Friday Links: The Town Manager, Darkest Dungeon, and the Ghost of Winston Churchill

There’s quite a bit of good stuff that’s happened this week in the world of the weird, the horrific, the speculative. As always, drop me a line if you’d like to be included in next week’s Friday Links, but for now, here’s the 411 on the bizarre:

At Nev Murray’s Confessions of a Reviewer!! , writer Pembroke Sinclair confessed her past, present, and future: “My current reading list is a bit more eclectic than it used to be when I was younger. When I went to college, rarely did I have time to read for enjoyment, but as an English major, I was exposed to the classics.  And I loved the vast majority of them.  Every so often, I will pull Alice in Wonderland off the shelf and reread it.  Milton’s Paradise Lost helped shape the themes I explore in my own stories, and I am forever grateful to my professors for helping me learn to look at the world critically.”
The ghost of Winston Churchill is apparently haunting the London Underground: “‘I’m a big believer in stuff like this but I have never ever seen anything like this before.’ The photograph, which was taken last summer, has since been showed to a number of mediums and ghost hunters, with many agreeing with Mr Cooper. The coach driver said: ‘I have since heard stories about people who have seen the ghost of Churchill down there.”
Ruined Head reviewed the horror/action video game Darkest Dungeon: “The twist here is that the characters suffer mental as well as physical damage, picking up a variety of afflictions—described as Paranoid, Selfish, Abusive, Masochistic—that impact gameplay, requiring a variety of treatments back on the surface. Sometimes, if the stress level becomes high enough, characters simply die of a heart attack before being able to retreat from battle.”
A pressbook from the 1952 Buster Crabbe film King of the Congo fell out of Zombos’ Closet . It includes a coloring sheet for the little ones, so it’s not to be missed.
Things went from bad to worse at the trenchant, incisive R’lyeh Tribune when Sean Eaton analyzed Thomas Ligotti’s The Town Manager: “In The Town Manager the work of this appointed official seems pointless and inconsequential.  He and his predecessors are typically seen napping at their desks.  Why should his disappearance cause much alarm?  What does the town manager actually do? What does it mean for the town to lose its town manager, or be given a new one?  And yet the town manager appears to have nearly god-like power.”
Vintage Everyday brought us 25 photos of vintage costumes that are simply…inexplicable.
John Kenneth Muir , a master at deconstructing old, supposedly bad films and rehabilitating them, defended Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: “The “nuke the fridge” moment in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is absolutely no more ludicrous than that inflatable raft scene in Temple of Doom.   Yet audience tastes have changed dramatically, and modern audiences don’t buy the “nuke the fridge” set-piece in the way that viewers in 1984 accepted the raft cliffhanger.  Nor do they buy “aliens” in an adventure film, or a geriatric hero defeating bad guys.  “Realism” is not served by these creative choices, and so these choices are, widely in some cases, derided.”
Bryan Stumpf interviewed writer/director David Munz-Maire at The Slaughtered Bird : “Born to expats, my formative years were spent living around our globe, and I find myself extremely fortunate to have been able to sample dozens of cultures through this cosmopolitan upbringing. The communal aspect of the filmmaking is one of my favorite parts of the business, and my worldly perspective has allowed me to be better adept at working with people from all walks of life, more open minded when confronted with new ideas, and generally more inventive when tackling creative problem solving.”
You do wear your seat belt whenever you’re in a car, right? Well, if you don’t, this Supergirl comic book from Jon’s Random Acts of Geekery will convince you otherwise.
Can you believe that it’s been 35 years since the movie Porky’s was made? The House of Self-Indulgence can, and it brought us the highlights: “In fact, the film’s two funniest scenes both involve Doug McGrath failing miserably when it came to stifling his laughter. The first one, like I’ve already mentioned, involves him trying not to laugh when he hears Kim Cattrall being screwed upstairs. And the second one has him unsuccessfully trying not to laugh as he listens to Miss Balbricker () explain to the school’s prudish principal that she wants put out an all-points bulletin for the teenage boy-penis she saw (and grabbed onto for a spell) in the girl’s shower.”
Father Cipriano de Meo, a longtime exorcist, told us how to tell if someone has been demonically possessed : “The key to telling the difference, he said, is through discernment in prayer on the part of the exorcist and the possessed – and in the potentially possessed person’s reaction to the exorcist himself and the prayers being said. The exorcist will typically say “(a) prolonged prayer to the point where if the Adversary is present, there’s a reaction,” he said. “A possessed person has various general attitudes towards an exorcist, who is seen by the Adversary as an enemy ready to fight him.””
In honor of yesterday’s celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, Ghost Hunting Theories did an overview of forgotten races of little people: “Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “Hobbit,” was found in Jakarta, Indonesia and aged at about 17,000 years ago. His brain was the size of a chimp, his body 3 feet long, but his feet strangely long and flat at 7-1/2 inches. The assumption by his very flat feet is that he was unable to run like we do, but could walk. In fact, though he was a hominin, he did not seem to have feet that were anything like our own evolutionary process.”
Taliesin Meets the Vampires reviewed the segment of the 1964 Japanese movie Kwaidan titled, The Woman of the Snow: “This was a beautifully shot segment, the painted backdrops during the snow storm segment was nothing short of gorgeous and added an eerie, overworldly aspect to the scene.”
Here, I pointed you to Valicity Garris’s review of my novel The Nephilim and the False Prophet, and told you why you should watch the 2013 miniseries The Bible .

Illustration by Earl Geier for Call of Cthulhu’s At Your Door supplement.