Our friend Patrick Keller wrote this interesting piece last year when speculation was going on about which case The Conjuring sequel might focus on. They’re still trying to decide, but in the meantime, this is very good reading–as is pretty much all of the content at his blog, The Big Seance, if the paranormal interests you. There’s plenty of research invested in the case, plus the piece is packed with links and a 12-minute recording so fucking creepy (real or staged) that I am very, very glad I did not listen to it after dark.
Click “View original” in the lower left, as I can’t get the font color for the first part of the entry lighter and more readable.
One of the many photos of 11-year-old Janet Hodgson supposedly levitating.
There are rumors floating (no pun intended) around the internet that suggest the story line for the sequel of The Conjuring, now a major box office success, will involve the 1977 Enfield Poltergeist in England. This case involves two young sisters, mainly Janet Hodgson, who were really either great at psychokinesis (PK) or were tortured by an unseen spirit, perhaps the spirit of a man named Bill (who reportedly died in the same house years before), who apparently possessed and spoke through one of the girls. The video below includes the famous levitation photos from the case and audio of the creepy and traumatizing supposed voice of Bill during investigations.
I’ve been reading rumors about a sequel for weeks now, and though nothing is official, apparently the film will again involve the characters of Ed and Lorraine Warren…
Couldn’t let this post from Ryan at Rhino’s Horror for a new contest pass without spreading the word! Can a horror short two minutes or less be scary as hell? Well, the short film “Mama” clocks in at two minutes, forty-five seconds (minus the end credits) and still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I’ve watched it dozens of times (hey, it’s a work of art) and still find it actively frightening. Horror Boom has posted plenty of Drew Daywalt’s “Fear Factory” shorts such as “Bedfellows” and “Mockingbird” that are LESS than two minutes. So yeah, I have faith that this contest will result in plenty untapped talent applying themselves, and ending up with contest entries that are the stuff of nightmares. Check out the piece for the rules and the deadline (click on “View Original” link at the bottom). What’s extra great is that the piece will actually be included (not just an extra on DVD) in the upcoming horror film Hellions (from Bruce McDonald, director of Pontypool). How cool is that?
As all of you guys know, Bruce McDonald—director of Pontypool—is currently hard at work on his latest horror feature Hellions, which is currently in the editing stage. In their way of giving back to the indie community, the cool cats behind Hellions are hosting an awesome short film contest to help spread the work of indie filmmakers. How cool is that? All you have to do is create the scariest short film up to 2 minutes long, and if they pick you as a winner you’ll have your work not only seen by horror fans from all over, but it will actually be seen in the film itself! Below are all the details!
I’d like to tell you some background on this, or how I found it, but the truth is I got lost (it’s not that I don’t understand how to navigate my way around online, but that ADD and an internet connection can add up to plenty of lost time, especially if you want to check out anything horror-related you find that’s new to you) and stumbled on it. Yesterday I go online to get some holiday shopping done today, next thing I’m seeing a link to some creepy kid’s drawings and a heated discussion going on whether they are real or not– a large faction argued that yes, they had to be real, but the little girl who drew them probably had some mental illness (multiple personality disorder was the most popular theory).
Me? I think they’re the product of a creative (and relatively sane) adult who had an idea for a creepy series of drawings to go with a story and wanted it to go viral. Well, I don’t know how long they’ve been floating around (someone mentioned 4chan as the first online source), but I’m glad I stumbled over them. If you haven’t seen them before, here’s the first half of the “Creepy Diary” below. I’d like to give a source, but whenever they pop up, the drawings and diary are never even vaguely credited to anyone, or signed. If I do find out who created them and owns the copyright, I’ll gladly give them credit where credit is due. They’re not part of any viral marketing campaign for a horror movie or any other kind of genre media (which was my immediate thought, but no dice). Maybe the artist/writer wanted to remain anonymous –no matter how tempting it was to put their name on it– for maximum creepiness factor.
Or maybe, just maybe…
Nah. They couldn’t be real.
Could they?
Well, if this is what Lisa looks like, it’s probably best that your parents can’t see her… for their sake.
Oh.
So they just left all the stuff on the porch? Uh-oh…
If you didn’t notice a disturbing theme here before, you have definitely have now. To read the entire “Creepy Diary” entry, click below for….
What’s that, you say? The “Creepy Diary” wasn’t as scary as you were hoping, and you still need your fix of being terrified by something online? I see. Well, then you might want to turn all the lights off, wait till you’re either home alone or the only one awake in the house, and check out this piece featuring a little Korean online comic. Crank up the volume first… I dare you. If that doesn’t scare you, check yourself for a pulse!
PRINCIPAL Let’s all ignore the fact shit just broke all by itself.
CHLOË goes home and some TWERP ON A BIKE harasses her, so she uses TELEKINESIS to knock him off.
TWERP ON A BIKE Let’s all pretend that didn’t just happen, and that anyone who saw the original Carrie isn’t having a severe fucking case of déjà vu.
Wow, this makes us both REALLY happy that we decided to wait for the DVD (A decision based on our gut feelings and Ryan from Rhino Horror.com’s probably spot-on review –-he knows what he’s talking about and seems to have pretty close to the same taste in horror that we do).
The parody is hilarious, the excerpt above doesn’t do it justice. So click below to read…
Starring Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Ron Livingston
When Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga) agree to help a distraught family claiming their house to be infested with malevolent spirits, they are unaware that the case they are about to undertake will be the most challenging and distressing of their eventful, tumultuous careers as paranormal researchers. Similarly, when I as an audience member originally intending to see low-brow comedy This is the End changed my mind at the last minute and bought a ticket for The Conjuring, I had no idea just how much my heart was going to be very unimpressed; as it was made to work overtime for nearly the entire 112 minutes…
Having helmed the decade-defining Saw (2003), creepy and atmospheric Dead Silence (2007) and the often terrifying thrill-ride Insidious (2010), director James Wan has established himself as Australia’s premier Master…
Unless you’re as obsessed with The Conjuring as we are, we’re guessing there’s going to be at least a few of these that are news to you. Either way, these (and the links we give for more information) make for some interesting– and creepy– reading!
1. Lorraine Warren herself has a very brief cameo in The Conjuring – in one of the classroom scenes. You’ll need to keep an eye out to catch her, though.
3. Remember the ‘Lipstick-Faced Demon’ from James Wan‘s Insidious (2011) who scared the shit out of everybody (especially Barbara Hershey when we first saw him peeking out behind Wilson’s character)?
AAAAAAAAAAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
That actor’s name is Joseph Bishara, and he plays Bathsheba in The Conjuring. Uh-oh.
4. You may have–OK, probably have– noticed via the film’s marketing campaign that there’s a doll in the movie so goddamned creepy that it makes the clown doll in Poltergeist look cuddly. The doll is based on another actual case the Warrens investigated.
Creepy-ass doll created for The Conjuring
5. The aforementioned creepy-ass doll that Wan based this sub-plot on was a Raggedy Anne doll named ‘Annabelle the doll’. James Wan decided rather than use a Raggedy Anne (Quote from Wan: I could not go to the company that makes Raggedy Anne and say, “Hey, can we portray your doll, you know, the product that you make as this thing that is a conduit to demonic spirits?”) he’d carefully design, craft, and build the creepiest doll he could find. Mission fucking accomplished. (See: Dead Silence if you doubt how sleep-with-the-lights-on scary Wan can make dolls and puppets) The Warren Occult Museum displays the original Annabelle doll (in a glass case— for the protection of visitors, not the doll), and you can read about the actual case here… especially if you’re feeling sleepy but need to stay awake.
The real deal.
6. Only one actual prop from the actual Warren’s Occult Museum (the museum was recreated by the production for scenes in the film), was used during filming. Ed Warren was an avid artist and painter, and James Wan says he saw one in the museum that “fit perfectly into our movie version of their haunted museum, and that’s what we have in there”. (Latino-review.com)
8. Andrea Perron (who was about 12 years old when shit got real in their new home)wrote a book about her family’s experience called House of Darkness, House of Light. You can see her reading an excerpt from in below. Also, she has her own You Tube channel.
9. During filming, star Lili Taylor (who also underwent a number of make-up preparations to represent her worsening stages of possession) actually blew her voice out from screaming so loudly and repeatedly… more than once. We assume she (and the sound editors) had a lot of work to get done in ADR. (source: Collider.com article here)
clap clap
10. Cast and crew reported, when asked in interviews, that they experienced strange events during filming, such as scratches appearing on Farmiga’s computer after signing on for the film (see below quote), people inexplicably waking up between 3 and 4 AM (“the devil’s hour’) and the real-life Carolyn Perron falling and breaking her hip while her family was visiting the set. (collider.com, same piece)
“We’d sent her the script back in December and she’s in New York. James [Wan] is in L.A. So she read it immediately. We got the call from her reps, who said she loved it and wanted to get on the phone with James, or Skype the next day. … She went to sleep. She came back in the morning to get on her computer to Skype him and there were three deep scratches on her computer screen. Completely inexplicable. Like, they weren’t there the night before when she read the screenplay on the computer, but they were there in the morning. And there was just no way to explain what it was but stuff like that has happened constantly.” –Producer Peter Safran
“Perron’s description of Bathsheba is where things really start getting creepy because she describes the spirit’s face as having almost no real features. Instead, it looked like a lifeless beehive with vermin crawling all over it. “Its head was leaning off to one side. It was round and gray, resembling a desiccated hornet’s nest. I couldn’t see anything underneath it… no eyes or mouth…it looked like the cobwebs hanging in the corners of the cellar.” This, as described by her mother.”
Jesus! I’d just sleep in my fucking car until we could find another house to live in… parked a couple counties away. Anyway, read this article for more disturbing details about the real-life case –also known as the Harrisville Haunting, or The Perrone House Haunting, that inspired upcoming nightmare put to celluloid, The Conjuring (opening on July 19th… NOT SOON ENOUGH FOR US! There’s lots of great video with interviews from the real-life Perrone family included in the piece… recommended while you wait for the movie to arrive.
James Wan’s latest foray into the haunted house genre leads him straight into The Conjuring, a film “based on a true story” about a family that was terrorized by demonic entities in which ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren were called upon to investigate. Many movies are based on some truth, and when it comes to something as terrifying as The Conjuring, then naturally we want to dig deeper into the events that inspired them.
Yes, it’s another reblog,originally from 2012. Still trying to fill in with popular, quality posts from 2012, due to some down time when we were out of commission: Mrs. Horror Boom had pneumonia and lost one of her best friends (got the phone call for that right after I came home from being diagnosed w/”walking pneumonia”), and Mr. HB was very, very busy. Anyway, don’t know about you, but it is BOILING up here, and we all need some chills to cool us down. I’m guessing you probably do too. Let’s try this for now, huh? Arp, if you’re reading this, skip the photos till you see the movie! Anyone else who hasn’t seen the ORIGINAL 2004 version of Shutter, from THAILAND (THAT one only) watch it! ASAP! OK. well, hold off if you’re having anxiety attacks or are a nervous wreck and calm down first, because Shutter has been known to cause these effects when watched alone in the dark.
…until I review [Shutter], I should probably just keep this short and…well, this movie is anything but sweet.
I’ve found that this excellent, well-crafted trailer is equally creepy whether or not you’ve seen the movie. It showcases the most frightening aspects of the movie without revealing so much that you wonder if you should bother with the 90-minute version. The tags sound chilling in the first place, but if you’ve seen the Thai film Shutter (2004), at least one of them-
Sometimes… they just want to be… around us
will make your skin crawl. Watching this trailer again before this posting made the hairs on my arms and neck stand up, and it’s still light out. Since I got moving today while the sun was out, I thought, this’ll be a good time to post one of the seven trailers left on this list that really could keep me awake…
Since we’ve lagged juuuust a tad in our “Scariest Short Horror Movie Of The Week” feature (which we genuinely regret) here’s an excellent post from blackiswhite, also a WordPress blog. Plenty to watch from California horror filmmaker Tim Buell: Unaired (2009), On That Day (2010) and Outcast (2011) —plus a great analysis from the writer.
Today I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Tim Buel’s short horror films are readily available on YouTube. Three of the Californian filmmaker’s shorts have been uploaded so far: Unaired (2009), On That Day (2010) and Outcast (2011). Every one of those is well worth checking out, especially if you’re a genre fan like yours truly.
Unaired (2009) is Tim’s spin on the found footage sub-genre. It revolves around a television crew, shooting a reality show on paranormal phenomena. Much like in Grave Encounters (2011), the troupe ends up being stuck in a real haunted house, unlike that movie (that came out 2 years later) this one shows you less, and that’s why it’s more successful. It’s also half the runtime and overall feels more fresh and fun. The filmmaker realizes the faux documentary angle is a gimmick and understands its limitations, but manages to respect the…
Really meant to get this up sooner, but we got knocked on our asses by pneumonia (and losing a dear friend suddenly) right as this was about to get posted. It really is something worth looking at. You can use the big red link below to look through plenty of images from the preview.
Man, we’d love to take a look at this in person… especially horror photographer Joshua Hoffine’s zombie masterpiece, Last Stand. Take a look, hell, we’d buy it and prominently display it if we had the scratch.
From the official press release:
As an artist, Travis Louie is known for his meticulously thought-out vision. He plans his paintings like a cinematographer, setting up a distinct look and feel and back story that connects his body of work. However, the tables will be turned at Last Rites Gallery‘s upcoming show “Zombie,” a large group show curated by Louie featuring a wide variety of artists — from Steven J. Daily to Brandt Peters to Allison Sommers and more. For the show, Louie will relinquish creative control and invite the artists to interpret the theme of the undead. See the complete line-up and a sneak peek at the art below and check out the show May 25 – June 26.
The full list of artists includes: Stefano Alcantara, Mia Araujo, William Basso, Michael Canavan, John Cebollero, Peter Chan, Bobby Chiu, Dave Chung, Steven J Daily, Matt Dangler, Brendan Danielsson, Kato Destefan, Dave DeVries, Rick Dienzo, Bob Dob, Zoetica Ebb, Bob Eggleton, Steve Ellis, Katelan Foisy, Alex Garant, Mark Garro, Eliza Gauger, Lisa Gloria, Gothic Hangman, Stan Grograou, Fred Harper, Kelley Hensing, Stephen Hickman, Joshua Hoffine, Martin Hsu, Charlie Immer, Sarah Joncas, J Anthony Kosar, Aimee Kuester, Edith Lebeau, Steven “Kid” Lew, Robert Mackenzie, Angie Mason, Vince Natale, Vincent Di Nguyen, Kathie Olivas, Brandt Peters, Lou Pimentel, Stephen Price, Carlos Ramos, Brandi Read, Chris Seaman, Allison Sommers, Tatiana Suarez, Lamour Supreme, Mark Texeira, Ben Walker, Eric Wilkerson, David C Wong, Jasmine Worth, Jane Ann Wynn, Chet Zar and Zombienose.
If you’d like to take a look at the making of Last Stand, there’s a series of great posts documenting the making-of process that we re-blogged from Hoffine’s awesome blog here, and another one here. Definitely work taking a look at!
One of the many photos of 11-year-old Janet Hodgson supposedly levitating.
If you didn’t notice a disturbing theme here before, you have definitely have now. To read the entire “Creepy Diary” entry, click below for….
HORROR BOOM 