YouTube video by Starlight Mints - Topic Pumpkin

Theme song for the day:

youtu.be/YK-qmYMLyjc?...

Between the Starlight Mints and the Flaming Lips, it seems Oklahoma’s a breeding ground for psychedelic aka art rock. 🤘 Take it from this dude who just like Eddie is a “guitar picker from [an] Oklahoma City with a pair of blue jeans on.”

YouTube video by Tom Waits Tom Waits - "What's He Building?"

Theme song for the day, the ultimate creepy neighbor horror song!

youtu.be/04qPdGNA_KM?...

Lee Hess presents Code Name Trixie, written in the red stencil caps of a title card.

A crowd of neighbors quarantined in a high school room start to freak out as they become the crazies.

White hazmat gas-masked army goons with guns push a virologist with a miracle solution into a crowd of creepy, quarantined, crazy neighbors.

Stills from the Crazies

The title for the movie over a tree lined suburban street with 1960s cars driving over it.

A girl sits blindfolded and hands behind her back against a tree as creepy neighborhood kids (banal to see, but trust me—they’re total creeps) sit on a fallen log, about to play hide n seek. The image foreshadows a depraved “game” to come, by suggesting bondage.

Two creepy neighbors slither a snake up a scared girl’s blue skirt in a woods.

A teen girl dangles by both arms from a basement ceiling as her crippled sister; abusive, murderous Aunt; neighbor protagonist, and sons of the evil aunt face her. She’s blindfolded with her back to us.

Stills from Jack Ketchum’s the Girl Next Door.

A black clad priest with icy cataracts seemingly looks out of the top window of an old, ivy grown over building. It’s the Sentinel, a creepy neighbor indeed.

A party of creepy neighbors having a birthday party for a cat as the reactionary director probably thought seemed the height of hedonistic absurdity. A tuxedo cat wears a gold birthday cone cat in a high chair surrounded by bohemians in fancy dress.

An old apartment’s public hallway starts to swarm with disfigured and deformed demonic representations that seem a bit insensitive towards people with real deformities, tbh.

A closer view of some creepy, demon neighbors.

The Sentinel stills.

Creepy Neighbours Day 27 placard for the 31 Days of Halloween Horror Challenge 2025 written over a cemetery silhouette backlit by the green tint of a setting sun.

My letterbox Diary for Creepy Neighbor movies. 1. The Sentinel. Creepily intrusive neighbors turn increasingly terrifying as we learn of their terrifying backstories. Then there’s the recluse neighbor upstairs neighbor, an old priest always staring down from the top apartment in the building, staring down with his milky cataract stair. Then there’s the hellish neighbor downstairs, a gate to Hell, so Satan and his assorted demon minions also count as pretty creepy. 2. Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door. Bested by only Stephen King and Joe R Lansdale among his generation of horror writers, Jack Ketchum mastered the genre and had a lifetime achievement Bram Stoker award to back up his top-tier bibliography. This movie, while masterful, anyone with a heart will find challenging, and like many of the scariest movies (Zodiac, Silence of the Lambs, the Sound of Metal)—many will say it’s a drama or a thriller instead of horror as if horror only belonged to unserious ghosts and goblins. Ketchum does the near impossible in taking an unthinkable crime and making the abuser behind the torture understandable albeit never sympathetic or relatable. But we learn how the rare psychopathic female thinks and creates, inculcates male abusers. It’s like a tour of the MAGAt factory to find out how rightards are made. This seems like a plausible origin story for a Pete Hegseth type. It walks you through the kind of torture and murder by neighborhood that makes most sane people go “how could that even happen.” Yet Ketchum also brings a sensitivity to it never losing sight of the victim’s humanity. 3. The Crazies. George Romero’s non-zombie horror movie (or living zombies in a way) that while slow-paced still blends Romero’s sadly prescient hippie conspiracy social commentary into a pandemic outbreak thriller about neighbors driven mad by a bio-weapon leak. Living through the COVID pandemic made some choices strain credulity, but still a solid film worthy of reassessment overall.

A joker poster with a creepy neighbor looking in a window captioned “creepy neighbors. The reason doors have locks.”

The creepiest of neighbors, this peeping tom weirdo. A still of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.

Day 27:

1. The Sentinel
2. The Girl Next Door
3. The Crazies

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#filmsky #horrorsky

A messy pumpkin carving competition seen from a pumpkin level view.

A mutant pumpkin covered in bumps lashed out with vine tentacles, wrapping around the arms of a kid in a corn costume wielding a butcher’s knife

A farmer in a flannel, suspenders and a bowler (seen from back) aims at a corpse in a corn costume puppeteered by a spider like mutant pumpkins’ tentacle vine as a human shield.

The mutant pumpkin from carved, often obscured, gets seem in full, save a shotgun sized chunk missing from its rotten, bumpy visage. It hovers, seemingly, albeit supported by spider-like vine legs.

Carved stills.

A young man bends his elbow awkwardly carving a pumpkin in the foreground. A bare legged woman wears a fuchsia, mini-skirt-length bathrobe

A young man in a blue shirt sits next to a woman in black, including a beret; she reaches into a pumpkin set on a hay stack, and a farm sets behind them in the background.

A woman in black loses control of a toppling wheelbarrow full of pumpkins next to a haystack at night, a strong barn light overhead.

A pumpkin carving contest set up on a long table surrounded by college kids on costumes in a barn decked out with pumpkin and scarecrow decorations.

Pumpkin Karver stills.

Ed Hardy cradles son Billy Hardy after a motorcycle accident, in a wood paneled room, seated on an iron frame bed, in front of a window omitting an orange, sunbeam haze.

Ed Hardy stands with a shovel on Pumpkinhead’s earthen-alter grave rising above a foggy pumpkin patch that Haggis the witch says covers the bodies of the country-outcast, deformed dead.

Pumpkinhead the demon growls at the camera as my OLED reflects a lamp I missed until now…oh well.

Pumpkinhead cradles and sniffs a victim.

Pumpkinhead stills

A quaint ceramic pumpkin glows behind a ceramic figurine of a scarecrow in overalls with a Pumpkinhead wearing a straw cap waving in repose. They’re Halloween Knick knacks on a wooden cabinet display.

A Halloween party from the 80s with orange and black balloons, a round table with an orange tablecloth with snacks, kids in costumes, and an adult original Annabelle doll costumed adult.

A young man with glasses leans on a counter lined with masks as two women face each other evaluating a glitter wig one of the girls wears. They stand in a costume store, full of masks and wigs.

A kiddie clown gets nearly drowned apple bobbing by a drunken dad, ensuring the kid grows up to be a killer clown. 3 pumpkin decorations and a black bat, and orange helium filled balloons, also fill the frame.

Hollow Gate stills

A manor arts on a wooded hill in the background. A white ornate gate with a jack o lantern stuck with a vertical butcher’s knife set in front of it has the title Hollow Gate written on it. The poster for Hollow Gate.

Two clawed demon hands hold a pumpkin dripping rotten juices. The poster for Pumpkinhead.

A Jack o lantern with gritted pointy teeth has a butcher knife stuck in in on the poster for the Pumpkin Karver, written in rough cut caps.

A bumpy, warty, pimply pumpkin with green tendril vines coming out of its eyes in close up provides the image for Hulu’s Carved, the poster.

The pumpkin 🎃 posters

Pumpkin on the Poster Day 26 placard on the 31 Days of Halloween Horror Challenge 2025 written over a cemetery silhouette backlit by a tinted orange sunset.

Evil pumpkins with fangs, rotting pumpkins on the vine, glowing Jack o lanterns, and unlit Jack o lanterns too, from the Factory of Terror Haunt.

A Pumpkinhead on a giant skeleton with a glowing light blue mouth and glowing orange eyes at the Factory of Terror haunt.

My letterbox diary. 1. Hollow Gate, the gateway joint to pumpkin on a poster day. It’s a Halloween set slasher where we see how abuse during Halloween apple bobbing creates a Halloween themed killer who dresses up in different costumes to kill each kid locked in his electric-fenced-in mansion. A serial killer who kills on Halloween? What will they think of next! 2. Pumpkinhead. I considered rewatching it on fairy tale day since it’s the best American set Fairy Tale I’ve come across in any medium. Stan Winston who normally did creature SFX and makeup kills it as a director. Pumpkinhead is a simple story but everything in it works, especially Lance Hendricks performance as Ed Hardy. His son may be one of the most endearing kids in horror. It’s in my top 3 Witch movies. See letterbox for my complete favorite witch flick list. 3. The Pumpkin Karver. A middling mid-naughties slasher that’s not intentionally funny enough to be a comedy or scary enough to be a good horror, but it does service some good Halloween imagery and slasher kills. It’s a predictable yet also unearned reveal, sort of the worst of both worlds. Weirdly, it’s set in a town called Carver yet the town doesn’t spell it with a K either, making the title even more nonsensical. 4. Carved. Like attack of the killer tomatoes before it, this movie images a mutant fruit as a creature feature. The Hulu logo smeared over it like a booger you can’t flick away, with poorly placed commercials, hurt the viewing experience. There’s some fun kills and a lot of it works, but it’s also a hate crime against potheads. Besides some off color jokes, language, and gore, this feels like kiddie horror. I liked the diverse cast, an Asian girl lead who’s new to me, and they found yet another rat face boy like Timothee Chalamet or Mason Thames as her beau, Corey Fungalmantis who I’ll apparently be seeing in the Cliff Booth Tarantino penned Fincher flick. I liked the progression of pumpkin (head), 🎃 karver, and Carved.

Day 26: 🎃

1. Hollow Gate
2. Pumpkinhead
3. The Pumpkin Karver
4. Carved

Stay away from Pumpkinhead, unless you’re tired of living— through “meh” movies.

See my letterbox for 🌟-ratings and reviews; also alt-text…
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#31DAYHORRORCHALLENGE
@nofspodcast.bsky.social
#filmsky #horrorsky

It’s embarrassing she has so little self-awareness that she continues to use the word “concerned” despite everyone catching on to and mocking her schtick.

A witch coughed up a blood mess of organs and the second-worst type of maggots.

A witch riding a broom sends a fireball down on an olden days Germanic village.

Witches being hung in an illustration.

Child Hansel and Gretel in silhouette, a witch candy house sets in a dark woods, with a frosting roof and candy façade.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters stills.

A witch with a broom over her shoulder sits on the shoulder of a brown-robe clad young monk she’s flying through the air dangling.

A dead young woman in white with long black hair reaches out both arms as she rises from a coffin surrounded by candles in a church, as a frightened monk standing before an open Bible stares at her from the background.

The dead noble lady surfs on her coffin in a scene begging to be immortalized by a Cramps song.

Incubi that look like green copper patina block a wooden church’s door and balcony. A dead woman in a white burial shroud stands in the middle center, a monk stands clutching a bible on a stand in a chalk circle.

Viy stills

Krabat drives a flying white carriage by an ornate, palace balcony.

Krabat tries to chop apart a reforming coffin with an axe to delay an apprentice’s sacrifice.

An owl flies in an evergreen heavy woods.

A grey bearded peasant in a hood gathering a bundle of sticks, his boots submerged in thick snow as more falls, motions to halt with his palm.✋

Krabat: the Sorcerer’s Apprentice* stills (set b)

The warlock master rides on a black horse across a red sunset and blackened landscape

Krabat has wings for arms after drinking the Red Bull Koolaid.

The eyepatch-wearing master sits behind a thick, open grimoire set next to a skull topped with a candle as ravens (transformed apprentices) swarm around him.

A mill sets in the background of a deep blue river. Ravens fill the sky. Silvery-lilac conifers line the horizon.

Krabat: the Sorcerer’s Apprenticd stills (set a)

A cloaked figure flies over clouds towards an alpine setting sunset; its Krabat about become a crow.

The bone meal mill dispenser where the ground bone meal omits.

The mill explodes into splinters among a hazy, snowy landscape.

A young maiden with long, brown hair and a green cloak puts the hand of an outstretched arm into the open hand of a tall, black cloaked figure with long grey hair, seen from behind.

Krabat stills.

An Irish man in a flannel talks about Fairy tales. This literally feels like a fairy tale as it’s a tale about fairies.

A fairies black clawed arm breaks through an attic trap door an Irish woman holds shut in an attic. A swaddled baby is in the far left by a framed picture set on the floor. Other attic clutter sets in the corner. A rectangular window illuminates the scene.

A fairy from the Halloween, which looks like a humanoid wood carving, caries a baby swaddled in yellow.

Our dude thumbs through the fairy tale guidebook searching its illustrations for answers.

The Hallow stills.

Feels like a Fairytale: Day 25 placard from the 31 Days of Halloween Horror Challenge imposed over a cemetery silhouette backlit by a purple-tinted sunset.

My letterbox diary: 1. the Hallow. An Irish folk horror movie that uses the fairies and changelings of Gaelic folklore (including their iron allergy) for a contemporary creature feature; I liked the addition of fairy fungus, a sort of black mold meets acid meets blob substance that looks like black forest ooze. 2. Krabat. The live-action take on the German fairytale figure of Krabat, most famous due to maybe Fantasia’s adaptation of Goethe’s poem the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Krabat is the orphan apprentice of an evil, one eyed wizard who extends his life by sacrificing one of his 12 boys needed to run his bone-meal mill. The boys gain some abilities like transfiguration into crows. 3. The superior animated version of Krabat made in the late 70s instead of naughties. The wood relief folk art aesthetic and emphasis on the magic—especially the annual wizard’s duel where the apprentice selected for sacrifice gains a chance to best his warlock master or else must dig his own grave—beat out the live adaptation, despite its noble attempt to tell the story on a small SFX budget than what animation can conjure. 4. VIY. A sin-prone young monk comes across and dispatches a witch only to find himself summoned by a rich nobleman to sit prayer vigil locked in a church with his late daughter, the maiden aspect of the hectare’s crone he killed; the whole piece feels like an Eastern-European fairy tale. Encounters of the Spooky kind owes this practical effect masterpiece from the 60s a debt for when Sammo also must spend the night trapped inside a mourning chamber with an animate corpse. 5. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. I often do “superhero Saturday” and this fit the bill perfectly for “feel like a fairytale” and a superhero-adjacent take on Hansel and Gretel. It’s better than I thought as I’ve passed on it over the years, superior to the similar Van Helsing attempt to update that character into an action hero. The Witch scenes steal the show.

A orphan boy sweeps a wooden cottage floor while observed by a black cat. It’s from the animated film Krabat and looks like a fairy tale book illustration.

A fairytale vibing swamp witch cabin from Pumpkinhead, which bridged Pumpkin on the poster day and feels like a fairytale day. A witch with thin white hair sits in a chair amongst witchy clutter.

Day 25:

1. The Hallow
2. Krabat
3. Krabat: the Sorcerer’s Apprentice
4. VIY
5. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

See my letterbox for 🌟-ratings and reviews; also alt-text…
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#31DAYHORRORCHALLENGE
@nofspodcast.bsky.social
#filmsky #horrorsky

A ghost vampire werewolf demon sneaks up behind Jeffrey Combs in his basement art studio.

Jeffrey Combs stands at the top of the basement stairs clutching an axe.

Jeffrey Combs kneels before frames in front of a drafting table and stacked, cardboard boxes 📦 in a basement.

Our heroine finds a hanging basement light and faces a wall painted like a Cellar Dweller comic cover.

Cellar Dweller.

A man stares, mouth gaping, standing next to a blonde woman with wide eyes covering her mouth with a gloved hand in a basement.

A blind man with white hair and a white goatee holding a gun pointed down, looms above a basement entrance, framed in the doorway and tinted red by the light.

A burglar covers his face as he backs away from a killer framed in an open, exterior cellar door.

In the background, framed by basement shelf’s full of junk, a white haired man falls backward into a basement, illuminated by fluorescent green beams of light.

Don’t Breathe stills.

Jennifer dials a white rotary phone in a basement as a hand reaches into the chute she escaped down.

Jennifer tries to escape a pit in the basement filled with victim body parts and maggots. She reaches one arm up but her hand can’t touch the pit’s rim.

Jennifer flees a basement leaving a drip trail in the background; a chained, blood spattered cop sits on and strangles the mother of a killer freak in her concrete, unfinished basement of horror.

Daria Nicolodi taunts the phenomena of insect beast mastering through a bloodied face—her lower teeth bared, eyes wide and wild.

Phenomena stills.

A hysterical patient tells a white lab coated Dr that “the people in the cellar need help.”

An undead doctor in a basement who holds the leg of a young lady who now needs help herself.

Zombies emerge from the sanitarium’s basement lab’s spiral staircase which goes down to a basement’s basement. The staircase is not pictured but we see several zombies in a green fog, and they’re all messed up.

Zombies in silhouette chase a man and woman fleeing while holding hands across a lawn at night, the couple also silhouetted while in the foreground,

The Dead Pit stills.

Don’t Go in the Basement Day 24 placard for the 31 Days of Halloween Horror Challenge 2025, over a sunset lit green-tinted cemetery silhouette.

My letterbox Diary. 1. The Dead Pit. A carryover between mad science and basements. This sanitarium houses a lab basement where a mad, undead scientist has created an army of zombies who ascend from a basement’s basement. 2. Phenomena. You don’t reach the basement until the late 3rd act, yet it’s the setting of an exciting and disgusting conclusion involving the second worst kind of maggot. Dario Argento directs a young Jennifer Connelly with a memorable basement-owner in Daria Nicolodi—frequent Argento collaborator, former partner, and writer of Suspiria. 3. Don’t Breathe. I wanted an entry that like Barbarian or Heretic gets placed into the recent sub-genre based on a sub-room, basement horror. All three tell stories involving somewhat labyrinthine basements that submerge a dark secret. 4. Cellar Dweller. Cameos and camp, but with a a short runtime, this movie has fun 80s slasher payoffs galore. The cameo of Jeffrey Combs as the cartoonist of the Cellar Dweller comic starts strong. The small art institute’s director allows for another horror legend cameo from Yvonne De Carlo, Lily Munster. Don Mancini better known for Child’s Play—the sequel I considered for basement day—writes a love letter to horror fandom in this proto-snark slasher that takes a meta approach before Scream. It’s a small, unexpected treat that punches above its weight.

The 31 Days of Halloween Horror Challenge 2025 calendar.

Before he inked Cellar Dweller, Jeff did this in basements. There’s a Re-animator poster in cellar dweller, and as Herbert had a basement lab, I rewatched Re-Animator on morgue day but “mad science” and “basement” also fits…

Day 24:

1. The Dead Pit
2. Phenomena
3. Don’t Breathe
4. Cellar Dweller

Consider me over such debasement.

See my letterbox for 🌟-ratings and reviews; also alt-text…
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#31DAYHORRORCHALLENGE
@nofspodcast.bsky.social
#filmsky #horrorsky

A Double bill Paxton and Pullman, Like Superman and Clark, Seen together at last!

Bud Cort (yes, Harold sans Maude) and Bill Paxton. Paxton wears a white lab coat, standing behind Bud, nitrate gloved hands on his shoulders. Bud’s head is in a harness restraint and his brain is visible, his skull cap missing.

In a chiasmus reversal, the first one now will later be last, the master has become the slave, which is to say Bill Pullman now his brain exposed in medical restraints, paralleling his operation on Bud.

Bill Pullman dressed in a lab coat and tie, prods a brain on a tripod in a laboratory.

Brain Dead stills.

The Brain that Wouldn’t Die title

A decapitated woman’s head sets in a bloody tray in a laboratory rig with tubes and beakers attached.

A scientist in lab stands in the background. A severed female head sets in a bloody tray in a laboratory rig, visible from behind.

The mad doctor in the Dead Pit.

The Brain that Wouldn’t Die stills, and one from the Dead Pit to show off its evil Doc.

A brain with an embedded eyeball sits in purple goo in a beaker, as a scientist, the back of his head visible, pokes it with a metal instrument.

The original television horror host Zacherle making a weatherman cameo.

Even Norm MacDonald has never seen this many dead hookers in all his life. A hotel room is littered with hookers exploded by super crack.

A Frankenstein lightning platform ascends from the garage of a cape cod home’s separated garage.

Frankenhooker stills

A monkey’s brain in a tank with two scientists and beakers and tubes.

A scientist and his wife with a clipboard observe a living monkey’s brain in a tank.

Two men and a woman in a lab observe Donovan’s brain in a tank. They knew it’s Donovan’s because it sang “Season of the witch.”

Donovan’s brain

Mad Science Day 23 of the 31 Days of Halloween Horror Challenge 2025 on an orange tinted cemetery silhouette.

My letterbox diary. Deadly Friend, the last Craven deep cut, bridged me into Mad science, with its android dead girl. 1. Donovan’s Brain; the originator of mad scientists trying to keep a brain alive only to find his experiments resulting into psych-vampirism, telepathic possession. The movie also has an early critique of the corporate class subtext. 2. Frankenhooker. The Last Drive In presentation of Frank Henenlotter’s black horror comedy, “one of the best films of the 90s” according to Joe Bob, and I don’t disagree. Frank said it’s based on… 3. The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. When Director Joseph Green heard Henenlotter took inspiration from his film, he accused Frank of theft until Frankenhooker was screened; it won him over and they parted as friends. This movie has a great head preservation SFX that provides prior-art to Re-Animator that homages this movie. 4. Brain Dead. Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, a double-bill. My mad science day had an undercurrent of “brain” focused movies, so this felt like a good continuation. It’s a less successful version of Pullman’s superior Altered States flick. 5. the Dead Pit. Mad doctors galore but mostly going on basement day, since it bridged midnight…

Day 23:

1. Donovan’s Brain
2. Frankenhooker
3. The Brain that Wouldn’t Die
4. Brain Dead
5. The Dead Pit —into basement day; this basement has basements.

See my letterbox for 🌟-ratings and reviews; also alt-text…
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#31DAYHORRORCHALLENGE
@nofspodcast.bsky.social
#filmsky #horrorsky