For a Halloween Horror, how about a song from a band called Suicide actually blamed on causing real suicides? It’s Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop,” about a working stiff who can’t make it, so he kills his wife and kids and then himself, and ends the song screaming in Hell.
Just another feel good 1970s ditty.
(Hat tip: The Professor of Rock, who advises listeners not to listen to the song alone at night…)
Let’s continue yesterday’s giant spider horror theme with a look at some recent video games.
First up: Cassiculus, a game where you face giant spiders underground.
Next up: Daz Games plays Jawbone Hollow, where you face… a giant spider underground.
Finally, Daz also tackles giant spiders in Huntsman, where you face a giant spider…in an office building! This one may have the most realistic spider of all of them.
Sweet dreams, arachnophobs…
We’ve previously featured some giant movie spiders. How about a (theoretically) real life giant spider?
Meet the J’ba Fofi.
The J’ba FoFi, also known as the Congolese Giant Spiders, are a type of large arachnid cryptid which is said to inhabit the forests of the Congo, possibly representing a new species of Arachnida.
Most of the many anecdotal tales describe the spiders digging a shallow tunnel under tree roots and camouflaging it with a large screen of leaves. Then they create an almost invisible web between their burrow and a nearby tree, stringing the whole area with a network of trip lines. Some oblivious animal, that’s likely soon to end up on the creature’s menu, will trip the line alerting the spider. The victim will then be chased into the web. This type of predatory behavior is similar to that of several species of trap-door spider.
Natives claim the J’ba FoFi eggs are a pale yellow-white and shaped like peanuts, and the hatchlings are bright yellow with a purple abdomen. Their coloration becomes darker and brown as they mature. Some of the peoples indigenous to the regions in the Congo where the J’ba FoFi has been seen assert that the spider was once quite common, but has since become very rare. Possibly indicating the species has become endangered due to deforestation.
The fullest account by Westerners appears in a cryptozoological book by George Eberhart. On page 204, Eberhart relates the terrifying experience of an English couple traveling through a region of jungle in what is now called the Congo: “R.K. Lloyd and his wife were motoring in the Belgian Congo in 1938 when they saw a large object crossing the trail in front of them. At first, they thought it was a cat or a monkey, but they soon realized it was a spider with legs nearly 3 feet.”
Cryptozoologist William J. Gibbons has hunted for what some think may be a living Congolese dinosaur called Mokele-mbembe. On his third expedition in search of the creature he came upon natives who related their experiences with giant spiders. He shared his experience with readers upon his return to Canada:
“On this third expedition to Equatorial Africa, I took the opportunity to inquire if the pygmies knew of such a giant spider, and indeed they did! They speak of the J’ba FoFi, which is a “giant” or “great spider.” They described a spider that is generally brown in color with a purple mark on the abdomen. They grow to quite an enormous size with a leg span of at least five feet. The giant arachnids weave together a lair made of leaves similar in shape to a traditional pygmy hut, and spin a circular web (said to be very strong) between two trees with a strand stretched across a game trail.”
“These giant ground-dwelling spiders prey on the diminutive forest antelope, birds, and other small game, and are said to be extremely dangerous, not to mention highly venomous,” Gibbons states. “The spiders are said to lay white, peanut-sized eggs in a cluster, and the pygmies give them a wide berth when encountered, but have killed them in the past. The giant spiders were once very common but are now a rare sight.”
Supposedly someone captured footage of a J’ba Fofi in Mozambique in 2014. Look to the right side of this video:
Amazingly vague footage, is it not?
I think a spider of that size unlikely, but more likely than Mokele-mbembe.
But I don’t think I’ll be vacationing in the Congolese jungle any time soon…
To kick off the Halloween season, here’s Kevin Pollack on the Rich Eisen show talking about greeting Trick-or-Treaters as Christopher Walken:
“Which one of you little freaks can guess what I’ve buried under the house?”
Good times, good times…
Today is Halloween, which means it’s time for the annual Fark scary story thread!
Here are the links to threads from previous years:
While you’re here, feel free to check out some of my other freaky/creepy/scary/silly Halloween posts.
If you’re easily freaked out by ordinary insects, you might not to want this giant insects video:
Obviously AI, but pretty well done. The guy’s entire channel features more of this sepia-toned nightmare fuel…
What’s more Halloween than an iconic horror movie directed by iconic director Stanley Kubrick from an iconic horror novel by Stephen King mocked by iconic Ryan George?
Honestly, I remember not being all that impressed with The Shining when I saw it back in the 1980s. A rewatch is probably overdue.
(And for fans of The Shining, this odd item might be of interest…)
How about a nice helping of existential dread for the Halloween season? But instead of worrying that you’re a fragile shell of decaying cells whose inevitable demise will terminate your brief, flickering existence in a howling void of meaningless nothingness, it’s the worry that neither you nor your too, too fragile husk is real at all, and that you’re just a string of 1s and 0s being run inside a computer.
Welcome to simulation theory!
Bostrom believes each of these is equally likely to be true.”
Personally, I think simulation theory is probably wrong for a meta-critique reason. All previous metaphorical understanding of the universe (as clockwork mechanism, as organism) have proven wrong, so this one is likely to be wrong as well…
How about some unsettling doorbell footage for the Halloween season? Some of it is of home invaders, and others that have ill intent, but some of it just seems to be of weird or deranged people whose motives are unclear.
As I may have mentioned before, I don’t tend to play horror video games, despite reading horror, because I don’t care for some tropes of the genre that appear in almost every game (path dependency and jump scares being two), but I do enjoy watching Daz Games play them, since he freaks out enjoyably at some scenes.
This time around he’s playing Still Wakes The Deep, a horror game set on a Scottish oil rig in the North Sea that manages to dredge up something horrifically eldritch. Though the path dependency is there, the game has two big things going for it: Superb voice acting for well-realized characters and a really detailed, immersive setting of a working oil rig that provides a lot of other dangers in addition to the monster.