how it is a smartly written Gothic tragedy, but I won't. It's a decent horror and Peter Cushing and Christopher is at the top of their game. The writers get a grip on the crux of sex for women without exploiting the lead actress, while having fun with the shallower tropes of the scientific-minded in film since about 1906

But what is so much fun about the film, is the fact that stereotypes are not dated.