halloween costume links

As it is stated in the movie Trick ‘r Treat, wears a costume.

While you’re mulling over the best costume this year, check out these links.

Quick, Easy, Fast

Costume Idea Zone link – best of them all.

Stretcher’s cheap and easy costumes link.

quick and easy for kids link.

super easy costumes link. (Fun Place)

thrift store costumes link. (ehow)

Other People’s Costumes

Most popular 2009  Halloween costumes for adults and kids link.

5 Worst Costumes link.

Twilight series costume guide link.

True Blood costume guide link.

Jon & Kate costume guide link.  Kate wig link.

Couples Costumes for Men Who Hate Costumes link (costumeideazone)

Mostly Pretty Pictures Stuff

Costumer’s manifesto – main page link

Dress Up Games – link – only for wasting time

Fantasy and Sci-fi convention costumes link

Costumer’s Guide link

horror movie podcast

I really enjoy the Movies You Should See podcast as I’ve mentioned before.  In this episode, they discuss movies that scared them as children and as adults.  They define different types of scary movies and tell us their favorite scary movie of all time.  Enormous fun.  Posted October 2008.

Scary Movie Special link.

Haunted Houses – fictional

Cover of Hell House

As a follow up to my haunted house attraction post, here is a list of haunted house books and movies.  I was surprised that it was difficult to find a list of haunted house books to jog my memory.  My final list is short which makes me want to read a bunch more.  There is a nice list on Wikipedia for haunted house movies.

Haunted House books & short stories

• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)
• The Open Window by Saki (1911)
• Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
• Hell House by Richard Matheson (1971)
• The Shining by Stephen King (1977)
• The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978)
• Homebody by Orson Scott Card (1998)

Of these, Haunting of Hill House and Hell House were the most satisfying to me.  I think they both owe quite a bit to James’ governess.  Both feature psychic investigators who visit an allegedly haunted house and confront their own psyches as much as any supernatural force in the house.  Matheson’s book removes any doubt as to the supernatural events but manages to be just as disturbing I think.

A minor story concerning The Shining. Many years ago I moved into an isolated old farmhouse.  Not long after, I was on the second floor, sitting up with a sick child.  It was a dark and stormy night.  Or, at least it was raining hard and the house was creaking in the wind.  Once the child had fallen to sleep, I decided to read to keep myself alert and naturally I chose The Shining.  It didn’t make me sleepy.  By the time I reached the bit about the bathtub, I had to put it down and find something else.  Very quickly. I had to finish the book in the daylight hours.

Haunted House Attractions

Haunted house stories are for me the most potent kind of horror story.  Perhaps it’s because I’ve moved around a lot but moving into an old house can be unsettling.  I don’t think my worries are as practical as worries about plumbing.  It’s more of a sense that a place has been much lived in, and some living is deeply unhappy.

Thus, haunted houses are more fun and scarier to me than most CGI monsters.  I read an article by John Seewer in which he listed a lot of haunted house attractions.  They all look spooky but I like the ones best that are held in old buildings.

Eastern State Penitentiary has a yearly haunted house named Terror Behind the Walls.   The living here must have been lonely since the penitentiary had implemented a system based on isolation of the prisoners.  It has also been used as a setting for several films such as Twelve Monkeys.  The website for the haunted house part lists several scary areas:  intake, the experiment, lock down, and night watch (with flash lights).  The tour has actors. A new section is the infirmary.  The building looks surprisingly attractive in its decay.

Winchester Mystery House -  I have read about this house in several of  those guides to the usual books, and Mrs. Winchester seems to have been quite the eccentric.  The story I read held that she was heir to the fortune made from the patent of the Winchester rifle.  She came to believe that the ghosts of the victims of the rifle would find her.  To counteract this ghostly persecution, she resolved to erect a bewildering home with stairs leading nowhere and doors that open to blank walls.  The more mundane story is that she was crushed by her grief over her husband and baby’s death and she designed the house as a kind of distraction.  She lived till she was 83 so something must have been working.  The house has a flashlight tour but there seem to be no actors.  Here is a guide to the house with lots of photographs.

Waverly Hills Sanitorium – This was a hospital for tuberculosis.  I used to think that tuberculosis was kind of an antique disease but apparently it’s still active.   However, it used to be a common and deadly illness.

At the turn of the twentieth century more than 80% of the population in the United States were infected before age 20, and tuberculosis was the single most common cause of death. By 1938 there were more than 700 TB hospitals in this country. David A. Cramer, MD

The misery that this place has accumulated over the years is a bit staggering.  I think it must be a happy place now since it’s being renovated and has tours for history buffs and psychics all the time.  I gained a few more facts and legends from a very entertaining book Weird Kentucky by Jeffrey Scott Holland.

• it is located in  Jefferson County, which at the time had the highest number of people afflicted with the disease in the country.
• 1 person died an hour at the height of the epidemic
• corpses were removed via a tunnel so that the living patients would not be distressed (where the haunted tour is held)
• it was later used as a geriatric hospital but closed because of patient abuse
• Room 502 – legend has it a nurse hanged herself there
• Legend has it that a girl without eyes and nicknamed “Mary” appears on the third floor
• In 2000, an alleged psychic and one of the present owners found a photograph of a girl inscribed with the name “Mary Lee”

The tour is called the Body Chute.  You are required to bring a flashlight and there are actors in place.

I’m going to make a post on fictional haunted houses and virtual haunted houses.

<mockery>

Due to the new necessity for full disclosure as discussed here and here and here, I will be candid about my resources.

John Seewer article – received a newspaper clipping from my mother which I have since discarded.

Weird Kentucky – read the essay on Waverly Hills from my sister’s copy which she borrowed from the library.

</mockery>

Vlad Studio Wallpaper for Halloween

I like to change out my wallpaper through October in honor of Halloween.  Most of the wallpaper I find is either super cute or a mite unpleasant.  Not that I dislike either but sometimes a more subtle tribute to the holiday is called for.  I like Vlad Gerasimov’s wallpaper from his site Vlad Studio for this time of year.

Some people might not find these eerie but that’s to be expected when the images are suggestive rather than direct.

Here are a few of my favorites:

(n.b. not the artist’s titles)

House

Robot’s gf

Lightning

Ghosts

Dream Uploading (spooky!)

Trick or Treat

Pac Man

Time

Trees

Black Cat

Library (I think it’s cozy but some people have been disturbed by it.)

Exploration

Midnight Forest 2

Jack-o-Lantern

Shared Nightmare (awwww!)

Midnight Forest 1

Blue

Lights Out

Cheshire Cat

Mushrooms

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Horror Movie Short: Mockingbird

From FEWDIO – this one is my favorite of their short horror flicks.

No gore but not for the sensitive.

Edgar Allan Poe – links

Image via Wikipedia

Halloween month is here and now I can post all my hoarded links and lists.

Here’s the first of my set of Halloween links on a very favorite author of mine:  2009 is the bicentennial of the death of Edgar Allan Poe.

This year, I think a reading of  The Tell-Tale Heart or The Fall of the House of Usher would be appropriate.  Maybe I should find a story I haven’t read yet.

The Roger Corum Pit and the Pendulum is my favorite of his Poe adaptations and Vincent Price and Barbara Steele managed to scare me good by the end of the film.  I haven’t seen it since I was teen, maybe I should watch it again, though I’m likely to be disappointed.

I’m in the middle of playing the ‘hidden object’ Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy game at Big Fish Games.  It’s better than most of its kind – graphics and animations are good, the sound is excellent and the puzzles are easy enough and not timed.  Plus, the storyline – did someone murder Poe is more intriguing than most.

things to come (maybe)

I had a lovely birthday. Many family members came to watch DVDs with me. One young woman heroically watched all six of them.
The films were:
Roman Holiday
The Prestige
King of Kong
Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer
Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Lost in Austen

I will try to write about all of them. I’ve been working on Lost in Austen but my dislike for it is compelling to add more and more to the post.

But Halloween is on its way as I’ve mentioned before. I’ve been working on my movie list and have found a lot of interesting movies and trivia to blog about. I’m looking forward to the next month.

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Halloween season approaches

Image via Wikipedia

I didn’t realize that it was close enough to October to start thinking of preparations for Halloween.

I have the horror disk to update for my brother, for one thing. A few years ago, I gave my brother a list of horror movies with reviews all grouped by monster type. The next year, I added horror site links and bunches of images. Last year, he said he wanted decoration how-to added to it. I’d love to find a bunch of classic movie trailers to add to the disk too.  Best of all I get to look up the new movies that have come out this year.

This year, I’ll have to tone down the horror movie watching since my roommate isn’t comfortable with them.  That means I can concentrate on old Universal pictures and animated specials.  Those are good too, so I won’t mind a gore-free Halloween.

Last year was a big decoration year but this year, I’d rather spend time telling ghost stories and bobbing for apples and carving jack-o-lanterns and things like that.

my Halloween

Image by brothergrimm via Flickr

I had a great Halloween this year.  Our own homes were off-limits, so my brother and I decorated my parents’ house.  We chose the theme of skulls and spiders, it made us happy.  We had a giant spider climbing out of a coffin with a skull.  We had spiders in webs and climbing down walls and over our dummy’s face.  We had skulls on pikes.

We made a wraith which was taller than the roof of the house. We had gray webbing this year which I preferred but my brother is a traditionalist. My brother even carved a spider on our jack o’ lantern. The pumpkin seeds were delicious.

We had a moderate number of trick-o-treaters but not bunches.  We had a small ninja who posed in battle stance for us (so cute!).  An adorable pumpkin and bumblebee came to visit.  We had some older kids: cowboys and pirates. All of them seemed incredibly shy.

My nephew was a monkey (my brothers were a monkey’s uncles); my nieces were a witch in a purple gown and a “Cinderella princess.”  My brother and sister took them out around the neighborhood and they got 2 buckets full each.

We watched Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1998) – the only scary part was the clown design – and Fido (2006) – a comedy with zombies as a gimmick. We played a story telling game that I had gotten for my birthday.

We also played Betrayal at House on the Hill – a superb game.  We’ve nearly run through the official storylines and are nearly to the point of making our own.

I do love Halloween.