Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Double Feature: The Haunted Hike & Halloween: Resurrection)

Here we are at last! Halloween! Spooky Day! The culmination of the spooky season, kids knocking on the door, candy given out, all of that. The choice of what to cover for the final day was locked in a while ago. It shouldn't be a problem. That was, of course, until things and impulses happened and there was another spooky season experience I really wanted to talk about on the blog. What to do? Do I not talk about Nameless and wait a day to talk about this? Do I skip the Halloween movie? Do I write about it and keep it in the vault until next year? The answer I came up with was just to do both. So, for this spooky finale, you get the equivalent of the full size chocolate bar from my house tonight. Two posts for the price of one. Hot damn. Let us begin.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 15 (Nameless)

One last non-traditional spooky scream before the end of Halloween. Wild. I say non-traditional because I am not a comics critic. I know some very good comics critics, one of whom asked very nicely for me to cover this comic. So here we are, covering it. It's even a Grant Morrison joint! They're a well-regarded and interesting comic creator! ...Whose works I have hardly touched. Seriously, it was Arkham Asylum one time ages ago and then this. That should not reflect poorly on their large body of intriguing and varied work. As I said, I am not a comics critic. I just have to pretend to be one for three paragraphs to get this thing out, and I'm already a third of the way there. THE GIFT OF RAMBLING AND INTRODUCTION, Y'ALL! With that in mind, let's see if we can find some interesting and actually relevant things to say about the six-issue comic series Nameless.

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It's a bleak, ultra-violent, at times nihilist piece of comic. That's something. Reading the first issue, I was thrown right into the deep end. There's some sort of dream diving, and dudes with fish heads, and a Nameless one and a veiled lady and a key. I have no idea what's going on but there's murders and a weird magic phrase and then our nameless guy gets contracted to go to the MOON. Also some of the shop fronts in issue 1 were mirrored. Okay, hang on. There's mirror bullshit and we're going to the god damned moon? When did Grant Morrison get on my brand of bullshit and can I get some advice on how to mainline this shit? Why are we on the moon? Because there's an ancient asteroid that's going to end the world and drive us all mad that we gotta get into and stop. I doubt this is an inspiration, but the comic gave me Dead Space vibes in places. A whole bunch of space body horror with lots of gore and madness and things infesting astronauts. Let me say it plainly, in case you seek this out: this comic goes hard as hell with the violence. I didn't content warning the post since I'm not going into detail and I will have found the safest image for the thing I can, but holy fuck this comic goes places.

Like deep into the line between dream, reality, hallucination, and madness-induced dream by a dark god from space. I didn't exactly bounce off this comic, but also there's a lot tinging under the surface that could be analyzed... if one were a comics critic. I am not, though, so I'm grasping at straws to make something of this. The last half of the comic is some wild shit where you're not sure what's really happening or not. It almost feels like the final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, a deep dive happening inside one nameless person's head as they deal with their traumas and repressed memories and what "really happened", in as much as the comic can be said to have really happened. It's a fascinating book that demands at least a re-read with the knowledge of its end bits in mind, if not several more to appreciate any deeper clues or symbolism within. There's meat on the bone here, is what I'm saying... but as I am not a comics critic, it's not my plate of meat to carve into. I'm just here for the appetizer course, so to speak, but now we've made it to the end and it's about time for Halloween. The spooky night approaches! Candy! Spooky songs! Kids knocking on my door! And, of course... the finale of the marathon.

Boo.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 14 (Doctor Who: Image Of The Fendahl)

Oh hey. It's that other space show I like to talk about on this blog. No, not Dirty Pair. Doctor Who! Seems like I'm a little early though, doesn't it? I mean, we've got six whole weeks of a new series looming on the horizon and here I am talking about Tom Baker. We'll deal with Flux when we have to deal with it, and that plus NaNoWriMo will make Mondays interesting. For the time being, it's 1977 and it's time to get spooked. When you think Tom Baker and Doctor Who and spooky season, a whole lot of memorable stories may come to mind that are well-regarded by fandom. I went with a more middle of the road story, as far as fan consensus is concerned. This ranked 122nd in the Doctor Who Magazine 50th Anniversary Poll. Middle of the road. Of course, if you've ever listened to me on the Doctor Who Reviews podcast with Rain and Kat (spooky season bonus: check out our latest episode on State of Decay!) then you know I mock this traditional-minded poll to hell and back and think that it's an opposite world of my own tastes. Where does that leave poor Image Of The Fendahl in my mind?

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 13 (Even More Spooky Star Trek Episodes)

Captain's log, Stardate 75887.3. Yet again for a Halloween marathon, we find ourselves boldly going to the darker corners of a sci-fi franchise that equal parts inspires and infuriates me over its long run. No, it is not Doctor Who, but Star Trek. You pegged that already, so well done. This time around, having done the immediate standouts to me, I decided to do a little research and Google what other folks thought were the scariest Star Trek episodes. In doing so, I found three stories from three different series to talk about. Let's boldly go right on back into space utopia and see what spooky bullshit awaits.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 12 (The Empty Man)

(CW: suicide)

This was... quite the unexpected piece. I didn't know anything about it going in, so it was certainly an experience. The best summation I can give is that it's very heavy, and I mean that in at least two ways. Certainly the CW up above tells you that there are obvious moments with some heft to them, and there's certainly this pervasive aura around the film as you watch it, especially when you don't know shit about shit going on in the movie. That heft doubles when you get to the heady philosophical and alchemical concepts teeming just below the surface. Combine that real anxiety with the sense of confusion, and Cowboy Bebop at their computer said it best: you're gonna carry that weight. God, anime references, I really am starting to lean back into my old wheelhouse. Let's transition to another topic, quick.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 11 (Gamera: Guardian Of The Universe)

Ridley and Kraid got beef.

Thank God. A little retreat from heavy themes like abuse and anxiety and gaslighting which make me uncomfy both watching the movie and then trying to write about it like a big weirdo on the Internet. Instead we have a pretty straightforward kaiju movie, and it's even from the Heisei era which I gather has some films that are appreciated by many a kaiju aficionado. I mean... I vibed with Godzilla vs. Biollante, and Godzilla 2000? Gamera is not in my wheelhouse, however. I also gather there were some films about Gamera from Back In The Day and that this is a revival of sorts. This is their Godzilla 1984 but it's a movie about a giant turtle beating the shit out of a giant bird. There's a simple level of pleasure from such a movie, a level which even legendary film critic Roger Ebert vibed with despite not vibing with the original 1954 Godzilla. That's interesting. I'm no Roger Ebert (though I have beaten Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES, a feat that to the best of my knowledge the late Mr. Ebert never accomplished in his eventful life) but let's see what we can make of this giant turtle kaiju movie.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 10 (Midsommar)

And now I'm mirroring you. AAAAAAAAAA

(CW: anxiety, suicide, gaslighting, sexual assault)

Jesus Christ. I was supposed to talk about a kaiju movie today! I led into it and everything, and then I got delayed, so I needed to slap something in this slot. Oh hey, this was on the docket! Suggested by friend of the blog Rain even! What's the worst that could happen? A glance at the lengthy string of content warnings I felt needed inclusion should help there. You have to understand. The beginning of this movie legitimately, no hyperbole, fucked me up. The first half is a punctuated and oft-prolonged anxiety nightmare which I'm pretty sure legitimately triggered me. I am honest to God tearing up writing this. This is not a joke, this is not a bit, this movie genuinely shook me to my core and scared me more than a glove-handed dream killer ever could. I was honestly somewhat relieved when it went in a folk horror direction of a strange communal religion with ritualistic sacrifice. That's not to say there's no connective tissue between those horrors, because there is. Let me tell you about it.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 9 (One Missed Call)

(CW: physical abuse)

Well, good God, this movie took a bit of an unexpected turn thematically. It will be tackled, of course, even though I feel a little out of my depth both in tone and culture. Before that though, the central premise! Which reminds me, in its own way, of The Ring. I haven't actually seen The Ring, mind, so I don't know what deep thematic stuff is going on under the hood in that movie and if it ties to the deep thematic stuff going on under the hood in this movie. By premise, though, you can see it, yeah? A spooky message haunting a method of communication that warns of your imminent death, that spreads once it gets you, and has a creepy girl ghost at the heart of it. Hell, both even use older forms of tech that the passage of time has made obsolete; The Ring's central haunted object is a cursed VHS tape, whereas One Missed Call haunts pre-iPhone cell phones. Time has already made the haunted object at the heart of the film a relic, and that only adds to the spooky nature in hindsight.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Local 58)

(CW: suicide)

Now we're really jamming with something weird and wild. Well, I should say we're going to be jamming with something weird and wild. Gotta get there first, so let us go through the process of getting there. The video linked above is how I found out about this series, a few months ago. I made a mental note to myself to come back to it for the spooky season on the blog, because with some of the concepts and sources of horror involved I felt obligated to. You'll see. You'll all see. So, for the uninitiated, Local 58 is a series of short horror videos created by the guy what did the famous Candle Cove creepypasta story. Lots of spooky bullshit about old TV and late night public access TV is at play within Local 58, and before I jam with the real wild stuff that's resonant to the blog, let's talk about the rest of the shorts for a little bit.

Of the seven shorts, three tie into what I want to talk about, one is very brief but contains what I feel is a main hook of the horror, and then the other three are just sort of there. I'll talk about those three now. "You Are On The Fastest Available Route" is a pretty simple one that glitches from TV footage to dashcam footage, with a GPS giving a driver directions before sending them into the woods to turn off their lights so a monster can get them. It works, and is retroactively tied into the rest of the shorts via the theme of technology betraying humanity. "Contingency" kind of crosses a line into outright disturbing territory as an emergency broadcast message. There's a fun scene I didn't talk about in Gremlins 2 where the Clamp Network airs a saccharine "end of the world" emergency broadcast message. "Contingency" is a way darker version of that, urging the preservation of American dignity in the face of nationwide defeat in war by encouraging mass suicide. It's fucked up, is what it is. "Real Sleep" is a later short and possibly deals with the theme of technology betraying humanity, and is decently creepy business about trying to suppress dreams via subliminal messaging, but doesn't scratch an itch for me personally.

What does scratch an itch, though, are those other three shorts. I'll talk about that brief middle one first, as it'll make everything else click. "A Look Back" is only a minute long and is a rapid montage of spooky clips from the other shorts up to that point, but contains a bit in the middle, flashing across the screen, that I will repeat verbatim in text form:

WE SEND SIGNALS TO OURSELVES

THRU THEIR DOMAIN

DID WE REALLY BELIEVE

THEY WOULDNT ADD THEIR OWN

Which brings us backwards, nicely, into "Weather Service", a short in which broadcasting is interrupted by a back-and-forth weather alert, first urging people to stay inside, then go outside, and so on and so forth. A creepy freak meteorological event that eventually takes over the station, urging all to go look at it. What is this nightmare weather event that insists we look upon it and go mad? It's the moon. There's even, in big black letters at one point, the words AVOID MIRRORS. You begin to see, given the magical girl exegeses we have covered here, why a creepypasta video series about the fucking moon going bad and trying to drive humanity insane is dark and spooky and something I had to write about, yes? "Show For Children" is a quick but effective descent into the spooky, a cartoon about a little skeleton boy peeking into graves and seeing other skeletons, all the while a cartoon anthropomorphized moon in the sky with big eyes watching. At the end, the skeleton boy lays in his own grave, the moon mirrors his peeking into graves, and the skeleton boy turns into a more detailed skeleton. The moon got him. "Skywatching" is the most horrific use of the moon as an object of madness, an astronomy show hacked into by malicious technology with close-up shots implying something is in there, and it ain't a fucking egg. 

In a wild way, this creepy video series feels made for me and the brand I've cultivated. The implication that TV signals are being used against us to communicate nefarious ideas to drive us mad alone is wild. It's the same driving force that made me appreciate John Carpenter's Christine, and how the titular car communicated her nefarious intent through rock and roll songs on her radio. Something is trying to make itself understood through the airwaves, using the moon as a source of horror and madness to get us. Local 58 is brief and often times ambiguous, but one can find worse ways to waste 20 minutes watching spooky short horror videos online. Just be careful the next time you go moonwatching. They say moonlight shines eternal, but eternity can be quite nasty when you think about it...

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 7 (A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child)

It's the end of an era here on the Halloween marathons. Each year for quite a while now, we've been revisiting a Nightmare On Elm Street film sequentially. Well, except for that time I jumped ahead and did Wes Craven's New Nightmare, but you'll understand that one is its own weird metafictional beast. We've still got one movie in the tank for next year, should we do this again, so this isn't the last Frederick Krueger movie we're covering. No, instead this is the last Nightmare On Elm Street movie I watched that I hadn't seen since first watching it in 2004 or so, in college, when I watched all of them sequentially as a fear-conquering exercise. Going in here years later, all I remembered were some of the unique kills. What, then, do we make of The Dream Child after all this time?

Holy fuck, guys, I do not fucking know with this movie. This is the one Nightmare movie I don't especially vibe with. The particular things I have enjoyed about this spooky dream murder series are the surrealist creativity of its dream murders, and the deeper interesting theme running through each movie that one can hang their critical analysis hat on and go "Yep, that's one fine hat hook this picture's got going-- Jesus Christ did that kid's muscle fibers just get turned into puppet strings? That's fucked up.". Let's shotgun through them real quick! Nightmare 1: the sins of the parent haunting their children. Nightmare 2: Fears and anxieties over one's own homosexuality. Nightmare 3: Mental health care is bullshit and doesn't help people in need. Nightmare 4: Grief and loss and how we remember those who we cared about who we've lost. With that in mind, what's Nightmare 5's cool hat hook? I... don't know. Oh, there are some at play, but I think the reason I didn't vibe with the movie is quantity over quality; instead of one big thematic hook that runs through the whole movie, there are like two or three half-formed hooks which only hang on parts of the movie. It's my job to talk about those shoddy hooks, apparently, so let's.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 6 (Return To Oz)

Friends =)

This one has been literal years in the making. A friend of the blog who likes this movie has really wanted it covered in the Halloween marathon. Well, here you go. This is going to be an interesting one, considering this isn't a traditional bit of spooky media... but we'll get to that. First, a confession. Until last evening, when I saw it as research for going into this? I had never seen the original 1939 Wizard Of Oz. Yes, I know. It wasn't available to rent in my little town, it never came on TV when I was a child, it just sort of passed me by. Watching it finally, it's fine. I can see how it's a cultural touchstone and a beloved nostalgic movie for many. I'm coming to it decades too late to really really vibe with it, but it's a good movie. The nearest I can come to understanding its appeal is that it reminded me of Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, a movie that has the same childlike wondrous visuals and musical nature that I did see when I was a child and vibe with nostalgically. So, you know, to people who love it, I can get where you're coming from.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 5 (Metroid Dread)

(Hi there! Given that this is a whole serendipitous bit of current event writing, it only feels right to give you all a spoiler warning heads-up. This game just came out yesterday and I'm going to talk about a bunch of stuff it does, especially story stuff, so if you're playing through it you'll want to wait until you finish before reading. Hope you've been enjoying the game, if you're playing! On with the show.)

BEEP BOOP IT'S MURDER TIME

There's just a bit of good timing at work here. Not only does Metroid Dread fit a spooky marathon perfectly, but I also spent most of my day yesterday playing the thing non-stop and I really want to talk about it. In the end, you gotta love stuff like this that gives me a good excuse to use a spot on something current. It's not like I can go to a theater and see Halloween Kills in three weeks anyway, so this is the most current events you're going to get. With that out of the way, let's see if I can be concise in talking about Metroid Dread.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 4 (John Carpenter's Christine)

[VFX: car on fire]

Okay. What do we make of John Carpenter's Stephen King's Haunted Car: The Movie? There's actually something I can really jam with in here, but we gotta build up to it. Unfortunately since it involves the titular Haunted Car, I am going to really have to stretch. No worries. No worries, y'all. If you know me, you know I'm good at stalling out a point and rambling. For God's sakes I'm doing it right now, even. I don't think I'm going to get a paragraph here before I actually have to talk about it, but I'm damn close. Let's talk about the book a little, then, since this is an adaptation. I'm not sure what drew John Carpenter to this King work, specifically. Oh. I literally just did a Wikipedia glance and it turns out this was just a "well I got nothing else going" kind of deal and Carpenter actually wanted to direct an adaptation of King's novel Firestarter. Interesting factoid. Okay. Let's talk about the book. Christine, not Firestarter.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 3 (Zombie Land Saga Revenge)

Idol stuff, man.

I always end these marathons with some variant joke on how the real horror before me is NaNoWriMo in November. This right here is a horror lurking in the future for me. This season of Japanese cartoon television, aired in the summer of this year, was good and resonant enough that it practically demanded I do a patented Frezno-brand deep dive project about it. It pissed me off and terrified me because of the work I'd have to put into it, but honestly? It won't be as long as Symphogear. I can live with that. So, consider this a rare moment of brevity before I give into my excesses and tell you fucking everything about this show and how it made me cry. First, though, a primer. Two years ago, in preparation for another spooky marathon, I took the first season of this show with me on vacation. You can read those thoughts right here. Two weeks ago, I blasted through it all on a rewatch on vacation in that same place. Here are some thoughts on that.

With Zombie Land Saga Revenge, it's a cemented fact: Zombie Land Saga is now my favorite piece of zombie media. It ain't even close. Sorry, Shaun Of The Dead. Woe be to World War Z. In fact, I'll lay a little groundwork for me to pick up on in like six months or whenever I get at this. Zombie Land Saga is the Symphogear of zombie media. "Oh fuck, did you drop a good one there, past me". I'll be saying. Zombie Land Saga, in its first season, was all about healing from trauma; the psychological trauma of one's anxieties/fears/regrets, and the physical trauma of literally having died and finding oneself to be the living dead. In short, ZLS Revenge runs on that theme to even greater effect. The main arc of the season is Japanese idol group Franchouchou, in secret composed entirely of the decomposed living dead, plotting a revenge concert at a massive venue in which they previously performed and totally bombed at. The first season was Franchouchou's rise, in between they fell, and now they're going to rise again. They're the undead, it's what they do best.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 2 (Llamageddon)

Good lord. What do you say about something like this? I guess you start with the mindset you have to have going into a movie like this. Some movies give you exciting thrills. Some give you insightful allegory. Llamageddon is not one of those movies. Llamageddon is the kind of dumb fucking movie you throw on with friends to have a chuckle at. There are all sorts of movies like this, but Llamageddon at least feels like it's laughing with you. It knows it is a dumb fucking movie about a killer llama, how absolutely gonzo that premise is, and just goes hog wild with it. Movies like Sharknado and its ilk are big budget variations of what Llamageddon manages with some cameras shooting at a house in the country for the weekend, and that's kind of impressive.

Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 1 (Gremlins 2: The New Batch)

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU'RE AT SOUP???

The spooky month has descended upon us again! It is time, once again, for the real horror to blight me; the constant non-stop writing rush between now and early December. God help me, the snow will be coming by the time my fingers stop moving. Ironic, then, that the inaugural subject for our new and brevity-improved Sixteen Screams marathon is the sequel to a Christmas movie. Yes, Gremlins is a Christmas movie and that's why I'm not covering it here. God help me if I ever wade into the debate about which marathon The Nightmare Before Christmas would belong in. It would help, before we begin, to talk a little about that original movie and what I remember it doing. Certainly I never saw it until I was a teen. As a child, a cousin had the Gremlins 2 game on Game Boy. Its cover art with the Mohawk Gremlin spooked me, but I liked the game. One summer while visiting I found the Gremlins 2 NES game at a flea market. Same cover, but I picked it up. Time has proven that it was a much better game than the Game Boy version. Oh, God. I said I was going to talk about the movie and then I went on a tangent about the Gremlins 2 video game. That was, uhhh, setup for going into talking about the movie. Yeah.