Not sure if this quite qualifies as a Halloween Horror, but it includes monsters, and it struck my fancy.
Basically, it’s an anime series focused on a guy who’s crappy job is to clean up after kaiju attacks.
It’s basically Damage Inc. meets Godzilla. Plus the teaser trailer is giving off a tiny bit of a FLCL vibe.
I don’t subscribe to Crunchy Roll (or any streaming service), but I’d seriously consider buying the DVD set when it eventually comes out.
Once again, The Simpsons “Steamed Hams” segment has inspired the Internet to produce an alternate version, this one in terrifying Soviet-style animation.
The juggling Crusty is pure nightmare fuel.
(Previously.)
Here’s a nicely creepy borderlands of science/urban legend/conspiracy theory video about a hole that has no bottom.
80,000 feet worth of fishing line found no bottom. Plus animals avoided it, and radios went crazy, when they weren’t picking up signals from 30 years before.
Then the government took it over.
Much more paranormal weirdness ensues
Was it real? Well, as real as anything else with a Wikipedia entry featured on Art Bell.
Good luck finding it on map…
I found this S.C.U.M. video in a list of Shoegaze videos, and I see them described as “Post-punk,” but what they sound like to me is 1980s-era Simple Minds. Here’s “Whitechapel.”
By the way, Simple Minds are still around and have a tour coming next year, but S.C.U.M. broke up in 2013.
The Halloween season is upon us again!
This video features a complete play-through of Isle of Eras, which starts out as a search for a missing brother and quickly morphs into a weird cosmic horror/time travel game with giant monsters and nods to everything from Donnie Darko to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s amazingly elaborate for an indie game put together by a tiny team. The monster design is particularly impressive.
Available for PS4/5 and PC (but not, alas, Mac).
Collapse is another obscure Japanese Shoegaze band. Or maybe not so obscure, since they already have ten albums and EPs out. Their earlier songs seem more My Bloody Valentine-influenced, but their later stuff seems a bit more Dreampop with a noisebed base, maybe Tokyo Shoegazer by way of The Cherry Wave and Civic with a soupcon of Asobi Seksu thrown in. Here’s “Path.”
Here’s “The Slab,” the final track from Slowdive’s new Everything is Alive album. But I should warn you that this is a case where the song of the CD is much stronger than the compressed version on YouTube:
I finally got the CD in this week, and I think it’s a very strong album, more consistent than their previous self-titled album, but only time will tell is something as strong as “Slomo” or “No Longer Making Time” emerges as particular favorites. (And the later only really twigged for me when it became such a burner live.)
Here’s another song off Slowdive’s forthcoming Everything is Alive album, due out September 1st.
Forty years ago today, August 19, 1983, Genesis released their self-titled album (their twelfth), and “Mama” was the first single released off that.
As a fairly new convert to classic Prog Rock Genesis at the time, I wasn’t a fan of Genesis’ move toward more mainstream pop, but “Mama” caught my attention, as it’s a pretty interesting song. And far from being an average pop song, it was weird and sinister.
And it has perhaps the most memorable laugh in any song, ever.
Peter Gabriel-era Genesis had a lot more overtly sinister songs (“The Waiting Room” comes to mind), but “Mama” was distinctly different from Genesis’ 1980s output, or indeed, just about anything else on mainstream radio in 1983. Between the sparse drum loop, the eerie high synthesizer wash, and Collins’ urgent, hungry vocals about a young man’s unrequited love for a prostitute, it still has power four decades on.
No director probably ever had three films back to back as good as William Friedkin (who just died at age 87) did in the 1970s. The French Connection, The Exorcist and Sorcerer are each truly great films that stand the test of time. The first two made a ton of money (justifiably). The third one didn’t, but has one of the greatest, tensest scenes of all time.
Friedkin let the success of those first two go to his heads, and then a string of flops (including Cruising, a film that, like The Last Temptation of Christ, alienated its only potential audience) put him out of favor in Hollywood.
He also directed a pretty swell episode of the 1980s Twilight Zone reboot.
He had a wealth of talent, I just wish we had more first rate films from him.