31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 8 (Unsolved Mysteries)

Probably a bit of a shorter one here, but I'm only looking to evoke a certain mood for the spooky month this time. For my nostalgic memories of the 90's, Unsolved Mysteries fits the bill nicely. I could just end this post here, having already linked the theme song that scared the piss out of my entire generation... but instead I actually went to watch some of the show. Lucky for me, a whole shitload of it is online and I went with two episodes from the second season. Here's where the approach got tricky, though. Unsolved Mysteries is, in a lot of ways, a true crime show. It also deals with aspects of the unexplained and paranormal, as well as some sweeter tales which we'll get to in a moment... but true crime is awkward. It's one thing for me to sit here and chronicle a review of some slasher movie where imaginary people played by actors get killed by someone. It's quite another for me to write out a real crime case where a real human being's life ended. 31 Screams has always been about exploring the fantastical, and just covering an actual fucking murder is a line I don't really want to cross. Lucky for me, the two I watched only had one actual unsolved murder mystery case between them. What's in between? Before we get to the spooky, here's the surprisingly heartfelt.


At this point I'm convinced that stories about hope and healing are haunting me; the first episode I loaded up, after a quick real crime update, told the story of a Vietnam vet named Jim looking for the nurse who helped him after he was wounded during the war. It's an unexpectedly sweet story, and one with the happy ending of the nurse and the patient meeting up again after 20-odd years. Now I'm skipping past more paranormal stuff, but I then loaded up a second episode from the second season. It began with the story of a Vietnam vet named Jim looking for the nurse who helped him after he was wounded during the war. I want you all to know that I lay there, downstairs, seriously wondering for a few moments if that Berenstein Bears/Mandela Effect bullshit had just happened to me, and I'd shifted between parallel universes in between episodes. It all ended up being a huge coincidence, though. At least, I think so. Still, for a show I decided to watch because it had a spooky theme song and dealt with like aliens and ghosts and shit sometimes, it was surprisingly poignant. It's like all those stories I get inspired by, your Sailor Moons and your Doctor Whos and your Zombie Lands and whatnot, but it's real. A real tangible connection between real people, shared for the world in the hopes that they can reconnect and heal the last scars of their wounds in Vietnam. The second vet even says as much, once he gets to meet his caring nurse from yesteryear. It's really quite lovely and I liked it.


And now for the SPOOKY SHIT! The two spooky cases I encountered were of the Roswell UFO crash of 1947, and the cryptid Ogopogo from British Columbia. Ogopogo is basically just Canada's Loch Ness Monster, for those not in the know. The Roswell case is presented in wild detail, and it's definitely a jumping off point that makes me want to read more into it. I mean, I have enough of a rational mind to know that it's probably all grasping at straws, but Unsolved Mysteries makes it feel real, especially when it gets into the details of leaked Army documents sent to UFO hunters. Which could just be people fucking around with UFO hunters, mind, but then you have a living eyewitness who supposedly handled the alien spaceship metal after his dad brought it home. There's always a rational way out of it all, of course, but when you've got that spooky mood and that spooky theme music it can be hard to forget that. That goes double for Ogopogo, a lake monster which actually has a bunch of blurry footage of it shot in the late 60's and the 80's. Unsolved Mysteries shows about four different bits of footage of Ogopogo, and in half of them you can't see shit. The ones from 1989 show something but it could easily be a big beaver or an otter. It makes me wonder if anyone with like, an actual HD camera in our day and age has captured Ogopogo footage. That's that for Unsolved Mysteries, I guess. It's definitely a spooky goddamned show, even if it has moments of true crime and sweetness peppered within.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 7 (Twelve Angels Weeping)

Okay, this one was a really fun read. Granted, it only gives me a little bit to work with for the thematic season... but there's just enough here to warrant a post's work of content. So, let's define what we have here. Twelve Angels Weeping is a short story collection featuring, well, 12 Doctor Who stories. Each of them is about a specific alien species/threat from the show's long history, and the whole thing has a "12 Days Of Christmas" vibe to it. It doesn't seem to fit spooky month at first, but if Tim Burton gets to make a movie that hugs the border between a Halloween movie and a Christmas movie, then this collection can as well. The stories are all really good and varied, but a lot of them aren't what I'd call "spooky". You get some wild things like Time Lord detective noir on Gallifrey, or aliens teaming up to pull a heist (but not like a time heist or anything), or an actual depiction of the whole Nightmare Child thing from the Time War. Sometimes we see the Doctor and pals, and sometimes we don't. Of the 12 stories in the collection, three of them have enough horrific attributes to them for me to want to cover today. As I say, though, all 12 stories are neat in their own right. Let's kick it off with the titular one.


"Grey Matter" is a Weeping Angel tale that definitely gives a strong start to the whole affair. Having the Doctor show up on a planet of Doctors during a quarantine is a neat concept, as is the idea of the futuristic plague masks they all wear. As a short story, it plays around the edges of the tale, focusing more on the POV of Chief Medical Officer Perinne as his planet and its mega-cities succumb to a mystery plague, one by one. Oops, the plague's not really a plague. It's a Weeping Angel infestation and they're doing that thing they did in the Byzantium two-parter, turning other people into Weeping Angels... and nobody can tell because they all have those future plague masks on and can't see people's faces properly. All of the scarier stories in this collection focus on a level of existential dread, and Grey Matter kicks it all off well enough as you realize what's happening while you're in Perinne's head and the corner of his eye keeps bugging him, along with a flicker on one of his monitors. It's not a situation that really gets resolved or anything, either. The Weeping Angels always were haunting, and they don't even seem hungry in this episode; they just keep propagating this planet and changing people into statues. Which fits well with the next story...


"Ghost In The Machine" is a Cyberman story told from the POV of a random Cyberman, who keeps heading into battle and hallucinating the image of a girl in the middle of the battlefield. There have definitely been Cyberman stories which play up the absolute conceptual horror of what it must be like to be converted into an emotionless robot, but they're few and far between. They mostly get used as big stampy robots who chortle about emotions sometimes. Kind of like the Borg in Star Trek, where the original point of them got lost in translation along the way. Ghost In The Machine plays that up with a simple but fucking morbid twist: the girl the Cyberman keeps seeing is her old self, the last bit of humanity still remaining that it cannot delete. Just thinking of the implications of that is supremely fucked up, and it adds a whole new dimension of conceptual nightmare to the Cybermen. It's great stuff, and so is the last spooky tale.


"Student Bodies" involves everyone's favorite cosmic fuckups, the Silence! The structure of this one is interesting, as it's sort of a found footage thing involving the audio logs of a student on a lunar university staying home over Christmas break... but, since this is the same university River Song studies at, it's crawling with the Silence. Their whole memory wipe thing causes... issues, as do the nature of those cracks in time they caused erasing planetoids that our protagonist discovered. We get little cameos from River Song and good old Madame Kovarian, and the paranoia and dread over these fucked-up memory wiping monsters nearly drives our poor protagonist mad. It's got that whole found footage charm to it, even in the form of just someone's audio logs. I don't know if it would work as a televised thing,, but what's on the page works very well. There's even an audiobook of the collection, if you want to hear this story (I stuck with the book for now, but I bet that would be worth checking out.) Those are just the three short stories I wanted to cover, but again the entire collection is worth checking out. That'll do it for now. What's next? I have no idea.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 6 (Zombie Land Saga)

Just undead gals being undead pals.

Hey hey, how about that? I am no longer a ghost writing these things in late September before I leave. I am actually writing in October, the day of, for once. I spent a week watching the subject of today's post and... well, have I got a mouthful. Let us start, then, with the concept of dissonance. Dissonance is used quite well in many a spooky production, showing a happy and cheerful situation completely at odds with the nightmares and terrors that await later on down the line. (An iconic example of this in the medium we chose for today is Higurashi, which you can read about here.) As good and chillingly effective as this can be... well, we've done it, haven't we? What if we did something different? What if we took an absolutely horrific premise, one which sends shivers down the spine... and made that into the happy cheerful heartwarming show? That's just what I spent a week in isolation experiencing, and what I'm eager to talk about today. Strap in, y'all. It's time to talk about Zombie Land Saga.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 5 (Goosebumps)

In the interests of brevity, I will spare telling most of the story involving my first encounter with these books. What I will talk about as a brief preamble, though, is how they really were my first tentative steps into horror. The fact that I graduated from Goosebumps in 1995 or so to somehow watching The Langoliers in 1998 is a bit much, but there's an entire personal history I can chart out there. Some of it you'll even see in this marathon! If Stephen King was the so-called "King" of horror, the nightmare master himself who filled my younger self with dread? R.L. Stine was the Prince of horror. A gateway that was tense, but tame. A gateway which allowed me to get interested in this spooky shit in the first place. It's almost 25 years later and I've come back to pay my dues. I collected every original Goosebumps book as a child, and I think all of them are still in my attic. I grabbed three random ones that I had interesting memories of, and read them for this post. Let's get into Goosebumps, y'all. Oh, and beware... because you may be in for a scare. Get it? I did the... the thing. Right. Book.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 4 (Ghouls 'n Ghosts Sega Master System)

Well, we're back here again... but in a really weird way. You may wonder why I specifically am highlighting the Sega Master System version of this game. Personal resonance? Aesthetic goals? No no. I'm doing it because this version, this poor unloved little darling, may actually be one of the finer examples of its series. Yes. I said that. We do need to familiarize ourselves with the original version, however. Let's go and do that... now-ish. 1985's Ghosts n Goblins was, to put it mildly, a chaotic hell festival of hatred. (You can read more about said festival here if you like.) Luckily, it was an arcade machine and its hateful hellish nature combined with A+ aesthetic presentation made it a lot of quarters. 1988 saw a sequel, Ghouls n Ghosts. The original version of this game was quite a step up, and I'd call it one of the better games in the series. Mainly because it's shorter and gives you better control over the chaotic elements at play. Granted, it adds new ones... such as treasure chests. Hidden over all the levels are treasure chests you can find. Some have helpful items inside, like an armor upgrade or a weapon drop. Others (in fact like 80% of the fucking things, if we're being honest) have a shitty magician inside who will curse you. Gambling! How FUN. Other fun improvements that stuck with the series (but only sometimes) include being able to shoot in four directions, upgradeable armor which lets you charge your attack to do a magic attack depending on your weapon (but shatters just the same in one hit), and the second loop unlocking a super weapon called the Psycho Cannon which you need to have on your second go of the final level in order to reach the true final boss. The game even has a pretty faithful port on the Sega Genesis that definitely emulates the feel of the arcade; I'd call it the second-best Ghosts n Goblins game. All that is intro, however, to the Sega Master System version. This weird underdog port that came out for an underdog system... what's it do different?

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 3 (Stephen King's The Langoliers)

AURORA BOREALIS? At this time of day, at this time of year,
in this part of the country, LOCALIZED entirely within a Stephen
King miniseries???

You may be wondering "What? Why this?"as you look on the subject of today's writeup. Maybe you have familiarity with The Langoliers, and maybe you don't... but either way, it's a bit of a deep cut when I haven't ever covered something more popular. The Shining this is not... but beyond the simple answer of "it's my marathon", I've got justification. Personal history, if you will. Let's go back to the past for a moment, albeit the past of memory and not... whatever the hell is going on in this story. We are getting ahead of ourselves, though. Okay. It's 1995. I'm a kid and I'm spending the weekend with my parents up at our cabin in the woods. It's lovely, if not quiet and isolated. Playing around with other kids, heading out to the diner on the highway, going swimming in the river. You know. Fun. The important thing happens when we get home. My sister, who did not come along and instead opted to relax at home (BIG MOOD, now that I'm older, by the way), is watching something on TV. Wow, what is this? It looks kind of interesting. Then it goes to commercial and I see what it is. Stephen King's The Langoliers. This is, as I've gone into before, a source of primal fear for me. Thanks to some... shall we say choice encounters with horror at a young age, I was batshit terrified of Stephen King. But this? This didn't look so bad, and it stuck in my mind. Here's the weird thing. I know 2003 was the breakout time when I started reading King, thanks to the Dead Zone TV series that came out around that time. I also know, however, that the titular Langoliers were in my imagination sometime before then... and it had to be before 1998, because of the eras of my imagination. Sometime between that cabin return in 1995 and the new era of my imagination and storybuilding in 1998... I had to have sat down with those VHS recordings and watched The Langoliers. I wasn't even planning on covering it here and now, but the other night I just saw the book collection on the shelf, pulled it down... and got sucked right back in again. Well. Here we are at last. Let us talk about The Langoliers.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 2 (More Spooky Star Trek TNG Episodes)

Captain's blog, Stardate 74822.3. We are, as they say, "back at it again" with the Star Trek content on the blog. Two years ago I covered a trio of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes with spooky-aligned concepts and themes, and I now find myself back at that well once more. It was and is, of course, a meaningful series to me. Though I've spent thousands of words on Enterprise and blasted through a bunch of the original series in 2019, it's the Next Generation era we find ourselves analysing again. Most of them are from the later years of the show, again, because I guess someone had a thing for the spooky themes as the show went on. Of course, the exception is our first episode, a little number from the first season I'd like to talk about called...


1X25- CONSPIRACY

The short version: We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.