Boris Karloff is horror royalty, whose presence could elevate even the worst cinematic drek — and he starred in a lot of it, especially during his final years.
Unfortunately that legendary status has been somewhat undercut for me by the utterly random epiphany I had some years ago that he bears a striking resemblance to the equally legendary character actor Abe Vigoda.
Recommended listening: They should’ve been huge, but got buried in a sea of flannel.
At my elementary school, it was a thing to send the entire sixth grade class off to a campground in the Nashoba Valley for an entire week to learn about nature and shit from a bunch of earthy crunchy undergrads.
I absolutely dreaded the experience — not just because the prospect of being with trapped for five full days with the same kids who’d made my life a living hell was uncut nightmare fuel, but also because my twelfth birthday happened to fall during the week in question.
To make things even worse, my only friend in the class got sent home a couple of days in because of a broken leg and we got socked in by a late season storm which dropped a foot of snow halfway through the week.
I ended up spending most of the time on a little ledge I found in the rafters of the communal bunkhouse, reading and rereading the copies of the original Marvel Handbook’s Books of the Dead I’d had the foresight to pack in my duffel bag.
When I got tired of those, I checked out what was on the shelves of the camp’s micro-library. Most of the books were, unsurprisingly, YA treatises on loving trees, hating pollution, and believing in yourself — all messages I can get behind, but are hardly stirring stuff for a tweenaged nerd. The library did have a copy of this, however —
— Rod Serling’s Triple W: Witches, Warlocks, and Werewolves, a 1963 anthology from the YA school of “familiar horror-adjacent celebrity lends their name and a quickie into to some anthology of spookshow standards.” Being a mark for that sort of fare, I devoured it over the course of a couple of evenings even though only one of the dozen stories made any lasting impression upon me, “And Not Quite Human” by Joe L. Hensley.
The short version (with spoilers) is that the the crew of an Arcturan Empire spacecruiser is returning home after nuking poor Planet Earth. The ship is carrying a small contingent of captive earthlings who’ve mysteriously managed to survive said nuking, and their presence has started to make the otherwise emotionless and dreamless Arcturans have sheet-soiling nightmares and a crippling sense of dread. That’s because the captive “humans” are actually vampires whose wooden stakes have been burned away by atomic fire and are tickled pink at the prospect of feasting on an entire galactic empire of hapless dipshits with zero knowledge of their strategies and weaknesses.
WHAT A SHOCKING TWIST! No wonder Rod dug it,
(To be fair, the combo of nuclear annihilation and a bunch of asshole fascists getting turned into snack food was very much up twelve year old Andrew’s alley.)
Recommended listening: In early 1980s Los Angeles, it would’ve been called deathrock, but in early 1980s Britain it was called “neither true goth nor true punk and thus destined for the memory hole.”
Sore. Why not?
Given the current state of the world, I doubt anyone would notice.
Recommended listening: The Horned One’s got game.
On March 13, 1987 — also known as my fifteenth birthday — MTV decided change up its Friday Night Party Zone formula by having legendary horror host John Zacherle, the Cool Ghoul himself, cause Downtown Julie Brown to flee the set and make may for the FRIDAY NIGHT HORROR ZONE.
That’s some first rate acting, Julie. No wonder you landed a role in Sharknado 5.
(Full disclosure: I have carried an irrational grudge towards Downtown Julie Brown since the time I took the last commuter train out of Boston after catching a Dead Milkmen show at the Paradise in the late 1980s, and I was stuck behind a trio of drunk white girls who spent the entire trip to Mishawum Station loudly trying to top each other’s impressions of her.)
Regrettably, the rest of the hour-long block fails to live up to that promising start. The fault wasn’t Zacherle’s, who gamely indulged in the candy-cornball bits and punny patter he was brought on to do. The problem was in the playlist which, apart from Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare” and Ozzy’s “Bark at the Moon” was same slow pitch MOR stuff one could’ve gotten by flipping the channel to VH-1.
Expecting too much from MTV has been a fool’s errand since the station’s inception, but 1987 was also a banner year for the kind of music that attracted black-garbed humanities majors with notebooks full of poetry and severe Vitamin D deficiencies. It would’ve been nice for Siouxsie or the Sisters or the Phantasmagoria Era Damned to make a token presence, but instead we got Stevie Ray Vaughn and Los Lobos and the fucking Motels.
Oh, and Ray Parker Jr’s Ghostbusters theme, but that was to “spooky music video” blocks what “Achy Breaky Heart” would be to 1993 wedding receptions.
Last time I checked, there was a copy of the show up on YouTube, though all the original commercials present in my archived version trimmed out. That’s a damn shame, because they went a long way towards offsetting the disappointing video selections and give an fascinating glimpse of the State of Things circa Spring 1987.
Besides such timepieces as spots for the Spellman Center (the only treatment ward for AIDS in New York at the time), the Blake Edwards bomb Blind Date, and Michael J. Fox flogging Diet Pepsi, there’s an early commercial for the Nintendo Entertainment System in there…
…in which a group of youths in totalitarian breakdancing wear are assaulted by a Skynet subnode formed from the console’s original “Black Box” lineup of games.
There’s also a sport for the then-recently released Nightmare on Elm Street 3 featuring testimonials by audience members whose extreme levels of 1987-ness are more terrifying than anything in the actual movie.
These dudes are my favorite, and not because they resembled the group I sat with in the cafeteria during 9th Grade.
Recommended listening: Yeah, it’s so obvious that it borders on a cop-out, but the classics never go out of style.
I have not been idle during my long hiatus from Armagideon Time. In fact, a good part of my free time has been spent dabbling in a form of digital necromancy, pulling and salvaging interesting and otherwise “lost” bits from a stream of block VHS-to-digital transfers that have been getting dumped onto the Internet Archive.
The quality of the recordings has been fairly decent considering the limitations of the source technology and the age of the tapes, which date back as far as 1987.
There are a lot of truly damaged recordings in there, though — some originating from the source signal, some from the imperfections of 1980’s A/V technology, and some from the entropic rot that magnetic tape undergoes over three decades. It’s irksome when it affects something I did want to crop out and archive, but otherwise I enjoy the nostalgic vibe it evokes.
After all, what are these recordings if not digitized ghosts, ragged and distorted echoes struggling to maintain a foothold in the present day material world?
Recommended listening: It’s always weird to be reminded that they started off as a junior division Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Confession time:
I cannot stand having makeup or any form of goop applied to my face. It’s one of my odd sensory tics and got me into loads of trouble when I was a young tyke and would scream and hide behind the plaid orange sofa when my artist mom wanted to apply the finishing touches to whatever elaborate Halloween costume she’d crafted for me that year.
It’s why I’m wearing an expression of abject shellshocked misery in every Halloween photo taken of me prior to 1979.
More than my usual resting hangdog face, I mean.
Recommended listening: From Boingo’s “best” album, in the sense that Trouser Press merely damned it with faint praise instead of calling for the public execution of the parties involved. Still, nothing compared to the blazing mad-ons they harbored towards INXS and Robert Palmer.
New York hipsters, man.
Testing…
Testing…
Is this thing still on?
Sigh.
If nothing else, the thick veneer of dust and curtains of cobwebs which have accumulated in Armagideon Time HQ will add to the ambience of my foolhardy attempt to reanimate the rotting corpse of this blog.
I don’t even have a concept of plan for where this will lead — and that, my friends-in-fright, is truly scary.
Recommended listening: Not my favorite rendition of this familiar standard, but she was the vocalist Johnny Mercer had in mind when originally penned the lyrics for it.
Sorry, kids, I really flaked on this year’s countdown.
It started off on a decent note, but the general state of affairs led me to call time on the spooky stuff halfway through the month and opt for more cozy comforts.
It’s not doomerism. Just a general sense of distraction.
Thanks to those of you who did tune in for what little there was. It was nice seeing those familiar names in the comments. It still haven’t written this place off entirely, but the stars aren’t quite aligned yet for me to consider what that would look like in practice.
Happy Halloween!
Recommended listening:
“I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.
But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be — sexy as fuck.”
Fun Fact: My maternal ancestors founded the real life community upon which H.P. Lovecraft based Innsmouth. There’s even a marker there featuring several appearances of that branch of the family’s surname.
Recommended listening: More inexplicable strangeness from forgotten aeons.
If you’re going to tamper in God’s domain, the least you can do is invest in a shatterproof containment flask.
Recommended listening: Breaking up is shard to do.
