Looks like there is no intellectual property that the great minds of Hollywood are afraid of resurrecting. Twenty seven years after it originally premiered, they’re bringing back Flatliners as a quasi-reboot / stealth sequel. They’re probably getting the message that us geeks are getting tired of rebooting properties when they could basically create a new story with new characters while keeping it in the same universe and even just some kind of nod to the original can satiate fans who are looking for a continuation of the story.
Joel Schumacher made one of the 1980s most stylish and inventive horror films with The Lost Boys (a film we’ve talked about on this podcast a hundred times) and he took the main heavy from that film (a little actor by the name of Kiefer Sutherland) and made him the lead of his next movie, Flatliners.
Flatliners is a film about medical students who create Near Death Experiences for themselves (the flatline of the title) and then get resuscitated back to life. They’re looking for the last frontier, what happens after we die, what Shakespeare called “the undiscovered country from whose bourne no man returns”, well, unless you’re Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Billy Baldwin, Oliver Platt, or Julia Roberts.
What they find is a cosmic justice waiting for them, an accountability for their sins in life waiting for them. And those sins can now come back to haunt them in our world, brought back through the portal of the Near Death Experience. That’s the gist of the story and it’s still an effective horror film. We’ll see about the remake starring Ellen Page and Diego Luna (who are usually pretty great) and directed by the original The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo director, Niels Arden Oplev (and written by the dude who wrote Source Code which is a solid Twilight Zone episode of a movie!)
Anyway, when you think of a Near Death Experience, you think of your life flashing before your eyes, a tunnel with a light at the end, and sometimes an Out of Body Experience where your spirit leaves your body and you watch what’s happening to you.
The Voynich Manuscript has been called the most mysterious book in the world. Two-hundred forty pages of undecipherable language, pictures of plants, constellations, and naked women… it almost looks like a high school stoner’s notebook, all it’s missing is a crude #2 pencil rendition of the Dark Side of the Moon album cover. But what does it say? What does it mean? Is it a magical spellbook (there seems to be a recipe section)? Is it about finding the fountain of youth? One researcher in the 1970s claims that it contains the secret to the elixir of life…
Brought to the United States by Polish-American (yeah, just like me!) book trader Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, it was said to have been bought by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in the 16th Century who was interested in old books that might turn his depressive moods around. By that era, it was already an old book and it was claimed to have been written by 13th Century English monk and “wizard”, Francis Bacon (who is famous for having a “brazen head”, which was an automaton made of bronze or brass that would answer people’s questions like a Medieval Magic 8-Ball.)
So, the book has a definite paranormal pedigree. People have spent the past hundred years trying to figure out just what the Voynich Manuscript might mean. It was donated to Yale in the 1960s after someone bought it from the estate of Voynich’s widow and you can see the whole thing online because they’ve digitized the whole thing!
Since people have been studying this mystery for the past hundred years, everyone was surprised when the prestigious Times Literary Supplement in the UK published an article saying that the Voynich Manuscript had been “solved” and it was just a medieval women’s health manual using Latin abbreviations instead of words. Hey, of course gynecological well-being is extraordinarily important and we’re 100% behind that, but let’s be honest, we were hoping for something a little more, well, mystical… (or at least a well-made hoax!)
Of course, the fine people of the Internet disagreed with Nicholas Gibbs’ conclusions on the manuscript almost as soon as he released them, but while we might never know the truth, it seemed like a reasonable explanation for such a strange text. At least for about five minutes anyway…
The Devil from the Codex Gigas, the largest of any Medieval manuscripts…
And we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention some of our other favorite mysterious texts from the land of fiction. Necronomicon Ex-Mortis of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series to the Darkhold of Agents of SHIELD, mystical books capture our imagination in stories as well as real-life mysteries. The most famous is H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon (which, in a story by Colin Wilson, actually was the Voynich Manuscript.) Lovecraft himself never fully created the text of his purely fictional book, but fans decided to make a version in the 1960s and sell it in bookstores, which lead to decades of kids thinking that Lovecraft’s evil book of the Old Ones transcribed by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred was an actual book and not just created out of whole cloth by the weird fiction master.
But in the end, all of these Medieval mysterious texts had to be copied by hand, a long and arduous process that could take years. Not that many people could read because there weren’t that many books! Before the printing press, the only way to disseminate written knowledge was manually and the copying would often be imperfect. That’s the idea of this week’s song, when you just make a copy, there’s something missing, and when you make a copy of a copy, it’s even worse (see the Michael Keaton/Harold Ramis underrated comedy, Multiplicity,for more!)
Whatever happened to your passion,
and all the pretty things that you used to believe in?
Was it worth trading your soul in,
for a vampire bite and a lump of coal?
I heard all the junior high school cheerleaders had a crush on you,
I know because I read it on your FAQ,
and all the small town boys were chomping at the bit,
a rose by any other name smells just like $&@#.
Did you get your piece of the action,
Your pot of gold and an ice cream cone?
Did my death give you satisfaction,
I saw you paint my picture on an old tombstone, yeah.
I heard all the neighbors’ kids,
were in love with you/
I know because I read it on your FAQ,
and I tried for so long to put my finger on it,
a rose by any other name smells just like $&@#.
Are you real,
or just a carbon copy?
A bloodless rose has a heartless body,
And you feel,
just like a carbon copy,
you’re paper thin of who you used to be.
I heard all the high school cheerleaders were in love with you,
I know because I read it on your FAQ,
and all the small town boys were chomping at the bit,
a rose by any other name smells just like $&@#.
Are you real,
or just a carbon copy?
A bloodless rose has a heartless body,
And you feel,
just like a carbon copy,
you’re paper thin of who you used to be.
Now you’re just like me,
just like me, just like me, just like me.
Are you just a carbon copy?
A rose by any other name,
smells like shit just the same.
Ever since our friend Lisa from Madison Ghost Walks met MJ Dickson from the British investigation group Sage Paranormal on a paranormal cruise earlier in this year, she said we have to have her on the show. She’s as down-to-earth as a psychic is gonna get and has lots of great stories of growing up in a paranormal family.
Raised all over the world in countries from Zimbabwe to Greece, MJ Dickson discovered her special gift at an early age when her and her mother ended up seeing the same spectral figure and she understood that she came from a line of psychic women.
Once her and her husband moved to England, she set up shop in the small town of Henley-in-Arden and started up a psychic reader business. When she started she said the townspeople were suspicious of her weird outsider status, but she says through kindness and patience over the years, she’s as accepted as anyone else.
And an interesting tidbit, she uses tarot cards as really just a prop to help make her customers feel a little more comfortable with the information that she’s hearing from her spirit guides
We discuss MJ’s experiences growing up in a paranormal family, some of her weirdest experiences, her favorite investigations, and of course, her paranormal convention!
MJ is the Founder of Sage Paracon UK which is coming up Sept. 22-24 at Warwick Castle. That’s right, a paranormal convention in a haunted castle with a ghost investigation with some of our favorite paranormal people like Haunted New England‘s Jeff Belanger and the world’s greatest Ouija expert, Robert Murch. Too awesome and we’re completely jelly about the whole thing!
In the interview, MJ mentions that a few years ago she was diagnosed with cancer and the first thing that she said was that she’s the kind of person who’s never going to give up. We found that very moving and that combined with the fact that she’s in Britain made us think about those “Keep Calm And Carry On” posters that were put up everywhere over there in World War 2. You have to just keep going in the fave of adversity, whether it’s the Nazis or it’s The Big C, you still have to live your life, waking up every day, eating, dressing, etc… MJ Dickson’s courage is inspiring so this song is dedicated to her, Sunspot with “Keep Calm And Carry On”.
Filmmaker Tobe Hooper passed away on August 26th, 2017 at the age of 74. Hooper was most famous for being the director on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist, but he also set his indelible mark on great films like Salem’s Lot and (the extremely under appreciated, in my opinion) Lifeforce. While he’ll always be remembered for having a massive impact on the the horror genre with his first big film, his other works have had real life paranormal urban legends and inspirations behind them. Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts, Wendy, and I talk about they recent Mothman investigations (Allison in Chicago and Wendy just went to Point Pleasant, West Virginia) and then we get right into our favorite Tobe Hooper movies.
First of all, we discuss the marketing behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, because the original tagline said that it was based on true events – which is completely not true! Of course, that kind of marketing helps sell tickets and makes something even scarier (just think about The Conjuring as a modern example). That little bit of brilliance helped Tobe Hooper turn his $300,000 independent Austin, Texas movie turn into a 146 million dollar (adjusted for inflation) horror juggernaut that inspired sequels, remakes, and even launched the careers of Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger.
But Leatherface was inspired by our own America’s Dairlyand homegrown Psycho, Ed Gein, who created his own masks of human skin from corpses he’d dig up in the Plainfield, Wisconsin graveyard. Ed died in Wendy and my town of Madison, but Allison has a fun story about her college poetry professor who used to volunteer at socials at the Mendota Mental Health Institute here and even got to dance with Ed himself (who was prone to dementia and considered good natured in his old age.) That was about as far as the “Based on a true story”, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre got. Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, and a little known Roddy McDowell film called It! were also inspired by Ed Gein.
Tobe Hooper made a huge impact on the cultural zeitgeist with his adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot for television and 11 years before kids were traumatized by IT, it was vampires in Maine that gave them nightmares.
Hooper and Spielberg on the set of Poltergeist
But then Tobe Hooper hit Hollywood pay dirt by scoring the directing gig for Poltergeist. While there was a controversy that Steven Spielberg might have been the real director, our interest comes from the curse that supposedly followed the actors involved with the production.
The story of the Poltergeist curse has been around for at least 20 years and it involves the fact that the two of the actresses died very young, Dominique Dunne was murdered by her boyfriend and Heather O’Rourke (the girl that says “They’re here”) died of bowel obstruction complications during the filming of Poltergeist III.
Plenty of stories on the Internet and on reality TV try to make it seem like there’s something to the curse, and the actress who payed the mother in the first two films, JoBeth Williams, even added fuel to the fire by claiming that real skeletons were used during the making of the film (that part might be true!). But beyond the coincidental tragedies of the two young actresses dying young, there really is no other evidence of any Poltergeist curse.
Hooper followed up Poltergeist with the awesome Lifeforce, written by Alien‘s Dan O’Bannon, but also based on Colin Wilson’s work The Space Vampires. Wilson was a fiction and nonfiction writer who would often deal with the paranormal and metaphysical and what makes The Space Vampires extra fun is that Wilson wrote the book on a challenge from Wisconsin author, August Derleth. Derleth is the one who kept H.P. Lovecraft’s world and mythology alive after his death, and he challenged Wilson to write a book in the Lovecraft vein. The Space Vampires was the book, and Tobe Hooper made it come alive (or undead!) with his adaption in Lifeforce. It wasn’t a big box office hit, but it’s been critically reevaluated in recent years for the terror-filled science fiction extravaganza that it was.
Tobe Hooper helping out one of Leatherface’s family onset
After the mid-80s and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 not lighting the box office on fire, Hooper did mostly television work and one of his coolest shows was a 1991 TV show (hosted by Leonard Nimoy!) called Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories where he dramatized the events of the haunted Toys R’ Us in Sunnyvale, California. Now, that story means a lot to me since I saw it on That’s Incredible! when I was tiny. It probably was the first “real” ghost story that I can remember.
The image captured during the seance
The ghost story of the haunted Toys R’ Us in Sunnyvale, California involves a farm hand in the Nineteenth Century named Yohnny Yohanson who was in love with the owner of the farm’s daughter named Elizabeth. He loves her, she doesn’t love him, he dies in a tragic accident. One hundred years later, there’s a Toys R’ Us built on the site and strange things start occurring. Famous psychic Sylvia Browne shows up, has a seance, tells everyone the story, and they capture a photo during the seance of a “ghost”. It’s a classic ghost story made for TV and it had a huge impact on me as a kid. The fact that Tobe Hooper made a dramatized version of the events (that had way more inventive camera work and effects for a time than these shows usually had!) blew my mind!
And it’s the Toys R’ Us story that helped us decide on this week’s Sunspot song. “Broken Toy” is a track full of 1980s’ nostalgia, when Tobe Hooper was in his directing prime. In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre it’s Sally Hardesty’s “innocence” that saves her, which is one of the most common tropes of slasher films that followed (deftly parodied in the third act of the first Scream film), but still relatively novel back in 1974. The main thrust of this track is how once youthful innocence is lost, nothing is eve quite the same.
I opened a box of toys I broke,
and the ones that have broken me.
Cruising in my lego car,
and Jem was my favorite star,
But I fell in love with a girl,
from a galaxy far, far away.
Hey boy, where did you go?
Life ain’t that simple, don’t you know?
And the Duke boys couldn’t get away,
when I painted in shades of grey.
Don’t look me in the eye,
I can’t take what it makes me see.
It opens a box of toys I broke,
and the ones that have broken me.
It reminds me too much,
of the way things used to be.
I can’t play with a broken toy,
I can’t live on a memory.
Ronnie’s got a million guns,
Protecting us from Mao Tse Tsung,
but I don’t want to think about,
”The Day After” today.
Hey boy, what did you say?
Can Voltron make it all okay?
Or will my faith that ran away,
bump into me someday?
Don’t look me in the eye,
I can’t take what it makes me see.
It opens a box of toys I broke,
and the ones that have broken me.
It reminds me too much,
of the way things used to be.
I can’t play with a broken toy,
I can’t live on a memory.
The Midwest is abuzz this Summer with stories of winged humanoid creatures flying over Chicagoland. Tall dark creatures with red glowing eyes have been spotted all over the city with dozens of sightings this year alone.
The Chicago Mothman is the big paranormal story of the summer and we knew it was time to get a round table together of these researchers to dive into the best sightings, the methodology of investigation, and the similarities and differences from the 1966 and 1967 Point Pleasant, West Virginia Mothman sightings that was a harbinger of disaster for the town.
And unlike this summer’s King Arthur movie, our Round Table does NOT disappoint (zing!) Not only does Lon give us the skinny on Remote Viewing Experiments he’s been conducting, but Manuel tells us why he thinks that there is a cover-up from the local government and media.
Wendy, Allison, and I also sported some sweet new See You On The Other Side t-shirts with a special new design made by Brent Simpson, and here you can see Allison modeling the shirt with some of our friends from the Paracon!
With UFO Legend Stanton Friedman
With Jeff Belanger
With WhatsYourGhostStory.Com’s Scott Markus
With Ghost Hunters’ Dustin Pari
And you can check out one of those shirts for yourself on Amazon right here!
Now for an episode like this, you know we just couldn’t resist working on a song by the man who sold his soul at the Crossroads himself, Robert Johnson (who we covered in detail in our first episode, “Making A Deal With The Devil: The Musicians Who Sold Their Souls To Satan”. ) Everyone from B.B. King to The Blues Brothers have done their versions of this song, and we thought we’d leave our mark on it. It’s also the last song that Stevie Ray Vaughan every played, at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin in 1990. It was an epic jam with Stevie, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Jimmie Vaughan, and Robert Cray – August 25th, 1990. So we also thought it was appropriate because this wewas the 27th anniversary of his death. And here’s our little blues jam, Sunspot with “Sweet Home Chicago Mothman”.
Oh, baby don’t you want to go?
Oh, baby don’t you want to go?
Back to the land of winged humanoids
To my sweet home Chicago
On Roosevelt and 59th
perched right on the light,
Flying off to the air
after flapping its wings twice,
Oh whoa,
honey don’t you want to go
where the mothman flies
Sweet Home Chicago
At Humboldt it’s an owl,
they call it Lechuza,
eyes of glowing red,
and they’re staring right through ya
Oh Baby,
Honey don’t you wanna go
to the land of the were-owl
Sweet Home Chicago.
Went to Lollapalooza
wanted to see the bands
But he had to fly away
everyone yelled at the mothman
saying Baby
Honey don’t you wanna go
to the land of man sized bats,
Sweet Home Chicago
The Tribune is silent
but City Hall knows it’s true
the Police won’t do nothing to
Make Godfather look a fool
And they say Baby
Honey don’t you wanna go
to where nobody’s seen nothing
My Sweet Home Chicago
Oh, baby don’t you want to go?
Oh, baby don’t you want to go?
Back to the land of winged humanoids
To my sweet home Chicago
Magician David Parr’s recent appearance on Penn & Teller: Fool Us ended up with David performing a neat card trick with Alyson Hanigan (Willow from Buffy!) that not only amazed the crowd, but managed to fool both of the title stars! The show is based around the famous magic duo trying to figure out tricks by other magicians and if they can’t figure your trick out, you get to perform with them at their Las Vegas show! On the August 7th episode, David Parr was the only one who managed that feat!
You can watch the segment in its entirety on David Parr’s YouTube Channel
In addition to just being an incredible performer, though, David brings a cast knowledge of magical and mystical history to his show. He has a special Spiritualist-type magic performance in addition to his stage show (which you can see in Chicago at The Magic Cabaret) where he delves into the history of the seance as well as the spectacle.
David Parr looking like he wants to trick you!
In this episode, Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts joins Wendy and I as we talk to David Parr about his favorite tricks, the whole experience of being on the Penn & Teller: Fool Us program, the problem with modern skepticism, non-staged and unexpected paranormal experiences during magic shows, and of course, miniature guillotines that kids used to get as presents (WHAT?!)
David Parr and his Miniature Guillotine
Well, one of the things that we discussed in the podcast with David Parr was that humans really love mysteries! That feeling of wonder and “not knowing” helps keep life interesting and fun, and magic is definitely part of that. We all love being fooled a little bit, whether it’s willfully getting engaged in the suspension of disbelief during a movie or watching a lady being sawed in half onstage, or even in our relationships. There’s what’s real and what we want to believe, and often, it’s just more fun to say to the person we love, “Lie to Me”.
Tell me I’m the biggest,
tell me I’m the best.
Tell me how hard I feel
and I’m better than the rest.
Let me know how good my kisses taste,
You’ve never felt this way before
Tell me how every other boy,
left you wanting more.
I can smell the bull$&^% on your breath.
Lie. To. Me.
Lie. To. Me.
Tell me I’m your big daddy,
Everything you’ve ever dreamed.
Lie. To. Me.
Lie. To. Me.
I’m the only one you need,
The only man who can compete.
I love it when you fool me baby
I love it when you fib
I love it when you make me feel
I’m just the best that there is
I’d rather live a fantasy
then suffer through the truth
And your sweet little fictions
Are all I need for proof
I can smell the bull$&^% on your breath.
Lie. To. Me.
Lie. To. Me.
Tell me I’m your big daddy,
Everything you’ve ever dreamed.
Lie. To. Me.
Lie. To. Me.
I’m the only one you need,
The only man who can compete.
She’s from right down the road from where we all grew up.
She co-authored the book Weird Wisconsin which is sadly out-of-print but it was the Fortean Bible of America’s Dairyland in the 90s.
She is a great storyteller who keeps things believable. I don’t have to mention that there’s a trend in this field to just jump and exaggerate outrageous details to juice up a paranormal story. Linda das managed to keep a good deal of her journalistic integrity for over a quarter of a century, now that’s something to be proud of!
To kick off the show, Wendy and I use our trashed voices to talk a little about our musical weekend, including a show at a haunted club in Middleton, Wisconsin, the Wisconsin State Fair, and an afternoon show on the Sugar River (which has its own UFO sightings and ghost stories) and then Wendy also tells a couple highlights from her trip to the Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas at the beginning of August. Including her two favorite cosplayers as Captain Kirk and Mister Spock!
Then, Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts joins Linda and I for a discussion about the latest news about the Beast of Bray Road, her favorite new cryptid stories, a little Native American lore from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and even a cryptic preview of what she’s working on right now!
Considering that our first interview with Linda about her book, American Monsters, inspired our EP of the same name, we knew that another conversation with her would spark some musical creativity. Her titles just lend very well to tracks laden with symbolism. When we thought about “Monsters Among Us”, we thought about our neighbors. Your neighbors seem like they’re great people and you have fun with them, you have them over for a barbecue, and you really like them. But then you see what they write about on Facebook. You see what kind of beliefs they have and in today’s Internet and political climate, it seemed that writing a song about how people that usually like each other as neighbors who connect through their locations or families or sports teams, might hate each other if they knew all about each other’s political beliefs.
Are other people’s differing beliefs in this world of outrage, forces for and against political correctness, and fake clickbait so offensive that we discount how they are when you’re hanging out with them in person. So we thought that lent itself to an interesting song idea, “The Psychopath Next Door”.
Watching through the windows
Peeking through the cracks
Waiting for their moment
So don’t you turn your back.
They act like they’re your friends,
But don’t you be a cuck,
They’re worshipping the Devil,
And it’s your soul they’ll suck
Sometimes the truth
Is just a metaphor
To think I barbecued with
The psychopath next door
The monsters live among us,
I see plenty everyday.
I don’t know who I can trust.
So I’ll send you all away.
So I don’t want no bumperstickers,
And I don’t want no big red hats.
I’m so sick of disagreeing,
So I’ll just hang out with my cats.
Sometimes the truth
Is just a metaphor
To think I barbecued with
The psychopath next door
Sometimes the truth
Is just a metaphor
To think I barbecued with
The psychopath next door
Jenny Ashford wasn’t a believer. She was always into horror movies, books, and goth culture, but had never had a paranormal experience herself. Interested in fiction and fashion, but never seeing the real thing, that all changed when she met Tom Ross, who was the focus of a poltergeist in his teens. While already a successful author and graphic designer, Jenny seized on the opportunity to start researching and writing paranormal non-fiction. She started with the story of her boyfriend Tom and what his family went through in the 80s, and together they co-wroteThe Mammoth Mountain Poltergeist. Since then she’s written several more books on poltergeist phenomena, The Rochdale Poltergeist and House of Fire and Whispers: Investigating the Seattle Demon House, both with British parapsychologist Steve Mera. Jenny has now compiled well over hundred poltergeist phenomena spanning centuries with her latest work, The Unseen Hand: A New Exploration of Poltergeist Phenomena.
Jenny Ashford
Jenny is a believer in the classic theory of poltergeists having a human agent as its focus (which I also was an adherent to up until our discussion with Geoff Holder.) Allison Jornlin from Milwaukee Ghosts joins us in the conversation as Jenny goes into detail about her own experiences, several of her favorite poltergeist stories, possible hoaxes, possible explanations, the horror that really scares her, and what she and Steve Mera found in the Keith Linder poltergeist case in Seattle that the crew of Ghost Adventures missed.
Check out Jenny’s website right here for more information on her paranormal books, scary horror fiction, and graphic design work. She also blogs horror reviews at Goddess of Hellfire and podcasts with Tom Ross at their show, 13 O’Clock.
For this week’s song, we decided to go into one of the dozens of poltergeist stories that Jenny writes about in the Unseen Hand, the famous story of the Bell Witch, made into a film as An American Haunting and deserving of an episode in its own right, because there is much more than meets the initial eye to it. We take the poem “Queen of the Haunted Dell” from M.V. Ingram’s work, Authenticated History of the Bell Witch from 1894. Ingram knew the Bell family and compiled as much information as he could about it including their own journals and released them after the last of the family who this happened to passed away. He was a journalist and not a poet, but he was inspired to add a poem to his book, and we used that poem as lyrics for this episode’s track, “Queen of the Haunted Dell”.
’Mid woodland bowers, grassy dell,
By an enchanted murmuring stream,
Dwelt pretty blue-eyed Betsy Bell,
Sweetly thrilled with love’s young dream.
Life was like the magic spell,
That guides a laughing stream,
Sunbeams glimmering on her fell,
Kissed by lunar’s silvery gleam.
But elfin phantomas cursed the dell,
And sylvan witches all unsean,
As our tale will truely tell,
Wielded sceptre o’re the queen.
Life was like the magic spell,
That guides a laughing stream,
Sunbeams glimmering on her fell,
Kissed by lunar’s silvery gleam.
But elfin phantomas cursed the dell,
And sylvan witches all unsean,
As our tale will truely tell,
Wielded sceptre o’re the queen.
It’s no secret that my sister, Allison Jornlin from Milwaukee Ghosts is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer superfan. I had seen the original movie, which I thought was more interesting because it was one of the first Pee-Wee Herman cameos after his “incident” (and he’s hilarious in the film), but I thought the whole thing was silly and way too lightweight, I was into heavier duty horror at the time it came out and didn’t like what I thought was the “Valley Girl” aspect of the whole thing (which also prevented me from truly enjoyingClueless until I finally read Emma a couple of years later.)
So, when the show launched on the WB network in 1997, well, I had trouble caring. They were more known for 7th Heaven and Sister, Sister, could they really have a sweet paranormal show or was it ust going to be another cheese-fest. After all, The X-Files inspired not-so-great copycat shows like Baywatch Nights (David Hasselhoff instead of David Duchovny, for real!) and Psi-Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal (which couldn’t even be saved by a game Dan Aykroyd.) Why should Buffy be any different?
While I watched a few episodes back in the late 90s and enjoyed them, I took my paranormal much too seriously back then. I didn’t start getting into the Joss Whedon-verse until Firefly in 2003, but by then Buffy the Vampire Slayer had become a phenomenon and I missed the train.
During this conversation to celebrate Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s 20th anniversary, they go into detail on how the show and characters inspired them to take up paranormal missions of their own!
For the song this week, Wendy and I, who are unfortunately not Buffy superfans, but we did some research and came across this Joss Whedon quote:
So I thought, ‘Well, a TV show needs something that will sustain it, and a California girl fighting vampires, that’s not enough. So I thought about high school and the horror movie, and high school as hell and about the things the girl fights as reflections of what you go through in high school. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s a TV series.’
“High School as Hell”, well, that’s something we can all understand. And our Sunspot song, “Loser of the Year” (a song written in the 90s and a couple decades old in its own right!) perfectly encapsulates that idea!
Remember when you told me,
I’m not worth the time of day?
Remember when you slapped my face,
By just looking away?
But I won’t hold a grudge,
I just wanna see you die (a painful death),
I won’t feel bitter,
It just feels good to see you cry…
Over and over again.
It looks like I have lost again…
I’ll be your loving puppy,
I’ll be your slave for torture,
I’ll be the one you call the
LOSER OF THE YEAR.
I’ll be your willing victim,
I’ll be your favorite scapegoat,
I’ll be your one and only
LOSER OF THE YEAR.
Remember when you tripped me,
Because I looked so lame?
Remember when you laughed at me,
Because I didn’t dress the same?
But I won’t feel hurt,
I won’t break in front of you.
Don’t you think I feel?
Don’t you think I have emotions too?
Don’t you remember gym class?
Looks like I’m chosen last again…
Yeah, you need me.
Yeah, you need me.
I’m the one who makes you feel good about yourself,
So you can go $%^& yourself.
But I won’t hold a grudge,
I JUST WANT TO SEE YOU DIE.
Don’t you think I feel?
Don’t you think I have emotions too?
Don’t you remember gym class?
Looks like I’m chosen last again…
I’ll be your loving puppy,
I’ll be your slave for torture,
I’ll be the one you call the
LOSER OF THE YEAR.
I’ll be your willing victim,
I’ll be your whipping boy,
I’ll be your one and only
LOSER OF THE YEAR.
When it came to causing nightmares for the children of the 90s, few people besides the bogeyman himself are as responsible as D.J. MacHale. As the co-creator of Nickelodeon’s long-running Are You Afraid of the Dark? horror series for children, his work terrified a generation of flannel-clad youngsters. In addition to Are You Afraid of the Dark?, D.J. has also authored the ten-volume (!) Pendragon series of young adult science fiction and fantasy books as well as the Morpheus Road ghost story trilogy.
We’re joined in the discussion by Scott Markus from What’s Your Ghost Story? who worked with D.J. on his show Flight 29 Down in the mid–2000s. Scott’s also going to be moderating a panel where D.J. is appearing with some of his Are You Afraid of the Dark? cohorts at Midsummer Scream, which is a festival dedicated to Halloween and horror on July 29th and 30th at the Long Beach Convention Center.
Click here to learn more about Midsummer Scream
While Are You Afraid of the Dark? was originally intended as a series of direct-to-video fairy tales that would help beleaguered parents put their kids to sleep, the concept evolved into the campfire ghost story that everyone remembers as D.J. and his co-creator Ned Kandel realized their fairy tale bedtime story series had more possibilities as an anthology television series focused around scary tales instead.
The show ran for seven seasons and produced ninety-one episodes and helped launch the careers of future stars like Ryan Gosling, Eliza Cuthbert, and Neve Campbell. With frequent nods to classic horror cinema, Are You Afraid of the Dark? became one of Nickelodeon’s most fondly remembered programs, but some of the nightmare fuel behind the show came from D.J.’s own paranormal experiences.
Even the ghosts of classic cinema, like F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, show up in the Tale Of The Midnight Madness
Growing up in an old haunted house in Greenwich, Connecticut, D.J. lived in a home full of weird sounds and feelings. He recalls his mother, someone who definitely wasn’t into the “oogedy-boogedy” side of the world, telling him later on that she had seen a woman in the window upstairs when there was no one in the house. Also, that she would figure out a way to turn off the lights upstairs without having to go through the hallway alone in the dark because she never quite felt comfortable up there.
He remembers two distinct experiences in the house. One, waking up in the middle of the night as a toddler, and seeing a shadow figure floating through the hallway beyond the door. This made such an impression on the young filmmaker that he even recreated it as the opening scene in Are You Afraid of the Dark’s first episode. Art imitating life (or death, as it were!)
Two, as a teenager, while home alone trying to learn “Foxy Lady” bu Jimi Hendrix on guitar, he could hear some kind of weird activity in that same hallway whenever he would put the needle down on the record. When he finally finished the song, he recalls clearly hearing someone in that same hallway sliding up against the wall and sighing. Thinking it was his brother-in-law playing tricks, he searched the house, but there wasn’t anyone there.
D.J. and his mother later theorized that it was the previous owner of the house, a Rose McKeever, who had died on the site, still roaming the upstairs hallway, and “tut-tut”ing young people for their loud music from beyond the grave.
Where do you think Ozzy and Tony Iommi got the name from?
Gee, ya think Ozzy Osbourne was influenced by this too?
Those experiences and a fateful screening of Boris Karloff’s Black Sabbath at a vintage theater would lead D.J. toward the worlds of fantasy, horror, and science-fiction throughout his career. From his work on Disney’s Tower of Terror film (which we discuss extensively in the podcast) to his latest book series, The Library, which lets the reader help in solving supernatural mysteries, D.J. MacHale is the man behind countless creepy feelings and sleepless nights.
The song for this week’s episode is our remix of the “Are You Afraid Of The Dark” theme song. We love how it sets the tone for the creepy stories that follow it, so make sure to listen to Sunspot’s (instrumental) remix of the theme at the end of the podcast!
A rock band's journey into the afterlife, UFOs, entertainment, and weird science.
