And, to start off happy, we’ll begin with music. I was hoping to cover all of the classic monsters with songs I’m familiar with, but I couldn’t find “Mummy Shuffle” or “Truck-Driving Vampire” on YouTube. I don’t intend this to be a comprehensive playlist; it’s only a few songs for the theme.
We’ll start with werewolves, with the song “Silver Bullet Blues,” by Michael Longcor:
Next, we’ll play “Frankenstein,” by the Edgar Winter Group (one of my favorite highway songs):
No vampire or mummy songs, so we’ll move into zombies with the Kingston Trio’s “Zombie Jamboree:”
We’ll follow that with a ghost song – Red Sovine singing about “Big Joe and Phantom 309”:
And, staying with the dead for a moment, we’ll finish with “Dead Man’s Party,” by Oingo Boingo:
Moving on, Eleanor Barkhorn has a problem with the idea of “sexy Halloween costumes,” particularly with respect to younger women and girls. Given my glandular bias, I have little problem with them, although I might make an exception for this one.
This, on the other hand, is one impressive costume.
Metafilter had a number of links to appropriate reading material yesterday. I’m giving the Metafilter links in all cases rather than directly linking to the stories, because at least one of the target websites is trashing the link and going to a generic backup site because of the aftermath of Sandy. Also, the commenters often have interesting additions to the topics.
First, a scientific paper on the feasibility of the events in The Call of Cthulhu.
Next, a pointer to an io9 article on spooky webcomics.
There was apparently a horror and fantasy radio series in the early 1980s.
Another link to io9, this one to the 55 scariest scenes from fantasy, SF, and horror films. I don’t know about “the” as the modifier, because these lists are always subjective, but they’re usually interesting, anyway. Besides, I’m not much of an aficionado of being scared, so I’m not one to make such a list myself.
Here’s one to scary stories selected by writers at The Guardian. When it comes to Crawford, who wrote the first story listed, I’m more inclined to select “The Upper Berth.” Another story from that era that I like is, “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad,” by M. R. James.
Don’t forget to make all appropriate preparations for the evening.
Finally, I haven’t carved a pumpkin for this year, but I did run across these instructions that I like. The last one I did came out quite well – not only did my daughter like it, she took it to a party and it was stolen. These earlier ones also came out pretty well.
UPDATE: Some interesting anatomical concept art here.