You know zombies well.. But where did the idea of them come from? Not light reading.
After the Haitian Revolution in 1804 and the end of French colonialism, the zombie became a part of Haiti’s folklore. The myth evolved slightly and was folded into the Voodoo religion, with Haitians believing zombies were corpses reanimated by shamans and voodoo priests. Sorcerers, known as bokor, used their bewitched undead as free labor or to carry out nefarious tasks. This was the post-colonialism zombie, the emblem of a nation haunted by the legacy of slavery and ever wary of its reinstitution. As the UC Irvine professor Amy Wilentz has pointed out in her writing on zombies, on several occasions after the revolution Haiti teetered on the brink of reinstating slavery. The zombies of the Haitian Voodoo religion were a more fractured representation of the anxieties of slavery, mixed as they were with occult trappings of sorcerers and necromancy. Even then, the zombie’s roots in the horrors of slavery were already facing dilution.
And more..
It was in this form—Voodoo bokor and black magic—that the Haitian myth first crossed paths with American culture, in the aforementioned White Zombie.Although the film doesn’t begin to transform the undead in the way that Romero’s films and the subsequent zombie industrial complex would, it’s notable for its introduction of white people as interlopers in the zombie legend. It would take another few decades or so, but eventually the memory of Haiti’s colonialist history and the suffering it wrought—millions of Africans worked into the grave—would be excised from the zombie myth for good.
I first noticed the bloated US obsession with the 31st day of October many years ago, during one of my annual trips to visit my sister in Florida. I tended to travel there in late autumn, mainly because the climate is at its most tolerable then, with the late summer hurricanes having abated and the mosquitos taking a breather from all the raging sucking.
Every year, I got more and more amazed at the scale of the American approach to Halloween. Unlike in this country, where it took a distant back seat to fireworks fight, the Guy Fawkes-free calendar in the US meant Halloween was the be-all-and-end-all – certainly until the next holiday, Thanksgiving, trundled into view in late November.
It’s gets meaner. Really. Written as only a Brit could write,
And things didn’t end with ringing someone’s doorbell. Now kids get a handful of responsibly sourced tofu treats just for turning up, but we had to do something to earn our fun-size Mars bar – maybe sing a song or tell a joke. I would tend to have one joke ready that I would trot out at every door.
And while this incarnation of Halloween may not have swollen the coffers of Tesco or Aldi quite as much, at least we had our dignity. I’m joking, of course.
A big giant ouch.
Of course cruel or not cruel, it does not matter.
As a matter of fact, right now as I write this brief post, my personal Facebook feed is filled with my friends’ photos of their barhopping.. adorned with the most ghoulish of attire, sexualized in nature, they are gratifying themselves at a watering hole of their choice and carelessly drinking the night away. Their makeup is running but that’s the point: It’s the makeup of blood, zombies, and gore.
Yes, America is filled with the nightmares of Elm Streets around the world. But most of those pastimes of Halloween are borrowed. Let’s not forget where bobbing for apples comes from..where Samhain comes from..where all of the customs and traditions come from. Not America. We’re the melting pot. We get them from everywhere else.
Including you Britland.
So don’t let your tea run cold. And we can have our zombies.
More on the live Blumhouse Periscope Halloween movie..
Apparently for some, it was too hot to handle and too scary to hold on their mobile.
From PC MAG: (note: This was written October 30 during the actual live scope)
Oscar-nominated horror producer Jason Blum, known for films like Insidious and Paranormal activity, is taking his talents to the small screen this Halloween. And, we’re not talking TV — he’s bringing his brand of horror right to your computer, tablet, or smartphone via Periscope. Blum on Thursday night debuted his latest project, a horror film called Fifteen, on Twitter’s live-streaming platform, and it was apparently way too scary for some people.
The film — Periscope’s first-ever live horror event — was briefly taken down after being flagged, but Blum just announced on Twitter that it’s back up for us to enjoy this All Hallow’s Eve.
The 20-minute flick follows a masked serial killer who broadcasts his crimes via the Periscope app. Sounds pretty grisly and awesome, right? You can watch ithere.
Flagged.. People scared. Too much for a venue where most film themselves talking way too close to their faces.
Love it.
More relics of my childhood and Ayden’s new *old* toys acquired..
This is the first LIVE PERISCOPE horror movie.. Blumhouse presents ‘FIFTEEN.’
And this, my friends, is the future of horror.. movies.. streamed live. I hope to theaters though eventually. I still enjoy a larger screen for my frightful delights..
What’s most clever about Fifteen is that it blurs the line between fiction and reality by making Periscope a plot device unto itself. In the world of the film, Truman is a serial killer that live streams his crimes, and what we as an audience watch as Fifteen is actually his ninth broadcast; he’s become so notorious in the fictional world, that a radio station in the short actually breaks into its broadcast to inform listeners that he’s begun streaming. Of course, given that it’s all coming from the Periscope account of a prominent movie production company there’s some awkward references to passwords being easy to hack to justify it all, but it’s nevertheless an intriguing (and somewhat disturbing) experiment for horror fans — even if Truman comes off a little hammy at times.
The amount of comments on various threads about last night’s botched live EXORCISM tells the story.. there is anger, “lols” .. all of the rest. Read away and enjoy this Halloween day: https://www.facebook.com/DestinationAmerica/
I still can’t believe in my right mind that the station billed this for a year, plugged it hardcore for months, and for the past 2 weeks, we were even greeted with religious folk who came and said beware watching the show live because you too can conjure demons. Was anything conjured? Anything more than advertisements each and every 5 minutes? It was unabashedly ridiculous.. and I will stop giving it air time on this website now, too.
Today, Halloween, another day when life as we know it could have ended.. changed.. potentially would have been the start of a mass extinction event.. and in another timeline or multiverse, a parallel place, that could be happening.
Luckily here in this timelime, the dead comet with the skull face is narrowing MISSING Earth instead of hitting.
A massive space rock that will shave by Earth on Halloween looks like a dead comet with a skull face, NASA said after gaining a closer look at the spooky space object.
Astronomers initially thought the object was an asteroid when they spotted it in early October, and named it Asteroid 2015 TB145.
But using the US space agency’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, experts “have determined that the celestial object is more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement late Friday
Scientists have also spotted an eerie skull-like resemblance on the face of the rock, based on radar data from the National Science Foundation’s 305-meter (1,000-foot) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
No danger of hitting earth. But maybe this should perk us up a bit, if not scare us. We should start getting to know the unfriendly skies more than we do.. we should get to know the threats that lurk. One day, perhaps on a Halloween of the future, a skull faced-dead comet could slam into our lives..
The ST LOUIS dispatch writes the review that I failed to have time to write.. but I concur with the words of Gail Pennington:
“What you are about to witness is a live presentation that may contain graphic and disturbing scenes,” Destination America warned. “Our experts are trained professionals equipped to deal with dangerous situations. Do not attempt this at home. Viewer discretion is advised.”
The only disturbing scenes, though, were cheesy re-creations. And although some viewers, following along on Twitter, reported being frightened, any real tension was quickly diffused by repeated commercial breaks.
Members of the Tennessee Wraith Chasers team from the channel’s “Ghost Asylum,” asked how the “Exorcist” house ranked among “scariest places in America,” declared it “No. 1, especially with demonic activity. We’ve never experienced this level of demonic hopping.”
“We’ve rassled with some demons before, but this is the Devil,” one said.
But the special was all talk and no action. Viewers were asked to believe that Wraith Chasers felt the presence of evil and heard a female voice in the attic. Psychic medium Chip Coffey, who entered the house with a Ouija board for a seance, reported “fast communication” with the spirit world, and a flickering candle flame. He shut the seance down just as it might have become interesting.
There was one personal reason I stuck with the show until the end.. The priest from the ‘Old Catholic Church (not the real Catholic church, FYI) looked a lot like a friend of mine. It was a stunning replica of him, actually.
That enough held my interest. Besides that, I felt bored beyond belief.. there was nothing scary, nothing creepy, and nothing at all entertaining about the show, save a couple of strange wide-eyed one liners from Chip Coffey. Otherwise.. a failure.
Without question, tonight’s DESTINATION AMERICA live exorcism was the biggest bore and waste of time I have ever sat through.. pitiful.. poor.. awful..
There is something really creepy about songs from 1915 around Halloween.. especially when you really, really listen to the words of GASLINE GUS AND HIT JITNEY BUS..
This could be the beginning of everything strange and bizarre, wonderful and amazing. From the NEW SCIENTIST report,
THE curtain at the edge of the universe may be rippling, hinting that there’s more backstage. Data from the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope could be giving us our first glimpse of another universe, with different physics, bumping up against our own.
That’s the tentative conclusion of an analysis by Ranga-Ram Chary, a researcher at Planck’s US data centre in California. Armed with Planck’s painstaking map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – light lingering from the hot, soupy state of the early universe – Chary revealed an eerie glow that could be due to matter from aneighbouring universe leaking into ours.
This sort of collision should be possible, according to modern cosmological theories that suggest the universe we see is just one bubble among many. Such a multiverse may be a consequence of cosmic inflation, the widely accepted idea that the early universe expanded exponentially in the slimmest fraction of a second after the big bang.
Read on if you comprehend..
Some people I speak to about these subjects, particularly those who don’t take well to science ruining certain religious principles they have grown up with, hate the concept of multiple universes. But regardless of our acceptance or not, certain truths still exist.
There have long been many people who have believed in such things. And these strange and spooky things…? Well they come closer to being true..
