One Cloudy Afternoon: A New Short Film!

My favourite horror-breathing webmaster has done it again! The spooktacular Ray O'Bannon over at Ravensblight, a little haunted town full of creepy yet pleasant surprises, has just revealed a new horror short film entitled "One Cloudy Afternoon." He hasn't posted it on the website yet, but that's the glory of social networking. Check it out below!

Or alternatively, you can download it here. (Right-click, Save As)

More short films like this can be found on his website, linked above. I wish I had your spirit! :) Maybe one day I'll have my own camera...

Until next time,

MicroReviews!

So, I realized that I haven't really been keeping up with the movies that I watch on Netflix (cause I wanna catch'em all), much less reviewing the ones I want to review, before moving on to the next film because I tend to write lengthy reviews. So, to help stop the madness, I present... MircoReviews! I talked before about micro-fiction, and I suppose this will be the same concept: short, sweet and to the point. This, I hope, will also act as my "list of movies I watched successfully." :D A little re-watch prevention, you know, to keep things running smoothly! That doesn't mean I won't re-watch things, I'll just be aware that it's occurring.

Cheers

At the Drive-In

Well, we fixed the projectors but they will only play classic horror movies! It's like... some sort of rip in the fabric of time and space has caused a flashback to the past! Oh well! Since we're here...

Retro Drive-In

Now Showing

Dementia 13 (1963)

I hope to be changing the movie each week, and you can always see what's playing with the nifty Now Showing! navigation to the left! Happy viewing!

New Playlist & Related 8-Bit Gameage!

I've replaced my Mary Elizabeth McGlynn playlist with the Left 4 Dead OST by the Valve Studio Orchestra. They did a really great job making this soundtrack really creepy, and I love it. Especially Witch, which is the last song on the playlist. The whole thing is great!! :)

Speaking of Left 4 Dead, if you haven't checked out Pixel Force's 8-bit remake, you've missed out! (You should have seen this coming...)
The game can be downloaded here. Below, I've found a game play video so you can see why I'm loving this.

Enjoy the gameage and the ambiance.

Guardian Angel *Update*

So, if you read my previous post about this wretched thing, then you know all about it's evil. Well, I'm beginning to think that I wasn't wrong, or crazy, and this thing really is something wicked.

Since I've brought this thing into my house, (to get it away from the car!!) it's been nothing but madness inside. Deception and betrayal amongst friends who do not fight. Lying, job loss, horrible luck, and malfunctioning utilities. And this all began soon after the pendant was carried into the house. It's been resting on my desk ever since.

I'm torn with conflict! I want to study this strange and delightful item, but at the same time, I want to put it as far away from myself as possible.

Suggestions! I need suggestions! I don't really know how to handle this thing. Should I contain it? Should I find some sort of anti-hex remedy to counter the pendants power?

Unbelievers, be wary. What I have spoken of is the truth.

I'm back!

And I've got weird things to share. To begin, I've just discovered weird secret messages on the inside of my cigarette packs. No, no, I don't mean the surgeon general's warning. Allow me to explain...

I smoke Camel Blue shorts, in a box. Easy enough, right? I've seen many packs of these cigarettes, and today, I looked down and noticed words on the inside on the folding top. The words read: NOW THAT'S A CAMEL.

I have literally never seen words written here before. Curious, I dug through the trash and excavated three empty boxes. I looked at all of them and found another message: 44TH ST. BILLBOARD.

Whoas, I said. I quickly went to Google and implored it. Google, please, why are there strange messages in my cigarettes, I asked.  After a while, only one lead turned up: a Camel billboard on 44th & Broadway in Times Square. However, I couldn't find anywhere else online about the messages, specifically.

[Edit: Follow this link to see the billboard.]

I'm expecting a distress message next.

Any ideas?

Taking Time Off

I need some personal time. I've already been taking some... I need to work through a few things before I can concentrate on this again. :\

Horrortheque

I don't know how I missed it before, but if you like older (and I mean.. older) horror movies, check out Horrortheque. It's got several public domain horror movies, from black & white to the last decade. This includes movies such as...

Nosferatu, The Last Man on Earth, The Little Shop of Horrors and Night of the Living Dead.

You can watch them right from the website, and a lot of them have Spanish subtitles.

Thanks for being great!

Uninvited & Carl Sagan!

Playing Uninvited for DOS and found this:

I dunno if I was supposed to break the glass but now I'm glad that I did. :D
I <3 Carl Sagan.

Caving Follow-Up & Good Horror

Yesterday, I learned a new word. The word is Ehrfurcht, a German word meaning "the awe of the supernatural and the need not to know", basically. We, of the English language, do not have such a word to describe the one thing that really packs a punch when it comes to creating horror. I mean, the scariest part of the movie or book, is when you can't ever get a look at whatever it is that's causing trouble, and leaving you without explanation, you think, "Could this.. really happen?" Explanations of the things we are supposed to fear only dissolves the fear. That's what makes Lovecraft's stories so spooky, because he never really tells you about the monster, or what it looked like, but only how just the sight of it would make strong men go mad. Fear of the unknown.
(Read more about this: What Makes Good Horror? @FearNet)

After discovering this word, I remembered Ted the Caver, and how much the "blog" really creeped me out, but once I read the story, and the monster, it's reasons and history, were spelled out for me, it was no longer scary, at all. I was actually kind of turned off. "What? Some random spooky thing from ancient times? Pfft!"
It was the idea that, a) this might have actually happened somewhere, and b) I had no idea where, when, or how, but all I knew was that bugger had eaten those fools and was just chilling somewhere in a cave in the country. There are caves in my state. And people go caving, all the time. Let it be known, I was prepared to go seek this thing out with everything I could muster and destroy it for all of time!
I was a little let down when I found out it was a hoax, but relieved.

See? It's all about the unknown.
I had no explanation for what was going on in the cave. Nor, did I really want to know. There's where an important part comes in. I didn't want to know. Basically, here's what I do when I'm scared:

If I can't see it, hear it or.. touch/smell/whatever it, then it's not real to me. Out of sight, out of mind. That's where I go when I get scared. Mind you, this doesn't happen often. But when it does - it's like a full mental and physical breakdown. (It's pretty frakking bad.) I'll curl up into a ball and hide in the corner with a blanket over my head until sunlight fills the room and I can actually see the lightswitch.

I'm rambling. The point is - I'm glad I learned this word. :)

My Guardian Angel?

Soooo.. I am dealing with a potentially cursed item. I don't know much about cursed items, or curses, but if I ever saw one I think it fits the bill.

In Brief:

This is a clip, about 2.25" long, of a guardian angel holding a star with a jewel/star in their hands. It reads:

"A Guardian Angel to watch over you."

This is written twice on the front and twice on the back, where a clip is glued.

I received this with a used car last summer. It was attached to the driver side visor, peering down at me. The car was pretty old, but ran great, so I assumed perhaps it was a good luck charm and left it there.

The car had a few problems in the months that I had it, but soon I needed a new this and that, and the car began to quickly become hard to take car of, which is how I ended up broken down in another state. (That is a story for another time. There were mutants.) A little while later, I wrecked the car (not badly, but it made it a little hard to drive and continue to use) under really unusual circumstances. We were driving, quite slowly, in light rain. The car in front of me put on the breaks, so did I, except I wasn't breaking. I put on the breaks harder. I realized then that I was breaking just fine, but the car was sliding towards the other car. I ran into the back on the car. I had enough time between realizing that the breaks weren't bad and hitting the car, that there was nothing I could do and pretty much watched it happen. Oh, their car was just fine because their bumper was muccchhh higher than mine, so they just mashed my radiator and lights. When I got out of the car to look at the damage, I almost slipped because something was on the road. It was as slick as ice. We were told when the cops got there, that there had actually been several wrecks behind us, independent of ours and each other.

So, there the car sat until my landlady decided to tow it. When I went to get my things from the car and hand over my title (I was done.), I saw the pin but didn't think anything of it, so I took it with me....

Today I found the pin in my friend's car, who had helped me remove the stuff from my car. In the past week-since I took the pin-his car has had two flats, a nail in his tire, a blow-out, and the spare went bad.

So, now the bugger is sitting on my desk, winking at me.

If anyone one knows anything about cursed items, you should think about perhaps letting me in on what to do with this thing. I think if I leave it in the house too long, the place might catch on fire or something.

Judith

So, we all know by now that I'm a freak for old [style] games. Pixels get me all hot. *wiggling eyebrows*
Sorry, that was creepy, wasn't it? Well, if you're like me and get your kicks from old school graphics and unique ideas, you'll love this.
Moving on!
I have a "game" I'd like to share.

Judith

*Spoilers Below*

Judith isn't so much a game, as an interactive tale, something of a ghost story. The story is fairly simple, and the game play is very linear, but that doesn't take away from the atmosphere they created.

So, what's Judith about?

The story takes place in a spooky abandoned castle. We meet Jeff and Emily, secret lovers who sneak away to this place to be alone together. Jeff explains to Emily that the place is a safe place for them to rendezvous because the locals are superstitious about it. Emily runs in first to explore this uncharted and exciting territory. Running in after her, she appears to have.. disappeared.

You spend the game trying to find Emily, while exploring the house from two perspectives: Jeff and Judith.

Judith was the wife of a baron who once owned the manor, who soon discovers her husband has been hiding things from her - like bloody gold, an armoury of not-so-gently-used weapons and a prisoner!

From two different times, you search for the truth, with every door that Judith opens, it is unlocked for Jeff.

This game is unique, and I think it's wonderful. It's very short, but I love the music/sfx and atmosphere created in the game. No really, this game had me on edge the whole time! At least during Judith's parts.

I've played through this several times and I'll probably do it again.

You can download the game from Distractionware.

Or here. (11mb)