Friday, July 11, 2025

Mark Snow

We lost composer Mark Snow on July 4th.  He was 78 years old.  When I was young, I can perfectly recall the disgust and uneasiness that my dad would project whenever a favorite Hollywood figure or big band composer would pass away.  He would yell into the other room where my mother was and say something like "Betty!  James Cagney died! I remember when he was a young man!  Everybody's dying!"


I never gave it much thought back then, as those people seemed to be some kind of relic or fossil.  My dad would add later "Never get old, boys!"  (Though he'd also often say "Never get married!...and if you DO get married, never have kids!")  

I feel like everyone who reads this blog probably has a deep love for The X-Files.  And if you feel that love, you probably know the show's composer by name.  His music was as much a part of that show as the two main characters.  I wonder if the show would have been as popular had he not scored every episode.  Would the aliens have been as horrifying?  Would those wonderful moments between Scully and Mulder have been as touching?  

Absolutely not.

Here's to a man who made an enormous impact on this guy.  
It's rough getting old and seeing your favorites pass on.
Everybody's dying.

Click below for the absolute perfect example of Mr. Snow's talents...






The October Country Project

It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring at you and never seeing you.

- Ray Bradbury, The Jar



Monday, July 7, 2025

Terrain Halloween 2025

Looking forward to visiting one of these stores come the season...They're one of the last ones that get it right.












Sunday, July 6, 2025

Now Playing: Oath Of Night

By Lamia Vox.


Click below...

Yokai

Yokai (妖怪) are a class of supernatural monsters, spirits, and demons in Japanese folklore. They are not easily categorized, encompassing a wide range of beings, from mischievous spirits to fearsome monsters, and even objects imbued with supernatural power. Yokai often blur the lines between the natural and supernatural, and are frequently featured in Japanese art, literature, and popular culture. 







More images here.

And click here to learn about a Yokai event occurring in Philadelphia.


Fire And Ice



More works by Scarecrow Atelier here.

Day Of The Dead

You want to put some kind of explanation down here before you leave? Here's one as good as any you're likely to find. We're bein' punished by the Creator. He visited a curse on us. So that man could look at... what Hell was like. Maybe He didn't want to see us blow ourselves up, put a big hole in the sky. Maybe He just wanted to show us He's still the Boss Man.



Image by lisa.


Saturday, June 28, 2025

Now Playing: Funebre Macabre [Musicorum]

By the Lovecraft Sextet.


Click below...

Kaidan: An Evening Of 100 Spirits



Man, I know almost nothing about this, but I'm extremely curious.
And it's coming to Philadelphia in September.

The Hyaku-Monogatari Kaidanki is a Japanese, Heian-era pastime of telling ghost stories to one another of increasing intensity with the hopes one of these spirits does not appear in your parlor. Drawing from the rich history of Japanese folklore and Victorian spiritualism this is a parlour and stage magic show encased in the mysterious and often eerie world of yurei and yokai. The production is a multi-media and performance evening combining illusions, history, storytelling, bunraku, kabuki, noh, and more to weave a creepy web of scary stories each paired with a performance or art piece to transport the audience to a time of onmyōji and 10th Century court pastimes. Educational, beautifully macabre, distinctly Japanese, and entertaining of course. Featuring Schreiben the Conjurer as he takes you through this peculiar world of spirits, investigating it through a Westerner’s perspective while tackling biases and misconceptions to spirit the audience away to another time and place in our world’s history.

Click below for details...


Modern Trailer: JAWS

Click below...



Witchy

Yes kids, you too can own one of the big Halloween three. 
That's right, THREE horrific masks to chose from. 
They're fun.
They're frightening,
and they GLOW in the dark.


Thursday, June 26, 2025

Saturday, June 21, 2025

Gothic Hills

Courtesy of westcoaster.net.

Now Playing: The Step I Take

A new track from one of the best Dark Ambient projects out there - Kammarheit.  Hopefully this means a new album is on the way.


Click below...

Thursday, June 19, 2025

Spoops: The Little Spirits Of Halloween



Who changes the leaves? Summons the autumn winds? Wakes ghosts and spirits to haunt houses and chill the air? Why, Spoops, of course! They hatch from the smallest gourds in your local pumpkin patch at the start of every fall, then tend to your town to ensure everything is just right for Halloween.

My friend A.J. Locascio has a children's book coming out this August, based upon the small creatures he invented and sells throughout the year - The Spoops.  I'm a proud owner of a few of them.






As someone who has looked into getting a book published, I have nothing but immense respect for the people who can pull it off.  It's truly impressive.  

Super excited for A.J. and illustrator Laurie Conley.  Looking extremely forward to adding this one to my growing collection of children's Halloween books.


Click here for his Spoops IG.

Click here to pre-order the book.


Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Friday, June 6, 2025

Chit-Chat

ChatGPT uses advanced natural language processing (NLP) to understand and respond to user input. It can be used for a wide range of tasks, including answering questions, summarizing information, writing articles, generating code, and even composing creative pieces like poems or scripts. 

How it works:

ChatGPT is trained on a massive dataset of text from the internet, allowing it to learn patterns and generate coherent and relevant responses. It essentially predicts the next word in a sequence, based on the previous words and the overall context. 

This technology will soon make you unemployed and intensely miserable (I made that part up).


This might seem self-serving, but I promise that my brother texted me out of the blue saying he asked ChatGPT about my work.  It was unsolicited (I swear), as I feel like simply asking A.I. about me is ultimately going to lead to it ripping me off, and to the aforementioned misery.  

But when asked, it responded with the below:

Pumpkinrot’s style can best be described as handcrafted folk horror meets Halloween art installation. His work blends rustic, decayed materials—like sticks, burlap, and natural fibers—with hauntingly atmospheric lighting and design. The result is a deeply eerie, otherworldly aesthetic rooted in:

Folk horror: Inspired by rural superstitions, scarecrows, and pagan-like effigies.

Organic textures: Emphasizes weathered, rotting, and natural elements.

Silent storytelling: His props often feel like they’re part of an ancient ritual or lost myth, evoking narrative without words.

Muted, earthy palette: Dominated by browns, grays, and sickly yellows, with flickers of candlelight or eerie glows.

Minimal but powerful movement: Many of his pieces are static but posed in ways that suggest life or presence.

Overall, his work feels like unearthed relics from forgotten autumnal folklore—evocative, unsettling, and deeply immersive.

I was really creeped out at first.  But then I figured that write up would look nice on a tombstone... I definitely appreciated that it formulated that description based on stuff it found online.  But it still feels icky.

Then I envisioned a future where home haunters begin generating A.I. haunt photos of nonexistent Halloween displays.  A future where it becomes impossible to determine what's real and what's not.  As someone who receives messages on Instagram asking me if my photos are A.I., I dread a future where no one can tell the difference.  And I'm thinking that future isn't all that far away.  





Thursday, June 5, 2025