(via Bad Newspaper)
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Dracula
This is the original 1931 Dracula with Bela Lugosi. From Wikipedia:
Dracula is a 1931 American Pre-Code vampire-horror film directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. The film was produced by Universal and is based on the 1924 stage play Dracula by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, which in turn is loosely based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker.[3]
Why Are Black Cats Considered Bad Luck?
We once accused some women of being witches, when they often were just crazy cat ladies. Our attitudes toward people change, but why do we still consider black cats to be bad luck? Chris Poole, who lives with the cats Coel and Marmalade, gives us the lowdown.
I’m glad to hear that there are places where black cats are considered good luck. My black cat Gogo is as sweet as a cat can be, but I’m keeping her inside during Halloween because you never know who will be passing by with all their superstitions intact. (via HuffPo)
Jon Snow White and Other Awesome 2015 Halloween Costumes
Since Halloween is on a Saturday this year, many people wore Halloween
costumes to work, school, or parties yesterday. Lucky us! Some really
good ones have already been posted on the internet. See a roundup of them at Neatorama.
Native Americans Try On "Indian" Halloween Costumes
Dressing up as an entire group of people for Halloween comes dangerously close to mocking them. That goes double when the costume accoutrements have cultural and/or religious meaning. Any time you have to wonder if your Halloween costume is offensive, it most likely is. You can always ask someone ahead of time. (via Buzzfeed)
Trying to Capture a Halloween Cat Photo
Chris Poole wanted to take pictures of his cats Cole and Marmalade in their Halloween costumes. Cole is Batcat and Marmalade is Supermarm. He even made an elaborate backdrop for the pictures. But cats don’t like to cooperate with anything a human comes up with. If you get them to look at the camera, they immediately jump at it. If you distract their attention from the camera, all you see is the rear of the cat. So it goes.
Cats do much better in video, where you can watch their movements ranging from graceful to disgraceful to hilarious. (via Tastefully Offensive)
Friday, October 30, 2015
The Vampire
From 1957. Wikipedia describes this movie:
The late Dr. Campbell was experimenting with vampire bat blood just before his death. Fellow doctor Beecher finds a bottle of pills among Dr. Campbell's effects and takes them home. Dr. Beecher's daughter accidentally substitutes the vampire blood pills for her father's migraine tablets. As a result, the kindly Dr. Beecher starts having blackouts from the pills, making him change into a bloodthirsty monster by night.
The House That Gave Sucky Tricks
Homestar Runner is back with a Halloween special! Strongbad wants to open a haunted house with new and different features that instill a more modern sort of dread. Welcome to St. Cadaverstump’s totally not just an old furniture warehouse Mortuary! When it says “end,” it’s not the end. When the credits run, that’s not the end, either. (via Metafilter)
Howling with the Big Dogs
Babies learn by imitating others. Usually, we think of that as a baby imitating his parents. But when the family dogs begin to howl, that’s a learning experience for this 5-month-old baby. The baby boy has joined a long line of canines who learn from their elders. Will he grow up to be a werewolf? Only time will tell. (via reddit)
Miss Cellania's Links
SXSW’s Video Game Fiasco Proves the Tech World Can’t Be “Neutral” on Harassment. They backed off even addressing the issue due to …harassment.
Have you ever picked up a hitchhiker? This guy’s story is well worth a read.
The 13 Most Bizarre Appearances by Horror Icons in Media. Would it be Freddie and Jason in Vegas or Chucky in professional wrestling?
10 Real Events That Sound Just Like Horror Movies. Screenwriters have to get their ideas from somewhere, after all.
10 Famous People Who Vanished Without a Trace.
Every Day I Want To Quit Social Media. A writer talks about the pressure of living and socializing online.
Why do secretaries need college degrees now? Because there are graduates who would be happy to land that job.
Text Messages From a Ghost. Do NOT skip the followup post.
Syracuse’s Transylvania Twist — The Best Halloween Song You Never Heard. (via Nag on the Lake)
A Bad Lip Reading of the First Democratic Debate
The folks at Bad Lip Reading had a lot of fun with the Democratic presidential candidates at their debate. Their lips are moving, but what’s coming out is pure nonsense. Stay to the end to catch Bernie Sanders reciting poetry! (via Neatorama)
The Spellbinding Stories of 6 Historic Witches
Witches as fictional characters are a lot of fun. But in the past, being accused of witchcraft was serious, and usually tragic, business. Here are the stories of six women who were regarded as witches at one time or another, in an article I wrote for mental_floss.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
The Brides of Dracula
One of the Hammer Films I recall from my childhood. From Wikipedia:
The Brides of Dracula is a 1960 British Hammer Film Productions Horror film directed by Terence Fisher. It stars Peter Cushing as Van Helsing; David Peel as Baron Meinster, a disciple of Count Dracula; Yvonne Monlaur as Marianne Danielle; Andrée Melly as her roommate, Gina; Marie Devereux as a village girl; and Martita Hunt as the Baroness Meinster.[2]
The film is a sequel to Hammer's original Dracula (USA: Horror of Dracula) (1958), though the vampires possess abilities denied to vampires in the previous film, much like those in the original novel. Alternative working titles were Dracula 2 and Disciple Of Dracula. Dracula does not appear in the film (Christopher Lee would reprise his role in the 1966 Dracula: Prince of Darkness) and is mentioned only twice, once in the prologue, once by Van Helsing.
Cinderella: Rags to Riches Costume
The question is, should you be Cinderella or a Transformer for Halloween? Or maybe a better question is, should you be Cinderella before meeting your fairy godmother, or after? Why not both?
Bumbly Bee is a costume designer and cosplayer. She designed, made, and modeled this award-winning Cinderella transformation. (via Buzzfeed)
Biisuke Ball’s Big Adventure
Biisuke is a little red ball who lives with his two brothers, Biita and Biigoro, who are also small balls. When two of them are kidnapped, Biisuke has to go on a grand quest to save them. This is a tale tale told through a Rube Goldberg contraption, which is impressive even without the story (subtitled in English) and the cute little song that goes with it. (via The Kid Should See This)
Miss Cellania's Links
When the news that Serena Williams is dating reddit founder Alexis Ohanian hit the front page, he only made one comment. Be sure to read the entire thread.
Photos From a Perilous 464-Day Sled Journey Across the Frozen Arctic Ocean. In 1968-69, four men and 40 dogs went from Alaska to Norway, a journey that hasn’t been repeated.
The Wah Wah Machine turns your text into the trombone-like adult voices hear in the Peanuts cartoons. (via Boing Boing)
Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts. The last one is a true eye-opener.
Ten DIY Tutorials Inspired By The Walking Dead. Celebrate Halloween zombie-style with costumes, makeup, decorations, and even food!
Pumpkin-Carving Stencils For The Real Monsters Of 2015. Download them for your own jack-o-lantern.
13 Spooky Film Scenes That Reveal the Terrifying Power of Dance. Yes, horror films have dance scenes, and we have video evidence.
The unified theory of all zombie fiction. It’s a philosophy of collectivism, focused on the survivors instead of the monsters.
13 Epic Pumpkin Carvings. Works of art that will last about ten days, max.
Exploding Thermite Pumpkins
A video from The Royal Institution explains in a very calm, subdued, British way what happens when you burn iron oxide and aluminum powder inside a pumpkin. The visual effects are quite impressive. It’s also quite dangerous, so don’t try this at home. Please. Thermite is nothing to fool around with. (via The Daily Dot)
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Dracula (1979)
Frank Langella is Dracula this time, with Laurence Olivier, Donald Pleasence, and Kate Nelligan. From Wikipedia:
The film was based on Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, though much of Stoker's original plot was revised to make the film (advertised with the tagline "A Love Story") more romantic. The film won the 1979 Saturn Award for Best Horror Film.
Duck Gets a Halloween Costume
You remember Nibbles the Duck: he’s the one who couldn’t wait for his boy Jonny to get home from school. Now Nibbles is modeling his Halloween costume. He’s a Lobster!
You could say the costume is, um, daffy. What makes the video is the infectious laughter. Nibbles is quite a trooper. He’ll put up with anything for his beloved, if somewhat wacky, family. (via Tastefully Offensive)
7 More Haunted Places and the Ghost Stories Behind Them
If a murder or other dismal event occurs in some place, eventually someone will see ghosts there. You can count on it. In the followup to last week's mental_floss list, here are a few more stories of murder, mayhem, and the ghosts left behind, in a list I wrote for mental_floss.
Image credit: : Thomas Good / NLN via Wikimedia Commons
Halloween Special
Kurt Richter took this picture of the construction site near his home. The heavy equipment crew has a sense of humor! Let's get a closer look.
Their simple Halloween decoration is tasteful, subdued, and really appropriate for the scene. Incidentally, I would advise springing for the deluxe service. (Thanks, Kurt!)
World's Slowest Rube Goldberg Machine
How would you design a chain reaction that takes six weeks to complete? Bob Partington of Field Day did it. My question was how they expect us to sit through the video! But that’s easy, because parts of it are time-lapse, with a clock in the corner to indicate which parts, and how much time is sped up. Part of this involves filling a trough with enough molasses to float a boat. Slowly. A tortoise has to carry the ball for a while. Popsicles have to melt. And the last “slowness” gimmick is a real doozy. Partington has another video in which he explains the design process. (via Viral Viral Videos)
Miss Cellania's Links
10 Famous Paranormal Hoaxes. You can fool all of the people some of the time.
How Long Would it Take for Vampires to Annihilate Humanity? Mathematical modeling gives us conflicting answers.
Watch Some Good Actors Do Ridiculous Things in the First Trailer for The Ridiculous Six. The Netflix original feature will premiere December 11.
The 42 Best Science Memes On The Internet. That is, if “meme” means a visual pun or an illustrated joke.
Why it pays to be nice to flight attendants. They can make the difference between a pleasant flight and a trip from hell.
29 Legendary Monsters of North America, parts one, two, and three. We're just infested with them.
The Hateful Life And Spiteful Death Of The Man Who Was Vigo The Carpathian.
How 19th-Century Zombie Dogs Revealed the Workings of the Brain. Warning: disturbing content.
Juggling Gentlemen
The New Conformity is a trio of jugglers who perform with Cause & Effect Circus. They start off with synchronized juggling, which is nice to see. Then they start juggling each others’ balls. A nicer term for that would be tandem juggling. They also do contact juggling, ball balancing, a hand dance, and even a Three Stooges-type routine. After all that, they just start showing off. (via Digg)
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
The Premature Burial
Another Roger Corman thriller, this time in color. From Wikipedia:
The Premature Burial (1962) is an American International Pictures horror film, directed by Roger Corman, starring Ray Milland, also with Hazel Court, Alan Napier, Heather Angel and Richard Ney, screenplay by Charles Beaumont and Ray Russell, based upon the 1844 short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe. It was the third in the series of eight Poe-themed pictures, known informally as the "Poe Cycle", directed by Corman for American International.
Waiting For That Movie
Once upon a time, you didn’t think about a movie until it reached your local theater. And that was a good thing, because it did not get to small towns until months after the official release. Then as theaters expanded, you’d see trailers on TV a month before the movie appeared, and that was the first you heard of it. Now, we get every scrap of film development on the internet years ahead of time. And for a fan, it’s not easy to wait for the finished product. It applies to any number of popular film franchises. Sadly, it also applies to TV shows, video games, and books. We know too much about them before we ever get a chance to try them out. (via Tastefully Offensive)
Tea with Jean-Luc Picard
The Captain really likes his tea. Sometimes that causes problems on the Enterprise. This video is actually called "Tea with Jean-Luc, episode 1: Ménage à Tea,” which tells us there will be more to come concerning Picard’s relationship with tea.
Andrew Hussie and Jan Van dem Hemel made about three dozen amusing vignettes out of old Star Trek:TNG footage in 2009. Six years later, they are reviving the series. You can see the entire collection at YouTube. (via Gamma Squad)
Miss Cellania's Links
Are There Still Real Skeletons In Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean? Some observers have even identified which ones they are.
The 13 Best Horror Movie Themes. With video evidence, in case you want to argue about the ranking.
The Common Core math quiz that has everyone outraged isn't about Common Core — it's worse. Some poor third graders are smarter than they think they are now.
And now someone has recreated Andy’s room from Toy Story 3. The project took two years, because of all the attention to detail.
Historic Werewolves. They may not have fit our concept of a supernatural monster, but they sure scared the people of their time.
Magical Realism: Northern Exposure 25 Years Later. (via Metafilter)
The Neuroscience of Anorexia Reveals Why It’s So Hard to Treat.
13 Judicious Facts About To Kill a Mockingbird.
Horrifying Killer Snail Makeup Tutorial
These killer snails are no masks, but they are certainly more than makeup. The Swedish duo called ellimacs sfx, which is makeup artist Ellinor Rosander and photographer Macs Moser, go through all the steps of making a pretty model look disgusting for Halloween. The results are truly disturbing. But the process of making it can be disturbing, too, because this is not something you’d just throw together at the last minute. These guys have some skills! You’ll also find some simpler Halloween makeup tutorials in a collection at The Daily Dot.
Monday, October 26, 2015
Mark Werewahlfberg
Marky Mark was a shark in the last ADHD cartoon featuring the movie star. Now he’s a werewolf for Halloween! Mark Werewahlfberg introduces us to all the iconic characters of the season, with plenty of almost-puns that you’ll have to supply the punchline for yourself. (via Tastefully Offensive)
Miss Cellania's Links
The Great New England Vampire Panic.
Report: Mom’s Got Her Thing Tonight. (Thanks, Laura!)
The Secrets To Growing A 2,000-Pound Pumpkin. First, you have to have an unrelenting obsession with growing a giant pumpkin.
55 Genuinely Scary TV Episodes. Which one gave you nightmares?
10 Supernatural Fright Films You Might Have Missed. They range from terrifying to silly.
A Man Who Was Never Born Fathers a Child. It’s a case of genetic chimerism.
Death and the Afterlife by Cliff Pickover.
38 Facts on Frankenstein (Including the Aerosmith song it inspired and the reason the Munsters never got sued).
Dancing Lizard
How do desert animals stand walking on that hot sand? This is how. I’m sure you’ve done this dance a time or two on concrete or when you notice your shoes melting. or with your hands when you are carrying some foot that’s just a bit too hot. If only we had musical accompaniment during those times!
Sunday, October 25, 2015
Super Talented Pets
I enjoyed this compilation of pets who perform remarkable tricks. Watch a hamster practice his backflips! Watch a bird play basketball! Watch a dog catch flying potato peelings! And best of all- the cat who rolls the toilet paper back up! (via Tastefully Offensive)
Backwards Backwards Race
This video of a short footrace looks a little strange. They take strangely small steps, and they keep looking over their shoulders. It’s just weird.
See, this is a backwards foot race. Everyone is running backwards! But the video has been reversed, so that they start at the finish line and run to the starting line. Meanwhile, the audio is still run in the right direction. Got all that? (via Digg)
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Rhapsody in Blue
This is so good, why don’t you play it while you’re doing something else in another window, like checking email or playing a game. It will make the whole next seventeen minutes so much more pleasant. The New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, performing George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
Han Solo's Flashback
The best part of the official trailer for The Force Awakens is the part where Han Solo assures Finn and Rey that the stories they’ve heard are true. What must he be thinking when he says that?
Nick Skywalk remixed the trailer with clips from other films to make “those stories about what happened” real, to Solo and to us, which just makes looking forward to the new movie more exciting. This is really well done. (via Uproxx)
Nana Goes Trick-or-Treating
The idea behind “trick or treat” is the implied threat of playing tricks on a homeowner if the treats aren’t given. That’s extortion. But Nana the border collie has a better technique, the “trick for treat”! She goes to a neighbor in her ladybug costume and performs her best tricks to earn treats. (via Tastefully Offensive)
Movie Worms Ranked by Size
Quick- think of all the movies you know that have important worms. Those will probably be the movies included in this supercut from Atlas Obscura. They start out small and cute, but the cuteness goes away pretty quickly. What’s left is an ever-growing menace of slithery, hungry, enormous cinematic worms!
Friday, October 23, 2015
An Honest Trailer for Back to the Future
Screen Junkies dissects the three movies of the Back to the Future trilogy, and comes to the conclusion that they are all the same except for the fashions. Great Scott!
Of course, it’s never a good idea to deconstruct a time-travel movie (or series of movies) too thoughtfully. You could end up with a headache. Or Primer. (via Gamma Squad)
7th Annual Riverside Halloween House Light Show
Kevin and Amber Judd of Creative Lighting Displays have once again set up a friend’s house to entertain passers-by for Halloween This year’s show features the songs “Ghostbusters,” Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” “This is Halloween,” and Bobby Pickett’s “Monster Mash.” Thousands of color-changing LED lights are accompanied by strobe lights, flood lights, and two Matrix boards, as well as tombstones and hand-carved pumpkins. My favorite new feature is the flames in the windows. If you can get to Riverside, California, here are the particulars for the show. (via HuffPo)
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