Friday Links: Four Poes, Evil Dolls, and Nethescurial

As we count down the days to Halloween, let's look back at what happened in the world of the strange, the unusual, the horrific.

• In Leeds, Alabama, a man was attacked by his girlfriend's evil doll collection: "Ms Nicole-Fine has been collecting dolls since she was eight, and got her first haunted doll at aged 12. She believes the doll, Violet, was haunted by the spirit of a little girl called Angie who died in the early 1500s. 'When I first got her, I had a vision in my sleep about how she passed away,' she said."
• An egg hatched from Shellhawk's Nest and out came a deeply disturbing Halloween photo from 1938.
• At the invaluably incisive R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton delved into the notion of Thomas Ligotti's Nethescurial as an egregore: "Have you ever had a dream or nightmare that begins with you as a spectator of some weird or frightening event?  Perhaps you are observing some violent or horrific event on a television screen or at a movie theatre—examples of how media technology structures even our contemporary dream life!—and suddenly you are actually in the dream, on stage, fleeing from whatever is lurking there."
• Breakfast in the Ruins brought us four Poes.  
  
• Nev Murray reviewed Greg Gifune's Devil's Breath at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "Greg Gifune is a man that has a lot of books out there. Each one is different in so many ways. The one thing that is consistent throughout is the fact that his style of writing is superb. Each and every one of these books is overflowing with a masterfully dark atmosphere that completely immerses you in the particular story you are reading. If you were handed a section of pages to read, not knowing who wrote them, you would immediately know his style if you have read him before."
• John Kenneth Muir analyzed one of my favorite Schwarzenegger films, The Last Action Hero: "Last Action Hero possesses many good ideas, and even a compelling thematic through-line that I hope to enumerate. That through-line ties into the jokes about Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a movie version of the play starring Schwarzenegger (perhaps the best scene in the film…).  It also ties into the characters of Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) and Jack Slater.  All three heroes contend with the same “to be or not to be” existential dilemma."
• The inimitable Zombos opened up his Closet to show us the 1964 game Bats in Your Belfry: "Main portion of game consists of 15" tall molded plastic castle w/spring-loaded launchpad that would toss any of the 24 included plastic "Vampire Bats" into the sky. Object of the game was to drop one of the two included heavy metal balls into castle to activate spring-loaded mechanism and catch as many bats as possible w/the two provided plastic skeleton hand scoops."
• Deck the Holidays showed us how to make faux barbed wire.  Very cool for Halloween!
• Steven Wetherell reviewed The Babadook at Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror: "Part of the cleverness of The Babadook is that the viewer spends less time wondering if the phantom is real or imagined, and realises that the differentiation really doesn’t matter— the horror is equal either way, plucking not just at our anxieties about what unknowns may lurk out in the world, but what unknowns may lurk within us." (Interested readers can check out my review of the movie here.)
• Author William Malmborg pointed us to a pretty dumb review of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado.  Kubrick used exterior shots of the hotel in his adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Shining.  I've been to the Stanley Hotel a few times, not to stay, and it's a really nice place.
• Here, I explained why I'm supporting the Beyond Lovecraft Indiegogo campaign and talked about anti-Christianity in our common culture.

Illustration taken from the Arkham Unveiled supplement of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.

Friday Links: Terrors of Dracula, Ghostwatch, and Battle Royale

It's the start of summer, and there ain't no cure for the summertime blues like catching up on what's been going on in the world of the bizarre and horrific this week:

• Sean Eaton did me the honor of riffing on a recent post of mine at his unforgettably invaluable R'lyeh Tribune: "As a speech language pathologist by profession, my university training included the study of early childhood language acquisition.  This is a fascinating process inseparable from the growth of the young child’s cognitive understanding of the world.  Certain key “cognitions” appear to underlie the ability to understand and use words:  that objects continue to exist even when no longer present to the senses, that sounds and gestures can stand for objects and actions, and—around age 3 or 4—that communication need not be about actual events, but can in fact be pretend, or put to other more entertaining uses besides the merely informative, which can become tiresome after a while."
• John Kenneth Muir set his eyes on Battle Royale, analyzing it as only he is capable: "The film depicts a few-days-in-the-future Japanese society in which children are out-of-control and violent, but where, ultimately, the adults are responsible for the worsening situation because of the laws they have imposed.   In the fictional Japan of the film, specifically, a BR (Battle Royale) law (or Millennium Education Reform Act) has been enacted. It states that troublesome students can be removed from their school rooms and remanded to a remote island, where they will kill each other in a contest over a three day span."
  
• At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, George Daniel Lea dove into the Retro Zone and brought up a 1990's television show from the UK: "Consisting of on-site investigations, interviews, on-going commentary from the family affected, parapsychologists, skeptics, all presented in the familiar format of a “crime-watch” style documentary, Ghostwatch traumatised the nation with its brilliantly subtle, almost subliminal scares, by upsetting the audience's expectations and desires; their very relationship to the media in question. Not only did it present its content as factual and live, it also directly involved them in the narrative by urging them to phone in with their own accounts of the supernatural, and later as part of an unwitting mass séance created by their viewing of the show via the television."
• At Zombos' Closet of Horror, we got a rare look at Terrors of Dracula Vol. 2 Issue 3 from August of 1980.  It's racy, raunchy, and remarkable.  Put your peepers on it.
• The Film Connoisseur reviewed The Babadook: "I think the root of the films effectiveness comes from the fact that it plays with our fears of being a parent, of thinking our kids are weird somehow because of their particular child like behavior. Ever seen your kid grinding their teeth at night? Scary, but only because we don’t see ourselves doing it when we sleep. Children’s fear of imaginary monsters makes us think our kids are schizophrenic, truth is all kids are scared of imaginary things." (Also look at my review of The Babadook here.)
• William Meikle gave us a look at his past, present, and future at Nev Murray's Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "It's one of my biggest regrets that I didn't start writing until I was in my mid-thirties. Since then it's felt like I've continually been trying to catch up to where I want to be with it, and now that I'm fifty seven I can feel the pressure build as time gets ever shorter and age starts to wither both my attention span and my eyesight."
• Visiting Ghost Hunting Theories, we were treated to reports of spiritual visitors to the dying: "When my father had a heart attack in 1979, he was proclaimed dead by the paramedics for four minutes. During that time, he witnessed his dead parents, aunts, uncles, cousins from Norway he hadn't seen since he was a child. He was relaxed, happy, and smiling as they took him to the hospital. He truly visited them and every fiber of his being showed it. Days later he did die, and I have no doubt at all he went to his relatives, but before he did, he visited me at the time of his death. That kind of visitation is called 'after-death visitation.'"
• Here, I brought you from truth to fiction to truth, and pointed you to some novella reviews I wrote for Ginger Nuts of Horror.

Illustration by Frank Brunner for Chaosium's Stormbringer 4th Edition Rulebook.

Movie Review: The Babadook

I'd read nothing but good things about The Babadook, so when it became available for Netflix streaming, I couldn't wait to see it.  It had been hyped as a terrifying, low-budget horror story that apparently scared the hell out of William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, so it had to be awesome.

It wasn't awesome.  But it was really good.

This review will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen it yet, go see it before reading.

• slasreveR eloR: A great strength of the film is that you weren't ever sure who the true antagonist was until the end.  Samuel started out as the obvious antagonist, and everything Amelia did made her the victim of his mood swings until she wasn't anymore.  Over the course of the film, her anguish made her the actor instead of the acted-upon.  It was only at the climax, when the Babadook manifested itself as an external expression of Amelia's grief, that the antagonist could be defeated.
• Samuel: Some of the earlier scares surrounding Samuel were blunted somewhat by his general unlikability.  The actor did an extraordinary job of portraying a disturbed child, a performance made even stronger by the film's ending, when you finally begin to sympathize with him.  At the beginning of the film's final act, when you weren't sure if there actually was a Babadook or not, Samuel transformed effortlessly into the hero.
• Amelia: One of the film's more effective subtleties was that Amelia didn't have an obvious mental condition to blame for the Babadook's presence.  She was grieving and at loose ends with a difficult child, but who could blame her?  There was no one triggering event that manifested the Babadook; it just sat within her until it was time to come out.  Don't forget, though, that she wrote The Babadook book, and even added pages to it until she cooked it on the grill.  Despite everything, she was (and probably still is) mentally ill.
• F/X: The Babadook has been labeled a low-budget movie, but it didn't look that way.  There was no CGI and very few actual sightings of the eponymous monster, which worked very well.  The filmmakers did a great job with the budget they had, and there was little reason for the audience to walk away from the film unsatisfied.
• Whither the Babadook?: Samuel's gadgets at the end seemed a little reminiscent of Home Alone, but they worked well enough to exorcise the Babadook from Amelia.  Allegorically speaking, I think that the film is telling us to try to make peace with our demons, but it's a bit muddled.  If you can't keep the Babadook down, how long will it stay in the basement, eating worms?  Can Amelia write a new ending for it, finally banishing the monster forever?

A bit long, a bit thematically muddled, but definitely worth watching.  Four out of five stars.

(I'm also looking forward to the sequels: The Baba Ghanoush, about an Arab family dealing with a childhood monster, The Gabagool, about possessed Italian cold cuts, and Baba Black Sheep Squadron, about WWII U.S. Marine pilots fighting off a clawed black monster.)