Plug in your orange and purple lights, turn on the fog machines, and blast the Dead Man’s Bones album while you admire the dead tree you’ve dragged in for celebration. Here, I’ll even help. Play this while you finish reading this post. Today is day one of the 13 Days of #Frightmas! What exactly is Frightmas?It’s the Midnight Society’s way of celebrating the holidays! Magic, mystery, and fright come together to create 13 macabre days of fun, counting down the days until Frightmas day! Each day of the 13 days of Frightmas, we’ll reveal a new gift[...]
Yearly Archives
2017
0 Steps from the White House, hanging from a red brick building lit from below like someone holding a flashlight under their chin to tell a ghost story, the banner read, “Murder Is Her Hobby.” Well now. I was instantly drawn in to Renwick Gallery and Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, an exhibit that highlights her contributions to forensic science and delightfully macabre craftwork. In a time when women were expected to pursue ladylike hobbies, Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) directed her money[...]
I LOVE horror games (shocker, I know), and I just spent the past few months revisiting two of my all-time favorites, Dead Space and Dead Space 2. When I finally put them to rest, I was looking for something to play when the ads for The Evil Within 2 started coming out. I'd played about ten minutes of the first game, so I decided to go back to that one and play through it so I could eventually get the sequel as well. I'm glad I decided to give The Evil Within another shot, because it's great. I've started a let's play series, and you can watch the first episode of[...]
Tis the season! Lights! Love! Hope! And don’t forget a bit of horror. Christmas horror! A gift that becomes a bit more than you can handle. A dark spirit of Christmas ready to punish all who don’t believe. So, dear scary-loving friends, let’s watch a horror movie...NO, let’s watch two Christmas horror movies! First... A 1984 horror-comedy directed by Joe Dante. No one can resist fuzzy little Gizmo in a Santa hat! And who can pass up creepy killers singing Christmas carols? Not me. A fun destructive romp through the lovely town of Kingston Falls where[...]
I grew up celebrating Thanksgiving on the edge of a Florida swamp. Our cabin was perched in the crook of a bend of the Little Withlacoochee River. It stood on eight-foot posts because sometimes the blackwater river would come out of its banks and spread through the swamp. You’d have to wade to the cabin then, shuffling to find the hidden logs, your legs lost in the dark water. It was pretty great. Thanksgiving Day was spent fishing, exploring the woods and making holiday crafts my mother devised. One year, we traced each other’s outlines on butcher paper. E[...]
I really, really enjoyed the first season of SyFy's Channel Zero series, Candle Cove. While it had its rough spots, the premise of a super creepy kids' show coupled with some great imagery carried the season. Season two of the Creepypasta-inspired series is not short on frightening imagery either, but it's so much deeper and consistently disturbing that it surpasses the first season in almost every way. https://youtu.be/LW7zWck0VAQ Titled "No-End House," this season's story begins with the legend of a haunted house that appears in a random location once per[...]
Hello boys and ghouls, Welcome to Monsterland, the scariest place on earth. When I first heard of this book, I had some serious RL Stine vibes in my head. One Day at Horrorland, anyone? Which was exciting for me because I freaking love RL Stine and I was pumped that someone else was writing a story about a dangerous theme park filled with monsters... Seriously, that would be like a dream date. This concept has been done with Jurassic Park or Westworld, but it hasn't really been done in YA before, with vampires and werewolves. I was super excited about this book[...]
Wednesday Addams, the Headless Horseman, and Velma from Scooby Doo walked into a horror convention. They walked with me from the parking garage to Spooky Empire, along with gender-swapped Beetlejuice and more than one Pennywise. Sam from Trick r Treat greeted me when I walked in. I love Sam, and Halloween was only a few days away, but I had a writing panel to catch. Spooky Empire started in 2003, and it’s grown to be one of the largest horror conventions in the nation. The self-proclaimed ‘dark side of Comic Con’ is held in Orlando, Florida nowadays[...]
Another Halloween has come and gone. Another season of skulls and horror movies and carving pumpkins. Another night of becoming something else, of facing that which scares us. The crunch of leaves underfoot. The colors of fall. The chill in the air. There's nothing like Halloween. As a kid, I couldn't wait for my dad to get home so we could go trick-or-treating. Always proudly wearing my costume to school that day. Always ready for a bag full of candy that never lasted until Christmas like I hoped. When we moved to this big old house with a front porch...and his[...]
Oh, hello there, It's been a while since we had a good chat. Too long, if you ask me. I took some time off. My brain got a little twisted but I'm back. I spent this week thinking about what I wanted to chat about. The obvious would be Halloween. It is, after all, nearly here. So I started checking out cool Halloween movies that flew under the radar and googling weird Halloween traditions from around the globe but I just kept thinking about death. Not mine, mind you. No, not yours either. I'm thinking about theirs. **TRIGGER** Actual death descrip[...]