Scary: Linda Blair in Hell Night (1981) Scarier: Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973) Scariest: Linda Blair in Roller Boogie (1979) The sanity-shattering apex of existential terror: Linda Blair on The Love Boat (1982) Recommended listening:

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 […]

Between The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973)… …and The Devil’s Rain (1975)… …the once and future Captain of the USS Enterprise didn’t fare well in his early 1970s encounters with the occult. Come to think of it, he didn’t do much better against spiders, either. Recommended listening:

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, […]

I am a ghoul who will lurk by your graveside I’ll be the fiend that you’re fighting off We’ll mope forever Knowing together That we did it all for the glory of goth After all these years I’m still wondering whether it was a “Robert Palmer being a Husker Du fan thing” or that some […]

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 […]

All right, my fellow fiends, it’s time to descend into a realm of truly tragic horror… …otherwise known as “mid-1970s primetime television.” “Vampire,” a second season episode of Starsky & Hutch originally aired on October 30, 1976, is part of the long if not proud tradition of tossing some modestly macabre plot into the mix […]

“Y’know, kids, the blood is the life…and it shall be mine!” Recommended listening:

Plans fall apart, interests change over time, but an annual playthrough of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has been a fixture of my October festivities since 1997. The Japanese version of the game — along with Bushido Blade — was the reason I sprung for a region-free modded Playstation back in the day. The tantalizing […]

One of the bigger events that happened during the hiatus was the passing of Ollie Dog last spring. He is much missed, but he had a grand life, was much loved, and left this world peacefully. My opinion that we should maybe wait a bit before getting another canine companion was vetoed by the wife […]