Category Archives: horror movie

September 7, 2025 · 12:45 am

There Are No Stranger Things Than Kids

I am planning to re-watch all eight hours of Netflix’s Stranger Things.  I can’t help it.  I really seriously love that show.  And the reason is the kids in the series.  Yes, it was set in the 80’s, a decade I long to return to, but I wasn’t a kid myself in the 80’s.  That was my first decade as a teacher.  The thing is… I taught each and every one of the kids in that series.  I admit, they had different names and lived in different bodies, but they were the same faces, the same personalities.

And it is not so much the characters the kids inhabit in the show, though they were obviously cast as themselves.  It is the real-life screwiness that Jimmy Fallon brings out with the silly string that I recognize.

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Finn Wolfhard’s character, Michael, is basically me.  The dreamer determined to make the fantastic become true.  And when they played Dungeons and Dragons in the basement, he was the Dungeon Master.  That was me.  The teller of the stories, the maker of the meaning.  He’s the one who creates the Demogorgon adventure that eerily comes to life.  He is also the one who finds and befriends the mysterious Eleven.  He is the driving force that leads them all to the inevitable conclusion of the adventure.

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And while I never met anyone quite like the mysterious Eleven, Millie Bobby Brown is definitely no stranger to me.  She is bubbly, outgoing, and utterly charming.  She can channel Nikki Minaj.  I must’ve taught at least five different versions of Millie in three different schools when I was a teacher.

Millie-Bobby-Brown-Stranger-Things1

She makes the weird and otherworldly character of Eleven become believable through the sheer force of a natural talent for empathy and understanding.  She is a highly intelligent girl with a knack for making things work.

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I have also taught about four different incarnations of the Dustin character’s actor, Gaten Matarazzo.  The goofy but courageous kid with a broad sense of humor and a focus on food is a very common type of junior high kid.  And while he isn’t usually a leader in the classroom, he’s the one you turn to when you need help getting the group to choose the right path.

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I swear to you, I know all these kids, even though I have never met them.  You see, when you are a teacher for long enough, everyone in the world comes in through your door.  You have to get to know them and learn to at least like them if not love them.  You do the thing for long enough, and you learn that there are a limited number of different faces and personalities that God distributes over time and circumstance to many different people.  It is possible to get to know nearly all of them.  And there are no Stranger Things than kids.

 

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Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, horror movie, humor, kids, review of television, strange and wonderful ideas about life

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May 3, 2025 · 12:01 am

Dave Barry

dave barry and alan zweibel
dave barry

I threatened to write a post about Dave Barry and the writing gods apparently thought that was a very very bad idea.  They have tried to prevent me from carrying out this idle threat by attacking my computer with gremlins.  Now my WordPress page is shrinking practically out of sight.  I can barely  see what I am typing.  You don’t believe me?  Here’s what it looks like at the moment;

20160527_095532

They obviously tricked me into pressing the secret shrink button on my computer, and I have no idea where to find the un-shrink features.  Not only that, but my Facebook page is automatically translating everything it can into French.  They really don’t want me to tell you about Dave Barry.  And why do you suppose that is?

Well, Dave Barry may actually be me from a parallel dimension.  He started writing for The Miami Herald in the early 80’s, at about the same time I started teaching.  He retired from that in 2004 after winning a Pulitzer Prize and started writing humorous novels…. the same thing I started doing when I left the job I loved and was good at.  Okay, so I am stretching the analogy to the point that all the buttons are popping off its shirt… but the point is, we are alike in some ways and I admire his work and I steal things from it whenever I possibly can.  Like this post.  I deeply admire the way he can say witty and pithy things.  Like some of these quotes;

dave44
dave55
dave2
dave3
dave4

So, you see, he is very good at doing what I want to be good at.  He is a humor columnist and all-around imitation Mark Twain.  And I have read and loved his novels.  Especially the Peter Pan things he writes with a partner.

Dave-Barry-and-Ridley-Pearson-250px
Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

So, I will leave this post here even though I could talk for hours about how Dave Barry makes me laugh.  I have to stop.  the words on the screen keep getting smaller and smaller, and my old eyes are about to fall out of my head.

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March 21, 2025 · 12:08 am

Midnight Monster Movies

I slept in this morning.  Spent another late night doing nothing but watching monster movies.  I recently got myself a DVD collection of Hammer Films monster movies from the sixties.  I found it in the $5 bargain bin at Walmart, a place I regularly shop for movies.

son-of-gravesend-manor-dateunknown

When I was a boy, back in the 60’s, there always used to be a midnight monster movie feature called Gravesend Manor on Channel 5, WOI TV in Ames, Iowa.  It started at 11:00 pm and ran til 1:00 am.  I, of course, being a weird little monster-obsessed kid, would sneak downstairs in my PJ’s when everyone else was asleep and I would laugh at the antics of the goofy butler, possibly gay vampire duke, and the other guy who was supposedly made in the master’s laboratory.  And when the movie started, I was often scared witless by the black-and-white monster B-movie like Scream of Fear!, or Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, or Eyes of the Gorgon.  It was always the reason I could rarely get up in time for church and Sunday school the next morning without complaints and bleary-eyed stumbling through breakfast.  I never knew if my parents figured it out or not, but they probably did and were just too tired to care.

It was my source for critical monster-knowledge that would aid me greatly when I grew up to be a fireman/cowboy hero.  Because battling monsters was… you know, a hero prerequisite.  And I intended to be the greatest one there ever was.  Even better than Wyatt Earp or Sherlock Holmes or Jungle Jim.

Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, and the immortal Christopher Lee were my tutors in the ways of combating the darkness.  When I started watching a really creepy monster movie, I always had to stick it out to the end to see the monster defeated and the pretty girl saved.  And they didn’t always end in ways that allowed me to sleep soundly after Gravesend Manor had signed off the airways for the night.  Some movies were tragedies.  Sometimes the hero didn’t win.  Sometimes it was really more of a romance than a monster movie, and the monster was the one you were rooting for by the end.  I remember how the original Mighty Joe Young made me cry.  And sometimes you had to contemplate more than tragedy.  You had to face the facts of death… sometimes grisly, painful, and filled with fear.  You had to walk in the shoes of that luckless victim who never looked over his shoulder at the right moment, or walked down the wrong dark alley, or opened the wrong door.  The future was filled with terrifying possibilities.

Now, at the end of a long life, when I am supposed to be more mature and sensible, I find myself watching midnight monster movies again.  What’s wrong with me?  Am in my second childhood already?  Am I just a goofy old coot with limited decision-making capabilities?  Of course I am.  And I intend to enjoy every horrifying moment of it.

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December 17, 2023 · 1:18 am

Dave Barry

dave barry and alan zweibel
dave barry

I threatened to write a post about Dave Barry and the writing gods apparently thought that was a very very bad idea.  They have tried to prevent me from carrying out this idle threat by attacking my computer with gremlins.  Now my WordPress page is shrinking practically out of sight.  I can barely  see what I am typing.  You don’t believe me?  Here’s what it looks like at the moment;

20160527_095532

They obviously tricked me into pressing the secret shrink button on my computer, and I have no idea where to find the un-shrink features.  Not only that, but my Facebook page is automatically translating everything it can into French.  They really don’t want me to tell you about Dave Barry.  And why do you suppose that is?

Well, Dave Barry may actually be me from a parallel dimension.  He started writing for The Miami Herald in the early 80’s, at about the same time I started teaching.  He retired from that in 2004 after winning a Pulitzer Prize and started writing humorous novels…. the same thing I started doing when I left the job I loved and was good at.  Okay, so I am stretching the analogy to the point that all the buttons are popping off its shirt… but the point is, we are alike in some ways and I admire his work and I steal things from it whenever I possibly can.  Like this post.  I deeply admire the way he can say witty and pithy things.  Like some of these quotes;

dave44
dave55
dave2
dave3
dave4

So, you see, he is very good at doing what I want to be good at.  He is a humor columnist and all-around imitation Mark Twain.  And I have read and loved his novels.  Especially the Peter Pan things he writes with a partner.

Dave-Barry-and-Ridley-Pearson-250px
Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

So, I will leave this post here even though I could talk for hours about how Dave Barry makes me laugh.  I have to stop.  the words on the screen keep getting smaller and smaller, and my old eyes are about to fall out of my head.

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July 4, 2023 · 2:53 am

“That Night in Saqqara I Was Taken By Surprise”

That Night in Saqqara 1

Life is never quite like the way it is in your head.  Things you don’t believe are true will constantly surprise you with the reality they belt you over the head with at the most inopportune of times.

Today’s colored-pencil Paffooney masterpiece is a case in point.  I never believed it was possible to take this good of a picture of it.  It is a horror movie to try to light this picture so I can snap it with a camera and get a result with no fades or reflected glare.  It was created in 1992, when I was really at the height of my colored-pencil cartoonist super-powers.  The subtle lighting is so much better than I can convey with the arthritic turkey-claw hands I now use for such artwork.  Torchlight in a pyramid is a hard thing to convey.  And over time, this picture’s colored-pencil patina has become glossy and difficult to photograph without glare.  It has subtle waves in the paper that photograph as shadowy valleys and reveal the two-dimensionality of the piece.  You can still see them if you look closely.  But it is far better than any previous photo.  Go back and check my archives if you don’t believe me… or you wish to be bored to death with old posts that you have somehow managed to dodge before now.

But like Tanis in the Tomb, things always turn out to be surprisingly different in their reality than they were in your little mind’s eye when you went into that dark hole in the ground.

We were discussing this at lunch, my kids and I.  We were talking about how Sims 3 portrays reality and how really surprising it can be when you realize that the game has got it right.  When I walked all the way to the bottom of the stairs this morning before realizing that I had forgotten my shoes upstairs, I had to turn around and go all the way back upstairs.  This, I am told, is exactly how it works in Sims 3.  A character in the game cannot turn around on the stairs.  If you change your mind half way down, the character. or avatar I think they like to call them, must go all the way to the bottom to turn around and go back up.  So obviously this morning, God was playing Sims 3 and using me as an avatar.

Now, I don’t really like to believe God plays video games with reality… but my son Henry brought up the Rolling Stones as proof.  It is common knowledge that Keith Richards is an un-dead creature, having so completely altered the bio-chemical make-up of his entire body with drugs that he died in 1988 and still goes on tour because his brain has not yet fully registered the fact that he is dead.  My son pointed out that in Sims 3 you can make your avatar all gray or green and zombie-looking and then play the game with your avatar walking around and doing all sorts of stuff without realizing he or she is dead.  So, not only Keith Richards, but the entirety of the Rolling Stones who are all skeletal old druggies who should’ve passed half a century ago, goes to prove that God is playing Sims 3 with the universe.  My gasted is totally flabbered!  And I hope this glimpse into the unholy truth has not ruined your day.

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May 4, 2023 · 11:53 pm

Dave Barry

dave barry and alan zweibel
dave barry

I threatened to write a post about Dave Barry and the writing gods apparently thought that was a very very bad idea.  They have tried to prevent me from carrying out this idle threat by attacking my computer with gremlins.  Now my WordPress page is shrinking practically out of sight.  I can barely  see what I am typing.  You don’t believe me?  Here’s what it looks like at the moment;

20160527_095532

They obviously tricked me into pressing the secret shrink button on my computer, and I have no idea where to find the un-shrink features.  Not only that, but my Facebook page is automatically translating everything it can into French.  They really don’t want me to tell you about Dave Barry.  And why do you suppose that is?

Well, Dave Barry may actually be me from a parallel dimension.  He started writing for The Miami Herald in the early 80’s, at about the same time I started teaching.  He retired from that in 2004 after winning a Pulitzer Prize and started writing humorous novels…. the same thing I started doing when I left the job I loved and was good at.  Okay, so I am stretching the analogy to the point that all the buttons are popping off its shirt… but the point is, we are alike in some ways and I admire his work and I steal things from it whenever I possibly can.  Like this post.  I deeply admire the way he can say witty and pithy things.  Like some of these quotes;

dave44
dave55
dave2
dave3
dave4

So, you see, he is very good at doing what I want to be good at.  He is a humor columnist and all-around imitation Mark Twain.  And I have read and loved his novels.  Especially the Peter Pan things he writes with a partner.

Dave-Barry-and-Ridley-Pearson-250px
Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

So, I will leave this post here even though I could talk for hours about how Dave Barry makes me laugh.  I have to stop.  the words on the screen keep getting smaller and smaller, and my old eyes are about to fall out of my head.

Leave a comment

Filed under commentary, horror movie, humor, Uncategorized

April 18, 2023 · 1:19 am

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 18

Canto 18 – Talking to the Dead

Stan took Maria to the study and made her bring the decorative skull thing.

“It’s time we look for the miniature radio receiver,” Stan said.

“So, how will you do that?” Maria asked.

“With an exactor knife.”

“But, if you cut into it, you are doing what the owl guy said you can’t do.”

“Surely you don’t really believe in demons and curses?”

“I believe in Science, like you.  But I also worry about things we might not know enough things about.”

Stan smiled at her.  Typical teenager with some knowledge, but lots of superstition and ignorance on the other side of the teeter-totter of the mind.

He looked at the thing Maria had put into his right hand as his left hand picked up the razor knife.  It was a beautiful piece of work.  Shaped like a skull, it was decorated with flowers and vines in bright, looping lines.  Someone had taken great pains to make this object worthy of its religious purpose.  And even if you didn’t respect the dogma and arbitrary rules of religion, Stan did have to acknowledge that somebody in the world cared a lot more about it all than he did.

“Gringo, if you cut me, you will regret it for the rest of your shortened life,” said the skull clearly and in English.

“What?  Maria, could you tell where that voice came from?”

“What voice?”

“You didn’t hear a voice?”

“Maria, I have a separate conversation to hold with you, Chica.  But I have to threaten the stooge right now.  Let me settle with him first.”  Stan knew the voice was meant for both of them to hear that time.

“Okay, stupid one.  There is a demon sealed into this paper skull.  If you cut through the magical designs that hold it within, it will come out and possess you.  You will kill pretty little Maria first, horribly with lots of blood, pain, and screaming.  And then you will kill your wife even more horribly.  And immediately call the police to confess your crime, not so you can pay for your crime, but to bring the police here to kill as many as you can, and then the demon will escape by possessing the cop who kills you.”

“Why is there a demon imprisoned inside of you?”

“He is bound there to provide the power I must use to perform the functions I have at Aunt Phillia’s.  The things I must do for Maria to accomplish what she must accomplish among the Bones of the Lonelies.”

“Stan, maybe you should give the thing to me,” said Maria.

Stan was quietly thinking about any possible explanation that didn’t involve real demons to counter what the thing said, but he didn’t dispute it out loud.  He put the thing in Maria’s hands.

“Maria, you know that Rogelio and Yesenia are both in the land of the dead though they are both still alive at this point.”

“Yes, I know…”  She had tears in her eyes as she said it.

“There is a possibility that they will both die there and become permanent residents.  You must now be honest about why you took Yesenia to the toy store to begin with.”

“I, uh… what do you mean?”

“You need to tell the Gringo Stan why you took Yesenia to the toy store.”

Maria looked at Stan.  Stricken is the only possible word for how she looked. 

“If you don’t admit it, you cannot go there and try to retrieve either of them.”

“I… I wanted her boyfriend to like me instead of her.”

“And what did you think would happen at the toy store when you took her there?”

She was ghostly pale.  “I knew from the stories that something might happen to her that would separate her from Rogelio.

“And you got what you wanted.  Why, then, did you take Rogelio there?”

She looked at Stan again.  “I felt guilty.  I had to…”

“You had to rescue her,” said Stan.

Her face crumbled and she was bawling.

“I can help you do that,” said the skull.  “You will have to put your own life on the line to do it.”

Stan reached over to Maria and took hold of her shoulder.  He pulled her to himself.  She cried against his chest as he held her.

“Maria, it shows me you are a good person that you wanted to fix this.”  Stan stroked the hair on the back of her head.

“You don’t hate me?” she sobbed.

“Of course not.  You are my daughter now.  No more question about that.”

The skull was laughing softly and creepily.

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Filed under ghost stories, horror movie, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

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March 12, 2023 · 2:58 am

Midnight Monster Movies

I slept in this morning.  Spent another late night doing nothing but watching monster movies.  I recently got myself a DVD collection of Hammer Films monster movies from the sixties.  I found it in the $5 bargain bin at Walmart, a place I regularly shop for movies.

son-of-gravesend-manor-dateunknown

When I was a boy, back in the 60’s, there always used to be a midnight monster movie feature called Gravesend Manor on Channel 5, WOI TV in Ames, Iowa.  It started at 11:00 pm and ran til 1:00 am.  I, of course, being a weird little monster-obsessed kid, would sneak downstairs in my PJ’s when everyone else was asleep and I would laugh at the antics of the goofy butler, possibly gay vampire duke, and the other guy who was supposedly made in the master’s laboratory.  And when the movie started, I was often scared witless by the black-and-white monster B-movie like Scream of Fear!, or Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, or Eyes of the Gorgon.  It was always the reason I could rarely get up in time for church and Sunday school the next morning without complaints and bleary-eyed stumbling through breakfast.  I never knew if my parents figured it out or not, but they probably did and were just too tired to care.

It was my source for critical monster-knowledge that would aid me greatly when I grew up to be a fireman/cowboy hero.  Because battling monsters was… you know, a hero prerequisite.  And I intended to be the greatest one there ever was.  Even better than Wyatt Earp or Sherlock Holmes or Jungle Jim.

Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, and the immortal Christopher Lee were my tutors in the ways of combating the darkness.  When I started watching a really creepy monster movie, I always had to stick it out to the end to see the monster defeated and the pretty girl saved.  And they didn’t always end in ways that allowed me to sleep soundly after Gravesend Manor had signed off the airways for the night.  Some movies were tragedies.  Sometimes the hero didn’t win.  Sometimes it was really more of a romance than a monster movie, and the monster was the one you were rooting for by the end.  I remember how the original Mighty Joe Young made me cry.  And sometimes you had to contemplate more than tragedy.  You had to face the facts of death… sometimes grisly, painful, and filled with fear.  You had to walk in the shoes of that luckless victim who never looked over his shoulder at the right moment, or walked down the wrong dark alley, or opened the wrong door.  The future was filled with terrifying possibilities.

Now, at the end of a long life, when I am supposed to be more mature and sensible, I find myself watching midnight monster movies again.  What’s wrong with me?  Am in my second childhood already?  Am I just a goofy old coot with limited decision-making capabilities?  Of course I am.  And I intend to enjoy every horrifying moment of it.

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Filed under autobiography, foolishness, horror movie, humor, monsters, nostalgia

November 8, 2022 · 4:02 am

Penny Dreadful (Thoughts from the Uncritical Critic)

 

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I confess to binge-watching the show Penny Dreadful, all three seasons on Netflix.   Good God!  What was I thinking?  It is everything that I cringe about in movies.  Blood and gore.  Gratuitous sex and debauchery.  I almost gave up and stopped watching when the Creature came bursting through the chest of Dr. Frankenstein’s latest creation.  And yet for a monster to be introduced to the series in such a way, and then to become the one character that strives hardest for redemption… I was hooked.

Sin and redemption is the major theme of the whole series.  And each character strives so painfully for redemption that you cannot help but love them… even though they are monsters.

You see, I, like all other people, am aware that one day, sooner than I would like, I will die and live no more.  And life, though filled with heartache and suffering and regret, is a priceless treasure to be guarded for as long as I can hold onto it.  There is poetry in that condition.  The greatest beauty that can be beheld is soon to pass away into ugliness.  The candle flame lights the darkness briefly and then is gone.

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The story is built from Victorian era literature and includes Mary Shelly’s Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a couple of werewolves, numerous witches, demons, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, and a character named Lord Malcom Murray who is obviously based on the African explorer Allan Quartermain from King Solomon’s Mines by H.Rider Haggard.

The characters all do a lot of suffering and striving.  Friendships are formed and made blood-and-family deep by shared adventures and brushes with pure evil and death.  The main character, Vanessa Ives, is variously possessed by a demon, courted by Lucifer, hunted by witches, and then seduced by Dracula.  She uses her deep faith in God, which wavers continually, to defeat every enemy but the last.  She is also aided by a cowboy werewolf and sharp-shooter who is her destined lover, protector, and killer.  It all swiftly becomes ridiculous-sounding when you try to summarize the convoluted Gothic-style plot.  But as it slowly unfolds and reveals new terrors with every episode, it mesmerizes.  The sets, the cinematography, the costumes, and the horrifyingly sweet-sad orchestral background music puts a spell on you that, when you awaken from it, you realize you want more than is available.  Three seasons was simply not enough.

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As I believe I indicated previously, the character that almost made me give up on the series, Frankenstein’s Creature, became the most compelling character of all to me.  He began as such a violent, repellent, selfish thing… and in the end became the most self-sacrificing and tragic character in the entire drama.  He took the name of the English poet John Clare for himself, and became a tragically beautiful person.

Do I recommend that you watch this thing?  This poetic and sometimes deeply disturbing depiction of what it means to be human and be alive?  I cannot.  It was a moving personal experience for me, one that made me weep for beauty and horror at almost every episode.  No one can find that sort of thing through a mere recommendation.  It is entirely between you and your God.

 

 

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Filed under ghost stories, horror movie, humor, insight, monsters, movie review, review of television

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October 13, 2022 · 3:03 am

The Encounter

Life, like a good Dungeons and Dragons game, is basically controlled by rolling the dice of random encounters.  Even if there is a great over-arching plan for this reality in the brain of the Great Dungeon Master in the Sky, it is constantly altered by the roll of celestial dice and ultimate random chance.

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Thusly, I managed a D & D encounter in the middle of the night last night.

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I generally have a sleeping skill of only +1.  That means, that if sleeping is a simple skill, I can add my +1 to the roll and only have to get a 6 or higher on a twenty-sided dice.  At 3:10 a.m. I rolled a 3.  I had to get up and wander bleary-eyed to the bathroom, a -2 for terrain effects to successfully to make it to the bathroom and pee through a prostate that is swollen to the size of a grapefruit, most often a difficult task, requiring a 15 on a twenty-sided dice.  I got lucky.  I rolled a 19.  Then, on the way back to bed, the dog rolled a natural 20 on her get-the-master’s-attention roll and let me know she had to go to the bathroom too.

I have to tell you at this point, that since I am trying to be more of a nudist, I seriously considered taking her out naked (by which I mean me, not her).  Dressing up in the middle of the night can be daunting.  And no one was going to see in the dark of the park at 3:15 a.m.  But I thought it probably wasn’t a good idea to go adventuring without armor in the darkness, so I at least put on shoes and a magic +4 bathrobe.

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So, we went out to let the dog poop in the park, a thing she can do profusely on a roll of 3 or higher.  We got it accomplished with little fuss.  Oh, there was some complaining and growling, but the dog managed to ignore me when I did it.  Then we had to find our way safely back to the house, and bed…. but we had a random encounter roll that didn’t go in our favor.  I am always on the lookout in the dark for aliens or black-eyed children or even the onset of the zombie apocalypse.  But what I got was the monster from under the bridge.

One of the denizens of the city suburbs that most enjoys the nightlife in the city and thrives even though it isn’t human is the horrorific creature known as a raccoon.  She’s a sow that I have seen a number of times before at night.  She lives under the bridge in the park and often has three or four cubs trailing behind her in the spring.  And she has nothing but contempt for humans with dogs.  She immediately launched into her fear-based hiss attack.  And coming from a possibly seven-foot tall monster sitting atop the pool fence and hissing in the night, it seized the initiative with a very effective attack.  She rolled an 18.  The attack succeeded.

I tried the ever-popular pee-your-pants defense, but failed, rolling a 2.  The reservoir was previously emptied, and I wasn’t wearing pants.  The dog bolted for the kitchen door and dragged me with her.  Her magic bark attack wasn’t even tried.  We were in the house before my heart skipped its third beat.

Surviving the encounter in this way is probably good for the heart.  It beat really hard for a bit and got thoroughly exercised.  But I went back to bed and reflected on the fact that random encounters like that are entirely dependent on the roll of the dice.

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Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, horror movie, monsters, Paffooney, photo paffoonies