Autumn's here which means Halloween-my favorite holiday-is fast approaching. Here are some links to get you into the spirit or to help keep you there all year long.
The It's Alive show:
I know I mentioned the It's Alive show last week, but there are two reasons to mention it again. First, the show just started it's second official season after being in reruns all summer. New movies, new bits, new music. All good.
The second more important reason to mention It's Alive is the show's cast and producers have organized Pittsburgh's First Zombie Walk. It goes down this Friday in the South Side. You should grab some old clothes, run them through the mud and join in. The post-walk party costs money but being a zombie or zombie food is free. Full details here.
Bateman 365 Presents: Atom Age Vampire:
Political cartoonist and animator Scott Bateman spent the past year animating a new short film for each and every day (and they were great). Now he's started a new project-joining the audio from the public domain film Atom Age Vampire with all new animations. The result is both a parody of the film and a brilliant evolution of the MST3K-style of film mockery. You don't have to have seen the original to appreciate Bateman's project, though it is available on the Internet Archive for download. Scott Bateman's maintaining a blog about the project here, you can grab the original movie here, or you can jump to the most recently animated part of the film here.
Scar Stuff:
Scar Stuff is a blog dedicated to old Halloween and horror LPs. It's all here-sound effect records, novelty discs, even Vincent Price reading Edgar Allen Poe. It doesn't get more Halloween than that. This site has everything you need to make the perfect Halloween mixtape or just select tracks to spice up your Halloween party. Not only are the albums on the site great, the webmaster provides concise descriptions and histories for each piece. I guarantee some of these tracks will be on my next Halloween show.
Finally, speaking of horror, I mentioned in the last post that I had free tickets to The Covenant. It bites. Don't see it. If you're in the mood for horror though, might I recommend Dario Argento's Suspiria. If you don't feel like renting (or trucking all the way around town to find a place with Suspiria even though it's totally worth the trip) you can check out a classic film from Pittsburgh's own George A. Romero. I speak of course of Night of the Living Dead, a film that's in the public domain and available for download from the Internet Archive here.
