Season's Screamings

Look what I made! I feel so crafty.

Last Chance to Catch Me in URBAN DEATH

(Photo of Urban Death at the LA Weekly Theater Awards 2011; by Timothy Norris for LA Weekly)

Tomorrow night, Saturday May 28th, is your last chance to catch me performing in Urban Death at Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre! If you haven't already seen the show, you're missing out - and I say that as a horror fan, not as a member of the ensemble of said show.

"I thought it was dead, but grand guignol is alive and well. It just doesn't live in 19th Century Paris any more. It dwells in contemporary North Hollywood at Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre." - FEARnet review, June 2010

Join us this Saturday at 11 PM at ZJU, 4850 Lankershim Blvd. in the NoHo Arts District. Tickets are $15. Make phone reservations by calling 818 202 4120. And get there early - it WILL sell out!

Book Review - HALLOWEEN NATION by Lesley Pratt Bannatyne

One of the most intriguing things about Halloween - at least in the grand scope of holidays - is the fact that there is no one way to going about celebrating it. Whereas everyone who celebrates Christmas has more or less the same plan for December 25th - big meal, gift exchange, tree with ornaments, etc. - October 31st can mean anything to any number of different people. You could go trick-or-treating, host a party, stay in and watch scary movies, attend a rite or ceremony, try to communicate with the dead, visit a haunted house, see a play, go to a concert, hit up a bar...the possibilities are limitless. Even the tone of the holiday is optional; whether your Halloween is sexy, gruesome, whimsical, terrifying or beautiful is entirely up to you. How you celebrate Halloween depends on the age in which you were born, the region in which you live, the kind of movies you watch, the genre of music you prefer to listen to, your childhood experiences with the holiday and, often, the nature of your most profound hopes and fears.

Another curious facet of Halloween is precisely how American the holiday really is; despite its reputation as a night for mainstream-taunting iconoclasm, the truth is that loving Halloween is practically patriotic. While Halloween (or some variation thereof) is celebrated in several other countries, it seems unlikely that any other place on earth has quite so many people who love the holiday quite so much. If you've ever wondered how the collective American psyche has shaped our modern celebration of Halloween, then Lesley Pratt Bannatyne's book Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America's Fright Night is for you.

A 200-page examination of why we love Halloween peppered liberally with color photographs and illustrations, Halloween Nation attempts to answer that question without resorting to dense prose or subscribing to any one theory. Similar in tone to the works of Mary Roach (whose books Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife are cited as resources), Bannatyne makes the kind of sociological examination demanded by the subject matter fun and cheeky rather than heavy-handed and academic.

She begins by probing the origins of the modern Halloween celebration, albeit briefly, since this book is about Halloween now, not Halloween hundreds (or even thousands) of years ago. Then she dives right into the slimy guts of the subject matter, speculating about the enduring appeal of the holiday's most iconic symbols (ghosts, witches, pumpkins, zombies) and taking an entire chapter to deconstruct the etymology of the jack o' lantern. Ghost hunters, witches, zombie walk organizers and farmers that specialize in growing gargantuan pumpkins are all consulted for their Halloween expertise.

Next, Bannatyne looks at large-scale Halloween celebrations from inception to execution, including the Village Halloween Parade in NYC and HAuNTcon (the haunted attraction industry trade show), and finishes up by examining Halloween-year-round subcultures like goth and metal, as well as a look at how "trick-or-treat" (particularly the "trick" aspect) has grown and changed in recent years.

In the course of the book, Bannatyne visits people from all over the country with many different connections to Halloween, from professed mediums and Spiritualists in the town of Lily Dale, NY to horror burlesque performers to sophisticated pranksters at MIT. While the book never gets particularly in-depth about any one subject - personally, I could read an entire book about haunted houses, theme parks and yard haunts - it provides a fascinating overview and may introduce you to Halloween traditions you didn't even know existed. (I am now extremely sad to have missed out on the Los Angeles Cacophony Society's haunted houses...sigh.) A glimpse of how our favorite day as we know it could only have happened here (in America) and now (in the twenty-first century), Bannatyne's Halloween Nation is a worthy addition to any Halloween fan's library.

For more information, visit the author's website.

Disclosure: I was provided with a complimentary copy of this book for review.

Happy Halfway to Halloween

Perhaps the best thing about Easter this year (apart from Cadbury Creme Eggs) is the fact that its arrival means that Halloween is only 6 months away. Yes, friends, at the end of this month we are officially at the halfway point! To celebrate, please enjoy this delightful seasonal video from FEARnet and Trick 'r Treat's Michael Dougherty.



P.S. Halloween Screme Eggs!? With green goo!? Be still my heart!

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

A profoundly strange and disorienting movie, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (a Czech movie filmed in 1969 - with government funding! - and released the following year) is a fever dream of sex, death, religion and the confusion that so often accompanies the onset of adolescence. Is it a straight-up horror movie? Not exactly. But if you're in the right frame of mind, the images from this film will certainly find their way into your nightmares.








Everything that happens in this movie is like something out of a bizarre fairy tale - we're talking classic Brothers Grimm here, not the cleaned up Disney versions. While the plot doesn't always "make sense" per se, I think the dreamy flow and jarring imagery accurately convey the horrors of being a 13-year-old girl. You're not quite ready to grow up, but your body has other ideas. Adult sexuality is foreign and intimidating at best, disgusting and threatening at worst. Every man you meet could be a potential predator. And in the middle of all this is Valerie, refusing to be a victim.

There are vampires, demons and a bit of witchcraft (or at least a burning at the stake), ladies who put fish down their dresses, magical earrings and menarche. Fun for the whole family it's not, but if you're down for a visual feast that will stay with you for longer than the 73-minute runtime, I encourage you to seek out a copy of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.

Walking Among the Dead at Linda Vista Hospital

Los Angeles, notorious for the vicious build/raze/build cycle that has cost the city so many of its precious historical landmarks, is not the most obvious place to look for a sprawling, abandoned and allegedly haunted hospital. But if you visit the Boyle Heights neighborhood near downtown L.A., you'll find just that in the guise of eerie, hulking Linda Vista Hospital. The building is, at this point, semi-famous; it's been featured on shows and movies (including the first season of Dexter), as well as a memorable episode of Ghost Adventures; you may remember Zak & Co. freaking out over the possibility of imminent gang wars. (LOLZ.)

Recently, the Boyle Heights Paranormal Project, a local paranormal research and investigation group that helps oversee the hospital and regularly organizes community events to allow the curious (and, perhaps, foolhardy) to sneak a peek inside, hosted an event called the "Walk Among the Dead." BHPP members lead groups on a flashlight tour of the hospital, with nefarious nurses and devilish doctors from the performance collective The Art of Bleeding lurking in the old hospital's morgue to add to the sinister, spooky vibe.

The end result was basically Halloween in March, a shivery treat for amateur ghost hunters, horror fans and Los Angeles preservationists alike. Here are some shots Mr. Spooky and I captured during our time at Linda Vista:









For more information on future events at Linda Vista, including BHPP's upcoming overnight investigation in mid-April, follow the Boyle Heights Paranormal Project page on Facebook.

Spooky Self-Promotion: Catch Me in URBAN DEATH

Hello, spooky friends! I apologize for the relative dearth of posts lately, but I've been keeping busy (a strategy that works well for getting through those boring non-Halloween months). What have I been up to? Well, I am currently rehearsing for the next production of Urban Death at Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre in North Hollywood!

If you've never seen Urban Death (and I have, so trust me on this), you're in for a scary treat. The show is essentially a series of horrific vignettes, and the entire show is done with minimal dialogue. Instead, the mood is set via creepy original music and the physicality of the performers. If that sounds at all pretentious, it's not - instead, it's enthralling, disorienting and terrifying.

Since Urban Death is ZJU's signature show, there have been many different incarnations, but this latest version promises to be the scariest to date. Join me on Saturday, April 9th at 11 PM, or any Saturday night through the end of May, to get a taste of the best on-stage horror in Los Angeles. Hope to see you there!

The Hearse (1980)

Such a strange and pointless movie! The plot is as follows: A woman who strongly resembles Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich but with slightly less extreme hair inherits a house in the country and decides to live in it; upon arrival, she discovers that the town is populated exclusively by male sex offenders and potential rapists who eye her lasciviously with varying degrees of both lust and disdain, barely concealed and in equal measure. Each scene is fraught with tension, as you repeatedly wonder whether you're about to learn that naive, trusting Jane just invited the wrong man into her house. There are vague mumblings about pacts with Satan and lovelorn ancestors, and a little girl with pigtails curtly informs Jane, "Your house is haunted and you're a ghost." I kept expecting something to happen that would begin to propel the plot forward, but instead the main character just trips around making questionable choices, and occasionally a creepy hearse driven by an even creepier driver appears and then disappears - making his rounds before he drops by Oliver Reed's place in Burnt Offerings, no doubt.

There's something to be said for the nostalgic, Vaseline-on-the-lens magic of any horror movie shot circa 1980, but there are other, better films from the era that you should check out before you take a spin in The Hearse.

Spit to See the Shine

Babes in Toyland always had fantastic artwork for their albums and singles - photographs and paintings that were raw, disturbing, and occasionally tongue-in-cheek. They were never a blatantly horror-inspired band, but singer/guitarist Kat Bjelland's piercing yowls, coupled with her tattered babydoll appearance, gave their music an aura of menace that was repeatedly reinforced by their cover art.

(It is also worth noting that Kat - not Geddy Lee - is the reason I play a Rickenbacker myself.)

Artwork by Cindy Sherman

Artwork by Cindy Sherman

Robert Williams' "The Thing in the Hope Chest" was used by Babes for the cover of their 1994 compilation album Dystopia. If you're down with toddler jerky, you can buy a signed poster from the artist here!

Doctor Druid's Haunted Seance

Check out this amazing record I found today at Record Surplus in West L.A.

NOTICE: This record is intended for entertainment purposes only; responsibility for any psychic phenomenon which may occur (either directly or indirectly) as a result of playing this record will not be assumed by the manufacturer.

Produced by Milt Larsen (founder of the Magic Castle) and featuring supernaturally salacious liner notes written by the late Forrest J Ackerman. Dr. Druid will "speak to you from the stereophonic tracks of this esoteric album and reveal the very information uppermost in your mind!" Also includes a guide to stunts that can help enhance the seance experience for your guests, including the Cemetery Serenade, the Wail of the Werewolf and the Danse Macabre. Almost too good to be true.

UPDATE: For a look at the back of the record and sleeve/liner notes, including the instructions to help "enhance" the experience, click here!