Happy Halloween 2015

[Kirijax]

Happy Halloween to everybody on Tennis Frontier! Hope it's a fun and frightening one!

 

[Kieran]

I hate Halloween. Cheers!

 

[Riotbeard]

I hate Halloween. Cheers!

Never come to New Orleans during Halloween. If you are curmudgeon like myself it's terrible, but I love horror movies, so they are a good reason to stay in!

 

[Kieran]

I hate Halloween. Cheers!

Never come to New Orleans during Halloween. If you are curmudgeon like myself it's terrible, but I love horror movies, so they are a good reason to stay in!

I love horror movies, especially ghost stories, eerie tales, old haunted house stuff. Hammer House of Horror. I checked the television schedules for tomorrow night. More like horrific, than horror... :nono

 

[Riotbeard]

I hate Halloween. Cheers!

Never come to New Orleans during Halloween. If you are curmudgeon like myself it's terrible, but I love horror movies, so they are a good reason to stay in!

I love horror movies, especially ghost stories, eerie tales, old haunted house stuff. Hammer House of Horror. I checked the television schedules for tomorrow night. More like horrific, than horror... :nono

My favorite era of horror is 60s and 70s. Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and Night of the Living Dead. Most of the horror now isn't very good. If you love ghost stories, I did like the movie the Innkeepers (about ten years old).

 

[Kieran]

By the way, Riotbeard, he's a great passage from Bob Dylan's autobiography, about New Orleans:

“The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time.

The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside.

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts”

 

[Riotbeard]

By the way, Riotbeard, he's a great passage from Bob Dylan's autobiography, about New Orleans:

“The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time.

The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside.

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts”

Beautiful.

He did leave out drunk tourists puking in the streets, but that passage really does capture the best parts of this city!

 

[Kirijax]

For those looking for a good fright on Halloween:

Scariest movie you've ever seen!

For me, the original Halloween was maybe the scariest movie I have ever seen. The Blair Witch Project freaked me out in a psychological way. Alien was also a good one. The Exorcist was on a whole unholy level. Captain Howdy still scares the crap out of me. For recent movies, Sinister was pretty scary.

Some advice: Never good ever ever comes from standing in front of a medicine cabinet mirror. Or so horror movies have led me to believe.

 

[Riotbeard]

I still think the Exorcist is the scariest in terms of true horror movies! I also love Alien!

More recently, the Descent is legitimately frightening and a recent classic.

I also really love the Evil Dead movies. Not so much scary but still brilliant. An American Werewolf in London is also really fun. Dawn of the Dead, amazing!

 

[Kieran]

The Dylan quote is beautiful, isn't it? Evocative and haunting, as a blurb someplace might say.

Okay, haunted/scary movies:

Se7en
Ring (Japanese version, never watched the remake)
Dracula films with Christopher Lee (not all of them, but one or two)
The Woman in White wasn't bad (with Harry Potter)
Exorcist

 

[Front242]

Never come to New Orleans during Halloween. If you are curmudgeon like myself it's terrible, but I love horror movies, so they are a good reason to stay in!

I love horror movies, especially ghost stories, eerie tales, old haunted house stuff. Hammer House of Horror. I checked the television schedules for tomorrow night. More like horrific, than horror... :nono

My favorite era of horror is 60s and 70s. Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and Night of the Living Dead. Most of the horror now isn't very good. If you love ghost stories, I did like the movie the Innkeepers (about ten years old).

Not sure if you've watched many Italian giallo horror movies from that period but they're definitely right up there with the best. Stuff by Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, Sergio Martino, etc. Awesome. And VERY gory! The best horrors are definitely well in the past and Romero's latest zombie stuff is nothing like his earlier stuff which was classic.

 

[Front242]

Specially for you, Riotbeard

[video=youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg8YBInpims[/video]

And skip to around 57:00 mins below for one of the most manky gore scenes I've watched! From Lucio Fulci, the Godfather of gore! Full movie below. This is from 1980 and makes most horror films these days look like Bambi!

[video=youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9utxKfegmc[/video]