All Posts By

MidnightSocietyVicki

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Dear Krampus – Our Horror Holiday Wishlists

Dear Krampus, At this most wonderful time of the year, we at the Midnight Society, have a few humble wishes to make our holiday season extra dark. Dear Krampus, I love Canada. I really do. But the fact that winter lasts 5 to 6 months means I’m going to need some especially creepy things under my tree this year to keep my dark little heart aglow. Here are a few goodies I would love to unwrap this Christmas morning over hot chocolate (extra marshmallows): I may not be able to fly like my bat-minions, but these Black Rubber Bat Wings would make my goth heart[...]

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Giving Thanks for Turkeys and BLOOD FREAK

BLOOD FREAK is the movie to watch with your weird friends and family while you recover from your Thanksgiving feast. Don’t worry, it won’t make you crave more turkey. In BLOOD FREAK, the turkey eats you! BLOOD FREAK isn’t a traditionally good movie. It’s gloriously 1970’s, with motorcycles, bikinis, and ominous drug use. It has the weird trappings of retro horror like Elvis-style hair and mad scientists. It’s wondrous. Herschell is a Vietnam veteran who meets Angel, a religious woman, along the Florida Turnpike. Angel helps Herschell find a job a[...]

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What We Let Die Inside of Us – My Latest Horror Game Obsession

I’ve been exploring a bunker.  I need to escape to save my sister.  The computer is reporting wildlife outside, and the radio is giving instructions on what to do if I feel the urge to eat my neighbor. Before this, I explored a house with a secret.  Thunder boomed outside, and my recorder picked up music when there was no one else in the room.  And there was that thing with the spirit board. The asylum came before that.  Hawthorne Manor was immense, and I think I’d been there for a long time.  Some madman had scrawled warnings on the walls, and th[...]

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The Frogs of May

It had rained for the past nine days in the Sunshine State.  Torrents of water, buckets of it, had poured down.  The days had been soggy.  The nights had been filled with thunder and wind. And frogs. The unending rains have driven them into a frenzy.  Tree frogs called in screechy wails, like fingernails scratching down a blackboard, over and over. Each night it got louder.  The swamp behind May's house vibrated with it.  It drove her cat crazy. May thought a storm woke her.  But the frogs had drowned out the thunder.  Each chorus sounded like they w[...]

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Horror is in the Eye of the Beholder

My day was filled with body horror. I was taking an online first aid course.  I was expecting a review of CPR and how to use an AED machine.  But the first aid section was the stuff of horror movies: shockingly graphic and so, so bloody. The wound care module opened with an arm so lacerated, they could’ve been fighting off Jason Voorhees and a freshly sharpened machete.  But the eye module was worse.  I now know the proper first aid if you have your eyelid sliced off.  Not just cut open, so your eye socket fills with blood and you need stitches.  No[...]

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The Empty Places

My job takes me deep in the woods, behind shopping plazas, and to abandoned lots. I visit the places customers and residents don’t see, the places in transition, about to become something new. The wild areas are lush with life and death. The abandoned places are different. Their history clings to them. People leave pieces of themselves behind.  Sometimes only trash.  Sometimes whole parts of their lives. Their presence is palpable, these past people, but the spaces are empty. These are the empty places. I’m drawn to them. I make up their stories, to fill[...]

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Utopia Inside The Hollow Earth

Describe a utopia. Most stories about the Koreshan Unity do not. They focus on the founder, Dr. Cyrus Teed, his “illumination” during a laboratory experiment in 1869, and his bizarre belief in cellular cosmogony: that we live on the inside of a hollow Earth. They portray Dr. Teed as a cult leader, who as Koresh (Hebrew for Cyrus and shepherd) lured hundreds of people from Chicago and elsewhere down to a commune in the Florida wilderness. Utopian portrayals, with characters searching not only for a happy ending, but to create an ideal world, aren’[...]

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Thoroughbreds Is Not Heathers – It’s More

  Thoroughbreds is not Heathers. It seems like every movie with teen girls and dark humor invokes Heathers. Heathers came out in 1988, and it was shocking and perfect for the time. It captured, as nothing before it had, the cynicism of students, the toothless administrators, and the deep emotional cruelty of teen girls. Veronica’s crush on the dangerous new boy in town resonated with young women, and they were empowered by her rejection of him when he went too far. Thoroughbreds is not Heathers. It’s something more. It’s quiet. It’s slow moving[...]

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All The Single Ladies: Why I Love Hag Horror

I recently visited with two of my favorite crazed older ladies at a theater performance of Arsenic and Old Lace. The stage play, written nearly 80 years ago, is a madcap romp that takes place in the living room of Martha and Abby Brewster. The sweet, spinster aunts are serial killers - strictly to give peace to nice, older gentlemen, you understand - but unfortunately, they aren’t the only killers in the family. You could say there is some family competition on who is better at it. The Brewster aunts of the 1940's gave rise to a plethora of unhinged film la[...]

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Blood on the Ground and the Devil’s Tooth

The Midnight Society likes their books a little bloody, but other bloody things are tantalizing, too. There’s something so enticing about the shiny, red liquid. Which is why, in a field of torn apart trees, I was recently kneeling to take photos. Amidst all the destruction, I had spotted blood on the ground. The ground was covered in fresh mulch and leaves. The forest had been shredded to bits. Stumps were pulled from the ground, black soil drying in clumps on their exposed roots. Devil's Tooth fungus (Hydnellum peckii) grows under forests, its myceliu[...]