Television: House of 1,000 Unisex Solid Paprika Rib Vest Sweaters.

If you're anything like me, when you think "high-quality, color-fast detergent that will handle tough stains without damaging my ," you think Rob Zombie. Here's Mr. Zombie's Woolite commercial. Enjoy!

Here's the link, so that you can enjoy the full-screen image.

Does anybody know why Blogger no longer fits any standard video in it's copy column?

Stuff: "I have a problem with mirrors."

Over in the UK, the Portsmouth branch of the National Health Service (NHS) is trying to combat what the BBC delicately calls the region's "traditionally poor levels of dental health" with a new public service campaign. Bad teeth? Solution: vampires. Enjoy.

Due to Blogger's sudden inability to size video worth a damn, I'll also provide this link to AdWeek, where you can see the ad in its full ratio aspect: Take me to where they know how a video should treated!

Movies: "It’s disenchanting, but it’s not difficult."

Today in the Grey Dame, Chuckie Closterman take time out from the normal music beat to ponder the oddly reassuring image of the living dead:

"I know this is supposed to be scary," he said. "But I'm pretty confident about my ability to deal with a zombie apocalypse. I feel strangely informed about what to do in this kind of scenario."

I could not disagree. At this point who isn’t?

Television: "Your inner monologue is the conscience of America."

Entertainment Weekly has a profile of Peter Weller, focusing mainly on his turn in latest season of Dexter. In it, readers discover that Robocop is, among other things, a UCLA PhD candidate in Renaissance Studies. I kid you not. This odd story leads to this interesting bit:

"I'm finishing my Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance history. I just passed my oral exam. One of the guys on my committee is from Cambridge, a professor, Peter Stacey — he’s a genius. He’s also a Dexter freak. I brought him to the Dexter set, and he had this great take on the character. He said, 'You know who Dexter is? If you watched Dexter from outside the US, you'd see immediately. He's the history of America: a child born in blood, condemned to tyrannize — like a child — but possessed with the voice of its Founding Father, pointing him in the right direction. He's the ultimate vigilante. A creation like Dexter sees itself as the world's police force except it has a conscience, which is the voting public.' Stacey told Michael C. Hall, 'Your inner monologue is the conscience of America.'"

Hmmm.

Television: Tru that.

I can't imagine that you’re a reader of a horror blog and you need a rundown of the premise of HBO's camped-up vampire soap True Blood; but, because this post questions an apparent contradiction in the series's backstory, we need to cover the premise anyway.

In the world of True Blood, vampires have recently "come out of the coffin" and now live openly among the people they used to treat as food. Previous to this, the vampires lived in total secrecy. Despite their individual power, this secrecy was necessitated by they fact that the vastly larger human population would, once aroused to the dangers of predation, rally and destroy the vamps while they slept. (Plus, there's something supremely unwise in waging total war against your food. If you win, you're screwed.) What's made this vast sweeping social change possible is the invention of an artificial blood substitute, TruBlood, that can fulfill the nutritional needs of vampires (though it apparently lacks the emotional kick of chomping down on humans). Although TruBlood might be considered a necessary good insomuch as without it vampires go on killing and human must kill them, within the context of the show it is distributed – at least in the Western world – in a manner similar to sports or energy drinks. Now we know from details in the show and the marketing materials that surround it, TruBlood was invented by a Japanese scientist.

Now here's the problem: The creation of TruBlood as a globally available product contradicts the backstory of the show. The concept requires that, for some extended period of time, a substantial number of humans knew about vampires prior to the widespread availability of an alternative blood source. But, contrary to the show's premise, this did not lead to the destruction of vampires.

Although the story of the creation of TruBlood is, I believe, not thoroughly detailed in the show, we get some hints to the drink's origins from other semi-canon sources: notably "marketing materials" HBO created for the TruBlood drink as part of their first season online ad campaign and a 1-ish True Blood prequel promotional comic in which a non-show vampire character discusses the first time he heard of the existence of TruBlood. From this material, we get the following bits of data:

1. TruBlood exists prior to its use as a dietary substitute to human blood and vampire outing occurs prior to TruBlood's worldwide use as such. From the promotional comic, we learn that Japanese vampires are the first to "discover" TruBlood's vampiric use. Convinced that the product's nosferatu-chow application is a paradigm shifter, Japanese vampires start using online forums to contact other vampires and promote the notion of coming out. This is important as it suggests that the notion of coming out occurs prior to the widespread availability of TruBlood. Indeed, the widespread availability of TruBlood, especially as a sort of high-end energy drink, would be predicated on the notion of the notion of a vampire market for just such a product. It might seem obvious, but it bears repeating: It appears that vampires "came out of the coffin" after an alternative to predation existed, but such an alternative was widely available.

2. There are, apparently, cultural distinctions in predation that suggest regional variations in just how "hidden" vampires population might have been prior to the revelation. The comic suggests that Western vampires, prior to the decision to "come out," lived under severe cover. Feeding, it is implied, most typically ended in the death of the victim. This seems to have been a matter of the feeding vampire covering its tracks, as it is well established that vampires can feed without killing. It is assumed that very few, if any, humans in Western culture knew of the existence of vampires. By contrast, there are very nebulous indications that Japanese vampires and their human victims had some sort of more consensual and knowing relationship prior to the revelation of vampires to the living. What exactly their relationship was and what that meant for what the developers of TruBlood is never explicitly stated. It does, however, leave open the possibility that TruBlood's developers may have known of the existence of vampires even prior to working out a viable alternative to predation.

3. That vampires are relatively ravenous. The marketing materials for the TruBlood drink imply that vampires get the itch to drink blood on a nightly basis. In fact, the range given for needing to feed is "nightly" to "six times a night." The show, however, implies that actual feeding occurs less often than this and even suggests – though such reports might be a sort of vampire urban legend – that some vampires can entirely suppress the urge to feed. Let's ballpark it and suggest that, prior to the revelation of vampires to the living world, an average feeding rate was once every six months. The average outer limit of vampire feedings, let's guess, is several years. A vamp can hold back, let's say, three years without feeding if they absolutely must. I'm kinda pulling this figure out of my ass, because we don't have any hard data to go with. Why is this important? Knowing how often vampires must feed, combined with the fact that most pre-revelation feeding led to a human fatality, allows us to start ballparking the human cost of knowing vampires are real, but choosing not to destroy them because you expect a solution to the problem to arrive soon. We need to make another WAG here: How many vampires are there? Despite how common supernatural figures are in the show, I think we're supposed to draw the conclusion that they pretty much a minority everywhere they live. Let's assume that vampires are less than one one-hundredth of one percent of the global population. This is actually an absurdly low number given the number of vampires that appear in the show. But, as you'll see, even this absurdly low number pushes the bounds of belief when we start crunching numbers. If there's a global population of 6,000,000,000 then there are 6 million vampires. Even if every vampire stretched their feeding limits to max, this would mean that, prior to revelation, vampires killed about 2 million humans a year, roughly 170,000 people a month. So, when we say that somebody knew about the existence of vampires, but decided to not destroy them, every month of inaction cost human lives.

Now let's apply some real world factors that I think we can safely assume hold true even if the world of True Blood.

1. Getting a commercial product to a global market takes time. For a comparison, it took Red Bull nearly five years from the moment it penetrated its first foreign market to the time it arrived on US shores. Admittedly, Red Bull isn't a matter of life and death – but one of the curious things about the show it the idea that TruBlood would be distributed like a sports drink rather than, say, like insulin. That's the novelist's choice and not my own.

2. Getting a commercial product to a global market requires a wide and somewhat transparent process that would preclude the possibility of keeping the products sole target demographic, vampires, a secret. We could, I think, assume that vampires found out about the existence of TruBlood through the vampire grapevine. However, even if you assume that your customers were hip, you’d have to convince numerous government and private agencies to go along with your plans.

Add these two together and you've got the following conclusion: The spread of TruBlood must have taken some amount of time, during which the existence of vampires must have been made a public fact.

Armed with this few data points, we can imagine a handful of scenarios involving the development of TruBlood. Instead of writing out a series of hypothetical narratives, I'm going to just ponder a few "what if" options and brainstorm the results of each.

We've determined that TruBlood was functional before vampires began debating assimilation into human culture. However, the hint that Japanese vampires were not a rigorously hidden as their Western counterparts opens up the idea that vampires might have had some hand in the creation TruBlood. This could have either taken the form of approaching the human creators of the artificial blood after it was complete and pitching the drink idea or one can imagine that vampires actually influenced the artificial blood's creation. The latter scenario does not, I think, require that vampires reveal themselves right away. Through the use of enthralled humans and the use of the vampire's mind-control "glamour," one can imagine that a small group of people – say a couple of key researchers – could be influenced to steer the project into directions most likely to produce a dietary substitute. Still, sooner or later, vampires would have to convince medical companies and beverage companies to start producing and packaging the artificial blood in a manner consistent with its current form in the show. At that moment, even if the existence of vampires was not widely known, at the very least several people at a handful of fairly large-sized companies would know of the existence of vampires. Further, it would be in the vamps best interest to keep the circle tight at this point. Until TruBlood is globally available, humans and vampire must necessarily conflict. Also, there's always a chance that the scientists and suits might react negatively, requiring the vamps to damage control the secrecy breech. The smaller the circle, the easier that would be. So let's assume vamp existence was reveled on a need to know basis in these early days.

This might not seem like a big deal, but it means, in essence, that everybody who knew at this point had to understand that, while their companies quietly sat on the fact of vampire existence, a truly horrific number of people were dying. Let's just look at the shortest scenario. Vampires are a total secret, preventing their destruction, until a global near consensus is reached to reveal themselves to humans. They reveal themselves to a small group of scientists, corporate suit types, a few bankers, and, most likely, a government official or two. Everybody who needs to understand why a company would want to release med tech as a sports drink. Keeping the numbers small as I think they could be, we're looking at a group of several hundred people working together for about four years (that's how long I'm guessing it would take to get people to believe in vampires; determine that the wisest course of action was assimilation and not total war; test the product; revamp, so to speak, production; and get government approval, assuming the approval was fast tracked due to the unique situation). During this time people are diligently working away on TruBlood, hiding the existence of vampires. At the same time, vampires, even if they are onboard with the overall plan, could not be certain that the end results will work out. For vampires, you could max out your eating limits, but you'd still have to assume that feedings that ended in death would be preferable to predations that could leave witnesses to your existence. You'd have to keep killing. Over the course of that initial ramp up, we can assume that over 8 million people would have died.

After that initial stage, I don't believe it would possible to keep the existence of vampires secret. The submission of TruBlood for international market approvals would inevitably lead to the question of why humans would drink fake blood. The spread of TruBlood as a drink requires that all the agents – a rapidly increasing network of people distributed widely and therefore unlikely to be influenced supernaturally by vamps – at all the stages understand the real purpose of the drink. Using the Red Bull model, it would take another, say, five years for the drink to spread around the globe. During these five years, humans are aware of the fact of vampire existence and vampires do not yet have a widely available substitute to human predation. Also, to survive, vamps would have still been feeding. However, at this point, we can no longer assume that most or all vampires would decide that murdering their victims was the wisest course of action. Some vampires might well have feed on willing victims, stopping short of murdering them. Others might have partially feed on unwilling victims, figuring that the big masquerade was no longer in danger and they could use supernatural advantages to confuse potential witnesses to their personal crime. Still, others may have simply continued to attack and kill humans, figuring that it is simply the best way to avoid human attention until such time as an alternative is easily available and human reprisals are unlikely. (Which brings up another unlikely factor in the decision making process that must have gone on: Just a vampires would have to assume the possibility that humans might not go for the plan, humans would have to assume a voluntary stop in predation was far from certain. In fact, in the show, predation still regularly occurs. Why would humans go through all this trouble just to secure an false peace that ensures that they'll always lose any interaction?) Still, even if we assume that vampire related deaths took a plunge, feedings would have to go on. Given that, by the time show takes place, voluntary feedings are only starting to become faddish, we can assume they weren't the dominant form of vampire feeding. Let's say, though I find it unlikely, that nearly half of all feedings were voluntary during this time. That would still mean that more than 10,200,000 people were attacked, some percentage fatally.

Even though we can't know the details, we can confidently can state that no matter how TruBlood was developed and spread, it required that public and private institutions around the world to work together to produce, approve, distribute, and sell the new product, during which time humans were aware of the fact that vampires were killing humans at a million people a month.

The question is: Why would any government have allowed that to happen? It makes no sense. Take the United States (please!). Assuming that vamp's are equally distributed among the human population, then there are only 300,000 vamps in the US. That's not even enough votes to carry a city election here in New York. Yet between the time Japan reveals their existence as a fact and the time TruBlood can act as a complete substitute to predation, those vampires would have offed more than 400,000 people. Why would the US government do such a thing? It would be like allowing serial killers to operate freely because a Japanese corporation says it is bringing to market a sports drink that will definitively cure their homicidal impulses, during which time they will actually kill more than their own number.

Following the show's own premises, the revelation of vampires, regardless of the existence of a food alternative, should have led to a conflict between vampires and humans that ended either in the wholesale destruction of one (vampires) or both groups (vampires and humans). That it didn't makes about as much sense as glittery vampires.

Link Proliferation: Do not drill or dig here before A.D. 12,000.

Disco zombies are coming!

My long-suffering wife had put up with me cryptically reciting, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, the following "poem."

Stevie Washington
Angry youth
Born to die
New York's New York
Turn of the century
All crime

So, finally, she Youtube'd the aforementioned angry young man and found an extended clip that ties together all the tiny MTV station break bits into a single almost-narrative. Bask in the warm glow of the very late 1980s. (The density of the sound work on these things is bizarrely rich for the simplicity of the visuals.)


What's cultier than cult?

NYC's Wooster Group aims at that incredibly tiny demographic that digs Baroque opera and Italio-genre cinema. Until the 26th of this month, they're performing a live mash-up of Francesco Cavalli's 17th Century opera Didone (an operatic revision of the Dido myth – with a happy ending, oddly) and Mario Bava's 1965 sci-fi/horror cult flick Planet of the Vampires. I kid you not.

Make with the click and you'll get a couple of scenes – but you can't control the volume of the music or pause, so don't come crying to me when your coworkers rat you out to the overseer for taking a few minutes of the company's precious time to snag a wee bit of culture.

The poster, shown above, not only references the Bava movie in it's title treatment, but alludes to those bags of brightly colored plastic spaceman figures that one used to be able to buy from the grocery shop for a quarter or two. It makes me giggle and do a little dance every time I see it.

NB: It has come to my attention that some bloggers take offense at my use of the term "cult" – as is in "cult film" – to describe certain subgenres and their fanbases. Some find it carries a derogatory connotation. Others seem to feel I'm claiming that such works are idols at the center of genuine religious cults and I'm asking readers to assume that digging, say, the works of Dario Argento is the exact equivalent of belonging to Aum Shinrikyo.

To the former, I see your point, but I believe the "slur" is – at this point in time – a pretty toothless thing. Like the term "grindhouse," I find the cult thing is more nostalgic than offensive: It alludes to a time when there was something subversive and vaguely illicit about outrageous genre filmmaking. Like "punk," "fauvism," "cubism," "impressionism," and countless other art/culture terms, I feel the word has traveled from insult, to badge, to self-aware camp. Consequently, I'm using it in that spirit. If it's continued use offends, I'm sorry, but at least you know what I mean by it.

To the latter, you're an idiot.


How do you scare people 10,000 years from now?

Last week (I think it was last week) Curt (of the Groovy), I, and several insightful commenters got in a discussion on his site about what we could or could not say about the mental culture of our ancient, prehistoric ancestors.

Curiously, eggheads at the DOE are dealing with a similar problem. But they're doing in reverse.

The U.S. Department of Energy is going ahead with a toxic waste disposal plan – the Waste Isolation Pilot Plan – that, in essence, involves burying in the ground and declaring the area of limits for the next ten centuries.

Here's the problem: How can adequately communicate a message of danger to people who will be living at a 10,000 year remove from you?

To get a sense of that scale, think about how you'd warn people today and trace how old those tools are. Go back just 500 or 600 years and few English-speakers can still easily understand the language that became modern English. Language-based warnings, then, are out. Arabic numerals have lasted a pretty long time – but even then you're only talking about a span of less than 2,000 years for the whole set of nine numerals and the zero. Is it impossible the number system could evolve into something new in a span of years more than five times it's current age? Representing time has it's own challenges. Will they understand the B.C./A.D. split (which is already giving way in some corners to the more secular B.C.E./C.E.)?

On the upshot, visual representations of human fear seem to be fairly universal. Researchers have found notable cultural influences on the interpretation of facial expressions, including the expression of fear. Still, this influences don't change the overriding fact that, regardless of cultural differences, humans can read emotional expressions with remarkable accuracy.

The DOE has proposed the sign shown above, but – more interesting in my opinion – they've drawn up plans to transform the area above the toxic waste into what's essentially a landscaped "stay away" message. The sketch below is one of several artists renditions of their plan.

Movies that stink.

The Philosopher's Magazine has a nifty little article posted on why films won't explore smell, "taken to mean the verb – the act of smelling – more than the noun – the fragrance or stench."

The article stars with a curious declaration by Stanely Kubrick. What book did Stan the Man Kubrick think was unfilmable?

Kubrick did a disservice to smell and to film when he labelled Patrick Süskind’s Perfume unfilmable. If the director who had risen boldly to the challenge of depicting the origins of humans deemed smell an unfilmable sense, there seemed no point in any lesser mortal trying to prove him wrong. Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton and Ridley Scott all followed Kubrick in abandoning the project shortly after they had taken it on. And the situation of olfactory cinema was not alleviated when Tom Tykwer did finally take up the challenge in 2006. His multi-million dollar blockbuster avoided tackling the problem of filming smell at all and so confirmed the audiences’ suspicion that the problem itself was unsolvable.

As smell rises in cultural esteem, challenging the ascendancy of the visual, it seems time to lament that there is no great olfactory film, and to ponder what this tells us about smell itself. There now seems no need to worry about the place of smell in contemporary life. That sense once denigrated by Aristotle as the least distinguished of all now has an assured place in university discourse and drawing-room chatter. We have a distinguished body of smell literature, presided over by Marcel Proust and Patrick Süskind; we have a growing scene of contemporary smell art. Last year Reodorant II: Urban Brain opened in New York, offering a series of multi-sensory installations that attempted to visualise and investigate the brain’s capacity for sense perception, memory, emotion and logic. The thriving state of what will no doubt soon be known as “olfactory studies” was made clear by the publication of Jim Drobnick’s The Smell Culture Reader in 2006, which brought together olfactory work by anthropologists, sociologists, perfumers and cultural critics. Tellingly, though, there was no essay on smell and film, only a brief discussion of smell-o-vision cinema, nestled amongst other newer odorous gimmicks. It is time for a filmmaker to prove Kubrick wrong by capturing smell on the screen.

Link Proliferation: And tell her that her lonely nights are over.

We have a winner!

Here's the winner board for the "Tales from the Captcha" contest:

Troy Z wins the big ol' first season of Tales from the Crypt.
OCKerouac wins Billy the Kid's Old Time Oddities.
Sasquatchan has himself a slightly new copy of The Cobbler's Monster.

If you guys could shoot me an email at the following address: [my nom de blog]44@yahoo.com. Let me know where I can send these bad boys and you get them promptly.

Winners were selected at random from the entry pool. If you didn't win this time, I want you to meditate on what you might have done to earn such bad karma that the mysterious forces of randomness at work in the universe have it out for you.


Mutually interred destruction

I'm not a big Metallica fan. In fact, my level of fandom is somewhere between "active avoidance" and "vast indifference." However, their latest video – brought to my attention by the mad genius behind the delightful The Horror!? blog – used animation, "found footage," CGI, and first person camera work to reconstruct a Soviet plan to close the nuclear missile gap with zombie-making spores. It's pretty boss and you can listen to it on mute if Metallica ain't your bag.




Col' lampin'

I have nothing to add other than this very concept makes me all giggly.


And operator, please reverse the charges

From Screamin' Dave over at Forbes' Digital Download blog, the new Ghostbusters videogame trailer.

Regardless of what the trailer does or does not do for you, can we all admit that the bit of concept art below is some of the craziest crap we've ever seen connected to the 'Buster franchise?

Bring me a dream

Over at Horror's Not Dead, Mr. Hall suffers J. T. Petty's faux snuff mockumentary S&Man. His description of the movie is amazing, but what will get your noodle turning about is the following claim:

It matters not whether the Sandman tapes are real, whether Eric Rost is a real person or just a character. He is a parable for a reality we all know exists. There are people who have made real snuff films. There are people who have sought out real snuff films. More frightening than that, no past tense is needed in those sentences. People still make them. There exists today a market for videotapes of real rape, of real torture and of real murder. Or, failing that availability, as close as possible as anyone is willing to simulate.

I can’t think of anything that disturbs me more.

Excluding the claim that there's a snuff market out there – which remains the snuff of urban legend, as it were – is there a moral equivalence between watching simulated snuff and the real thing? If something is simulated so well that it is indistinguishable from the real thing, is the moral cost of consuming it indistinguishable from the real thing?

Victim-dar

New Scientist reports a weird correlation between psychopathic tendencies and the ability to recall biographical details of "vulnerable victims." Or, more simply, psychos have victim radar.

From the article:

Contrary to popular belief, most psychopaths are not Jack the Ripper types - often they have never committed a violent crime. But as many as one in 100 people display antisocial behaviours deemed psychopathic. Chief among these is a callous ability to manipulate other people to fulfill their own desires.

To investigate this behaviour, Kevin Wilson of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and colleagues put 44 male college students into two groups according to their scores on a test that measures psychopathic traits. "None of these students qualified as psychopaths, but some did have behaviours associated with psychopaths," says Wilson.

The students were shown a series of faces, each accompanied by a name, a job and details about interests and hobbies. When later asked to recall the details, those with more psychopathic-like behaviours were better at describing sad-looking and unsuccessful females than the normal group, especially details about the women's lives.

So ladies, do try not to be sad-looking and unsuccessful.


The dead travel fast

Over at the made-of-awesome Human Marvels site, there's the tale of Elmer McCurdy, former bank robber and wandering corpse.

In life Elmer McCurdy wasn’t anything special. Elmer wasn’t really unique or extraordinary. It was only following his demise that Elmer amounted to much of anything, when his corpse became famous and the stuff of urban legends.


Maybe this is why Euro-horror seems so lame to me

Over at the Neurophilosophy blog, there's a nice write up a recent study that suggests that expression of the biological fear response may be culture-specific, a case of nature being nurtured.

From the article:

The new study was led by Joan Chiao of the Social and Cultural Neuroscience Lab at Northwestern University. 22 volunteers were recruited for the study; 10 were Caucasians living in the United States, and the remaining 12 were native Japanese living in Japan. All the participants were presented with a series of pictures of 80 faces, each for 1.5 seconds, and each depicting an American or a Japanese person expressing either a fearful, happy, angry or neutral facial expression. Their neural responses to the facial expressions in the pictures were measured using functional neuroimaging.

The results:

Both groups of participants could recognize the emotions depicted in the pictures very accurately. Interestingly though, the Japanese participants were significantly quicker in recognizing fear in all the pictures, while the Americans were significantly more accurate at recognizing fear in pictures of people from their own culture. More importantly, the response of the amygdala was increased when the participants recognized fear in pictures of members of their own cultural group relative to others. Hemispheric differences were also observed: the increase in amygdala activity in response to fear recognition in own-culture faces was significantly greater in the right amygdala than in the left. By contrast, no significant differences in amygdala activity was observed when the participants viewed pictures of happy, angry or neutral expressions.

Earlier neuroimaging studies have shown that white Americans show an increased response in the amygdala when presented, either consciously or unconsciously, with pictures of black Americans with neutral expressions. By contrast, no differences in the response to neutral faces of either cultural group were observed in this study, even though Americans often hold positive sterotypes of Asians. Thus, the earlier observations may have been due to cultural knowledge of the negative sterotypes about African-Americans, rather than negative stereotypes of members of other ethnic groups per se. This is supported by the finding in the earlier studies that black Americans also exhibit increased activity in the amygdala in response to pictures of black people with neutral expressions.

Sir Larry's "Hard Day's Night"

This has nothing to do with horror. But it's pretty funny.

Here's Peter Seller's doing the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night" in the manner of Olivier's take on Shakespeare's Richard III. Don't try to wrap your head around that description, just watch.



Have a great weekend, my little Screamers and Screamettes.

Television: For the little monsters.

Kids get all the cool stuff in our backwards mixed-up culture. Despite their relative uselessness in the workforce, their inability to hold a decent conversation, their complete lack of appreciation for me, and their alarming tendency to support the careers of pre-fabricated Disney-produced pop groups, the culture industry of North America continues to waste its most creative, interesting, and wonderful ideas on this completely ungrateful demographic.

Here's two pieces of irrefutable evidence of this disturbing trend.

First, for some historical context, I submit to you: The Hilarious House of Frightenstein This gem was brought to my attention by eagle-eyed Screaming regular cattleworks.

Produced by CHCH Channel 11 in Canada, this children's gag-comedy show ran for an amazing 25 years in Canada and the US. This was all the amazing in that the show was only in production for about a year. The production of HHF sounds like some dada-ist provocation. For nearly 12 months, random skits were shot of various characters doing different funny things. These segments were then spliced together to produce several seasons of the show. This is all the more amazing when you consider that many of the characters to appear on HHF were played by a single man: the excellent Billy Van. The incomparable Vincent Price was also a regular, playing the role he was born to play: himself.

Here's a clip of Price doing the intro the show:



Here's a clip of Van as the Count and his sidekick Igor:



For the full rundown on Frightenstein, you can check out this excellent tribute site.

Jump to today. Ghoul a-Go-Go is a cable access show that is part cheese horror host shtick and part variety show. Vlad, his hunchbacked co-host Creighton, and the Invisible Man (host of the Tiki-Lounge) entertain the kids and host out-there bands like Hasil Adkins and, in the clip below, the 5, 6, 7, 8's.



One of the things I like about Ghoul a-Go-Go is how incompetent a host Vlad is. He's not very fond of children, which, in my humble opinion, makes him the perfect host for a kid's show.

Check out the Ghoul a-Go-Go web site for the skinny on these cool ghouls.

A huzzah for Dave over at Digital Download for hipping me to this show.