This Halloween was a blur. On top of my aggressive posting schedule, I was working a lot, too.
So let's see what I accomplished this past month.
October Horror Movie Marathon
My theme this month was "Small town horror," focusing on movies between 1985 and 1986. I expanded it to 1983 to 1987 to cover my high school years, and again to cover 1980 to 1989. The theme I discovered was "Horror Comes Home." I dealt with movies where the horror was largely local. You no longer went to some strange land to see horror; it came home to you, or, more often, it was already there waiting for you.
The main takeaway for me is that small towns make good horror settings because they feel familiar and safe, yet that same familiarity carries a history of secrets and old grudges, stories everyone knows but few take seriously.
Jackson, Sunny Valley, and Carbon Vale for NIGHT SHIFT are set in just such territory. The supernatural is at its most effective when it is paired with the everyday, where one can have a Friday night football game and school on Monday while something impossible is going on three streets over.
I was also reminded of how willing 1980s horror was to be weird. These movies mixed horror with comedy, science fiction, heavy metal, teen drama, fantasy, and whatever else they could get away with. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it absolutely did not. But even the failures could be fun. That willingness to experiment is part of what made this month enjoyable, and apparently, forty years later, I am still not done exploring it.
I am torn on my next theme. I kinda want to do a Chicago-based one, but also I want to do one where I just cover movies I have already seen and talk about here but have never given a proper October Horror Movie Marathon presence.
ETA: I started building a list of all the horror movies I have seen that I have not reviewed here, and I am already at 50+, and I am barely out of the 1970s.
Follow Timothy's board October Horror Movie Challenge on Pinterest.
Mirror Mondays
I wrapped up the Mirror Mondays series I started earlier this year. I am pretty pleased with the themes I explored, and the playing that took place to get to the place to explore them.
Now comes the harder part. Putting it all together into my two big projects.
Coven 13
Having put four issues of Coven 13 behind me, I would say what I like best is not any particular story or author or piece of occult lore. Rather, I like the magazine’s readiness to put all of that in one world. Witches and ghosts, werewolves and vampires, old gods, folk magic, demons, sorcerers, science fiction and Sword & Sorcery are allowed to rub shoulders here with no one making a fuss over which shelf they should be on.
In a historical sense it puts Coven 13 in an interesting position. One has Weird Tales, Unknown Worlds, Robert E. Howard and the older pulp traditions Landis so plainly respected in its history. Before it lies the occult revival of the 70s, modern supernatural horror, and, a few years later, Dungeons & Dragons. I will not go so far as to say Coven 13 had an influence on D&D; there is no evidence for it. What these four issues make plain is that a good many of the ingredients we link to fantasy gaming were already being mixed in the same cultural stew.
Coven 13 may not have influenced D&D, but plenty suggests both were part of the same cultural zeitgeist.
What matters more to me is that Landis returns time and again to the idea that the supernatural has a place in the modern world. The old magic did not vanish with the construction of highways, office buildings, universities and subdivisions. A ghost can take up residence in a suburban home. Your neighbor may be a witch. An old god is still under the ground. And the grimoire works even when the crossroads it refers to is now occupied by a gas station.
I suppose that is why so much of this was right away useful for Jackson and Sunny Valley. I have no desire for the supernatural to be walled off in another world. It should exist beside this one and from time to time intrude upon it. Let there be a mundane map, and one the witches know. Family stories ought to be true and folk remedies effective for reasons long forgotten. Monsters should have a history, not just Hit Dice.
Four issues is hardly a run, but they sufficed.
Coven 13 had a good idea of the supernatural world it wanted: strange and messy, modern and old, frightening and funny, and unwilling to stay in its assigned genre.
Yeah. I can use that.
When I get around to rounding up the rest of the Witchcraft & Sorcery issues, we shall see where that current leads.
Fantasy Fridays
Again this year I did "Urban Fantasy Fridays" and investigated how my Jackson kids look like in other games. I had such a blast with it, and learned a lot about the characters and the setting that I want to keep it going. I might expand it to "Universal" games like GURPS or BRP. Plus I have few more that would have fit if October had been 7-8 weeks.
So that's it for my October!
See you all here next year!