a sense of joy and then a panic

The Telegraph: Ghost Sightings Highest in 25 Years (via Charles Tan at sfsignal)

The study found that despite being in time of accelerating technology, 21st century Britons have not turned their back on ghouls, boggarts, hell-hounds, witches, wizards, banshees and black magic curses, with a whopping 968 reports of demonic activity in the past 25 years.

The report indentifies Yorkshire as the centre of ghostly goings-on demonic activity with 74 reports of demons, including Uncabus and Succubus (male and female demons that make sexual attacks on sleeping victims), instances of demonic possession and sightings of hell hounds, water demons and demons with repulsive forms such as ghouls and werewolves.

Sightings of demons in Yorkshire have included a hideous shadow-like hell-hound with no discernible facial features which collided with a car between Northallerton and Leeming Bar on the A684. A sea-going water demon has also been reported off Filey Bay in Yorkshire. Witnesses claimed to have seen a ghostly creature with a long neck, a vast serpentine body and glowing eyes.

Wiltshire is one of the most popular areas for sightings of phantom dogs, shucks or hell-hounds. At Black Dog Hill near Black Dog Woods in Chapmanslade, there are reports of a huge black hound with eyes like red hot coals.

People in Inverness report sightings of 13 water ghosts in the last 25 years, evil spirits whose main purpose is to lure their victims into dangerous water and then drown them. The water ghosts contribute to the area's overall total of 39 demonic beings and one of the most notorious water ghosts resides in the area of Boat of Garten, which lies on each side of the River Spey, near Chapeltown and Tulloch Moor. The paranormal reports from Boat of Garten involve an ancient, inscribed stone visible when the river is at its lowest. According to legend, the stone is cursed and guarded by a malevolent water-demon, or kelpie-type entity, who protects it savagely. Anyone touching it or attempting to move it is said to become prey to this aquatic, demonic being.

All I really have to say is... where the hell has FARGO been all my life?  

I watched this on the plane going to China.  This is the clip where I was like, "OMG, it's Nebraska."  Except of course it's not, and it's not our accent, but whatever.


The whole movie is on YouTube, so seriously, no one has an excuse not to watch this beauty.  It's already vaulted into my top ten.  If I'm not careful my entire top ten will compose of Coen Brothers movies and Apocalypse Now.

I've managed to recently watch quite a few movies that I should have seen long before.  Like, The Matrix.  There are some really neat ideas tucked in here, and great music that I already own.  But damn if Keanu Reeves is not a horrible actor.  I wasn't blown away.  Especially by the climactic events.  This was sort of - worldbuilding = A, plot = C.  I fell asleep watching The Matrix Reloaded, but not before getting creeped out by their future human city.  Another movie I fell asleep watching was The Informant.  Really I watched the first 1/3 and then woke up for the last fifteen minutes.  Which seemed interesting, really, and I want to try to watch it again, but the dialogue was so quiet and I couldn't hear it on the plane.  Don't ask why I could hear everything on Fargo. 

I also watched the entirety of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick) for the first time.  I'm a Nicholson fan, and a Shining fan, so it's not like this could really go wrong.  It's not as scary as the book, and I admit some changed details annoyed me, but uh, I had to look away during Room 217.  That was not good, and it went on way too long for comfort.  I hadn't known much about Insomnia, but I clicked on it because I saw Christopher Nolan and "land of the midnight sun."  It's one of those cops going crazy movies, and it's actually pretty good.  Mostly because Alaska makes for such an intense setting, and it's filmed with aplomb.  Get Carter - Stallone the financial adjuster goes home to the Seattle burbs to find out who killed his brother - is pretty entertaining for the first 2/3 of the movie, all this off-beat humorous violence and stuff.  Then it turns into a rape-secondary-revenge movie and gets all somber and icky.  Still, not bad for a let's-be-criminals movie. 

The Legend of Drunken Master/ Drunken Master II is some seriously good shit, better than the first.  I know some people aren't into kung fu attempts at comedy, but I was literally laughing like 80% of the movie (I mean, you know me).  Anita Mui is just fucking fantastic in it - she plays Jackie Chan's stepmother.  Oh yeah and Jackie Chan.  Basically I wanted to join their family.  And yes, I know - I watched the dubbed version.  My only other language choice was French!  Thanks, Netflix!  I can't recommend Bloodsport, though: '80s Van Damme movie about an underground world fighting tournament.  Yeah, you hear world fighting tournament and you're like, oh man, it's gonna be awesome!  Not really.  More like land o' cliches with no entertainment in sight.

I watched a few of Showtime's Masters of Horror pieces.  They're not very good, in general.  That Damned Thing is under an hour but probably the best, about a monster in a small town in Texas.  The acting is reasonable for a TV movie and the plot feels... I don't know, genuine in some way?  I don't want to totally recommend Dreams in the Witch House, a modern adaptation of the Lovecraft story, but for you horror junkies, it may be worth a view.  It's not only creepy in a fun way but it's highly amusing as well, kind of like a good Tales From The Crypt.  Nightmare Man, about an evil African fertility mask, is very very bad - laughably bad.  Valerie on the Stairs, about a haunted writer's colony, is even worse because you can't even laugh at it.

So many religious horror movies!  I lost interest in The Prophecy pretty much immediately.  Requiem, on the other hand, is a really interesting movie if you want to know the true story behind the "true story" behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  As in, this is what really happened to the girl - epilepsy and intense religious pressure, from within and without.  Depressing movie, but good, with a very retro/antique feel (set in the '70s in rural Germany).  On a similar note, we've got The Woods, a sort of B-movie-trying-to-be-A-movie-or-is-it-really-trying? about a girls' boarding school with a supposed history of witchcraft, and oh, the evil woods.  If you're into that sort of thing, it's not bad.  I can't say it's worth watching though.  Picnic on Hanging Rock is a far superior treatment of the Witchy Boarding School idea.  Hell House, the original Jesus Camp, is a less scathing, more personal documentary about fundamentalist Christians trying to save America - by building "haunted houses" to scare people out of being gay or having abortions.  It really gets in the heads/motives of the organizers, though, with interesting results.  Not a movie, but I also watched an episode of this BBC show Apparitions - about a Catholic priest who exorcises demons in modern London - and quite enjoyed it, particularly the emotional honesty of the characters portrayed.  Plus I'm a sucker for the whole ambiguously "good" versus "evil" fight over some guy's eternal soul thing.  Apparently British people didn't like it, because it got canceled.  C'est la vie.

Oh yeah, and I watched Shutter Island.  I never felt like it was a real movie.  The acting made it seem more like a community theater production.  Like, way below the caliber I expect from all these guys involved, including Scorcese.  A couple unnerving shots, and I will admit the last 20% of the movie felt like a step up from all that came before - ironic given the plot - and of course, gratuitously scary asylum is gratuitously scary.  I'm not going to rec it though.  I have very mixed feelings.  Like disappointment matched with bewilderment.

I was watching Ghost Hunters International on Hulu, and I like it, with all its Nazi-chapel-castle-built-on-the-gates-of-HELL!-stories, but my favorite "paranormal investigation" show ever remains MTV's Fear.

Six young amateurs are dropped off at a huge haunted locale and told to do various occult stunts in exchange for money (all via computer).  Very rarely did all five make it to the end - in one episode, every single contestant dropped out.  MTV never gave the actual names of the places they visited and they made up all sorts of stories to tell the contestants before sending them out to do a voodoo ritual or seance, and there was never any "evidence" or "analysis" here.  All you get is the expression on the poor suckers' faces.  Total fucking fear.  This show is all about the mental mindfuck that is our concept of and interaction with the paranormal.  And I think this made Fear much more interesting than the professional ghosthunting shows being made now. 

This is the middle clip of the episode where they all quit, Mina Dos Estrellas in Mexico - supposedly the only place where MTV didn't make up a backstory (it was a mine, there was a flood, many many people died).  Two people have already quit.  There's a lot packed into this snippet.  Especially love Zach's meta-poetry there at 6:30. 

A/N: I meant to post this earlier this week, but I failed, because I fail.

Consider this my first foray into both mixes and mediafire.  But it's Halloween and I love Halloween so I decided to make a playlist of Halloween-y music.  I split it into four manageable, slightly coherent volumes.  I tried to include various types of Halloween-y music, but of course what they ultimately have in common is that I like them.  If there's no lyrics posted under the song, that means it's either instrumental or in a different language or I can't figure out what the fuck they're saying. 

Also, if you download the Death in June and you live in Germany, it is not my problem if you are arrested.

So, hope you find something you like!

( table of contents and zip files )

Halloween video!


Audio: "Nobody Likes You When You're Dead" by Zombina and the Skeletones
Video: "Wild Zero" by Guitar Wolf [a rock opera?]
Mash-up by: DeadboyandGravegirl

The Children of Loki: (L to R) Jörmungandr, Fenrir, and Hel. 

It's too bad another son, the eight-legged horse, didn't make it into the photo op. 

Seriously though, I wish I knew more Norse mythology.  It seems really bad ass.

I decided to check out several horror books (novel / short story collection) this summer and read them.  I tried to pick both un-read classics and newer ones.  Also, Stephen King is like my barometer in horror fiction, which is why he's mentioned in (almost) every review.  This is part of the reason I need to read more horror!  Anyway.  In the order I read them:

1.  The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson (1959).

This is the mother of modern haunted house stories.  You can see where King took "inspiration" from her for both The Shining and Rose Red.  The idea of houses as beings unto themselves - in this case insane and manipulative and ever-desiring of more humans to "take in" - must have started here.  It's a pretty atmospheric book - no gore and only implied ghosts - but it was extremely difficult to put down and is a very fast read (which doesn't mean the writing was simplistic, because it's excellent).  Basically, a scientist has launched an expedition to Hill House and the protagonist, Eleanor, is one of the psychics he's invited to "wake it up" (yeah, Rose Red basically copied this part).  And Hill House eats at Eleanor, which is very real for the reader because you are positioned with Eleanor, who is both crazy and extremely sympathetic. 

Because of its paranormal elements it's labeled horror, but The Haunting of Hill House belongs with the likes of Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (this could be considered a sister to "The Yellow Wallpaper," a story that I really think everyone should read).  There's a lot of feminist themes in this one, and I mean that in the best sense possible.  It's very much about gender roles and their intersection with mental stability (Eleanor's best friend/antagonist/love interest is the perky, beautiful Theodora).  The insane house just plays on those themes, teasing and aggravating the raw emotional nerve. 

I don't know how this book would read to a reader who was more of a Theodora, or a Luke.  But as an Eleanor type - the high-functioning kind - it was like having someone stick their finger in your artery and swish it around.  I understand it's been made into movies, but none of them seem to be honest about the book.  This isn't for some slapdash B-movie director - this one needs a visionary at the helm.  A must for anybody interested in "women and horror" as an issue, and I'm infinitely glad I read it - and really happy to have been a Shirley Jackson Award nominee.

2.  20th Century Ghosts, Joe Hill (2007).

I have to say it: Joe Hill's dad is literally Stephen King.  That said, they write with totally different styles.  Hill is more heart and soul and literary persuasions, whereas King is more blood and guts and utilitarian speech.  I will tell you straight up that 20th Century Ghosts is neither very scary nor very creepy, but I don't think Hill is trying to scare the pants off anyone.  He uses the paranormal to write literary stories, following the argument that if it's "weird," it's horror (an argument I've tried to convince myself of, but in vain).  But anyway.  The first story, "Best New Horror," is very good.  It's a satire about the horror publishing industry, and the protagonist is the editor of the horror collection of the title.  It's dead-on, unfortunately. 

The second story, "20th Century Ghost," I couldn't get into.  Okay, I have a really strong bias in horror fiction - I hate, double hate, loathe entirely the "performance ghost" genre.  You know, the ghost of a former lounge singer who goes back and plays the piano and clinks the glasses on the bar, the sort of shit you see on "America's Most Haunted."  I just find these stories boring and trite and pathetic and I don't know who would enjoy them, but I guess somebody does because horror writers love to pull out ye olde "performance ghost."  

So, moving on.  "Last Breath" and "Dead-Wood" were both short, creepy, and wonderful - about people's dying breaths and the ghosts of forests.  The kind of stuff Hill should spend more of his time on, because there's not a lot of horror writers with the patience or skill to pull off that kind of story.  Unfortunately, I can't say that any of the writing held my attention enough to plow through the rest of the book.  I'm sorry, Joe Hill!  Maybe I'll try you again some other time when I'm in a more literary mood? 

3.  The Descent, Jeff Long (2001).

[Disclaimer: My review here covers the first 1/3 of the book, at which point I could not bear to go on reading.  Therefore, it cannot be taken as an overall assessment of The Descent, which I will note I picked up in the first place because of several glowing reviews on Amazon.com]

No, this is not the cave spelunker movie, but they have in common underground humanoid monsters.  If you know any Lovecraft, or have even heard of Hollow Earth theory, the whole subterranean nether-world premise is nothing new.  That being said, the first chapter, where a Himalayan mountaineering expedition stumbles into a cave and find a mummified corpse inside, is spectacular - and I mean, spectacular.  Grotesque, scary, unbelievably bold in terms of what Long was putting on paper.  I had really high hopes for the rest of the book. 

Unfortunately, in the chapters that followed I ran up against a couple things I couldn't get past.  First, the chapters that follow are very "international," but boy can you ever tell they were written by an American.  It reads as though Long did  wikipedia research and read some Lonely Planet in order to explain to you that Srebrenica was a "killing field" as if he's parlaying some local info that every adult shouldn't already know.  His protagonists are a sadly all-American cast of goodie-goodie-good-guys (except for a couple random Europeans, people of other nationalities don't talk) - none of whom are racist, they just think foreigners are "savage" or "fiend"-like, but that's cuz they are, goddamnit, those African lepers making sacrifices to pagan gods have crossed the line from pathetic to horrifying!  I about cried when Long set a chapter in Indonesia (identified only as "Java".  He also says that gamelan music takes a lifetime to learn to like, which sure explains why they play it in hotels to greet tourists).  And this is why Stephen King sets all his stories in Maine!  I felt that any substantial international experience Long has did not show - which is really very unfortunate. 

I might have been able to keep going if not for the sense that this book was shaping up to be more of a thriller than a piece of horror fiction (and not just because the scares stopped in chapter one) - which explains the action-adventure feel and the annoyingly unrealistic characters used to info-dump (the worst was the beautiful, spunky nun from Texas, but the slew of rugged individualist heroes got old fast too).  Ultimately it was this thriller vibe that made me realize that I didn't know why I was reading this book, since I do not enjoy thrillers and I do not read writers who mishandle Indonesia (and seemingly ignore post-colonial race dynamics) - I stopped reading Sam Winchester's critically-acclaimed Krakatoa for this same reason.  So the book went back to the library.  The first chapter, however, will live forever in my heart.

4.  Books of Blood, Vol. 1-3, Clive Barker (1984).

I'd only been exposed to Clive Barker through this Sci-Fi B-movie, The Plague, which wasn't so good.  I don't blame him for that because Books of Blood is really, really fantastic.  It's a collection of short stories, five or six per volume, and he explains what a "book of blood" is in the first story of the first volume - literally, it's apparently when legions of ghosts grab you and carve stories of their violent deaths onto your body, but Barker's real point is that we are all books of blood.  Barker's awesome because he wields the blood and guts with the boldness of say, the first chapter of The Descent, but he's got writing chops up there with Joe Hill and at times, Shirley Jackson.  There are, of course, a couple clunkers - Barker's not so good when he's being more light-hearted, like in "The Yattering and Jack," and he too pulled out the dreaded "performance ghost."  But the non-clunkers are frequent and magnificent.  

In volume 1, "The Midnight Meat Train," "Pig Blood Blues," and "In The Hills, the Cities" are all A+ stories.  It's funny, because "In The Hills, the Cities" is also based in the former Yugoslavia (like parts of The Descent), but it feels infinitely more real and poignant because Barker treats all his characters like actual human beings, not caricatures/props.  You'd think it would be easy.  "Midnight Meat Train" is mostly a fine piece of gore about a serial killer in New York subways that takes a mind-blowing turn at the end, one that lifts it up into the sublime. 

Volume 2 is a little more solidly "good" instead of either "ho-hum" or "great," but "Hell's Event" - a really fun, adrenaline-filled story about demons trying to win a human marathon in order to destroy democracy (great to see sports in sf!) - and "The Skins of the Fathers" - an absurdly fantastical story set in the Southwest about monsters in the hills (and in our veins) - are both great.  To my surprise, I actually wanted to read the "performance ghost" in Volume 3's "Son of Celluloid" - but seeing as how it's about the ghosts of movies taking root in a disembodied tumor, it was kind of different.  "Rawhead Rex" is gruesome, no other way to describe it, and I felt the ending was lacking, but damn if the rest of the story wasn't horrific.  "Scape-Goats," on the other hand, is one of the most lovely, macabre pieces of purely existential horror I've ever read, about a ship-wrecked quartet of young people on an "empty" Northern island.  To put it simply, Barker totally gets the idea that horror should be a meditation on the world and humanity and all the darkness therein.  Can't say enough about these stories, really.

5.  The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson (1908)

If Hill House is the mother of the modern haunted house story, then House on the Borderland is the father of the Lovecraft monster-god story.  Fittingly, it's also older, lesser-known, and more deranged than Hill House.  In one sense, the style is very old-fashioned (obviously) - half-utilitarian, half-needless prose, describing every little detail of every little action - you know how it is with most writing of this period.  On the other hand, as the story continues the style begins to have the effect of a much more recent phenomenon: the Blair Witch Project. 

The bulk of House on the Borderland is purportedly a discovered "manuscript," and unlike, say, Heart of Darkness, which is clearly just a framed fictional narrative, there's a slap-dash, seemingly amateur, random quality to the writing, much like Blair Witch's unpolished acting and "bad" camera angles, that make House on the Borderland seem like it could be real.  A lot of Lovecraftian stories have this quality - like it's just insane enough, and just un-literary enough, and just out-of-bounds enough, that it feels eerily real.  Apparently some people don't like this, but I find it a very interesting reader experience, if one that I wouldn't want to repeat too often. 

So anyway, here's the plot: the unnamed narrator, the manuscript's author, is an old man living with his sister Mary and beloved dog Pepper in an isolated mansion in Ireland.  The house is surrounded by wild gardens, and beyond the wild gardens is a big ravine called The Pit.  Things start coming out of The Pit - horrible humanoid Swine-Things that force the narrator et al. to hole up inside the house.  The narrator also has these psycho metaphysical visions where he goes first to a mountainous "arena" in The Plain of Silence (which is surrounded by gigantic mythological gods of destruction, like Kali and Set), then watches the Earth die, then goes floating around other planets and the Dark Sun and the Dark Nebula and... uh, yeah.  I must admit, I got a little lost.  But thankfully the story brings us back to the House, maligned now not by Swine-Things but by the Thing from the Arena, which is really a gigantic Swine-Thing... and it all ends very creepily, of course.  Hodgson clearly started something huge in horror fiction here: "cosmic horror," monsters of incredible unknown and incredible powers, huge hidden parallel worlds... overall, good stuff.  It's in the public domain, so I recommend taking a gander.

But it's a quiz about vampires!  The password = lamia.

Grrarrrgharrr!

I decided to see Drag Me to Hell because it got a NYTimes critic's pick.  Apparently it was supposed to be a combination of funny and scary and Evil Dead-y, or something.  And it was funny, in some parts.  But it was never funny without being scary.  While not soul-crushingly scary like The Ring - a good thing, since I wouldn't have enjoyed it at all if that were the case - it was definitely full of jump-scenes, major gross-outs, and some serious supernatural heebie-jeebies.  I had my eyes protected about 1/5 of the time, I would say, but that's because I'm scared of jump-scenes.  The part where I actually felt genuinely afraid was the seance.  Ho ho, that was a bad ass seance.  That was when I said, "okay, I'm not watching this."  Luckily I went with Christina, who being Greek Orthodox understands exactly where I'm coming from.  The whole idea of curses is not a suspension of disbelief for either of us, it's safe to say.  Regardless - damn load of fun, if you're into this sort of thing.


( discussion, spoilers, etc. )

Goddamn, I am such a goth.  The cernunnos in the beginning is basically the best part, too.  Also, I watched Triumph of the Will last night, but I'll talk about that later.  Don't worry, still not a Nazi!  No amount of German music will turn me into one.  I'm too much of a humanist.