Halloween, Zombies, and You

What follows is a short piece that didn't make it to the final manuscript of The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse.  Like all good survival advice, it is timeless and necessary, especially for this time of year.

For children, Halloween ranks right up there with Christmas as the best time of year.  For the informed adult concerned about the coming Zombie Apocalypse, Halloween can be a gut check.  It doesn’t mean, however, that you have to dread it entirely: costumes, free candy, and parties are celebrations of life and a thumbing-of-the-nose at grim death.  As such, you should have fun.  Take the kids out trick-or-treating.  Throw a party.  Dress up as Batman.  Just keep a few things in mind that will maximize your personal security.

A Supernatural Zombie Apocalypse is more likely at this time of year than any other.  Halloween is when the veil between life and death is at its thinnest, making it easier for unquiet spirits to cross over from Purgatory to the land of the living.

• Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things: Stay away from graveyards at all costs.  A dead body buried in unhallowed ground can be an attractive vessel for ghosts seeking a return to life (or unlife, as it were).  It may be traditional to hold parties at cemeteries during Halloween, but as an enlightened student of zombie combat you know that the best way to avoid being killed by the undead is to not be where there are going to be large numbers of them.  
• The Craft: Stay away from practitioners of the occult, and don’t dabble in it yourself this one time.  Just like you wouldn’t play with matches near a gas station, getting out the Ouija board to see if you can contact a random spirit from the Great Beyond on Halloween is a terrifically bad idea.

To most of us, Halloween means dressing up as someone or something else.  The continuing popularity of zombies in modern American culture means that there are going to be many people shuffling around outside at night looking like hungry undead.  One of the worst things you could do is shoot an innocent living person because he made the unfortunate choice of having a realistic costume.  So it’s up to you to make sure you can tell the difference between a zombie and a person dressed up as a zombie.

• The Scent of Blood: Because any true zombies active at this time of year are most likely Supernatural Zombies, they’re probably going to be more rotten, and hence smell a lot worse than a fresher Viral Zombie.  Putrefaction has a scent all its own, and the vast majority of zombie poseurs, even the most hardcore, won’t go the extra mile of smearing rotting meat on their bodies to complete the costume.
• The Naked and the Dead: Clothing and funeral cerements tend to rot in the grave, and the effort of breaking through a coffin and digging out from six feet of earth tends to destroy burial garments.  It’s extremely unlikely that someone will shuffle around town with his private parts exposed to the wind as part of his zombie costume (though you can’t entirely rule that out).
• Body Parts: It’s an easy thing to apply white, green, red, and gray splotches of makeup on your face, dress up in carefully torn clothing, limp around, make pitiful moaning noises, and call it a zombie costume.  But you can’t convincingly fake a truly skeletal hand with missing flesh over moving, bony digits.  

The most important thing is to make 100% certain of your target before shooting.  That smelly, grunting, half-naked person might be an Occupy protestor, not an actual undead creature.  Don’t shoot until you know beyond a shadow of doubt that the zombie in your sights is a true monster.  If necessary, call out verbal commands.  Even the most “in-character” zombie actor will fill his trousers and stop approaching at the sight of a drawn gun and a proper command to freeze.

Just take behavior and appearance in aggregate before deciding to act on a perceived threat.  What’s unacceptable the other 364 days out of the year can be the norm on Halloween.  Use common sense.  Real zombies don’t ring doorbells looking for candy: they’ll try to break the door down.  Keep an eye out, make sure your children are safe, and have a good time this year.  I can’t speak to the specifics, but I’m quite certain that next year you’ll have more pressing concerns than buying the economy bag of Snickers or Clark bars for the neighborhood kids.

Happy Halloween, and if you're concerned about the safety of yourself and your loved ones at this  dangerous time of year, arm yourself with knowledge and run, don't walk to get your copy of The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse.

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.

Two Mini Horror Reviews for Your Halloween Pleasure

Happy Halloween!  From its pagan origins to its crass commercialism, it's a great holiday for both kids and adults. Think of how strange it is: children dress up in costumes and go door-to-door demanding candy from strangers.  A kind of forced fellowship with one's neighbors until November 1, when we can go back to politely ignoring each other. I love it.

Breadhead Friday's canceled because of Halloween and the nasty cold I've gotten as a Samhain present from my little boy.  I'm at that apex state of the cold where my head's full of stuff and everything tastes terrible and I feel like hell, but it's Halloween, so I'll eat a lot of chocolate, not taste it, and put up the last few decorations outside.  We're going with a skull and skeletons theme this year.  

Yesterday, I felt too awful to write.  So for the first time in years, I sat, did nothing, and sucked on the glass teat all day.  It's not an experience I want to repeat for a myriad of reasons, but I was at least entertained.  This is what I watched:

V/H/S

Like all horror anthology films, this one was a mixed bag.  It was entertaining for the most part, and had some particularly creepy moments.  The unifying plot (Tape 56) of getting some secret VHS tape from the old man was kind of silly, though.  It could have been done better.  The best segment was Amateur Night: nothing in it was terribly unexpected, but it was done well, and had some horrifying moments.  Second Honeymoon had two particularly disturbing moments that saved it from its pedestrian execution.  Tuesday the 17th tried to turn the typical slasher theme on its head and utterly failed: it was easily the weakest of the segments.  The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger tried too hard to create a twist ending and ended up overcomplicating itself, but was pretty watchable.  10/31/98 was good: the characters were realistic, the situations were frightening.  Overall, V/H/S/ is worth a watch.

Hemlock Grove

I watched the first two episodes at my wife's request so we could watch the rest together.  I quite like it.  There're some story elements that have so far elevated it above standard vampire/werewolf tropes.  Lili Taylor isn't annoying, but Famke Janssen's English accent is.  I'm looking forward to the remaining episodes, once this rhinovirus lets me stay up past eight.

Have a fun Halloween!

Oh, I almost forgot.  Dreadedin Chronicles: The Nameless City is still free until tomorrow, so get it while supplies last. Free shipping!  Thrills don't get cheaper than this.

Fred Zombies and Dreadedin Zombies

A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to work with firearms expert Phil Motzer on a number of instructional videos, including Combat Handgun, arguably the best primer on using a semi-automatic pistol for personal defense available.

Not long after our professional relationship ended, his wife asked if I might participate in the first Fredericksburg Zombie Walk, a charity event.  I was unable to attend, but I did send a number of autographed copies of The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse.  I've done so for every Fredericksburg Zombie Walk since.

This year's Fredericksburg Zombie Walk will be held on Saturday November 1, 2014 at Hurkamp Park, 500 William Street, Fredericksburg VA 22401, from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm.  Please bring a non-perishable food item, cleaning supplies, or a charitable donation.  There'll be prizes and contests and all sorts of fun.

###

The title of my YA Lovecraftian Halloween novel will be Dreadedin Chronicles: The Nameless City.  Electronic copies will be available before Halloween, and physical copies some time in early 2015.  Here is the blurb:

Paige Ashton is an ordinary teenager, just trying to get through high school. Friendless, she’s socially invisible until bizarre occurrences put her in the spotlight. When disaster strikes on Halloween, why is everyone looking for her?

College freshman Ryan Kincaid is living a lie: he pretends to go to class but hangs out and drinks with his friends instead. He’s never had to work for anything in his life, so how is he going to save his family from a fate worse than death?

Soon, they’ll have to face cannibal zombies, a horrible sleeping sickness, and an ancient evil hundreds of millions of years old, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

Happy Halloween!

The story will take place in a fictionalized version of the town of Dunedin, Florida, and most of the supporting characters have been taken from local teen volunteers who filled out a questionnaire provided by the Dunedin Public Library.