Category: Reflections

Our thoughts and discussions of the horror genre.

Reflecting on Poltergeist – “No More.”

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Everyone has that one movie they use to officially kick off the Halloween spirit. My wife’s, for example, is The Rocky Horror Picture show. Mine on the other hand, is Poltergeist.

Poltergeist is, hands down, one of my favorite horror movies of all time. It is the perfect balance between terror and wholesomeness. On one hand we have the slowly growing threat of the spirits’ takeover of the homestead. On the other, we have the loving family dynamic between husband and wife Steven and Diane Freeling. I could write an entire post surrounding the love these two have for one another but for now, I would like to focus on another character.

That of their youngest daughter Carol Anne.

For you see, there is more than one love story in Poltergeist. We have the love between Steven and Diane, but also the love between Diane and daughter Carol Anne. A majority of the movie revolves around the mother’s feelings towards protecting, and later finding, her daughter.

Hell. One of the movie’s strongest and most emotionally charged scenes is when Carol Anne, trapped within the spirit world, runs through Diane. Diane then describes the sensation. Talking about how Carol Anne touched her soul and how she can now smell her daughter on her clothes. It is a powerful scene that really hammers home the love Diane has for Carol Anne and is another fine example of just how well made this movie is.

With that out of the way, let’s discuss something I noticed during my most recent viewing. Carol Anne’s “No More.”.

“No More.”

As I had mentioned before; the primary story of Poltergeist revolves around Steven and Diane trying to save their youngest daughter from the spirit world. After several stressful days and sleepless nights, the Freelings get in touch with a medium who agrees to help them.

They concoct a plan to send Diane into the spirit realm to find Carol Anne and bring her back to the world of the living. The plan succeeds resulting in reunion of Carol Anne with her family. The next day, as Steven and Diane pack up their belongings to move away, we learn that Carol Anne seems to have no memory of what happened. According to Diane, the little girl is as happy and as care-free as she has always been – much to the relief of her parents. No expensive therapy for this wee one.

I don’t know why, but for some reason I ended up focusing on that line. What was it that made this line stand out so much? Then it hit me. Carol Anne’s whimper of “No More” meant that she did, indeed, have memory of being inside the spirt world. She was fully aware of everything that had happened to her the previous night and she did not want experience that horrific event again.

Now I don’t know if this was the intention of the writer and director but for me, at least, it adds just that much more tragedy to Carol Anne’s experiences. The poor girl wants nothing more than to forget everything that happened only for the entities to try and pull her back in. It is as heartbreaking as it is terrifying.

What are your thoughts on this scene? Is this just Carol Anne’s reaction to another ghostly event – having already experienced such things earlier in the movie? Or is she expressing fear based off her memories of being within the spirit world? Let us know in the comments below!

I would also like to take a moment to apologize for our lack of updates. We are working to keep moving forward with entries – whether they are brief discussions such as this one or fully detailed reviews. We appreciate your patience!

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Unexpected Horror: Dr. Stone

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I have an odd confession. When I was little, I feared Anime more than I did Horror. In fact, I daresay that I got into horror a lot easier than I did anime. Why? Well because the anime that I knew about was violent as hell!

Now while I didn’t want much anime, I did have access to the internet. Through which I discovered clips and screenshots of some of the most detailed and violent movies and shows that 80s and 90s anime had to offer. Movies such as Wicked City, Bio-Hunter, Ninja-Scroll, and Violent Jack were all over the internet and just the site of animated violence was enough to make me feel queasy. Of course, things are different now that I am used to such things but as a kid, I avoided most Anime like the plague.

There were exceptions of course. I got into shows such as Lupin the 3rd, Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, and Tenchi Muyo. It wasn’t until junior high that I started really getting into the harder stuff. I had a friend who lent me a collection of movies on VHS. I started off with Samurai Showdown (my first anime with blood – a quick moment of it spraying out of a character’s mouth), moved onto Ayana’s High Kick, then headfirst into Battle Angel Alita and Ninja Scroll. The former being my introduction to anime gore, the latter being my introduction to, well, everything else.

Since then, I’ve been a fan of anime. Anime such as Spirited Away, Gurren Lagann, Kill la Kill, Hellsing Ultimate, Outlaw Star, Hunter x Hunter, and so on. From the silly to the violent, from the action-packed to the psychological; anime has become another genre that I’ve come to adore.

I know what you are thinking. With an opening like that, I must be getting ready to talk about some kind of horror-anime. Something like Perfect Blue or Paranoia Agent. While I do love them, they are not what I want to talk about today.

What I want to talk about is the wildly entertaining and surprisingly wholesome anime, Dr. Stone.

Dr. Stone is an educational adventure anime that revolves around the hyper-intelligent Senku Ishigami. He is a 16-year-old high-school student with an obsession for science. It does not matter whether its chemistry, engineering, or astrology; he loves it all. So much so that he has dedicated most of his childhood to studying science in hopes of on day going to outer space.

All this changes, however, when a mysterious green light turns the entire human population of earth into stone. 3,700 years later, Senku breaks out of his stone prison and begins his tireless journey to restore the human population with his weapon of choice: science.

What follows next is a fun journey that educates as well as entertains. I highly recommend it. It really handles itself differently than other anime. Instead of having these big epic battles, Dr. Stone focuses on using science and engineering to solve their problems. Even when their enemies’ resort to violence, Senku and his crew fight back in the most peaceful and logical ways possible. It’s great.

Yet not even the wholesome Dr. Stone can escape the long-reaching claws of horror.

**Warning: The following contains spoilers for Season 3**

Season 03 of Dr. Stone finds Senku and his friends advancing in both science and technology. By this time in the show they have already conquered things such as radio communication, hot air balloon travel, and paved roads. They realize, however, that the next thing required for their Kingdom of Science is an improvement to their communication properties. This leads them to build a radio tower. To test its range, Senku and a handful of his allies take a small boat out onto the water and turn their newly boosted radio on. It is here that the horror begins.

Now, as mentioned before, this is a wholesome, comedic anime. The closest thing to a “horror movie moment” came during season 01 where the Senku and his friends discovered a lake of sulfuric acid. It is here where the show represents the deadly Sulfur Dioxide with the image of a rotting angel. She, like the Sirens of Greek myth, calls out to the protagonists in hopes of luring them to their deaths. It’s an intense scene and is admittedly rather scary. Though I would say that the fear comes from the real-world hazard that comes from sulfur dioxide; not the anime itself.

What happens on the boat, however, is a different story altogether.

After activating the high-frequency radio, Senku’s apprentice Chrome tries to contact the mainland. He wants to talk to the priestess of his village, a woman named Ruri. The radio works but as Ruri is about to respond, a stronger signal interrupts her. This signal provides a series of strange noises; noises that turn out to be a series of tapping.

Morse Code.

The team realize that the code is a single word. A single word that is repeating itself nonstop.

“Why?”

It is at this moment that I felt a chill creep down my spine. This is a primitive world. The only people alive are the ones freed by Senku or the natives of the village. Natives who have no concept of science and technology. And yet there is another signal out there in the world. A signal that didn’t exist until Senku and his team activated the radio tower.

Imagine this if you will. You are the only person alive on the planet. You have proof that you are the only person alive on the planet. Then, one day, you wake up to find a message spray-painted across your lawn.

Someone is out there.

And they are watching you.

You don’t know anything about them. Not where they came from. How long they have been there. Why they decided now to contact you. Only that they exist, and you are no longer alone.

That, my friends, is terrifying.

This is why I found the episode so scary. And what makes this specific scene so eerie is the fact that there is no build-up leading up to it. One minute our heroes are enjoying a nice day on the water, the next they discover an invisible enemy that is monitoring their activities.

So there you have it. Yet another example of unexpected horror. Tell us; what did you think of this episode? Did it send shivers down your spine or was there another moment in the show that you found as creepy?

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Unexpected Horror: Rugrats Season 03 – In the Dreamtime.

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Horror has the tendency of popping up when you least expect it. Case in point: Rugrat’s Season 03 episode “In the Dreamtime.”

Dreamtime Title

In the Dreamtime revolves around our favorite ginger-haired scaredy cat Chuckie Finster. He has been having a hard time telling the difference between his dreams and reality. What transpires next are several short dream sequences that keeps audiences guessing on what is real and what is a dream.

Space Dream

For example, there is a moment in the episode where Chuckie is explaining the dream world to the other Rugrats. Tommy takes inspiration from Chuckie’s dreams and decides to lead the gang of ankle-biters upstairs into Grandpa Pickles’ bedroom. The adventure starts off normal enough, but it doesn’t take long for the world to warp. The staircase grows longer and longer and the babies soon find themselves in outer space. Chuckie’s attempt to join the fun leaves him falling into nothingness. He wakes up with a scream and realizes that it was just another dream.

ClownStu

In the end, Chuckie realizes that dreams are just that – dreams. They cannot hurt him. His father Chas ends up comforting Chuckie before putting him down for the night. However, in a surprise twist, we follow Chas into the kitchen where he encounters a deformed, clown-faced Stu. He wakes up with a shout as the episode ends. This leaves audiences wondering whether it was really Chuckie’s dreams we’ve been watching or Chas’s. Either way, it ends on a creepy note.

The episode obviously takes a lot of its inspiration from horror. The idea of being unable to tell the difference between the Real World and the Dream World is probably one of the oldest tropes of the genre. We’ve seen it in such movies as Phantasm, Donnie Darko, episodes of the Twilight Zone, and the granddaddy of them all: Nightmare on Elm Street.

RugratsDog

To add to the horror, we then have the scene where Chuckie decides to talk to the neighbor’s bulldog. Now this is not a sweet pupper like Tommy’s dog Spike. No. This is an angry, frothing at the mouth, raging bulldog that wants nothing more than to tear Chuckie apart. Luckily, Tommy is able to distract the dog with a stick before Chuckie gets hurt. Still, that does not negate the fact that we just watched a baby nearly get mauled by the neighbor’s dog!

Then you have the sudden, and rather horrific transformations of Tommy and Stu’s faces. These transformations, being so quick and random, reminds me a lot of Large Marge from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. For those of you who don’t know – Large Marge was a truck driver that Pee Wee Herman hitches a ride with while looking for his stolen bike. She tells Pee Wee about a terrible accident of which she was a witness too. When she describes the dead person’s face, her own suddenly twists and contorts; much to the shock of Pee Wee and the audience.

ClownTommy

Clown-Face Stu and Clown-Face Tommy follow the same idea. Both keeping their faces normal, or hidden, before the big reveal. Combine that with their suddenly squeaky and high-pitched voices (‘When I Talked. Like. THIS!”) and you got yourself one memorable episode.

And memorable it is. In the Dreamtime is one of the most talked about and referenced episodes of the Rugrats. People, to this day, still consider In the Dreamtime to be one of their earliest experiences of ‘nightmare fuel’ with many fans still considering it to be one of the creepiest episodes of this long-running franchise.

And I agree.

At the time of this post, In the Dreamtime is currently available to stream on Paramount +.

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The Art of the VHS

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Horror never looked so beautiful

I don’t mean to come across as the crotchety old man waving his cane while proclaiming how much better things were back in his day. But there were some things that were objectively better when I was younger. The most obvious being the beauty of VHS cover art.

I cannot tell you how many times a movie, especially a horror movie, caught my eye because of its cover art. Hell. I distinctly remember sneaking over to the horror section of my BlockBuster Video just so I could check out all the creepy imagery on display. It was fun. As a kid, I was not allowed to watch scary movies. So looking at VHS covers was the closest thing I could get to watching the movie.

Now you see, there were 2 kinds of cover art. You had ones that used live-action photographs of the main characters. And you had ones that had hand-painted artwork. The live-action ones were still pretty cool. I remember Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child’s VHS cover. It was simple but effective.

This VHS cover had a blue background with Freddy Kruger kneeling over a gothic, bone-like stroller. He was holding one claw up to his lips to hush the audience. And while his expression wasn’t scary, the stroller sure as hell was! It looked to be a combination of bone and blackened flesh. It always stood out to me.

The other movie that stood out was Hellraiser. Again, a simple design but I found it to be quite menacing nevertheless. Pinhead was standing in the center of the image. He was holding a partially solved Puzzle box and it looked like he was offering it to you.

Hellraiser VHS

But what struck me as scary about this VHS cover was his expression. Freddy usually had some kind of smart-ass expression on his face whereas Chucky would be laughing maniacally. Pinhead, on the other hand, looked PISSED. His lips curling back in a quiet snarl. His eyes narrowed and filled with rage. The hooked chains in the background dangling with deadly intent; this was a VHS cover that stuck with me all throughout my childhood.

On the other side of the coin you had the artistic cover art. These were painted images meant to capture the spirit of the movie.

HouseVHS

The movie that springs to my mind every time I talk about cover art is the 1985 horror comedy HOUSE. The VHS cover was absolutely terrifying for a young me. It showed a severed hand ringing a house’s doorbell. It was super detailed – with the veins and muscles showing. You could see the bones in between the rotted out sections of flesh and beneath it were the words “DING DONG, YOU’RE DEAD.”

Another cover that I enjoyed was Chopping Mall. A simple design but so much fun to look at. It shows a robotic claw clutching hold of a red shopping bag. Through the several rips and tears of the bag we can see various body parts sticking out. Eyes, fingers, an ear; even a screaming face. Like the Dream Child VHS cover, this was simple and effective. It you everything you needed to know about the movie. It was a horror film that takes place in a shopping mall.

What was fun about these artistic designs, however, was that they rarely involved a scene from the movie itself. There is no shopping bag full of body parts in Chopping Mall. In fact, the robots that movie don’t have hands to begin with. House, also, does not include a floating severed hand that rings the doorbell.

Dead Alive does not have a woman peeling off her face to expose a skull beneath. Wax Works does not have a little person opening a door to a melted mass of horrible faces. And Evil Dead does not have a woman being dragged underground by a zombie hand.

But you know what? It didn’t matter if the art matched a scene from the movie. It was still very eye-catching and fun to look at.

Unfortunately, as time went on, VHS and subsequently DVD cover art began to change. They focused less on the showing the concept of the movie and more on the actors who star in the movie. You can see this a lot in the late 90s to early 2000s. Cover art changed thanks to the reemergence of the slasher genre. Live action photos of the main cast posing in front of the killer became the norm. This style would, sadly, replace the hand-drawn or stylized live-action posters of the 90s.

Scream, I Know what you Did Last Summer, Soul Survivors, The Faculty, Final Destination, The Curve – the list goes on and on. Of course there are exceptions to the rule. We still have some fantastic stylized cover art but it’s not like it used to be.

I understand that it costs more money to produce something unique and special for your DVD cover but there was just something special about the way cover art used to be. Luckily there exist websites that work to preserve this art. Websites like Critical Condition that provide an extensive list of obscure movies (and not just from the horror genre). They include reviews, cover art and variants, and brief histories on the movies. The Internet Archive has their own archive of cover art – again not just limited to horror movies. I highly recommend checking them both out if you are a fan.

So tell me. What is your favorite horror cover art? Which movies stood out for you the most? Let us know in the comments!

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“It is only a game. I like scaring myself.”

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taptap

My introduction to horror didn’t come from a dream demon or a zombie in a hockey mask. It did not have a puzzle box nor did it come from the depths of hell.

No.

My introduction to horror came from a children’s book. A book that was written to help children overcome their fear of the dark. It was called “The Flat Man” and it was published in 1988. Written by Rose Impey and illustrated by Moira Kemp, the book is a short story about a little boy who is afraid of a ‘Flat Man’ who hides in the shadows. The man can stretch his body up to the ceiling, and flatten itself against the floor. He can slip under the crack of a closet door and can crawl along the floor like a snake. The Flat Man wants nothing more than to smother and terrify the little boy.

Now the story on its own is creepy enough but nothing prepared me for the illustrations. The Flat Man was this paper-like entity with a wide, bald head, broad nose, and a pair of angry eyes. Throughout the book we see him creep and crawl towards the boy; bending and folding his body in impossible shapes to remain in the shadows. The worse came when he reached the boy in his bed – twisting his body so that he could wrap his thin arms and spindly fingers around the boy’s body. Looking back on it, I guess you could find this to be a metaphor for fear itself – how it can envelop you, suffocate you; bury you in anxiety and terror.

The book has a happy ending. The boy fed up with the monster, flings it off of his bed. He finds his flashlight and uses to it stun the Flat Man before finally turning on the lights to his room. The Flat Man, weak and helpless, crumples up into a ball and flies out the bedroom window.

But it doesn’t stop there. For what is horror without a twist?

As the boy lays back in bed, he notices a paper bird hanging from the ceiling of his room. It was a present his parents bought him. He then pretends that the bird is a monstrous vampire – ready to swoop down on him at a moment’s notice.

And that’s how the book ends.

As a six-year-old, that was pretty scary. The idea that everything and anything could become a monster? That no matter what I did, there was another monster waiting for me around the corner. Talk about intense.

I still have this book. The original from my childhood – with its ripped dust cover and worn pages. It was just one of those books that I could never get rid of. Every once in a blue moon, I would take it out of storage and flip through its pages; wondering if the illustrations and story still creep me out.

They do.

However, I look at the book differently now than I did back then. You see, as I sat down to write this journal, I took a moment to download a digital copy of the book to get a refresher on the story and its artwork. It’s been quite some time since I sat down and read the book. And, having re-read it as not only an adult, but as someone who loves horror, I can say, with confidence, that this book influenced my life more than I had originally thought.

You see, what I hadn’t realized back then was that the child created the Flat Man. It was not some blood-thirsty monster that lived in the shadows. It was a figment of the boy’s imagination.

At the start of the book, the boy recounts how his room would transform whenever the lights were shut off. How the shadows would make his toys, clothes, and desk look like terrifying creatures. The Flat Man was created when he heard tree branches tapping upon his window. He liked to think of the branches being the fingertips of a monster; drumming its claws against the glass wanting to get in.

The following is a passage from the book.

“But I like to pretend that

It is the Flat Man, trying to get in.

His long, bony fingers

Tap on the glass.

“Let me in,” he whispers softly.

Tap, tap, tap.

It is only a game.

I like scaring myself.“

How apropos. What betters describe the horror fanbase more than this quote?

“It’s only a game. I like scaring myself.”

Isn’t that just the truth? We know that it’s fake; the movies, the books, the comics, the tales around the camp fire. But while we read, watch, or listen to the stories; for those moments, we like to pretend its real. We let go of reality and pour ourselves into the world of terror that these creatives have conjured. A world where zombies feast on human flesh. Where demons possess housewives, poltergeists terrorize suburban families, and dolls come to life.

But what happens when the movie ends? When the last page of the book is flipped or when the story teller finishes their tale? Well, we find ourselves cast back into the real world but not without consequence. The horror sticks with us, lingers on our bodies like a smell. We cast glances over our shoulders least the masked killer be right there, raising a knife over their heads. We monitor the dark corners of our bedrooms as if waiting for the glow of a monster’s eyes.

And thus, the game begins.

The game of scaring ourselves.

Like I said. We know it is fake. But we like to pretend it’s real.

Because we like scaring ourselves.

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