To celebrate the coming weekend for no other reason than weekends are great, I’ve compiled a group of Halloween-esque tunes to get you in the Shocktober mood.
The first is from Disney’s Haunted Mansion. It’s the song “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” which you hear sung by the harmonizing statues in the graveyard about two-thirds into the ride. The following is from one of the Disney Sing-A-Long videos that my brother used to watch on repeat, and which I would end up having to watch too. The only bad thing about this video is that there’s less footage of the actual Haunted Mansion than there is of Donald Duck in a Ghost costume (although it could be Daisy, you can’t really tell).
There’s another version of this sing along on YouTube where you basically get to see the whole ride, but it’s too long and it doesn’t have dancing trees. Next up is a Kate Bush classic - “Hammer Horror,” which is her campy ode to the British horror studio Hammer, as filtered through a tale of some sort of failed romance, as usual. It’s pretty great. The video is super campy, with a Mr. Cellophane meets Mummenschanz ballet number that’s most unsettling - though if you want to see the trick of it work better, there’s another clip on Youtube here from a concert, and it shows how the darkness of the stage makes the trick lactually work.
Finally, my absolute favorite Halloween song is Type O Negative’s “Black Number One.” The song is a Danzig-esque gothic number that’s also seems like an ode to horror movies and TV - if you can count Lily Munster as a creepy reference. The singer Pete Steele is dreamy, in a goth jock way and listening to this song is the way I always got into Halloween, although, I far prefer the single to the album cut, which is about 11 minutes long and too unfocused for me. Luckily the video is for the single. Enjoy.
Category music, shocktober | admin | October 12, 2007 | 9:19 am
One of my favorite Halloween movies to watch is the 1981 horror spoof Student Bodies, which was a flop on it’s initial release, and has become a sort of cult movie. It’s filled with corny (and I mean corny) gags, but a lot of those corny gags are pretty funny. It takes place at a local high school - a killer who comes to be known as “the Breather” stalks a high school girl and her friends and kills them when he finds them having sex. It’s filled with spoofs of all the big slasher movies, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Psycho and many more. Surprisingly, the thing it spoofs the most - or rather, it’s biggest reference point is Dario Argento’s classic giallo film The Bird With The Crystal Plumage - which also has a “breather” calling up his victims and whispering hateful things to them. But when the breather calls in Student Bodies, something very different happens. Sort of NSFW. This is so stupid but it cracks me up!
Another super stupid one, but I love how the cast really plays it sorta straight. “Did you hang up?” “No, I just said ‘Click’.”
In the next sequence, we get to hear what’s really going on in all those serial killer’s minds as they spy on young teen girls in the lockeroom. “Belly Button!”
Seriously, how can you not find that funny enough to want to watch? It’s awesome! And so much better than that dumb Scary Movie! It’s great!! Honest!!
I go through this dilemma every year. So every year I want to be a ghost, with a sheet, but I always chicken out at the last minute, afraid that wherever I go, nobody will look at me because they can’t see that under the sheet, I’m super hot (hold for laughter). I have the same problem whenever I want to go out dressed as a Klansman. (hold for - oh, you’re not laughing at that one?) I really am into the classic costumes - Frankenstein, Dracula, Ghosts - I’ve never gotten to be those as a kid, and as an adult, well, the closest I got was a sheer longsleeved shirt with Karloff’s Frankenstein silkscreened on it in green rubber that I bought at Patricia Field’s in 2001. Yeah, pretty cringeworthy.
I have been (and these are the ones I can remember, suppose the others were too painful) a cowboy (2nd grade), the Joker (4th grade), a mad scientist (5th grade), an escaped mental patient with an arsenal of weapons (6th grade) during my most Macabre Addams Family-obsessive period - today I would have been on the Columbine shortlist, a Voodoo Doll (7th grade), an Angel (12th Grade), the killer from Scream (11th grade, and yeah I know, I’m a big loser). Most recently I was a Greenpeace worker who’d had his face pounded - an inside joke lost on anyone who wasn’t a New Yorker a few years back when the obnoxious charity street salesmen started harassing residents.
I always obsess about what I am going to be, and yet, some years I get so stressed about it I can’t decide and end up being nothing. And I have a lot of good costume ideas. I’ve never done drag. I’ve never been a ghost. Maybe I could go as a ghost in high heels? It’s pretty important this year because I’m going to see the B-52’s on Halloween. They’re one of my all-time favorite bands and I really want to look good. Then I saw this costume in the store, and I have to say, I was intriuged. It’s so bad, it’s really bad. And that could be good.
Seriously, this is a “Giant Boob Costume.” That’s what it’s sold as. It’s hideous but I love it. And look how happy the guy is who is wearing it! You know he’s all feeling himself up when nobody’s looking. This would be a great costume for a couple as well. And you can really accessorize, like maybe I could decorate the boob with bats and spiders and witches and go as a “Giant Boob on Halloween?” Or I could wear lobster claws and be Boob Lobster or Lobster Boob!!
I will keep you, my public updated on what I decide, but rest assured, this issue is far from over.
These were probably one of my favorite things about Halloween growing up. Here’s the awesome Halloween episode from Roseanne Season 5. Once you start watching these, you really can’t stop. Roseanne tries to avoid Halloween and is visited by three ghosts - well, okay, one is just a big guy in a Candy Corn suit. The costumes were always stellar but in this one they’re just about perfect - John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf as Marie Antoinette and her head? Amazing. Sara Gilbert (my childhood TV idol) as Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds? Breathtaking. Enjoy.
I am not dead. Sandman did not get me. The Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings show at the Legendary Apollo was one of the most kick ass shows I’ve ever seen. She tears the roof off the place, and busts a move all over that stage. She is just so alive with energy, and humor, and pure unfiltered talent. If she comes to your town, don’t miss her. The crowd was up on it’s feet, dancing and singing along the whole show - the opposite of the Bettye Lavette show I saw a few weeks ago - but like I said in my last post about Sharon, it wasn’t Bettye’s fault at all. I’m just so into soul music right now and I feel like it’s gonna come back in a real big way, thanks to Daptone records and the renewed interest in the Stax sound that seems to be heading back to the mainstream. In the words of Stevie Nicks - I can’t wait! If there’s any doubt that this Augusta, Georgia native is the female James Brown (although I get that that’s a bit reductive, as she’s just fine as Sharon Jones), check out this rehearsal for the encore finale “A Tribute to James Brown” that really brought the house down.
The only other thing I will say about the concert is that I really dig the whole bear thing, and I dig hairy guys. But the five bears who were seated directly in front of me were a bit much. I’m happy to see two guys into each other, and I’m happy to watch them make out (in the privacy of my own home is preferred, seriously, email me) - but these two guys in front of me were making out the whole fucking show? Seriously guys, the girl I was sitting next to could not see over your giant hairy beards which were joined together in lip-lock for the entire run of the 2 hour show. It’s great that you are fearless, and it’s great that you have embraced your new body images, and have somehow found both a boyfriend and two other guys who have the same exact body type as you to hang out with, and it’s even more great that you were like “Let’s go bring our fat hairy gayness to the Apollo,” but like, just have some consideration for the people behind you. I want to see Sharon Jones, not your makeout sesh!!
Then there was a crazy bear who was friends with these guys who was so into the show he kept screaming and yelling - awesome - we were all screaming and yelling, dude. We get it - you love her more. I behave the same way when I see Bowie and Iggy. Then Sharon kept bringing guys up on stage, who she kept saying weren’t plants but who danced suspiciously well and in step with her. Anyway so this guy ran up to the stage and she brought him up to dance. Then she realized he was like a crazy bear, and she played along - it was pretty adorable dancing. But then he came back to his friends, and I guess one of his bear friends had been in the bathroom and missed the whole thing. (Side note: Does a bear shit in the Apollo bathroom? And if a bear shits in the Apollo bathroom, and doesn’t see his friend dancing on stage, does anyone care?) So then, Dancing bear gets up and starts screaming at the friend, at the top of his lungs, for missing it. Then Dancing bear turns into Crying Bear. I’m not even kidding. Screaming and Crying bear. Like with two songs to go before the finale. Then the other bears like slowly move away from this bear. But you know they can’t be all “Oh he’s not with us,” cause they all look exactly the same!!!! Bears are crazy.
That’s all. Check out Sharon Jones’ new album 100 Days, 100 Nights. It’s freaking great.
Oh and PS. the Apollo theatre is SO SMALL. I can’t believe it. It looks so big on Showtime at the Apollo - do they film it in IMAX or something?
Synapse DVD recently reissued two strange Japanese horror classics from the sixties, both of which appear to have attained a kind of cult status over the years since their original release. Last week I watched Nobuo Nakagawa’s Snake Woman’s Curse, from 1968, and this week I watched Testuo Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men released the following year in 1969 to almost no attention.
Snake Woman’s Curse is probably the weaker of the two. It tells a very standard vengeful ghost story. A wealthy landlord works a poor old tenant farmer to death, and his wife and adult daughter are forced to move in with the landlord’s cruel family, who essentially cause their deaths. The landlord’s gang are then driven mad by ghostly appearances of snakes and visions of spouses turned into snakes. It’s extremely old-fashioned in a good way, more reliant on mood and atmosphere, pleasant and fun to watch. But the film doesn’t really scare in the typical sense. It’s more like an old Hammer Film - lush colors, studio sets, and creaky acting. The story is too tame thematically, and the idea that it’s only psychological horror that destroys the landlord’s family is a bit too reserved for my tastes. The landlord and his family are so cruel that you really want to see them get their just desserts, which never really happens with the kind of relish that would make the ending really satisfying.
Horrors of Malformed Men’s ending is sort of dissapointing, but also so fucking bonkers that you can’t help but be like “WTF?” (in a good way, yet again). The film’s a really spooky Poe-esque tale, in fact it’s based on a script which mashes up several stories of the Japanese horror writer Edogawa Rampo (the Japanese pen name created by phonetically saying the syllables of Edgar Allen Poe - try it - it’s fun). It’s about a man named Hirosuke, who wakes up in an insane asylum, kills a strange bald man who’s giving him the evil eye, and escapes on a journey to a mysterious island to try and understand the reoccuring dream he keeps having, which goes something like this:
The man in the dream (and who eventually appears in the narrative, natch) is Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the Japanese dance movement known as Butoh. After Hirosuke arrives on the outskirts of the island, he finds that a man who looks exactly like him has just died. He then pretends to be this man resurrected, and starts living with the man’s family, trying to find out clues to who he is. Eventually he’s drawn to the island, run by a mad Dr. Moreau-character who’s been creating malformed men for some creepy reason. It’s great how many popular Poe tropes are thrown together - part of the fun is taking the film apart piece by piece. There’s the doppelganger thing, the reoccuring dream, the mysterious murders, the madman hanging out in the attic. Then the film goes nuts - imagine a Japanese version of a Jodorowsky world with strange women covered in silver body paint stuck in cages, while others ride around on leashes held by even creepier deformed men. It’s crazy, but great. Check out the trailer, the subtitles are hilarious.
They’re billing it as the most controversial Asian horror film ever, I guess because it was pretty much surpressed by the government censors for years - although there’s nothing too too shocking in there. Maybe it’s just that there’s a counter-cultural spirit in the scenes on the island that are so disturbing not because they’re scary but because they’re so strange and performance arty. The ending is equal parts Agatha Christie and Scooby Doo, with an incestuous twist. Park Chan-Wook has to have seen this film - I’m theorizing that it’s a major influence for Oldboy, though I will probably be corrected. It’s hard to really say it’s a great ending, because it’s really too campy and silly, and tries perhaps to explain the crazy nature of the story for a Japanese audience who must have needed the kind of closure the explosive finale provides. But it’s also totally admirable for the bizzare balls that Tetsuo Ishii must have had to put it to film. I’m glad to see in the DVD extras that people acknowledge it’s dual nature as being totally great, and yet totally over the top and laughable.
Either way, it’s definitely recommended, for a pleasant Shocktober evening.
