John Rozum's Blog, page 9

31 Days of Halloween - Day 30

Here's part two of my visual tour of Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France. To see part one simply scroll down to yesterday's midnight post.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 29 - Movie

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a position as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. Located in the Rockies, the hotel will be completely cut off once winter sets in. Aside from the isolation, Jack and his family (Shelly Duvall and Danny Lloyd) must also deal with the malevolent hotel's ghosts, Jack's descent into violent madness, and young Danny's psychic abilities called the shining.

The Shining (1980) directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on the novel by Stephen King, is a movie that I disliked for years, but gradually, over time, have learned to enjoy for its merits. As a stylishly made film full of fantastic imagery it's wonderful. The acting is great and it has incredible discordant music selected for its score. As a horror film, it's pretty much a bust to me. Kubrick's style of directing always keeps the viewer outside looking in, and not an active participant in what is going on, so there is a remove that keeps the viewer from engaging on the visceral level necessary for a good horror story to work. Nicholson is exceptional as Jack Torrance, but is presented in a way that does not suggest a caring family man trying to build a life before being undermined and influenced by the Overlook's malevolent nature. Nicholson's Torrance seems like he's just one step away from madness from the beginning. I've been training myself to get past those two negative aspects and to allow myself to enjoy The Shining for its strengths.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 29 - Book

Ghostland by Edward Parnell. William Collins. 2019 This is not a travel guide to haunted England, but a travelogue of the country and of personal history. Edward Parnell who has loved ghost stories from an early age, traverses the country to sites connected with various authors of ghost stories, the stories themselves, and even BBC and cinematic adaptations. His travels often intersect with places that he'd lived, or visited on familiy excursions, and the memories associated with those trips often entangles with those of the ghost stories. Not all of the ghosts are literary. Parnell has suffered devastating loss, and this book is as much a love letter to those who left him as it is to the stories that inspired him. This was a very engaging read. Even if, like myself, you've read countless ghost stories, this book will make you want to return to old favorites as well as seek out some you may have missed. I'm also really dying to see all those BBC adaptations, especially of the M.R. James stories. I've known about them for ages but have never seen any. The trick for me with Ghostland is not knowing where to shelve it. I actually have a number of regional ghost tour books, but I'm not sure this belongs with them, or with my collections of ghost stories.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 29

The last of my travel photo posts takes us to Père Lachaise Cemetery covering 110 acres in Paris, France. It truly is a city of the dead and is filled with amazing monuments, crypts and tombs. There are also many notable people buried there. You can find out its incredible history and the names of its most famous inhabitants at the official website. This post will be in two parts. Part two will appear tomorrow.

#1 Days of Halloween - Day 28 - Movie

Your enjoyment of Cartoon Roots: Halloween Haunts will depend upon your affinity for early circle and rubber hose style animation. Fifteen animated and live action films containing animation from 1907-1936 are provided in chronological order. These include appearances from Koko the Clown, Felix the Cat, and even one of Walt Disney's Alice shorts. Nothing is scary, most aspire to be amusing, but in this era of animation any visual gag was a novelty, and storytelling took a back seat to visual gags, so you get a lot of repeated animation cycles of bouncing skeletons and so forth.

I, personally, find a lot of charm in these early cartoons, but can only watch a handful at a time. Many of these have circulated you tube for years now, but have never look as good as they do on this bluray which also includes new musical scores in order to allow the restorers to hold a copyright on these particular restored prints. Watching one, or two of these cartoons between some classic horror films would make for a perfect evening of Halloween viewing.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 28 - Book

Don't Turn Out the Lights - Edited by Jonathan Maberry. Harper Collins. 2020. In 1981 a thin book of creepy campfire-type stories aimed at young readers appeared. The stories were very short and set up almost like jokes with macabre punchlines. There was a premise, a set up, and a dark finish. Characters were thinly drawn. No matter, this book was extremely popular (and followed by two more) and hgave many kids nightmares, no doubt fuelled by Stephen Gammell's unsettling illustrations. The book was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz. I was too old to be the target audience for these books when they came out. I was aware of them, but would noy investigate them until many years later. Jonatahn Maberry was also too old for them when they first hit the scene but took a copy camping with him and recognized the power of those stories whie out alone in the middle of nowhere. Don't Turn Out the Lights is a tribute anthology to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It contains 35 stories by some of the top spooky YA authors out there. Like the books this is in tribute to, most of the stories are very short, though a few run a bit longer. They also typically foow the format of the original's tales, joke-like in structure with more attention paid to the details than to the characters, though typically, the inhabitants of these stories have a bit more meat on their bones. The stories here are all quite good, and are entertaining, even though, I'm quite a bit beyond the age of the intended audience at this point. each story is accompanied by an atmospheric illustration by the amazing Iris Compiet who is going to explode in popularity soon. If you are a fan of the Scary Stories books, this is a worthy successor.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 28

Along with the other perennial Halloween symbols such as the witch, the Jack O'Lantern, the Black Cat, and skeletons is the owl. I've always liked owls, and owls as decor. They don't show upas often as Halloween decorations these days. I still hope to have a taxidermied barn owl in my collection, but the road to ownership in the United States is a complicated, difficult one. In the meantime here are some vintage Halloween owl images I've acculmulated over the years.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 27 - Movie

A group of friends enter the house of their friend Tyler. They find Tyler's mom, dead of an apparent overdose, and a paranoid Tyler hiding in a closetmwho then attacks and injures two of them with a knofe before being subdued. Some time later the group has a reuinion, and a wake for Tyler's mother, at her cabin in the woods. The rebonding between the group is a rough process. No one really trusts Tyler even though he's on medication and claims he's better. While scattering his mother's ashes, Tyler witnesses a shimmering, permeable wall surrounding him. He thinks it's a hallucination until later his friends all witness it too, only now it has expanded into a long corridor. This anomoly starts rewiring their brains. They can hear the pilots talking in a plane flying far overhead, then they start intercepting each others private inner thoughts. Paranoia grows as do violent acts, and everything begins to unravel. This corridor just wants to connect, but not simply between itself and the friends, but connect the friends as well, and this is something human brains just weren't meant to do without adverse consequences. QWhen Tyler figures out that the goal is much larger than simply the Corridor and the five of them he tries to stop it. The Corridor (2010) is an ambitious, low budget, well acted movie, that slipped under my radar. It is similar in nature to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" or Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, with an alien phenomenon that begins to transform the life forms living within it's influence. The script, by Josh MacDonald, is well written, but I had some issues with the pacing. It has a nice slow build to it, letting the interrelationships between the characters breathe and isolating Tyler from the others. Once the violence sets in, it seems like everything begins to happen all at once and then the movie is over, taking away a lot of the satisfaction that viewing the first 2/3 brought. If you want a smart, though uneven, science fiction/horror film that doesn't spell everything out, you may want to give this a look. If you need something with more visceral chills and thrills, this probably is not for you.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 27 - Book

From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea edited by Mike Ashley. British Library. 2018.


In the fifteen short stories contained in this volume we are given a range of types of weird sea story. The stories represent the ghost story, Flying Dutchman story, Marie Celeste story, desert island tale, revenge from beyond the grave story, sea monster tale, Sargasso sea tale, strange submarine story, and others. The quality across these stories is generally high with no clunkers in the batch. Most, if not all,  of the stories, including the one by William Hope Hodgson, will be unfamiliar to most readers.  The final story, "No Ships Pass" by Lady Eleanor Smith, concerning a group of disparate castaways trapped together on an island that seems to change position around the globe, is probably the best of the lot.

I recommend this book and the other titles being published by the British Library in their "Tales of the Weird" line.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 27

Actor, special effects technician, and archivist Bob Burns has an incredible collection of science fiction, fantasy and horror props (20th Century Fox gave him essentially everything they had from Alien), but for many years, assisted by many of the top talent in Hollywood, he went above and beyond what was necessary to entertain trick or treators ringing his doorbell. Below are a couple videos of his collection followed by videos of his Halloween extravaganzas.