Lots of people don’t like wasps. And even people who have no particular animosity toward ants are not wild about seeing hordes of army ants on the move.
Well, imagine waking up one morning and seeing a living rope of army ants attack a wasp nest on your house?
That’s gonna give some people the heebie geebies….
Just a short, amusing Halloween dog video:
In the menagerie of paranormal/imaginary creatures, Shadow People are just that: shadow-like or completely black beings in the shape of people. Some say they’re evil spirits or aliens, others tricks of the imagination, fatigued brains or sleep paralysis nightmares. I mentioned this to a friend, and he said “Oh yeah, I’ve seen those!”
Hell, there’s an entire archive of people to have claimed to see them. Some seem benign or helpful. Others? Not so much. Some seem to wear hats. Then again, people now claim to see Slendarman and Chupacabras, so it hardly proves anything.
There are lots of “shadow people” videos on YouTube and most are painfully fake, obvious superimposition shots, etc. Want an unconvincing compilation video? Of course you do!
Here’s another one, with a couple of repeats, though these seem least slightly less embarrassing than most:
(The guy with the super-haunted house in the last video has his own video channel There’s also a Facebook page debunking it. )
Nothing says “science to benefit humanity” quite like tricking people into thinking that “Shadow People” are in the room with them.
Researchers scanned the brains of 12 people with neurological disorders, who had reported experiencing a ghostly presence.
They found that all of these patients had some kind of damage in the parts of the brain associated with self-awareness, movement and the body’s position in space.
In further tests, the scientists turned to 48 healthy volunteers, who had not previously experienced the paranormal, and devised an experiment to alter the neural signals in these regions of the brain.
They blindfolded the participants, and asked them to manipulate a robot with their hands. As they did this, another robot traced these exact movements on the volunteers’ backs.
When the movements at the front and back of the volunteer’s body took place at exactly the same time, they reported nothing strange.
But when there was a delay between the timing of the movements, one third of the participants reported feeling that there was a ghostly presence in the room, and some reported feeling up to four apparitions were there.
Two of the participants found the sensation so strange, they asked for the experiments to stop.
The researchers say that these strange interactions with the robot are temporarily changing brain function in the regions associated with self-awareness and perception of the body’s position.
The team believes when people sense a ghostly presence, the brain is getting confused: it’s miscalculating the body’s position and identifying it as belonging to someone else.
There are multiple shadow people movies on IMDB, all of which get ratings that range from mediocre to horrible (and the best seems to be a romantic drama that has nothing to do with horror or the supernatural).
Also, here’s a list of possible explanations for shadow people.
(For more creepy paranormal entities, see the post on Black Eyed Kids.)
Pleasant dreams…
Lifeforce
Directed by Tobe Hooper
Written by Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby, based on Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires
Starring Steve Railsback, Mathilda May, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Patrick Stewart
I avoided Lifeforce when it came out because the reviews were considerably less than positive, it was a Golan-Globus production (two names that did not spell quality), and the whole thing had a whiff of cheesiness about it. But with Halloween approaching, we thought it was time to give it a try.
I actually enjoyed it a bit more than I expected, despite the fact that it steals generously from just about every successful 1979-1984 science fiction/fantasy/horror film, from Alien (O’Bannon) to Poltergeist (Hooper) to Dawn of the Dead to The Hunger to The Keep, plus a big helping of Quartermass and the Pit.
A multinational expedition is sent to Hailey’s Comet, where they discover a huge, 100+ mile long derelict spaceship. Exploration reveals dead giant bat-like creatures…and three naked, perfect human beings in suspended animation inside crystalline coffins. Naturally they take them on board.
You can guess how well that works out for them.
Soon the female (Mathilda May) is wandering around London naked, sucking the lifeforce (via swirly blue beams) out of people, who in turn become lifeforce vampires themselves. And the race is on to track her down, lead by the captain and sole mission survivor (Steve Railsback) who has a deep psychic bond with her, along with an SAS colonel (Peter Firth). And they soon find out that their quarry can switch bodies…
Despite it’s reputation, Lifeforce has a lot going for it. Hooper keeps things moving along at a steady clip, the disparate elements mostly make sense together, the John Dykstra special effects are generally more than passable, and the movie (budgeted at a then-pretty-hefty $25 million) avoids the usual Golan-Globus cheapness. There’s an excellent cast of British character actors (including a post-Equus Firth and a pre-Star Trek Patrick Stewart) in supporting roles. Plus it hales from The 1980s Golden Age of Mainstream Female Movie Nudity, and a 20-year old Mathilda May is very easy on the eyes.
Also, it may be the first use of “body hoping psychic vampire” idea, which I didn’t encounter until Stephen Gallagher’s Valley of Lights (1987). I assume that (and many other elements) are taken directly from the Colin Wilson novel, which I own but haven’t read yet.
Not everything makes sense, but usually the movie moves quickly enough that you don’t have time to think about it. The “London goes crazy” scenes are good, but probably go on too long, and look more like an attack of zombies than vampires. The special effects for the “real form” of the vampires seen near the climax looks pretty cheesy. Oh, and you get possibly Patient Zero of the now ubiquitous “glowing blue space beam” trope.
Here’s the (R-rated) trailer:
It isn’t so great that you should pay $80 bucks for the Shout Factory Blu-ray of it. But if you’re looking for a gory-but-not-really-scary science fiction horror action film for the Halloween season, you could certainly do a lot worse.
Imagine that you’re a well-off Chinese businessman who lives in a posh condo in Beijing.
Now imagine that you start seeing people in your building who are decidedly un-posh, people who actually seem to be quite poor, but somehow they’re living in your building.
Seems your building has unwanted guests. Just like the spider man of Denver, or the Japanese man who found out an unwanted guest had been living in his house a year.
Only on a much bigger scale.
How much bigger?
Think 400 people.
So you remember: If you live in an apartment building or condo, and start seeing strange people, there may be more of them than you think…
Many of the must-have homeowner amenities considered an essential feature are no longer to be found on modern homes. No longer are buildings including such once-essential features as coal cellars, lightning rods, fallout shelters or murder tunnels.
And remember: A murder tunnel is completely different than a corpse hatch.
Any schoolboy whose studied the French revolution has wondered: How long does a human head retain awareness after decapitation?
Here’s a roundup of information on that topic.
Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds … I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible, exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to see every day in the exercise of our profession, or as in those just dead.It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions … Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves … After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out. It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.
Snip.
My friend’s head came to rest face up, and (from my angle) upside-down. As I watched, his mouth opened and closed no less than two times. The facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion, followed by terror or grief. I cannot exaggerate and say that he was looking all around, but he did display ocular movement in that his eyes moved from me, to his body, and back to me. He had direct eye contact with me when his eyes took on a hazy, absent expression . . . and he was dead.
“It is very possible that a head so removed may remain lucid long enough to know its fate.”
Blink once if you agree…
Yokai is a very broad category of Japanese supernatural entity that can include demons, ghosts, monsters, and just about any other creature from folklore, from microscopic monsters than infect your spleen to dragon-sized titanic snails. Many, but not all, are malevolent, and a goodly number are extremely specific, such as Karakasa kozo, the one-eyed, umbrella-shaped yokai that likes to sneak up on people and lick them with its long tongue.
Here’s a brief guide on identifying various yokai:
There’s also a live-action film featuring 100 of them:
Other Japanese Halloween topics:
In this one, Bimbo is menaced by a veritable legion of phantoms in a graveyard.
(Hat tip: Don Webb.)
Suppose you wanted to do the soundtrack for a horror film: What would you use to score it? Synthesizer? Computer?
Or how about commissioning a custom instrument to make eerie, unnerving sound?
Behold The Apprehension Engine!
The Witch is one of the films Mark Korven has scored, and I just noticed that it seems to have gotten pretty cheap as of late…