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: The Thirteenth Floor, Out of the Aeons, and The Female Frankenstein of Fifth Avenue

It's Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday...

• John Kenneth Muir analyzed the underrated 1999 film The Thirteenth Floor: "In other words, the sense of reality in the novel was layered, with worlds upon worlds stacked atop another. In each world, the individuals inhabiting it believed they were "real," not simulations...but were in error. The Thirteenth Floor faithfully recreates this creative dynamic, and features all the trappings one expects of the sturdy film noir format. The film then applies these standards to its science fiction premise with aplomb and meticulous attention to detail, both in the depiction of its 1937 setting, and in charting the possibility of multiple realities, with personalities overlapping."
• Sean Eaton deconstructed Lovecraft and Heald's Out of the Aeons at his compulsively readable R'lyeh Tribune: "Strictly speaking, Out of the Aeons is not really a story at all so much as a pastiche of ideas and imagery from other more famous works by the author.  There is no dialogue, characterization, or conflict, and except for the final two sections, nothing actually happens other than scholarly research.  To be fair, with careful editing, sections IV and V, and some of III might have formed the germ of an interesting and even unsettling story.  The notion that petrified human remains might house an intact intelligence and consciousness over centuries is a perennially intriguing one."
• Frankensteinia brought us the Female Frankenstein of Fifth Avenue: "One year before BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), there was The Female Frankenstein of Fifth Avenue! That’s how Paramount Pictures pitched Mary Morris' character, "the vicious, venomous New York aristocrat" named Victoria Van Brett, as the sinister star of the 1934 chiller, DOUBLE DOOR."
• Nev Murray reviewed Marty Young's novel 809 Jacob Street at Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "Finished this story just a little while ago. My skin is still crawling. This is an exercise in how to write something that will have you reading with blinkers on until the very end, with nothing disturbing you."  I think he liked it.
• At Wag the Fox, Gef Fox reviewed Dark Screams Vol. 2: "It certainly started off strong enough with the likes of Robert McCammon and some good ol' small town horror in a tale called "The Deep End." It's a really good, gripping story about a grieving father convinced it was a monster that killed his son at the town swimming pool and not the latest in a long line of drownings. Folks are always praising McCammon's novels and rightfully so, but if there is a collection of his short stories somewhere, then I need to track it down, because he has a real knack for those too."
• At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, Alex Davis interviewed Phil Stevens about his horror film Flowers: "Most of my time is spent painting and drawing. In this process, there is no dialog. I don’t really verbally socialize, so there is no dialog even outside of my art. Therefore, a project without dialog came only natural to me. On the production side of things, I really hate writing and recording dialog - just wasting so much time and energy trying to get lines to sound halfway decent without burning out my cast."
• The Cathode Ray Mission showed us some stills from Battle Royale.
• Here, I discussed the terrible film God's Not Dead and pointed you to a review I wrote at Ginger Nuts of Horror for Alan Spencer's novel B-Movie War.

Illustration by Nick Smith for Call of Cthulhu's Cthulhu Casebook supplement.