Scary Squirrel Sunday

Squirrels are a delight. What animal is less objectionable? They're cute and playful, they don't prey on other animals and they're too swift-footed to have any real predators. They're basically in an ecological niche all by themselves. A cute, furry, lovable little niche.

A video has been making the rounds lately of a squirrel who is allegedly become drunk after feeding on a fermented jack-o-lantern.



Now that's cute. Maybe a little sad if a cat stumbled upon said squirrel in his sodden state. And if that squirrel did manage to flop it's way up to it's nest somehow it'd just end up getting ghosted in a jack-faced nose-dive, anyway. I know that squirrels do feed on jacks that are left out. Here's one frosty one sitting in my backyard right now with the fang-marks of the beloved neighborhood squirrels all over it:

Oh noooo, Mr. Jacko! I didn't know that they could get drunk off of a pumpkin, though. I'll put that down as food for thought

There are an endless array of videos titled "scary squirrel" and "evil squirrel" on YouTube but most of them seem to be incredibly insipid--Photochop slideshows mostly--and I don't feel like sorting them all out. But here's a few cute ones I did find to fill out the theme:

Horror Comix Wallpaper (widescreen)

(1440x900)

Art Appreciation-Sounds to Make You Shiver

When I was a kid we had numerous novelty sound-effects albums, including this one released by Pickwick in 1974 featuring a cover artwork that almost perfectly exemplified my boundless enthusiasm for Halloween. A distorted scene of mayhem and mystery with every Halloween horror veritably spilling forth from a bizarre, seemingly impossible, Gothic fortification. There was the Count, a colossal shambling Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man, a witch throwing bugs and eyeballs into a bubbling cauldron, a strangely grinning ghost and a big hairy monster, among others.

Atop this monsterosity looms the characteristically un-menacing Count, obviously in a supervisory position, accompanied by his faithful henchman the Hunchback.

Beneath them are a trio of nameless horrors, obviously the failed experiments of a mad doctor. Even so, they have a nice open-air view of the bleak countryside peopled with doomed peasants. Seeing as the laboratory beneath them seems to be on the verge of a violent explosion, you can see why they are so eager to bust out of their cages.

A structurally-unsound-looking Frankenstein's Monster lopes dangerously off the canvas, one ungainly hand blocking out an apparent dimensional paradox as the back of the clearly benighted castle seems to hover above a dusk-tinged cemetery.

Well, no matter, it serves up all the Halloween Horror goods in a colorful way and for all it's flaws it will always be one of my favorite pieces of artwork. As for the contents of the album itself-the rattling chains and screams and groans and thunder, it's okay in small doses but give me the Monster Mash any day.

How It All Began

OH NOES! Devil-worshippers! Burnt-sacrifices! Jack Chick warned us about this...

Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural

The time is the 1930's, in the rural, Prohibition-era American South. Shy, thirteen-year old Lila Lee (Cheryl Smith), ward of the young reverend (played by director Richard Blackburn) goes in search of her gangster father, who is a fugitive from the law after having shot Lila's mother to death. Little does she realize that the letter summoning her on this dangerous trip to the remote, spectral town of Astaroth-- where her father has taken refuge, apparently near death--was authored by the mysterious recluse Lemora, who is merely using Lila's father in order to take possession, body and soul, of Lila Lee herself.


Lila Lee's odyssey begins when, trying to get to the bus-station to get a ticket to Astaroth, she stows away on a car going into town, and overhears the local gossip about the Reverend's less-than-puritanical designs on her. Lila Lee is further harried by scenes of corruption and debauchery in town before finding out that the only bus to Astaroth is driven by a bizarre little man with a mildly deranged manner (the somewhat overdoing-it Hy Pyke), and she's the only passenger. During the ride, the driver warns Lila Lee about the dark reputation of Astaroth, complete with the distinctive monstrous attributes (dubbed the "Astaroth Look") of it's inhabitants, tearing a page from H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth.


Unfortunately for Lila Lee, she soon gets to see the dreaded "Astaroth look" first-hand, as the bus breaks down and the two are swarmed by a pack of feral vampire-creatures. Lila Lee escapes only by being abducted by some other less horrifyic "civilized" Astaroth-ites who wear cowboy hats and turtle-necks for some reason. These vampires drive away the others and kill a few with stakes to the heart, and Lila Lee wakes up the next day in a padlocked stone hovel, illuminated only by sunlight though a barred window and tended to by a creepy old woman (the Renfield to Lemora's Dracula) who seems to be out of her mind. Lemora finds out that this cell is on the property of the woman who wrote the letter appealing for Lila Lee to come there, alone, to meet with her father, and that, far from being his protector Lemora has him captive, along with Lila Lee and others. After Lila Lee nearly escapes she meets Lemora, a strange woman with dark eyes, an unnatural complexion and funereal 19th century clothing. Lemora brings Lila Lee into her stark old manor and forces her to eat raw meat and blood for sustanance. In spite of being subjected to this and other indignities, Lila Lee begins to grow closer to Lemora. Lila Lee quickly comes around to the ominous reality, however, that Lemora, her henchmen and the gaggle of strange, laughing children that Lemora treats as her own are all vampires. More, Lila Lee is attacked by her own father who, as one of the savage feral vampires, is driven away by Lemora, banished to the woods where

the other feral vampires run berserk. Lila Lee escapes again, only to find herself pursued by the "wild" vampires that Lemora's vampires hunt like animals. Before long these vampires clash in a climactic battle for supremacy, in which Lila Lee is seemingly caught in the middle.


Written and directed by Richard (Eating Raoul) Blackburn, Lemora would be the young film student's only feature film, owing largely to the movies poor reception among American audiences of the time. Though a monumental career setback for Blackburn, his ambitious little independent genre production was rewarded with some recognition, mostly by European film critics, as well as a small cult-following from Americans who caught it on late-night movie-of-the-week broadcasts (for me, that was Shock Theater). Out on Synapse DVD in a remastered special edition, Lemora can now be enjoyed with a pristine picture, far surpassing the inky, nearly unwatchable, incarnations previously seen on cable and VHS. The clarity of the DVDs picture does, unfortunately, reveal many of the rough edges of the woefully low-budget. When I saw Lemora on Shock Theater as a kid, I always wondered what the creatures pursuing Lila Lee in the woods, the ones making the horrifying guttural beast-noises, actually looked like. What my imagination cooked up was a little freakier than what can clearly be seen now, but considering the financial limitations (Blackburns cast and crew were primarily friends and family) the home-made make-up effects (including plastic Halloween vampire fangs) don't detract too much from from what was, after all, a laudable experimental work that hardly launched any of those involved to stardom.




The late Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith did go on to appear in a slew of exploitation films in the seventies and early eighties (Caged Heat, The Pom-Pom Girls, and the ilk), wherever a freckly, buxom, translucent blonde was called for, but few were starring roles and only a couple of those appear to have required serious acting skills. Smith turned in an unusually restrained performance as Lila Lee, apparently not seeing the character as being easily unnerved. Smith's performance is eerily remote, almost somnambulic. It reminds me a little of Candace Hilligoss' wandering spirit in Carnival of Souls. It can be argued that Smith was no Jodie Foster, but on the DVD's commentary director Blackburn asserts that though he pushed her to exhibit more emotion in key scenes, he was glad, viewing the film today, that Smith had resisted the his direction to make Lila Lee the "screamy" type. It may be that Smith struggled with the characterization as it was. Here was a streetwise sixteen-year-old California woman playing an innocent, gospel-singing girl of thirteen, after all, and Cheryl even had to have her breasts taped down under her clothing so that her true maturity wouldn't be so obvious.


The performance choice for the eponymous Lemora (Lesley Gilb) was also a bit curious. The character comes across as a shrill photo-phobic schoolmarm, begging to be defied. For an age-old vampire who preys on children, you'd think that she'd have developed a more winning personality to help soften her severe, staring countenance.


Lemora isn't necessarily an engrossing, genre-defining movie but it's nicely textured and evokes a suitably spooky dreamscape atmosphere with a slightly off-kilter dramatic sensibility. Rather than going for sheerly exploitative thrills, as was the trend of the genre market of the day, Blackburn produced more of an art film with a European flavor. Though the lesbian overtones that vampire flicks of the seventies were lousy with are present, there is little erotic about Lemora's strained, awkward seduction of Lila Lee. Blackburn indicates that the film is about sexual repression at the core. The Reverend represses his indecent desires for Lila Lee, who is in turn forced to veil her desires as a young woman coming of age. This repression presumably contributes to their ultimate fates--grim or liberating, depending on your own particular interpretation.

Spooky Horror Wallpapers

Carnival of Souls (800x600)

House on Haunted Hill (800x600)

Spook Show (800x600)

Horror Rises from the Tomb

Witchcraft (800x600)

(Regrettably, the above are only available in 800x600.)

It's Halloween!

Alright, so we open with some nice young Halloween partiers bobbing for apples and then BOOM an old lady gets kacked by the angel of death. And isn't that kinda what Halloween is all about?

Halloween Book 1

Here's a Halloween book I cherished as a small kid for some reason. Looks like this is part 1 of 10 or 11.

It had eleven years to be beat up by the other kids before I took it out of circulation.

Countdown to Halloween 2009

RIP John Keel

I recently learned that one of my early favorite authors, John A. Keel, passed away in a nursing home this past June 3rd at the age of 79. A copy of his The Mothman Prophecies caught my eye when I was about ten, more particularly the phantasmic titular character displayed on the cover stalking a couple of teenagers in the moonlight. It's really a wonderfully mysterious book, particularly if your mind is open to such phenomenon, which mine assuredly was at that age. I believed in ghosts and Bigfoot and UFO's and so why not sinister flying trans-dimensional harbingers of doom?

Here's a good obituary of the man at Cryptomundo. And a simple simple wallpaper tile I did several years back:

First, The Hook....

Okay, there's this guy-a madman-and he's just escaped from the local nut-hatch and he has a hook for a hand. He uses this hook to dispatch his innocent victims. He's a hook-murderer. Master of Hook-fu. So why they let the guy keep his hook in the looney-bin is anyone's guess. I assume he didn't stump a bloody swathe to the local police station's homicide evidence locker to retrieve it Terminator-style but whatever. He's at large, he has a hook, he's got some kind of mental issue that inspires him to fatally jab people with it. That's all that's important.

And obviously it's the hand that has him so pissed off. What else? He wants to get his revenge on everyone with a healthy pair of hands. Maybe he even wants to cut their hands off. He collects them or something. Don't ask me. Maimed people are evil. We've learned that from the Phantom of the Opera and Dr. Phibes and Freddy Kreugar and...

Come to think of it, Freddy Kreuger isn't a good example because he was already way freaking evil and that's why he was maimed in the first place. And he was cool with it anyway because the horrible scars made him scarier and more effective at his job. Basically a murderous blistered specter who collects teenager's souls so he can take over the planet. Why am I talking about Freddy Kreigar? Krueger, Krieger, who cares? He's old hat. Strictly Pet Rock. Yesterday's snooze.

Anyway, so after getting squared away with his evil prosthesis where does an evil maimed guy head first? I guess I'd go to lover's lane because that's where he goes, the local lover's lane. And he'd probably know where it was, too, being a psycho. What is he going to go terrorize the shuffle-board crowd first? Who's that gonna impress? No, he's going for the teenagers who are huddled in the dark, avoiding the authorities while drunk and in a serious state of distraction. And there might be some boobage to spy in the moonlight. And besides the teeners have nicer hands than the old folks. They look better nailed to the walls of his murder shack in the woods.

Unfortunately for Mr. Hook bulletins are being broadcast on the radio warning that hey, there's this crazy guy with a hook and he kills people with his hook and-hell,you know the one. How many psychos with hooks could we possibly have in this shithole town, anyway?-well he's escaped from the insane asylum and he may be headed to lover's lane! I mean where else is he gonna go this time of night, the bowling alley?

And the teenagers at lover's lane all have their radios cranked up to drown out the noise of the date rape or whatever so they're hearing the bulletin and starting to file off down the road to town to change their underwear and barricade themselves in their homes. But there's always one douchebag who doesn't take the danger seriously and he's the last to go, arguing hey, the guys got a hook for a hand. What's he going to do, put someone's eye out? No way I'm crawling back in my burrow with blue rocks on, sweetie, no way. But no his date keeps hearing strange noises and she's always been self-conscious about being assailed by hooked maniacs intent on disemboweling her so take a frakking rain check you creep and let's get the funk outta heah! And so the prevert fires up his rusted jalopy and they're down the road.

So are you ready for the scary part? I don't know but I'm going to go on anyway. He gets her to her house and on the way there she's somehow trained him to open her car door for her because that's what he does. And he finds a bloody hook hanging from the cars door-handle. And she's all freaking out or whatever.

Yeah, don't ask me, it's an old story. The guy has lost his hook and his three squares a day and he's alone in the middle of the dark woods with an itchy bleeding stump. Now what?

IIIIIII CAAAAAN'T FIIIIND MYYYYY HOOOOOOOOOK!

Slow September

FWIW: Posting will be very light for the rest of the month as I get ready for the Countdown to Halloween Blogathon. Should be a ball!

Awkward Situation