Dylan Charles's Blog, page 16

31 Days of Spoooktacular: It Approaches

Halloween is loping forward at a dead run, though you have your back turned and you’re not aware of how close it is to pouncing on you. As always, I feel like I didn’t do enough Halloween stuff, that I did too much too early and burned out too fast.

But I’ve decided to let it go this year.

There’s only so much you can do to celebrate and when you start thinking, “I haven’t celebrated enough”, then it’s time to step away, because you’ve made it Not Fun.

And you’re going to have a bad time.

So, in...

31 Days of Spoooktacular: Factory Built Haunted Houses

I have never really wanted to go into one of those haunted houses that pop up this time of year. You know the ones; they advertise every five seconds on TV between September 1st and October 31st, the commercials always show screaming frat boys, and there are a lot of pumpkin graphics while the guy who also announces for local monster truck shows does the voice-over.

The idea of them, their very foundation, doesn’t appeal to me. I can’t imagine anything less scary than a large group of people b...

31 Days of Spoooktacular: Sweet Dreams Are Made of These

When I was younger, I used to have nightmares on occasion; terrible things that woke me up in the middle of the night, sweating and shaken. I once woke up to pitch black and I could have sworn that I heard someone whisper, “I’m going to kill you”.

There were a couple of uneasy moments while I tried to convince myself that the voice wasn’t real.

I’ve woken up once or twice feeling like I’ve been crying.

But here’s the paradox, the tricky little bit that I throw in to make my life more interesting...

31 Days of Spoooktacular: The Gauntlet

Way back in the beginning, you may recall that I said that 31 Days of Spoooktacular was part of how I planned to force writing to become a habit for me. Writing has always been something I do sporadically,intermittently and with no true pattern. Even over the course of this year, where I’ve given myself the goal of writing ten entries a month, which I have done so far, I don’t evenly space those entries throughout the month. Usually they’re all shoved in at the end of the month and then I go...

31 Days of Spoooktacular: Masks

Masks are scary. And not just masks of scary aliens or wolves or demons. I know for a fact that there are people who find the above mask creepy, even though there is nothing inherently creepy about it. There’s no blood or fangs. There’s nothing sinister about it. It represents no gender, race or deformity. It is a blank form.

And yet, this mask elicitsuneasiness. If you don’t think this is scary, think about MichaelMyer’smask. It is a white, featureless face. Or think about Jason’s mask. It’s...

31 Days of Spoooktacular: Do You Fear What I Fear?

If I were to catalog the myriad fears and superstitions that bind me, we would be here the rest of the night and you would be feeling increasingly sorry for me. They range from the mild, but compelling (numbers, silver, threes) to the more provoking, but manageable (don’t touch, please don’t touch, and now there’s germs) to the almost paralyzing (Emily’s late and almost certainly dead, that food istoo old, this person is angry and I have to make them UN-angry). And, if you didn’t know it, thr...

31 Days of Spoooktacular: The Haunting of Dylan Charles

I recently talked about the fact that I now live in a haunted apartment. I don’t know who or what it’s haunted by, I just know that, on occasion, it gets all creepy up in here.

There have been new sounds added into the mix. We both heard the sound of something thumping on the side of the house, though when I went onto the porch to investigate, I didn’t see anything there. There are the usual creaks and moans as though someone was walking on the ceiling and doors continue to open and close of t...

31 Days of Spoooktacular: The Remade

Between 2007 and 2010, all three of the major slasher icons were featured in reboots of the old movies. Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers stalked the silver screen again in “fresh” “re-imaginings” of the old movies. Halloween came first, followed shortly by Friday the 13th and ANightmare on Elm Street. The idea that this was even a profitable idea probably came from the success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, which grossed over $107 million dollars worldwide. And that’s...

31 Days of Spoooktacular: Spoooky Beer Review: Paulaner’s Oktoberfest Wiesn

I’m taking it upon myself to review as many Oktoberfests and Pumpkin Ales as I possibly can during the Halloween Season. All while listening to “Thriller”.

Next up: Paulaner’s Oktoberfest Wiesn

I love free things. We all love free things. If you see something in the store and it comes with something FREE, it triggers the same gut reaction as when you saw the free prize inside label on a cereal box. You HAD to have that cereal. Since I have the emotional maturity of a ten-year-old, this kind of...

31 Days of Spoooktacular: Spoooky Beer Review: Blue Moon’s Harvest Pumpkin Ale

I’m taking it upon myself to review as many Oktoberfests and Pumpkin Ales as I possibly can during the Halloween Season. All while listening to “Thriller”.

Next up: Blue Moon’s Harvest Pumpkin Ale

I know Blue Moon entirely through theirBelgianale, which I do not like. To be honest, I don’t like any Belgian ales, on any level. So I took a chance here, a deep personal risk, to try their Harvest Pumpkin Ale. For all I knew, it was a Belgian that tasted like pumpkins. And no one wants that. Not eve...