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 […]

I’ve been filling out my October smörgåsbord of spooky fare with selected episodes of Night Gallery, thus triggering my umpteenth reassessment of that three-season and oh-so-early-1970s attempt to recapture some of that ol’ Twilight Zone magic. Was it a supernatural counterpart to Love American Style‘s mix of celebrity guest stars and cornball black-out gags? Was […]

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:

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Recommended listening:

I was hoping to get a bit more substantive during this countdown but, as they say, the devil is in the details. Recommended listening:

All those PSAs and parental lecture were right — peer pressure can make a person do the darndest thing. I can hear my mom’s voice now: “If Mike Sterling bought some original comics art, would you buy some, too?” Well, yeah, mom. Mike is the coolest cat in the funnybook blogging scene, and that would […]