Two Classic Movies To See This Halloween

The Half Man Johnny Eck

Pinhead Simon Metz aka Schlitzie

Halloween... the time when horror and sci-fi movies all come crawling out of the woodwork and onto various television channels. Who hasn't watched a movie starring the characters of Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees or Mike Myers...? Or a dark and foreboding Stephen King movie...? Or one of the Hellraiser movies starring the character Pinhead...?

But, for a change... How about a movie starring a real pinhead...?

Tod Browning's Freaks may not be a horror movie in the sense that they are today, but back in 1932 it was considered a "pre-code" horror film. Aptly so, since most of the "freaks" either frightened or out-right disgusted movie goers.
The tale tells the story of a group of circus performers, only two of whom are normal in appearance. One of the so-called "freaks" is a midget named Hans who is in love with the "normal" female performer dubbed Cleopatra. Cleopatra is quite the bitch, poking fun at Hans and the other freaks until she learns Hans has inherited a great deal of money. Suddenly, her demeanor towards him changes (obviously she's a gold-digger) and, seeing his chance at happiness, Hans proposes and she accepts. The two are married and the freaks, being kind of heart, decide to accept the cruel Cleopatra into their ranks. But being married to a freak doesn't suit Cleopatra... Unbeknownst to anyone, she begins to slowly poison the poor, naive Hans, hoping to kill him to gain his inheritance and run off with the strong man.
But the freaks aren't stupid... They know something is amiss and, after a bit of spying, learn of Cleopatra's doings... They decide to get revenge, end up chasing her through the woods and converging on her. The next you see Cleopatra, she's a half woman, half duck side-show freak.

It isn't the plot the makes the movie anything even remotely close to a horror film. What makes it so are the freaks... Above are two of the stars of Freaks, Johnny Eck and Simon Metz (aka Schlitzie). These are not a result of trick photography... These are real "freaks" of nature. Eck was one of two twins that was born without anything below the rib area. Though, after reading up on him, it seems it wasn't a misfortune in his eyes...
Metz was born with microcephaly, a neurodevelopmental disorder. In the movie, they were referred to as "pinheads" due to the small structure of their heads.

Though not technically a horror movie, it's still a must see for Halloween, if for no other reason than to see real life oddities.

Carey Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace

Grant as Mortimer and his murdering aunts

 Another must see for Halloween is the 1944 film, Arsenic and Old Lace starring Carey Grant.
Creepy as it is comedic, this classic movie is a perfect movie for the Halloween.

Set on Halloween in Brooklyn, New York, the story tells the tale of a writer named Mortimer Brewster who has written several books about marriage, dubbing it "old fashioned superstition". Yet he marries the girl next door on Halloween day in secret. After the vows are taken, they both go to their respective homes to pack for the honeymoon and tell their respective families of their union. However, things don't go well for Mortimer when he arrives home to tell his two adorably sweet spinster aunts and his insane brother (who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt).
When Mortimer opens the lid to the window seat, he finds a dead body inside. At first he assumes his brother Teddy killed the man while in the grips of some delusion. However, he learns that his spinster aunts, Abby and Martha, are actually the ones responsible. The two, sweet little old ladies have a room for rent that usually attracts lonely old bachelors with no family. The aunts tell Mortimer that it's one of their "charities", putting these men out of their suffering of loneliness by serving them elderberry wine spiked with arsenic, strychnine and cyanide (I bet that wine packs a real punch). Once put out of their misery, the aunts have Teddy take the poor soul down into the basement, where he believes he's digging locks for the Panama Canal, to be buried as an unfortunate victim fallen prey to yellow fever.
As if this news hasn't whipped poor Mortimer up into enough of a frenzy... To make matters worse, his murdering brother, Johnathan shows up with a stiff of his own and an alcoholic plastic surgeon, Dr. Einstein (played by Peter Lorre). He's on the lamb and decides the aunt's home is the perfect place to dump the stiff and have the good doctor change his appearance. But things don't go according to plan... In a drunken stupor, Dr. Einstein reinvents Johnathan's face to resemble Boris Karloff's and the aunt's make a fuss about having someone they consider a "stranger" and a "foreigner" buried along with their nice, lonely old gentlemen.
All the while, Mortimer is trying frantically to keep the situation under control and having more than a little difficulty. But who wouldn't if they were trying to keep their kindly, murdering aunts from getting caught, getting their insane brother committed to an institution and keep their murderous brother from killing them? And all the while, having their new spouse growing more and more tired of waiting to begin their honeymoon... Not to mention the fear of becoming insane like the rest of the Brewster family. It's Mortimer's frantic state that really provides the comedy in the film...
In the end, Johnathan gets arrested, Teddy gets committed to the asylum and the aunts, not wanting him to go alone, decide to join him (which is where they should be anyway). But before they go, the aunt's inform Mortimer that there's no fear of him becoming insane... He's not a Brewster, he's the son of a sea cook, which he then happily exclaims to his new bride and whisks her off for their honeymoon.

In this age of wanting terrors, blood, guts and gore in our horror films, we tend to forget the classics that provide a bit of horror in their own way. Sad but true... Thankfully, there are still some of us who can appreciate these wonderful old movies.

Morlocks vs. Eloi

The cannibalistic Morlocks

The naive Eloi

First off... how messed up is the spell check feature...?! It questions the spelling of Morlocks, but not the spelling of Eloi in the post title...! That's... kind of messed up...

But, then again, so is the title itself... It sounds a bit like a new version of a Street Fighter game...

For those unfamiliar with H.G Wells The Time Machine or the movie based upon the book (the original from 1960 with Rod Taylor, not the goofy new one), allow me to illuminate you...


The story is the tale of a man, a scientist of sorts,  named George who has a fixation with time and the idea of time travel. The tale starts in the last day of 1899 and the first few days of the new century. George shows off his prototype time machine to a group of his friends, most of whom are quite arrogant (Sebastian Cabot plays one of them, so that should give you an idea)  and even though the prototype works and actually time travels, his friends (with the exception of his best friend, Filby) aren't impressed and think George is a bit off his rocker. That sets the poor guy off a bit and he decides to test the actual real deal that he has built in his laboratory. He sits in the time machine and pushes the lever forward, slowly...
By far, this sequence is the best in the movie. Granted, the graphics were awful (it was 1960, what do you expect?) but it was the idea of how he travels. As George is moving forward in time, he's able to see things moving around him, so he literally gets to see time fly. He travels through WWI, WWII and a nuclear war... The latter war causes eruptions, lava flowing up over the time machine... Thankfully, George is traveling so fast that he doesn't get burned but, rather, gets trapped inside the mountain the cooled lava produced until it eroded away. It's really a cool segment of the movie.
George finally stops the time machine, a bit too quickly for it spins and throws him off, on October 12th in the year 802,701... I think H.G. Wells was a bit optimistic, assuming that, after a nuclear holocaust, there would still be people that survived and were able to continue to reproduce for so many years without adverse effects...
In any case...
At this point, humans have developed into two different groups, the Morlocks (those attractive blue dudes in the picture above) and the Eloi (the stereotypical perfect blonde haired, blue eyed people in the other picture) who are as different as night and day. And it's this difference that has produced some profound, yet ridiculously random, thoughts...

I wanna be a Morlock...

I'm not saying I want to be some ugly blue dude with bad teeth and saggy, baggy man boobs (they all appear to be male in the movie) that are constantly having a really bad hair day... But if my only choice was to be one or the other, I'd much rather be a Morlock...
And I'll explain why...
The Eloi are rather indifferent about everything. If one is in danger of losing their lives (like the only named Eloi in the story, Weena, played by Yvette Mimieux, who was drowning when George first arrives) the other Eloi just turn the other cheek and choose to ignore what's going on. They're very naive and totally clueless as to... well... anything. They have no real clue as to what happened in the world years ago, save what these talking rings tell them, and comprehend nothing.
They also allow themselves to be eaten by the Morlocks...
The Morlocks, obviously, are cannibals. Every so often, they set off a siren (more specifically, the kind that warns of a nuclear air strike) and the Eloi, conditioned to move underground when they hear the siren, walk as if in a trance to the entrance to the Morlocks' underground habitat and go inside. When the Morlocks have enough Eloi, they close the doors and those who went inside never come back out.

The Eloi are dumb as posts... They do nothing all day but lay around in the sun. They have no clue where they get their food and clothing from, nor do they care. It shows up when they need it and that's all that matters to them. They're very naive and moronic.
But the Morlocks... they're smart, chubby cookies... They're the ones providing everything the Eloi need to live, keeping them ignorant and happy. It's a lot like us breeding animals for consumption. And once they're nicely fattened up, the Morlocks turn on the siren and call the Eloi to them to become Eloi-kabobs...
No offense, if it comes down to choosing to eat or be eaten... I'm gonna eat...

I wonder if Eloi are a low-cholesterol food...

Nevermore...

Edgar Allan Poe

John Cusack as Poe

"I heed not that my earthly lot

Hath little of earth in it--

That years of love have been forgot

In the hatred of a minute:--

I mourn not that the desolate

Are happier, sweet, than I,

But that you sorrow for my fate

  Who am a passer by."

    ("To---" by E.A.Poe)

The above poem, "To---", is my all-time favorite written by the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe...

Every year, when the leaves begin to change colors and the air turns crisp, my thoughts start turning to one of my two favorite holidays... Halloween... And with thoughts of Halloween comes this overwhelming desire to curl up under a nice warm blanket with my book, Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe... Not surprising since he was, for lack of a better term, the founding father of the macabre and tales of dark things, the very thing that the holiday of Halloween is based upon.

Poe's tales are certainly an acquired taste not had by many, back then and even today.
I think that, in order to at least appreciate if not enjoy Poe's works, one must enjoy dark, macabre stories and also be of an above average level of intelligence. At times, his tales are certainly difficult to read, with the vast vocabulary and mile long sentences, something that few of the masses back in his time had the education  to comprehend.
And, of course, the masses today have some level of difficulty reading his tales due to the change in patterns of speech over time. That kind of goes without saying...

As for myself... Poe is one of my favorite authors. And so, every year around Halloween, I get this overwhelming desire to read these dark tales of mystery and death. In fact, I look forward to this tradition every year, ever since I bought that beat up old book years ago. I've read almost every tale and poem and have read my favorites dozens of times over, sometimes at various times of the year. So I guess you could say I'm a bit of a Poe addict...

Recently, a movie came out in theaters called "The Raven", starring John Cusack. The plot line is a murder mystery, a tale of a serial killer who fashions all his crimes after the murders in Poe's stories. The police hire Poe (played by John Cusack) to help them solve these mystery murders, hoping he'll have the insight to do so since they're all based on his tales. The movie also offers another interesting view of the reason for Poe's mysterious death.
For me, a Poe-aholic and a huge fan of John Cusack, the news of one of my favorite actors starring in a movie where he'll portray one of my favorite authors fit in the fan-girly nose bleed category. Poe wasn't exactly a handsome man (perhaps for his time he was, however) but John Cusack is quite attractive, even done up to closely resemble the man he was portraying. And after seeing the movie, I can tell you, if you are a fan of either man, you won't be disappointed.

I have to say... I feel a bit of sympathy for Poe... He was something of a mad genius and, as most of us know, mad geniuses are, more often than not, completely misunderstood and isolated...

Did you hear that...?
It sounds like "the beating of that hideous heart"...
Tread lightly... or you may find yourself walled up in catacombs or buried alive...

And if you find yourself on a dreary night, nodding, nearly napping and you hear a sound as if someone is rapping... Don't open your chamber door...
Or you may find yourself faced with a dark, feathery house guest...

"Nameless here forever more..."

 

How Bizarre...

While doing a Google search for something this morning, I came across something most bizarre...

Take a good look at this Victorian era photo of the gentleman standing next to the chair...
Are you thinking, "Gee, he looks a bit disheveled for a man from that era"? Or maybe you're thinking his stance is a bit off, like perhaps he has some sort of muscular or skeletal issue... Maybe you're thinking he was three sheets to the wind at the time and that's why he's standing a bit cock-eyed...
Or maybe you're thinking that he was one hell of an unattractive man...
Well, I should hope you find him unattractive...

After all.... he was dead when this photo was taken...

Now, this has got to be the most bizarre and disturbing thing I've ever inadvertently come across while doing a Google search. And what's, quite possibly, even more bizarre and disturbing is that there seem to be a large number of people who are strangely fascinated with this macabre practice of post-mortem  photography.

The big question is... WHY?!? What in God's name were these people thinking?!?
Well... Wikipedia actually has an article on this bizarre practice that can be read here. I'm not sure it sheds any light on the subject as to why they did something so... ghoulish... It's said that these photos (called daguerreotype, which I myself own a few of these as well as the following process photos called tintypes) served as memorial pieces to remember the deceased... They would pose the corpse accordingly, prop their eyes open, then take the photo. Afterward, they would sometimes paint on rosey cheeks and pupils (due to the eyes clouding over after death, which you can see in the photos that were not touched up after the fact). Really...? Eww... I mean... just... eww...

Honestly, I don't understand this at all. Why the hell would you want a photo of a dead person?! Granted, I'm sure some of the people weren't able to get photos taken while they were alive due to cost or the time frame when photography became popular... but I personally don't want my last memory of a person to be of them as a corpse. Not to mention that I think it's a bit disrespectful to stand a body up and prop its eyes open for a photo. They even had a device just for the occasion of propping up the body (see diagram on the right)... Really...?!? That kind of went above and beyond the realm of macabre, folks...
And if you need evidence that they really did use such a thing, take another look at the photograph above. You can see the base of the device by his feet.
On the other hand, I can understand better the reason why they took such photos of infants and small children. As the Wikipedia article stated, the post-mortem photos were probably the only ones they had ever gotten taken of them. Understandable you would want at least one picture of your child to remember them by (which are the most disturbing to be viewing, in my opinion). As the article states, this was common with infants and young children because the mortality rate of them during this era was extremely high...
Well of course it was! The mind set during the Victorian era was that children should be seen and not heard and parents often doped their children up with Laudanum to keep them quiet. You had to expect a few... thousand... deaths with practices like that.

Moral of the story is this... people in the Victorian era may have build large, beautiful, ornate houses and made beautiful furniture and clothing, but, for all intents and purposes, they were, as a whole, a helluva lot more than just a few fries short of a Happy Meal...

Could there be a more apt true tale for the Halloween season...?

You are an Obsession, You're my Obsession...

Trend Scratch n Sniff Stickers

Truer words from the 80s were never spoken... And this was and is mine...

Scratch n Sniff stickers...

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, companies like Mello Smello and Trend pumped out sheets upon sheets of this awesome invention. A simple looking sticker with some funny cartoon animal or object wasn't anything to jump up and shout about, but... when you scratched or rubbed the sticker... Suddenly, your nose was filled with the scent of spearmint... or fried chicken... or skunk... Yes, those of you not old enough to remember this incredible fad, they even had a skunk scented sticker (see the first image above), a shoe scented sticker... One company made one that smelled like gasoline. Makes you wonder why in the hell they thought young children would want to smell those things...

But I digress...

For me, the obsession all started with one little spearmint scented sticker. As a matter of fact, it was the frog sticker shown above, the very first scratch n sniff sticker I ever received, that began what turned into a fetish.  The very day I got that sticker, I insisted my mom take me out to find more of these wonderous things. 

Before I knew it, I had about a half dozen books (one an 8x10" size) so filled with these stickers that there wasn't even a bit of the actual page showing. 

Sadly, as it always is in the case of remakes, the newer scratch n sniff stickers today aren't the same... The types of scents are very few, not as strong and the pictures not as imaginative or cute. It's disconcerting...

However... vintage stickers like these above can still be found on websites like ebay and Etsy. I myself have bought a few of these amazing stickers from ebay and am happy to report... they still smell as fabulous after all these years...

But while these sites do have a vast cornucopia of vintage scratch n sniffs, there are still those that seem to slip from my grasp... 

Trend, for a time, made larger and more shapely stickers than the smaller circular ones. For example... the picture on the above right... This is a set of six cat themed scratch n sniffs made by Trend. The sticker in the lower right corner, the cat with the pitcher upturned on its head, was one of my all-time favorites. I can't tell you how much time I spent scratching that sticker and placing my nose right up against the sticker so as to not let one whiff of the sweet cream scent escape me. 

It was difficult enough to find this tiny image of the sticker... Finding it for sale, it seems, is damned near impossible. But I won't give up the search. Such is the curse of the obsessed... 

And of the sticker sniffers...

 

The Root Of All Evil...

Pocket Frogs

Sometimes a smart phone is such a dumb thing to have... especially for people of an addictive nature... like myself...

My latest addiction is a "game" (for lack of a better term) called "Pocket Frogs". I'm not sure you can call it a game since it really requires no skills other than touching lily pads and making your horny little frogs breed (then, if you wish, sell the frogs or their offspring). But, technically, it's classified as a game and something that gaming skill inept people like me can manage to get somewhere with. That, in itself, makes this an amazing app for your phone.

However, there is a downside... Actually, there are a few downsides. One downside is that the little frogs are  so damned cute and, except for the very simple ones, have the coolest colors and markings. That doesn't sound like a downside, but it is. You're only able to keep eight frogs in each habitat and you start out with only two (if you count the nursery for the little frog eggs). Granted, you earn coins as you play and those can be used to buy more habitats (at an increasingly hefty rate) but they still only hold eight frogs each... and it's tough choosing which to keep! This game has me so absorbed that I play it a good portion of the time. Damn these adorable, colorful frogs and their bizarre hold over me! They are truly the root of all evil...

Was that entertaining...? I'm hoping someone out there is nodding... because, after all, isn't that the purpose of having an internet blog? It's not just a place for you to pour out whatever is on your mind. If that was all a person wanted to do, there are journals (actual books) and journal software for that.

I think people make blogs to not only jot down what's on their minds but to also entertain others with such thoughts. Some may blog about their personal lives, some about art, some about intellectually stimulating things... Then there are people like me who blog about nothing in particular, just a random assortment of thoughts, sometimes a mix of all the things other people blog about. But that's just me... I like to mix things up a bit on a regular basis...

Hopefully everyone will find something they can enjoy on here...