“Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can’t shet his eyes no more, an’ is all aout o’ shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he’ll take to the water soon.”
- Zadok Allen
When Captain Obed Marsh made his deal with the devil, he didn’t sell his soul; he sold something infinitely more insidious: his lineage. (more…)
We’re watching Phantasm. Ed’s never seen it, but the rest of us have. We love it, but we can’t shut up with the comments. We make fun of the late 70s fashion. We laugh at the fake sets and the amateur acting. Our minds boggle at the bizarre plot.
Yet when the sentinel sphere embeds itself in the face of the cemetery caretaker and drills into his skull, we all get quiet. Blood streams out of the back of the sphere and the caretaker collapses to the ground. As he dies, his muscles relax and a pool of urine collects at his feet. We nod in appreciation of this one moment of stark realism. (more…)
The phrase “just like family” exists because of an understanding that blood and sacrament aren’t the only adhesives that make people stick together. In the excellent videogame adaption of The Walking Dead, this truth is explored by putting familial connections through their paces. It, like all zombie stories, is the tale of people struggling to survive. The game’s protagonist, Lee, becomes the adoptive father figure of a small girl named Clementine. At first Lee’s protection comes as a kind of moral obligation. Clementine is on her own, her parents likely dead – no good person would leave a child to die at the hands of zombies – but, as the pair suffer through brushes with death (and worse), their connection becomes something else. (more…)
Editor’s note: due to damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, the greater New Jersey area is celebrating Halloween this year on November 5, hence the post-Oct. 31 publication of this holiday-themed piece.
When I think of Fall and Halloween, I think of horror films. I can’t help it. There’s nothing better than a good scare, and why not devote an entire month to celebrate that? And when horror films come up in conversation between genre fanatics, one thing that’s always hotly contested is whether or not we should see the monster that’s on the protagonist’s tail. There are plenty of slasher examples – Leatherface, Jason, and Michael Myers, to name a few – but are we afraid of the boogeyman, or we afraid of what they might look like under the mask?
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Welcome back to Unwinnable’s Pulp Book Club. In honor of Halloween, we’re discussing Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October, a relatively recent (1993) novel that chronicles the events of The Game, a month-long magical ceremony that will result in opening the way for the return of Lovecraftian entities into the world – or keep them shut out. The players and their animal familiars are a host of characters from literature, history and film – Jack the Ripper, Dracula, Frankenstein, Rasputin, Sherlock Holmes and more – and The Game is played out through a series of deals, murders and other skullduggery in a rural suburb of Victorian London. (more…)
Ah, listen to them, the children of the night. What sweet music they make. Whether it is the howling whoas of punk rock or the dancey dissonance of goth or the aggressive anti-heroics of metal, music is what makes the autumn the spookiest of seasons. How scary would Halloween or The Exorcist or Suspira be without their respective scores? Its the music that makes our skin crawl.
Here, then, is a mix tape to serve as your soundtrack to the darkest, scariest day of the year: Halloween. (more…)
The following is the latest in a series of journal entries chronicling the author’s descent into next-gen gaming degeneracy and assorted geekery — from getting his first television in years to trying to figure out why the @$@$&@@ you need two goddamn directional pads just to walk down an effing hallway. (more…)
