Halloween Decorations Ideas

Halloween Decorations

Last year for Halloween I made up a list of things to do for Halloween night, whether you’re spending it alone, with friends, or even planning a party.  This year, I figured I’d continue the list with some of my personal favorite decorations, perfect for whatever you’re planning to do this year!  Can’t have a perfect Halloween season without some proper spooky atmosphere in your home!  So if you’re looking for some horror-fan-approved decorations, look no further!

(I realize this list is coming out a bit late and may not be the most useful now but... ideas for next year, I guess?)

Bought Decorations

I’ll start off with some of my store-bought favorites, for when you’d rather spend more time decorating than making the decorations but still want a good-looking, questionably haunted home:

• In My Veins Blood Dispenser: Because who wants to use a boring old punch bowl when you can use an IV drip?!
• Fridge Door Cover: I mean, you keep severed heads in your fridge too…. Right?
• Spider Webs: A basic, but a necessity.  Don’t forget the giant, fluffy spiders!  You can find both at just about any store during the season, too. (I quite like the blood-splattered webs)
• Caution Tape: Wrap around your door, across the walls, and definitely around door frames!  Can also be found at a lot of places around the season.
• Fog Machine: Always a great touch for additional outside spookiness and easy to find at a local Walmart.  Fog machine and strobe light combo is too OP.

Homemade Decorations

Sometimes store-bought decorations just don’t quite do the trick (or are WAY too expensive) and you need, or want, to get a bit craftier with your decorations.  Sometimes it’s more fun to make your own, personal spooks.  Here are some of my favorites from around the internet:

• Candy Bowl Holder: When you need your candy bowl to match the rest of your décor!  This is a neat idea to both decorate and keep your candy in an easy to reach spot.
• Halloween Bouquet: These would look rad any time of year but they’re especially fitting for the Halloween season.
• Cardboard Tombstones: A bit of a bigger project to tackle, but looks like a lot of fun to make and a great alternative to the impersonal store-bought option

Of course, every good Halloween season needs fitting music so here are some of my favorite songs from my own Halloween Playlist.  A lot of these artists have a ton of damn good Halloween or Spook-themed music so I suggest taking a look through the rest of their works, as well, if you need more:

• Left Behind
• Painted Smile
• Dead Silence (Dubstep Remix)
• Welcome to Freddy’s
• Haunted
• Spooky Scary Skeletons (Remix)
• Pokemon Tower Remix
• Creepy Doll

Hope you found something useful and, as always, I wish you all a

Happy, Spooky Halloween!

Uzumaki Review

Uzumaki

Rating: Instant Fav

Themes/Genres:   Horror, Supernatural, Spirals

Main Characters:   Kirie Goshima, Shuichi Saito

Developer/Publisher/Writer/Artist/etc: Junji Ito; Big Comic Spirits/Viz Media

Overview:

There are horror ‘well knowns’ and there are horror ‘dear god never touch this genre again’, but then every once in a while, once every blue moon, we get the rare horror ‘holy shit give me more now’.  Japan has produced a lot of really great horror over the years and the most infamous horror artist among them… is Junji Ito.  His style is unique and disturbing and his storytelling is top tier.  If you’re ever on the hunt for the best of the best of horror manga, look no further than anything done by Junji Ito.  Anything he touches is guaranteed ultra-creepiness.  Imagine if he’d helped work on something equally notorious for its spooks in another genre… like say… a Silent Hill game.  *coughcough*FuckYouKonami*coughcough*.

But one of the most well-known pieces is the three-arc story of Uzumaki.  It’s most people’s first introduction to Junji Ito’s work, even when they don’t know the artist, most people recognize the artwork, and it’s one I’ve read several times over and absolutely adore.

One of the most widely recognized panels in the series

Summary:

Kurozuchou is a town cursed by the Spiral, manifesting in everything around it from the shape of the grass to whirlwinds to little whirlpools in streams.  While only Shuichi is able to notice because he goes to school in a different town and started noticing how abnormal his hometown was compared to others, the entire town is soon sucked into the curse.  Starting in small manifestations with odd behaviors, including Shuichi's own father, the town's curse quickly escalates until escape is impossible.

Characters:

Kirie and Shuichi are both decently likeable characters with relatively realistic reactions to all the strange events going on in their town.   There's a certain uniqueness to Ito characters that both captures basic human simplicity in a strange world, but also have a subtle strangeness, themselves.  Their very human reactions to the strange events around them drastically contrast the off-putting nature of the story and while the characters are believably every day in nature, they also have just that slight bit of off-ness that gives it a distinctly Ito-y feel to them.

Shuichi and Kirie: the main focuses of the story

Plot:

While the concept is entirely supernatural, the writing pulls you in enough that, instead of questioning the likelihood of the story actually happening, you instead focus on the events within the story and the character reactions.  While it's outlandish and unbelievable, it keeps the characters, themselves, grounded in enough reality to keep the focus on the story.  The human element is human enough that the supernatural element doesn't need to be questioned.  The story is masterfully paced in order to create the perfect amount of suspense and tension without making any of its more self-contained stories over-long.

Art Style:

Junji Ito has one of the most recognizably 'him' art styles in manga.  The monster designs are outrageously creepy and off putting while the human characters look relatively normal in comparison.  The art is detailed and expressive, each person looks unique, and the backgrounds are beautiful in the creepiest ways.  He obviously puts a lot of thought into the world around the characters and it shows up in every detail.  The imagery from Uzumaki is just mind-blowing and inspirational in its concepts.

A melted bulb in a lighthouse... that still emits a dangerous, swirling light

Ending:

In the weirdest way possible, it's both extremely unexpected… but also gives you the proper 'holy shit wtf' feeling that good horror should.  It ties up its ends but also has such an insane conclusion to it all that it leaves you plenty to think about.  It builds up and builds up and even though you’re fully expecting shit to go down, you can never guess what the answer actually is.  It’s a perfect ending with just the right kind of buildup to it.

Final Thoughts:

I fucking love this manga.  It's creepy, it's outlandish and unexpected, and it’s such a unique experience that deserves all the praise it gets.  Junji Ito is extremely well-known for his horror over in Japan and I can see exactly why, his work is brilliant and I'm glad I was able to read these books.  It makes me want to hunt down more of his work, for sure.  I’ve since tracked down a couple more of his mangas, Tomie and Mimi’s Ghost Stories and while I haven’t finished Ghost Stories yet, I loved Tomie as much as I loved Uzumaki.  Ito’s work is amazing and I adore everything I’ve seen from him so far.  I couldn’t recommend his work enough.

(Side Note: I highly suggest picking up the actual manga for Uzumaki, if you can, because the end of book additions are hilarious)

Quick Review - My Bloody Valentine (2009)

Quick Review - My Bloody Valentine (2009)

Rating: Meh

Themes/Genres:    Horror/Slasher, Revenge Kills

Main Characters:   Tom Hanniger, Sarah Palmer, Axel Palmer

Director/Writer/Publisher: Patrick Lussier, Todd Farmer/Zane Smith, Lionsgate

Summary:

Ten years after a horrifying event with a vengeful miner, Tom Hanniger returns home to sell his family’s mine and finally be done with the town.  Unfortunately for him, the events from ten years ago are starting back up again and he’s wrapped right up in the middle of it.  With a town angry at him for his decision to sell, a sheriff jealous of his previous fling with his now wife, and a pickaxe murderer on the loose, Monday’s a long ways away.

Review:

Honestly?  This movie’s just kind of dumb.  It’s not the dumbest, by far, there are some bad movies out there, but this one isn’t particularly great, either.  It raises a ton of questions without ever really answering any of them and the Valentine theme has so little to do with anything it just confuses you instead of adds to it.  I mean, sure, it all falls on Valentine’s Day, but that’s so irrelevant to what happens that the only way it’d make sense is if you looked up the original movie, a Canadian film from 1981 about a killer based on a folklore surrounding the holiday.  But then the bad-reboot roots start showing.

Gore-fest... really, how else do you start a horror movie?

But really, an accidental cave-in on Valentine’s Day?  That’s how you pick your theme?  The date is so utterly pointless it feels shoe-horned in for the sake of the title.  I have a world of problems with the title and theme, but I’ll just leave it at that.

I mean... really.

Right from the get-go you’ve got the obvious self-indulgent excessive blood and gore, which, frankly, I can’t fault that too much.  I’m a horror movie fan, blood and gore is part of why I’m here, but it is a little excessive in this movie.  On top of that, you’ve got a potential setup for a mysterious killer that just falls flat on its face when it’s revealed who it is within the first three minutes.

Then throughout the movie you have the annoyingly obvious 3D parts, a huge mistake for movies around the big 3D-boom.  The moments are so blatantly thrown in for the sake of the effect that it honestly ruins the movie if you watch it in anything but, which, let’s be real, is how most people probably saw it.  It looks cool in the theater with the big screen and the fancy glasses and the surround sound, but the second you pick that up on DVD and watch it at home all those “super terrifying” 3D moments just look ridiculous.  Luckily, it’s died down a lot since 2009 but let this movie and its silly “BY THE WAY, I WAS MADE FOR 3D” moments be a constant reminder of how NOT to do 3D movies.  Ever.  Unless you want it to be silly and immersion-ruining.

This is where you realize... you're watching a 3D movie... even when you're not

Finally, you get some sort of twist-ending half pay-off at the end that… I’ll be real, is one of my favorite twist endings for horror movies.  But it doesn’t feel worth it at all in this movie.  It’s a good twist, there’s actually semi-decent buildup around it, making you fully expect it to be the other guy… but because of the bullshit you have to slog through to get to it, it just doesn’t have the effect it probably should have.  It didn’t feel worth it.  It’s a good twist… in a sub-par movie.

It’s not a movie that makes me vehemently angry with how bad it is, as most do since I have no mercy for ‘so bad, it’s good’ movies, but it got a bit irritating at times.  It never even bothered explaining why any of it happened in the first place.  Why did the original killer start killing in the first place?  Why was he so hell-bent on coming back and continuing?  Who knows!  It’s never explained!  That’s probably what bothers me the most.  There’s so little that’s actually explained that needs to be that I’m just left confused and irritated.

Overall, not a great movie.  The obvious 3D moments are dumb, the questions pile up with no answer, and the twist doesn’t feel earned.  It could certainly have been worse, but it also could have been better.

The real reason to watch this movie, though: Jensen Ackles

Top 5 Zombie List

Top 5 Zombie-Related Media

Overview

July 16th marked a dark day for horror fans and especially those with a love of the zombies.  George A. Romero, the Godfather of the Dead, and the origin of the modern zombie and reason for them being the phenomena they are, died at the age of 77.  Romero set the gory stage for the zombie apocalypse and changed the game for independent films everywhere, horror wouldn't be what it is without Romero and the loss of his brilliant mind is a heavy one, indeed.  Therefore, in place of this month's usual review, I've decided to a do a list of my Top 5 Favorite Zombie-related media.  From movies, to games, to anime, zombies can be found in all forms so let's take a look at my personal favorites from each genre:

Keeping in mind, these are only things I've personally watched/played/read at this current time.  There's still a lot out there that I haven't gotten to so this list will probably change over time.

List (ordered by genre)

1. Live Action Movie: Land of the Dead
• Fourth in Romero's series of six 'Living Dead' movies, Land of the Dead focuses on the creation and holding of a class system in the middle of the apocalypse.  While the zombies around them adapt and learn, the living and breathing are thrown back into an archaic system of "protect the monarchy, let the peasants die", creating animosity and growing rebellions from the general populace.  But it all soon comes crashing down when the undead break into the sanctuary, leaving all in their path equally devoured in the brutal, bloody ways only Romero can achieve.

Big Daddy and Gang emerging from the river to fuck your day up

1. Animated Movie: Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island
• Despite the shit they're pumping out nowadays, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island was one of the best direct-to-video movies to grace the series, it was also the first.  Reunited after a year-long hiatus, The Mystery Gang meet up on a remote island said to be haunted by that of pirate named Morgan Moonscar.  However, as they work to uncover the mystery, they find that, for the first time ever, they're faced with real monsters (zombies!) and an unexpected villain.  With as silly and campy as Scooby-Doo has always been, Zombie Island was a nice change of pace that still kept the characters recognizably themselves, despite how different the situation was.

The Late 90's: When Scooby-Doo gave you nightmares

1. Anime: School-Live!
• [Spoiler] - If you haven't watched this yet, just watch it.  If you have... you know why this is here.

...

1. Manga: I Am A Hero
• Hideo Suzuki is a middle-aged mangaka struggling to balance his return to the manga limelight with a new series, a relationship, and his mental delusions when an outbreak spreads across the country.  Suddenly, everything he was struggling to deal with becomes irrelevant as his new need to survive takes over, making him more of a hero of his own story than he ever thought he could actually be.  It's a uniquely wild ride of a manga that only gets better (read: more insane) the further in you get.

Total Dweeb Turns Hero in Not-So-Local Manga

1. Video Game: CarnEvil
• A late 90's rail-shooter arcade game, CarnEvil takes already terrifying carnival clowns and makes them a million times more horrifying by zombifying them.  The only thing more terrifying than the game, itself, is the Game Over screen after your face gets bitten off by whatever horrifying creature you failed to kill in time.  Because who doesn't love a long-fanged, bodiless jester laughing at your failure, right?  This game scared the shit out of me for the short period of time it was at my local Bowling Alley and it'll always hold a special place in my zombie-loving heart.

Because 'Fuck You', that's Why

Final Note: Seeing as this is replacing the review I was planning to do this month, I'd like to give a brief addition for the content I originally planned: Ghost Stories.  Some of you may be familiar with it, but most who are will only know it for its English Dub (i.e. the Canon Abridged Series), but I intended to review the original Japanese subbed version for an explanation as to why the English Dub is so notorious.  However... after watching it, I only have this to say:

             

The Gallows Review

The Gallows

Rating: Forgettable

Themes/Genres:    Thriller/Horror; Supernatural, Vengeful Spirit/Theater Ghost

Main Characters:   Ryan, Pfeifer, Reese, Cassidy, Charlie

Publisher/Director: Blumhouse; Chris Loffing/Travis Cluff

Overview:

Hype can be a dangerous thing sometimes.  More often than not, in fact, too much hype kills entertainment rather than helps it.  Sure, it gets that initial burst of sales, but as soon as people experience it, with a bar set way too high by imaginations and expectations running wild, it ends up falling flat.  There’s a rare occasion of it being exactly what people had hoped, and there’s even one or two cases of it turning out even better… but ‘The Gallows’ is not one of those cases.

Before its release, ‘The Gallows’ caught attention with trailers that showed very little and a marketing campaign that ended up going viral.  It had a ‘Cloverfield’ effect where, there was so little shown and so much was left to the imagination, that audiences were left wondering and trying to dig into it as much as possible, creating mystery-hype.  Leading up to the release, it was a huge deal…. But then it came out… and immediately dropped off the map.  It was never mentioned again and, I admit, I completely forgot it even existed until it popped up in the ‘cheap movies’ section at Walmart.

Part of the marketing was to draw back to popular 80's horrors, insinuating it would be another major horror star

So let’s find out how, even with viral trailers that were grabbing the internet by the balls, ‘The Gallows’ fell so hard off the map and out of everyone’s memories so quickly after release.

Summary:

The movie begins with high school stage play in 1993, which ends up going horribly wrong when the lead actor dies in a prop-gallow-related accident.  Years later, in 2013, the high school decides to try and resurrect the play, headed by actress Pfeifer.  However, when the easily-swayed and unsure male lead gets talked into breaking into the school at night with his two friends to sabotage the play, hoping to keep the play from happening at all, and running into their leading actress in the process, they soon find themselves trapped in the school and at the mercy of the ghost of the theater.

Plot:

• Coincidence-ridden, most of which lessen the effect of the story rather than help and are ultimately unnecessary
• Predictable, very basic 'vengeful ghost' story
• Dicks around too much in the beginning
• Doesn't explore backstory that it should have, could have benefited from more moments involving Reese's father
• The only good twist, in a story ridden with cliche 'what a twist!' moments, was the revelation about Pfeifer's involvement
• The final scene involving the police raid of the house was just drastically unnecessary

Once the story actually gets started, it stays relatively on-track with the basic story, but the beginning could honestly be cut out entirely and probably make for a better experience.  However, the story, itself, is just a bit too basic and way too predictable to make any sort of impact whatsoever.  Person dies in an accident, ghost is out for revenge, douchebag characters die, one girl lives.  The concept of a theater ghost, especially, is nothing new and the movie, itself, explores no new concepts or ideas, whatsoever.  The plot is full of horror movie tropes, the jump-scares are extremely predictable, the similarities between the past and present play are groan-worthy, and it all adds up to a really boring experience. 

The ending scene... that you could see coming from a mile away.  Obvious setup was obvious

Characters:

• They're all douchebags
• Almost every single character is an unrealistic stereotype of some kind
• Reese is the only even remotely likable character by even he's way too easily swayed to do stupid shit by shitty friends (the true horror of this movie: peer pressure)
• There was a whole lot of "I'm acting!" (i.e. really bad acting)
• Dialogue is clunky and extremely unnatural most of the time, Ryan and Cassidy are amazingly stupid, even for teenagers

Here we see King Douchebag, douching it up and just asking to get killed by Theater Ghost

Seriously, the characters are so unbelievably stupid or such unrealistic jackasses throughout the movie you’re just waiting for them to get killed off already.  Instead of feeling horror, like you’re supposed to in a horror movie, you just feel relief when they die.  The entire first section of the movie, instead of building up the backstory and subtly hinting at what’s to come, just spends way too long showing you how much of a dick Ryan is and wishing Reese would just get better friends.  You feel no connection to the characters whatsoever and thus, their struggle, panic, and anxieties get no emotional response from the viewer because you honestly just don’t care what happens to them.

Visuals/Cinematography:

• 'Found-footage' style really worked against it rather than for it
• Certain moments of non-chronological order editing just comes out weird
• Does at least show most of the action when it finally happens, instead of leaving you staring at a black screen or everything happening off-screen

An attention-drawing scene for a trailer... but was way too 'Blair Witch Project' in the movie, including annoying up-the-nose camera angles and one of the most 'I'm acting!' moments in the entire movie

There isn’t a whole lot you can say about found-footage movies when it comes to visuals.  Normally I love them and I feel like they’re just a fun way to shoot horror movies, but this is one of those cases where even I have to say, it would have been better as a normal movie rather than found footage.  On the one hand, it doesn’t leave you with several minutes of pure black screen like the original ‘Blair Witch Project’ and it doesn’t leave the best action entirely and unnecessarily off-screen like the ‘Paranormal Activity’ movies love doing, you get all the action, even if the editing comes off a bit weird.  But on the other hand, there was so much there that just wouldn’t have been filmed, even by an incredibly stupid teen, that it just feels unnatural to be in the found footage style.  A normal cinematic-style filming would have been much better in this case.

Final Thoughts:

While this movie was, overall, incredibly boring and I can see now why it was so quickly forgotten upon release, there is one thing that I would like to mention: the actual tactics behind filming the movie.  For those that simply saw it in theaters or bought the DVD and never really explored the Special Features section, there’s a commentary about the filming of the movie from the Directors, as there always is, but this particular one held a unique bit of information that, despite the movie, on its own, not panning out to much, there was an impressive amount of effort put in behind the scenes.

The directors went to great lengths to get as authentic a reaction as possible out of both their audiences and their actors, even going so far as to film on an actually haunted location and plan out certain scenes in a way that would get real scares from everyone on set.  Some of the best acting in the movie wasn’t acting at all, they legitimately scared the crap out of their actors, and they went to a lot of trouble to do it.   It’s effort that I have to commend, even if the movie can’t stand on its own, knowing what they went through to film it gives it its own credibility.

Ultimately, it’s not a terrible movie, but watching it, on its own, without knowing anything about the filming, it’s boring, it’s clichéd, and it’s forgettable.  But I’ve certainly seen worse.  Is it worth picking up?  Maybe for a couple bucks, just to watch the Special Features, but nothing I’d plan for an actual spooky-filled evening.  It’s not going on anyone’s Halloween Night movie list, that’s for sure.