Once Upon a Time on Halloween.
There's something primal about Halloween. It reaches not just back to our youth but to the youth of the human race. It reaches back to a time when the darkness held within it a dangerous world we could barely imagine. To a time when we felt the presence of the dead all around us and felt compelled to honor and appease them lest they take their mischief out on us. Much has changed over the passing of hundreds of generations, but the dark heart of Halloween remains the same. On Halloween, the dead are amongst us and mischief is at hand. Read the full article in Horror Curated: Halloween.
Halloween on the Air.
If you happen to go motor-vating through the southwest part of New Mexico, you might come across a small town with a rather odd name. In 1950, Ralph Edwards, the host of a popular radio game show, announced that the program would broadcast its ten-year anniversary episode from the first town to rename itself after the show. Hot Springs, New Mexico won the contest by renaming itself Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, on March 31st of that year. It's still called that. Read the full article in Horror Curated: Halloween.
When we hear about serial killers, most of us think of one of two things. It's either the slasher movie type-Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger, Norman Bates-or documentaries and Netflix limited series about the modern monsters like Ed Gein, Jeffery Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy. Some might even go to those mythical killers who have transcended their stories and become myth and legend thanks to their mystery and intrigue like Jack the Ripper, the Zodiacs, or the Texarkana Moonlight Murderer. But perhaps the most prolific real life serial killer of them all, whose name is a true blurring of myth and monster, is Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary. Read the full article in Horror Curated: Bloody Tea.
Mr. Paul Johnson was the scoutmaster of Troop 99. Every campout we went on during those four years I was in the Boy Scouts, he would bring along one of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents... anthologies. These were published by Dell for about twenty years, beginning in the mid-1950s. Slim little books, they were edited by the staff of Hitchcock's eponymous mystery magazine. Before taps every night, as we gathered around the campfire, Mr. Johnson would read a story from one of those books, sending us all off to our sleeping bags with visions of monsters, murder, and mayhem in our dear little heads. We had our favorites, of course. I couldn't tell you how many times we insisted that Mr. Johnson read us a little gem called "Sredni Vashtar" by some guy who called himself Saki, but it was one of the regulars in his rotation. Read the full article in Horror Curated: Bloody Tea.
Photo by Arun Kuchibhotla.
"I'd be amazed if there is anyone reading this expository essay who is unfamiliar with the 1843 Charles Dickens novella, A Christmas Carol. The classic tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and that memorable Christmas Eve when he was visited by a series of ectoplasmic entities in order to adjust his attitude toward a more compassionate perspective has permeated the culture, having been adapted to stage, screen, radio, television, and other media hundreds of times over the past almost one hundred and eighty years since publication. It is by far the ghost story of any kind that has been the most adapted, with the runner-up, Aleksandr Pushkins' "Queen of Hearts," coming across the finish line as a distant second." Read the full article in Horror Curated.