Wednesday, October 21, 2015

The Runup to Halloween... Meteor Madness

This being the runup to Halloween, I figured it would be appropriate to post a video of a scary movie... or a movie that was supposed to be scary, at any rate. Perhaps

Die, Monster, Die! is loosely based on The Colour Out of Space, my favorite short story by H.P. Lovecraft. The Colour Out of Space, as I have noted before, is second only to Ethan Frome in the "terrifying tale of the disintegration of a New England family" literary sub-genre.

Anyway, here is Die, Monster, Die!, not exactly pure Lovecraft, but a reasonable facsimile:





Oddly enough, an even closer approximation of The Colour Out of Space, though one played as a broad comedy, is the vignette from Creepshow titled "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill", in which Stephen King plays the hapless title yokel:





I tend to find a lot of Lovecraft's stuff funny, because I don't share a lot of his hangups (plus the idea of geometry being scary is just plain silly, unless you're a mathphobic high-schooler). It's kinda weird to see his one truly unsettling story being mined for laughs.

UPDATE: Early this morning is the best time to watch the Orionid meteor shower... fortuitous to link to some movies featuring killer meteorites on a night when the stars will me shootin'.

2 comments:

mikey said...

Not only that, but the Venus/Jupiter/Mars/Mercury low in the east just before sunrise is absolutely stunning.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Not only that, but the Venus/Jupiter/Mars/Mercury low in the east just before sunrise is absolutely stunning.

Indeed, it really is a dramatic alignment. Stuff like that makes working from stupid o'clock to crazy o'clock worthwhile.