Mr. Pumpkin Takes a Wife

Shh. Only I can hear you. Only I.

No one ever told me blood was so tasty.

Her lips like the teeth of a saw. I return to them again and again.

Every drop of blood lay screaming on the ground.

Mr. Pumpkin took his wife in hand and pulped her.

No severed head is silent if you listen carefully.

She relaxed, and her heart fell dead and silent.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

The Night Force

In the night, I feel every dream is suffused with nightmare. At least for me, I can't speak of others. If you've watched someone sleeping, waiting for them to awaken perhaps, and notice you there, watching, and fearful they will see you, then you can understand what I'm saying. Since I've only watched women sleeping, not children or men, with the kind of fascination only a once-crushingly-lonely man can manage, it is often then, in the night, where the greatest fear of losing another settles in.

Horror is personal, but terror is communal. At least that's the message sent by a media which shrieks TERROR TERROR TERROR while images of bearded zealots and amputated soldiers floods our consciousness. So we find ourselves looking at the woman, in the night, perceiving a weakness of fear, of inability to stave off the snaking terror, of inescapable reality. This woman will die some day, no matter how much you love her. Whether it is a car accident, or cancer, or a slipping away into a night recognizable as the nothingness from which we came, and to which we return, she will die. This is personal horror, while personal terror is merely in how we will awaken the next morning after our loved ones are gone from this world. No one wants to arrive cold and shivering into that new world of loss.

In the end, there is little a man, even a watchful man, can do to stop such a thing. He can love her, and the way her hair falls, and the sheet where it clings to her lower back, but no one can escape their shadow, the final shadow.

The Wolf Man by Day, and Night

I think the Wolf Man has always appealed most to me, primarily because he's a savage, driven by the moon, spurred by prey's blood. He's the best of Man as a survivor, melded with the perfect hunter of the wolf. No longer a Man, wholly, yet still imbued with a Man's intellect. Where the wolf might be instinctually naive, the Wolf Man perceives Man as the Enemy. It is both the fear of the beast and the awareness of the endangered human being.

Also, savagery and bloodlust, when transposed from animal to Man, is inevitably rage in its most pure form. The fight/flight becomes a berserker's defense: attack until nothing moves, until the danger is shredded and crushed.

Frankenstein's Monster is the most tragic, being as the Monster is horrifically aware, an intellect trapped in corpse-flesh. While Frank's brute power and towering offense to God is far more interesting, the Wolf Man is a primal duality, as old as time. What lurked outside of the firelit cave, in the dark, is at once unknowable on any level and as close as a brother, within the Wolf Man.

Debra Paget's Scorning Me To Death with Those Eyes

Watching THE HAUNTED PALACE last night, great Vincent Price work, Roger Corman directing, and one of my favorite writers Charles Beaumont (THE HOWLING MAN) screenwriting the thing. It's a bizarre mash-up of Poe and Lovecraft. It's almost disconcerting to hear the Lovecraft terminologies, names and scenarios for Dark Elder God invasion, elucidated in a Corman cut-rate chiller, but there it is all the same.

Debra Paget plays the suffering young wife of Le Price, and man, what a looker. Unbelievable-looking woman. She almost makes Raquel Welch look like someone's deformed sister. Almost.

I'd kind of missed the Debra Paget worship, but look at the bod on this dame. With that amazing facial bone structure and those powerhouse gams, I can't for the life of me understand who'd fawn all over Marilyn Monroe's soft boozy no-orgasm-having behind. It's a shame Paget didn't have the same impact, because if I have to look at the transsexuals at Mardi Gras, I'd rather they look like Paget than Marilyn M. any day.

Pure Love

Linda Miller, 1967, lots of Japanese moviemakers, and one giant Kong hand. Cute dame and I had a crush on those knees a'hers.

Frankenstein's Kissing Cousin: the Hulk

Jack Kirby's Hulk shared a pile of similarities to Frankenstein's Monster. The Hulk wouldn't tap into that "misunderstood monster" angle for a few years after his first appearance (above.) Mostly the Hulk was a very socially-phobic monster. People really got under his skin, even if they weren't soldiers shooting at him. His girlfriend--or rather the Hulk's alter ego Bruce Banner's girlfriend--Betty Ross, basically gets told she's just another scummy human by the cranked-up Hulk.

Another literary feature for Kirby's Hulk: the early Hulk is a handsome dude. He wears a ripped puffy shirt and has deep circles around his eyes, just like poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the early 1800s. Shelley also happened to be Mary Wollstonecraft's main squeeze, and she just happened to write the novel about Frankenstein.

The Hulk is philosophical as well as sexy-brooding.

In the years since 1962, Hulk's origin, and now, he's barely recognizable, or rather rarely has had any consistencency to his persona or physical nature. I prefer the early Hulk, just after the Hulk's "puffy shirt" phase and into his little purple panties phase, where he talked like a longshoreman and had a flat Boris Karloff as Frankenstein head.

Awesome. Simply awesome.

Frankensmack

Probably in my top panels of Thor Getting Punched of all time, 400 percent better because it's a Frankenstein Monster, and a Teenage one at that, from a comic book about an alien invasion of Earth foiled by a group of superheroes no one remembers ever existing. John Byrne is the artist, Roger Stern the writer.

Nothing makes me happier than Thor punched right in his piehole. Give me Hercules any day, but Frank Jr. more than either.

The Frank/Drac Rumble

Probably the best-drawn Frank/Drac slugfest ever, from the pencil of John Buscema, inked by John Verpoorten. Not exactly a great story, overall, and maybe not even Buscema's finest hour, but a nice rumble nonetheless.

Give a Little Bit

The undersea adventures of a boy in love. Does a woman need the pliant dampness of human skin as she is made love to? Can she desire the rending spires of a crustacean's shell-like armor?

Who is to say, really? A woman will put up with a lot. More than she should. A dweller from the ocean's depths need only fulfill her, protect her, and make her laugh, playing amongst the dolphins.