Get ready for two Oddities this week. The first is a news story from NBC news about the “growing trend” of people handing out potatoes to unsuspecting Trick or Treaters. When I first saw the story this morning, I assumed it was local news about people in Idaho. After all, Idaho is nothing but potato farms. There is nothing else to see here, so please don’t come to check if I’m lying. Unless you’re a subscriber, then feel free to visit and we’ll drink some potato schnapps (aka Vodka) and I’ll give you a tour of one of our 8,000 ft tall free range potato farms that non-Idahoans call mountains.
Turns out that the story was about people on the East Coast and it put me in a state of massive cognitive dissonance. Who the heck, outside of Idaho of course where our official candy is the Idaho Spud, wants a potato for Halloween? Sounds like someone is trying to get the kids to return to classical Halloween activities like breaking into your house and stealing your furniture for the grand bonfire.
In preparation for an upcoming Geekchat with
’ owner Richard Iorio, I watched a very interesting video on the history of Washington Irving’s tale of the Headless Horseman. There’s a lot of interesting information, and some interesting speculation in the piece, and it ties the lore to the Andre Affair which I thought was really cool. Irving’s tale is highly influential, and I will talk about that more later in the Rogue Games Colonial Gothic Geekchat, but I’ve always thought of it as a Christmas movie. Maybe it was the fact that the Disney animated film tended to air around Christmas, or maybe it was because of the way George Washington celebrated Christmas with Hessians at Christmas time in 1776, but it’s not a Halloween tale for me.It is, however, a tale that influenced H.P. Lovecraft more that I often see discussed. Compare the opening of Sleepy Hollow to the opening of Colour Out of Space and you’ll see what I mean. They are different in the poetic use of words, but the thematic way they establish the environment before moving on to the tale is very similar.
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.
— Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.
The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.
There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep’s secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.
— H.P. Lovecraft The Colour Out of Space
There’s a ton of great history in this video, including that the Horseman might have actually lost his head at the Battle of White Plains which might make it more of a Halloween tale. White Plains may have inspired inspired Washington’s attack on Trenton at Christmas in 1776, but Trenton isn’t in New York and Sleepy Hollow is.
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
While it’s not a film review,
has an interesting discussion about how different cultures treat Halloween and how the day is cause for much concern for many religious people in the United States. Those who express concern often cite it’s connections with the pagan observations around Samhain. Samhain is one of those great Celtic words that when the English transcribed them they decided to have the spelling and pronunciation completely unrelated. It’s a lesson I learned reading both the Mabinogion and Michael Moorcock’s Corum stories. Between the two, I learned that Pwyll is pronounced “pool” (maybe with a bit of a breathy catch at the end if you want to try it) and that Medhbh was pronounced “Maeve.” I’m left wondering why they didn’t even try to have the spelling match the phonemes, but maybe that was the point.Of course such observations are true as far as they go. Pope Gregory IV did shift observations venerating our dead elders from the time around Pentacost to the fall as a part of the process of Inculturation that the Church uses as a part of its evangelic mission. It helps to convert the pagan, if you can convince them they are already observing your faith. It beats having to go full St. Boniface and chop down Donar’s Oak. The veneration of the dead long precedes Christian encounters with Irish pagans and the prayers mirror Yom Kippur observations when the Yizkor is recited. The pagan origins of the practice are often overstated by Evangelicals and Atheists alike, as happens with a lot of Christian practices, but the date of observation was shifted expressly in this case because of encounters with pagans in Ireland. It’s my opinion, and only my opinion, that Christian observations venerating the dead were moved to Pentacost (or Easter in some cases) in order to distance Christianity from Judaism. I don’t have any direct evidence of this, but it makes a kind of sense to me.
Anyway, all of this is to say that the devoutly religious in Ireland don’t have the same fear of Halloween that many Americans do.
I don’t have a lot to say about the recent story regarding breach of contract and sexual harrassment surrounding the Terrifier franchise, but I imagine Luke will have thoughts the next time we host a Geekside Chat given our discussions about the franchise in our last discussion.
Mendelson’s Melodic Meanderings
has an interesting discussion about the changes in audiences and how this has resulted in anime releases being more mainstream programming. He also discusses the failure of recent musician biobics like A Complete Unknown and Deliver Me from Nowhere. Have we hit the end of Boomer biopic interest?
The Reminisces of the Retroist
I’ve decided to move
to a semi-permanent segment of the newsletter because he’s constantly producing great stuff that I think you should listen to. I say “semi-permanent” because he doesn’t always talk about films and I’m not sure whether to have him float in and out of this section of the newsletter or if I want to treat his stuff like I treat Luke’s and include it in the film cavalcade even when it isn’t film related. I’ll probably do that, since he pretty much always has a podcast episode I want to share.This week it’s about the very 80s film The Wraith which can only be described as a Brat Pack Semi-SF Dead Man’s Curve film. It’s an interesting movie that critics rejected, was a financial failure, but that audiences have grown to love enough for it to become a cult film.
My friend
, who helped me get through some very rough times, has rebranded his Substack and has been on a tear writing content lately. One of his most recent pieces discusses the Monster Squad television show which shares much of the line up with, but not the good/evil alliance of, the movie of the same name. In this case, Dracula, Wolfman, and Frankenstein’s Monster are crime fighters with a scrappy sidekick. I think I’d love to see his remade. over at has an excellent post discussing John Carpenter’s Halloween and its important place in the horror genre. She has also kindly provided a series of links to articles discussing every entry in the franchise. I haven’t had a chance to read through them all yet, but I will. I’m always up for learning more about things I love. Even though I’m looking forward to reading them, I do wish that John Carpenter and Debra Hill had been able to achieve their goal of creating a Halloween anthology franchise rather than a Michael Myers franchise. I prefer him as The Shape, with only a single entry. I often examine the rest of John Carpenter’s filmography to put together a list of the “Real” Halloween Movies. It’s kind of my “Highlander” fan (there is only one Highlander film) equivalent for the Halloween franchise. If Carpenter and Hill had not been required to allow a second Shape movie to be made, here is my list of what the Halloween franchise would be. I left out movies based on well known books and remakes (with the exception of Ghosts of Mars). Overall, I think it’s a pretty good list and it fits with my headcanon that Jamie Lee Curtis is playing the same character, with a “new name” in Halloween and The Fog.
Halloween 1978
Halloween II: The Fog 1980
Halloween III: Season of the Witch 1982
Halloween IV: The Thing 1982
Halloween V: Prince of Darkness 1987
Halloween VI: In the Mouth of Madness 1994
Halloween VII: Assault on Precinct 13 Mars Edition…I mean Ghosts of Mars 2001
There was no way I was going to let this week go by without sharing
’s ‘horror moments’ series, especially since she used my favorite word in the English language in this entry…penultimate. It sounds like “super mega ultimate and best,” but it really just means next to last. It’s a wonderful word and I use it all the time. In this one she discusses one of Edward Gorey’s less child friendly books but it’s one that, like Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend (don’t look this up) or Watership Down, might have been handed to kids because “animation and illustrated books are for kids.” I don’t know anyone who actually rented Urotsukidōji for their kids, but I have talked with some of my daughters friends about other anime (that was far too adult for them) that they watched when they were still in grade school.There were several comments in the piece worth discussing, but I’ll focus on the one that is a main thesis of the piece and that is that “[Edward Gorey] is demonstrating how the unseen can be much more titillating and terrifying than the seen” with the tale in question. I think this is absolutely true and it reminds me of the very simple phrase that one of my film professors told me as an undergraduate. He would frequently state that “Believing is seeing” and use the shower scene from Psycho as an example. We think we see more than we do and that is what gives the scene power. My own example would be The Blair Witch Project, which didn’t scare me at the moment because it didn’t show anything scary, but which scared the bejeezus out of me later that night when my mind raced with the implications of the film.
On a purely scholarly note, I am once again sharing Crystal Lewis’s
. Not only has her writing been of immeasurable aid to me as I complete my dissertation, she provides one of the best research resources on the internet…FOR FREE. In this week’s post, she shares a great article on reproduction and replication. As she states, “The practice of repeatedly testing published results with the same data (reproduction) or new data (replication) is currently gaining traction in the social sciences, owing to multiple failures to reproduce and replicate published findings.” There is a major replication crisis in psychology and other social sciences and it has researchers re-evaluating a lot of prior research.In political science this hit particularly hard when Michael LaCour did a study on contact theory and support for same sex marriage. The findings showed that it was possible to use discussions to change people’s minds and that it didn’t take much. One problem. He made up his data completely and he was exposed by David Broockman and other researchers for manufacturing his data when they tried to reproduce his results, or as I now call it LaCouring his data. The ironic thing is that when Broockman later replicated, rather than reproduced the results, he found that LaCour’s theory had some merit.
Similarly the Stanford Prison experiment has undergone a tremendous amount of scrutiny, to the point that some now call it fraudulent. I guess when you publish your results in newspapers hoping to shape public policy before your research is peer reviewed and analyzed, it might suggest you are being less than rigorous.
So too have the Milgram obedience experiments gone through re-examination. There is still some “there there” in the Milgram research, but it’s much more nuanced than initial research would have suggested after all researchers found that Milgram removed people from the studies who dropped out:
“Reicher and Haslam found 40 per cent of participants dropped out when the learner spoke for the first time and mentioned the pain he was in.
All of this flies in the face of the overriding narrative Milgram established after his experiments of obedient people in agentic states blindly following orders. While his findings are in no way artificial, Reicher said, he could have reached the conclusion that people aren’t programmed to take orders but rather make choices over which ‘voice’ to listen to in a given situation, which can vary depending on an individual’s relative identification.”
People can still be compelled to engage in harmful activity, but it might require more manipulation than previously thought and we know nothing about whether the pool of participants had Dark Triad personalities.
Let me introduce to you a wonderful game idea. In Night’s Black Agents, named after a Fritz Leiber anthology (get the reprint with “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” because it’s a great vampire story), you are a former spy who discovers that Vampires are behind most of the world’s suffering and you dedicate your life to destroying them.
The Cold War is over. Bush’s War is winding down.
You were a shadowy soldier in those fights, trained to move through the secret world: deniable and deadly.
Then you got out, or you got shut out, or you got burned out. You didn’t come in from the cold. Instead, you found your own entrances into Europe’s clandestine networks of power and crime. You did a few ops, and you asked even fewer questions. Who gave you that job in Prague? Who paid for your silence in that Swiss account? You told yourself it didn’t matter.
It turned out to matter a lot. Because it turned out you were working for vampires.
Vampires exist. What can they do? Who do they own? Where is safe? You don’t know those answers yet. So you’d better start asking questions. You have to trace the bloodsuckers’ operations, penetrate their networks, follow their trail, and target their weak points. Because if you don’t hunt them, they will hunt you. And they will kill you.
Or worse.
The game uses the innovative Gumshoe system designed by Robin D. Laws that is the most creative system for “investigative roleplaying” I’ve seen published to date. The game has a rich setting and Kenneth Hite and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan have done a great job of supporting the game. One of my favorite supplements for the game is the Dracula Unredacted book (a version of the real novel Dracula with added in game footnotes) and The Dracula Dossier that helps you run a game where your players fight against he forces of the Prince of Darkness himself. Kenneth Hite is one of the great game designers, as is Robin Laws, and Gareth is one of the most productive freelancers in the industry. Check it out.
It’s Halloween, so it’s time for Halloween music.
The Exorcist is one of the best horror films ever made and it features a phenomenal score that incorporates Mike Oldfield’s prog rock classic song Tubular Bells to create haunting and creepy moments. What amazes me about this use of the song, a song that also influenced John Carpenter’s compositions for Halloween, is that hte song itself isn’t creepy or scary. It is “haunting” in the sense that it sticks with you due to its beauty, but that’s just it. It is a beautiful song, but it is one that shifts from one musical phrase to another seemingly unrelated musical phrase with transitions that make these shifts almost seemless. It amazes me that he composed this when he was 19 years old.
Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London is one of my favorite whimsical monster songs. The song began as a joke, but became a pretty bit hit ending up at #21 in the Billboard Top 100 and was one of the reasons that Zevon’s album Excitable boy hit Gold and then eventually platinum certification. It’s a fun son that has a wonderfully incongruent opening line.
There are quite a few Blue Öyster Cult songs that could be included on a Halloween themed list, I chose their relatively unknown song (outside Soft White Underbelly fandom) Astronomy. I have a special place in my heart for BOC. They have collaborated more than a few times with Michael Moorcock and the results are some of my favorite songs. This particular song references a fictional character who is an altered human that influences historical events.
Thought it’s a bit on the nose, the classic Horror Punk band Misfits has a very entertaining song called Halloween. It’s fast, punk, and references the false fears that spread every year.
I can still remember the first time I saw Electric Frankenstein in concert in San Francisco. They were the opening act for Dwarves at a relatively large show, which if you know Dwarves at all you know that meant a short set from them as their big sets are at dingy clubs. I hadn’t heard of Electric Frankenstein before the show, but I was blown away by how much they rocked. Appropriate for a punk band, they were stripped down rock and roll that moved at pace. Unlike a lot of punk though, they could play. This was fast paced, simple, well played DIY rock and I loved it. I left the show knowing that punk might have died, but it came back in a burst of electricity because of bands like Electric Frankenstein. So yeah, you get two EF songs.
There’s a saying about punk bands that endure, “eventually they learn to play their instruments.” While AFI could always play their instruments, when they signed with Nitro records they shifted out of the relative obscurity of the hardcore world and into a very successful alternative band. They always managed to keep a touch of their horror punk origins, even as they wandered through genre after genre in the 2000s. Compare their Misfits influenced song The Checkered Demon, with their later and more mainstream song Girls Not Grey. The band’s sound remains, even as the distortion fades and production quality increases.
For reasons that were touched upon earlier in
’s piece, there is no other film to recommend on Halloween than John Carpenter’s 1978 film Halloween. I’ve seen the film many times, but this year was the first year I was able to convince my wife to watch it. She had two rules for the viewing. First, that we had to watch it when the sun was still up. Second, that I couldn’t jump scare her when we walked the dog later that evening. She really enjoyed the film and we talked about how different our current neighborhood was from the streets of South Pasadena but how similar our old neighborhood in Glendale was. I don’t think she could have walked the dog with me if we still lived in Glendale. The film left just the right impressions. A slight aftereffect of lingering fear, but one that faded cathartically with time.The movie is a masterpiece.
Thanks for the shout out Christian!
I remember staying up to obscenely late hours as an eight year old watching one horror flick after the next. Two in particular scared the bejeezus out of me. One old film featured a head tumbling down a flight of stairs. The other took place in a creepy mansion where a face slowly materialized in a window pelted by rain. Wish I knew the name of that one.