Countdown to Halloween: Horror Around the House

As we get right up on Halloween, here's a nice chunk of the horror-related books and toys and whatnot I like to accessorize with at home.

Three old-school Draculas guard the bookshelf...

Horror fiction in various states of read- and unread-ness. You got your King hardcovers that date from when I was in high school, and countless books good and bad I've collected (I do not recommend re-reading It as an adult, however Song of Kali remains perhaps the greatest horror novel I've ever read). I am particularly fond of '70s and '80s paperbacks, mass market/drugstore rack stuff long before it was reprinted at $14 a pop for a movie tie-in. Looking for a nice I Am Legend paperback, cheap, as well as the splatterpunk stuff I used to read nearly 20 years ago that I've since sold off. Wow, very little Straub and what, no Machen or Blackwood! Gotta get on that. Anybody remember the Dell Abyss line? This guy does.



Some of my beloved Sideshow monster toys!

A stack of horror movie books. You cannot go wrong with The Overlook Horror Encyclopedia, The Book of the Dead, Nightmare Movies, or Immoral Tales! Get your Netflix queue ready.

And Clive Barker's demonic ladies guard over his works below.



I love these 11 x 14" posters; they're great if you don't have a lot of wall space. The one for Zombi 2 came with the 2-disc DVD set!


And Brundlefly and Cesare from Dr. Caligari's cabinet round things up!

...and I'll whisper, "No."

While the entire nation seems utterly incapable of doing anything but ejaculating over the new Batman movie (it's #1 on the IMDB Top 250 movies?!) I myself am more taken with the trailer that comes with it: the long-awaited movie version of Watchmen, the seminal 1986-87 miniseries "graphic novel" by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (which is near the top of Amazon's bestseller chart).


According to many reports, director Zack Snyder (he of the not-too-shabby Dawn of the Dead remake and the I-have-no-interest-at-all-in 300) has attempted a faithful adaptation. The trailer looks phenomenal and easily gave me an anticipatory thrill. And it includes my favorite bit of dialogue from the comic: Rorschach (longest-comeback-ever nominee Jackie Earle Haley!) intoning, "The world will look up and shout 'Save us!" and I'll whisper, 'No.'"
To put not too fine a point on it, oh man oh man oh man!