“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 […]

Vampires and werewolves may be frightful, but they lack the gnawing existential elan of the terrors of parenthood. Besides all the anxieties about perils which might afflict your offspring, there are more subtle chills — namely the recurring fits of angst over whether the example you’ve tried to set or lessons you’ve tried to impart […]

As I mentioned in my last post before settling back into hiatus, one of my joys of the pandemic era experience was discovering the Model 2 emulator, coded to run games made for Sega’s (surprise, surprise) Model 2 hardware. While I game had originally wanted to play — Virtual On — was tangled up in […]

I just wanted to play Virtual On. That’s all. The mecha-based arena fighter was one of the first games I picked up for my Sega Saturn in the day, and it been decades since I’d last booted it up. The wrinkle was that I didn’t want to play the Saturn version. Don’t get me wrong: […]

First things first: I am incredibly lazy do not lack for well-considered (and self-serving) reasons not to do something. This site has always been something I worked on when I couldn’t do the things I’d rather be doing — be it playing video games, napping next to the puppy, or staring into space for hours […]

…and so we reach the final movement of this year’s danse macabre. It was a bit skeletal as far as content went, but my real purpose was to see if I still had it in me to stick to a daily schedule, even if only for a month. I apparently do, though I have no […]

I grew up in an era where trashy low-budget horror flicks had a marketing presence in newspapers and television. With cable and VCR tech still a ways from becoming ubiquitous household staples, and my peers and I being a little too young (and chicken) to sneak into R-rated movies, these ad spots were the sum […]

It’s like my grandpa used to say: “The only thing worse than a haunted muscle car is a haunted racist muscle car.” Multiple problematic aspects aside, this episode (“The Ghost of General Lee,” 10/29/1979) creeped the heck out of me as a kid, even though it was clearly established as a hoax out of the […]

In Search of… has to be near the top of my personal list of formative TV viewing experiences. The syndicated series covered all manner of topics under the expansive rubric of “strange phenomena,” which was quite the cultural obsession during the uncertainty and turbulent 1970s. The legend of Dracula one week, Amelia Earhart the next, […]

One of the happier events to come out of the pandemic lockdown period was discovering a full run of Our World on YouTube. The short-lived ABC show was a favorite of my teenage self, and its weekly wide-angle coverage of particular historical moments had a tremendous impact on my own academic development. It racked up […]