Bad Romance

I really like Lady Gaga's new song Bad Romance. There is a certian creepy, spooky, scary element to it. I've been so taken by it that I've been scouring the Google Images for spooky/scary pictures of the birdo, and I found just that.

This set of photos was done for Out magazine sometime this past summer by the superb Ellen von Unwerth.

EvU said that her intention was to tell a story about a sort of Frankenstein monster that is turned into a vampire after being endowed with life again.

Isn't that a story you'd love you would love to hear?

The images are very reminiscent to me of of both The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and The Bride of Frankenstein(1935) staring Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester.

As far as the song bad Romance and its music video go, I recommend checking them out. The intro and outro each have a kind of harpsichord (?) in halloween sound and the dance in the video barrows elements of Michael Jackson's Thriller choreography with great success.

House of Frankenstein

(This post is part of Careful With That Blog, Eugene's Universal Horror Blog-o-Thon. I usually only write posts when something really good hits me, so hopefully this is decent writing. Enjoy.).



My only real experience with Universal monster movies is yearly around Halloween when Caleb and I, and some of our friends head down to an old theater in Detroit to watch some classic horror films. While they are fun, I’m definitely not as big of a fan of them as Caleb is, or probably Paul. I think their biggest problem is that you already know the plot going in… I think it’s just pop culture osmosis or something. Besides that, their pacing is a little too slow and their plots too convoluted, but the latter is partly what makes them so fun. However, seeing House of Frankenstein for the first time made me realize just how much Universal had missed their mark on the film. While it turned out to be a generic monster movie that tried to cram Dracula, The Wolfman and Frankstein’s Monster into the same movie, I was imagining something far greater… A buddy movie… Seinfeld for monsters. While The Munsters and The Addams Family give you an idea of what I’m talking about, those were takes on the family sitcoms of the 60s and 70s.

All I want is a bunch of freaks sitting around their apartment in Bucharest and whining about their problems. Frankenstein’s Monster the idiot of the bunch, Dracula the womanizer, The Wolfman always annoyed at the lost sleep from his murder binges, The Invisible Man talking big, but never actually doing anything but sit around and watch M.A.S.H. re-runs, The Creature from the Black Lagoon glubbing… it’d be great. Doctor Frankstein could be their landlord, maybe… You could throw The Mummy in there, too. We could call it Frankstein’s Place.

The plots would be a mix of the mundane and the ludicrous, maybe an annoying Van Helsing could stop by every once in a while. The monsters would want to just be left alone, but they’d have to throw him out the window or they could just eat him, I suppose. But that would be the genius of the show, there is just so much material to pull from. Despite how contrived most of the movies are, these characters are extremely interesting.

Why have them doing the same damn thing all the time? I’ve seen enough Universal Monster movies to know they all have the same basic plot. For once we’d see the world through the monster’s eyes. Sure they’d kill people every once in a while, and maybe The Invisible Man would be tempted to rape some people, but… okay, well that’s not really defensible, is it? But… it would be great! Blood, guts, Frankenstein’s Monster sitting in front of the TV and watching Sesame Street all day.

Okay, this probably is just a really bad idea and I’ve gone off the deep end, but it really seems like it’d make a good show. At least it would be better than House of Frankenstein. At the very least there wouldn’t be any gypsies.

House of Frankenstein focused on some demented scientist whose brother new Dr. Frankenstein. His goal was to bring Frankenstein’s Monster back to life or switch someone’s brain with the Monster’s… or… something, I honestly don’t remember. He ends up killing some schmuck who runs a travelling freak show and quickly after brings Dracula back to life. Dracula eventually gets into a hilarious carriage accent and Dr. Weirdo and his painfully Igor-like assistant head off to free Frankenstein’s Monster and The Wolf Man from blocks of ice beneath Frankenstein’s castle (which I assume is the titular “house”). The Wolfman is freed first and falls in love with some gypsy woman, who eventually has to kill him… Of course, he dies before Frankenstein’s Monster comes back to life. Yes, folks… this movie whose one draw is that we get to see The Monster, Dracula and The Wolf Man together never actually puts them conscious on the screen at the same time.

Fucking brilliant. And that’s the best part of this show! It has all of them together at once, doing weird monster stuff. It’d be like the Super Friends with less world-saving and more pointless table smashing! It takes the best parts of those Universal movies (the monsters), sticks them together and removes the stupid, megalomaniacal idiots, the overacting heroines and the contrived plots. We’d leave in the angry townspeople, of course, because who doesn’t love an angry mob every once in a while?

A. Dracula

This past friday I saw one of the worst original run Frankenstein movies Universal put out, House of Frankenstein. The movie was followed by a direct sequel named House of Dracula which miraculously resurrected all the characters from its predecessor. Anyways, all these monsters got me thinking, "it's been a while since we've seen my favorite friends..."

Halloween, Part one

When I was young, very young, I dressed up as Superman for every Halloween. Understand though that when I saw “ young” I mean before Superman suits had fake muscle chest, but also before I had memories. When I was young and all of my thoughts were framed through my father's camera and slid projector I dressed as Superman for Halloween. I do have one genuinely honest memory from those Halloweens though, I remember my mother knelling down in front of me and pulling my curl down over my forehead, just like Superman’s.

We were in the hallway of our old house, at the bottom of the stairs, standing on the long rug that ran between the bathroom and the playroom. The bathroom shone a glorious white. White lighting, and yellow light bulbs and white, slick, smooth, cold porcelain tiles glared out of the bathroom and into the halls and out all the windows of the house. I doubt it was late enough at night for it to be dark out, even for a night in late October, but in my memories it was pitch black outside.

After years of being the man of steel my curl would evolve, transform me, straighten and lengthen itself, pressed down to my forehead with my brothers hair gel, a tight widows peak, an orange devilock draping down my little Halloween melon head. For many years I put on a new cape, black and red replacing gold and blue, that I tied tight around by throat, damp with sweat and rain all October. For a month I lived as a little Dracula child, hiding under beds and behind trees, falling end over end into piles of leaves, stealing away with lengths of rope to hang bodies from trees and build giant spider’s webs. Halloween would transform me too, evolve me, turn me into little beasts, raise me from the dead, turn my face whiter and my blood redder, and let me walk out at night, set lose, a full fledge vampire sucking down sugar and ready to eat the black out of the sky, to unhang the moon and drop it in my pillow case like some treat I’d claimed as mine that night.

For a long time I spent Halloween with my best friend, my brother, Jake. Jake was my best friend from one Halloween to the next, not because he was my brother, or because for years he was the only other person in life I knew besides my parents, but because he was exciting. Jake was what Halloween was supposed to be: trouble. Lots and lots of trouble. Once in a psychology class someone asked me where I learned what it meant to be a boy from and my first thought was that no one has ever taught me more about getting into trouble than my brother, the kid who taught me what it was to be a boy growing up, who through torture and demonstration showed me how to hurt people, hide things, steal junk, dig holes and run from anyone. My older brother Jake showed me not only how to be a monster on Halloween, but how to be a terror every other day of the year too.



...to be continued.

Caleb Michael, ghoul

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: A short piece on fear

Some of the scariest things in life aren’t phobias but necessities. When people grow up they put better names to things, but when we’re young we don’t have sociophobia, agoraphobia, and necrophobia, you’re just scared, of things like strangers, being alone, and bogeymen.

I do not know about you, but most of my greatest fears in life are those same things I was afraid of when I was just a little kid. But I’m not talking about losing a toy or a person or yourself, I’m talking about that feeling you got every Halloween that’d cause you to bring your legs up close to your body in bed just in case a madman tried to chop off your legs. Before I even knew what a madman was, what was really mad, what Friday the thirteenth meant or why white vans were terrifying I knew I was scared of all of them, with no little help from my older brother. For years I slept in the center of my bed, clutching a heavy flashlight (and in later years a police baton), my arms folded over my chest like some ancient honored pharos, just out of reach from any hands from any place under my bed. Before I knew what anxiety was I had seen hell’s fires, Bram’s asylum, crazed dogs and lost children, greater fear’s than fevered dreams, things far worse than Goosebumps, X-files, and Are you Afraid of the Dark?, horrors unheard of but ever imagined since the first sons of man were old enough to torment the second sons, because what else are older brothers good for. Shit! It’s a wonder any of us ever left our rooms on some of those darker nights. But through it all there has only ever been one fear that has always stayed with me, that one fear (besides seaweed) introduced to me by 1941’s The Wolf Man: Gypsies!



I’m not too worried about strangers or being alone any longer, but bogeymen and gypsies still scare the daylights out of me. I don’t know what did it, if it was the ragged clothes, the eeriness of the fortuneteller’s eyes, all black and white, a Dracula in different clothes Bela Lugosi nearly plays himself, a wild European madman staring out of cursed eyes. Or, maybe it was just the fact that they traveled in wagons, lived in them, from village to village, like some sort of communist trailer park carnival people, which is quite possibly the most evil amalgam of Euro/Anglo/Americana trash known to man. The Wolf Man’s story draws it’s plot and circumstance from folk lore, making use of myth and storytelling to build the Wolf Man as an ancient evil. And that’s what gypsies are- ancient evil folk people. So you know they’ve got nothing to lose, and that is scary.

Most fears are irrational, and the scariest stories, murders, monsters and ghouls are spun of spider webs already in our heads. But even so, this one fear of mine, this one real fear I have left over from childhood I think I’d rather like to hold on to for as long as I can, no matter how irrational it is. There are far worse things in life to be afraid of than gypsies, and once we get past all our irrational fears all that’s left are the rational ones, and all those are truly terrifying.



Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
Turn and face the strange
Ch-ch-Changes
Pretty soon now you're gonna get older
Time may change me
But I can't trace time

-Caleb, un-truly terrifying

Me, a Swimmer, and The Creature From the Black Lagoon: An Unnatural Love Affair

What’s wrong with the Creature From the Black Lagoon is everything that is wrong with science and religion. Love.


I can still remember when I first saw this movie. It was a long time ago. Throughout six and seventh grade I spent many Friday nights with my best friends Joshua and Nathaniel. We’d stay up “late” at Josh’s, sitting on his floor watching old movies his father had rented for us. We’d watch the classics: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, Abbott and Costello Battle Racism and Oppression in White Hollywood. And we’d watch the creature features, like The Creature From the Black Lagoon.

Remember when you were little, and you were never sure whether something was going to be really scary, or just exciting and funny instead? Watching The Creature From the Black Lagoon is very much like that. When you’re young so many things that shouldn’t be scary are scary, like dead bodies, and missing links, and girls. But when we get older the really terrifying stuff in the night comes out, like loneliness, and lose, and woman. And if we’re lucky those things can still be funny too. But what was nice was that back then they always were funny and scary. Back when we were little everything scary had the possibility of being funny, and that’s the way it should be. We should be able to laugh at ourselves over the stupid stuff we get torn up and freaked out over. I remember hiding in Josh’s closet, wound up in a curtain, waiting for Nathaniel to come out of the bathroom so I could jump out at him. And remember that feeling you used to get, that feeling when you’re trying to scare someone, and you’re so tied into it, so excited and young and funny that you’re scared too? Scared of your own tricks, of your own jokes, of how young and stupid and sublime you are. I had that felling. And it was wonderful, wonderful to be scared.

That’s what The Creature From the Black Lagoon is like. You don’t know if you should be scared or laughing. And usually it changes every time you watch it. Just like when you’re trying to scare someone else, if you want it to be scary, if you’re willing to let yourself go, let yourself be a part of it, it can be as scary and exciting as anything in life can be.

The last time I watched The Creature From the Black Lagoon I decided to get a professional opinion on the movie. So I went to Wynston Rose McCreary- The Swimmer. And right away she hit it right on the head:

“I don’t get it…is it supposed to be funny?”

Wynston is completely right, sometimes you can’t tell! The Creature From the Black Lagoon doesn’t always make sense. The character himself…its self, really is a contradiction between science and religion. And no, not like the way Nightcrawler is a Catholic, or John McCain is a Republican, but the way Jesus is the son of God, or Orion is the son of Darksied, or Luke is the son of Vader.

You have to understand; the level of weirdness in this film is of that like you’ve never seen before. It isn’t a horror film, or a slasher, or a thriller; it’s a creature feature. The villain isn’t evil, or demented, or a Dracula, they’re just weird. They’re blobs and flies and gillmen. The Opening scene of Creature is the creation of the heavens and the earth…and then all of a sudden WHAM! they cut to the primordial sands of evolution and start talking about how all life evolved out of the sea, pulling itself up from the dregs and the muck and pretending to be man. They even say the world is over 15 million years old. See? They’re coming at us from all angles!

The Main character, The Creature, Gillman, is no less confusing when you think about him. He’s a sort of missing link, part man, part fish. Have you ever watched a fish in a tank? They’re fucking crazy! And so is Gillman. Fish are like retarded hairless dogs that can breath underwater. They go all over the place, eat all sorts of stuff, chase and roll and scrap with one another, and what do they do at the end of the day? Die on you. And Gillman is the same way.

In the film a group of scientist travel to the Amazon searching for The Creature. And, of course, they have to bring along a young, pretty, she-scientist. And of course, Gillman falls in love and tries to kidnap her. Which makes no sense! I’m not sure what he wants with her, he has no penis. So why is he kidnapping her if he can’t rape her? What, is he going to wait for her to drop her eggs and swim up stream so he can then fertilize them? Or, of course, maybe he’s just a little curious and wants to dry hump her a bit.

Honestly though, I find it pretty upsetting that the science crew and I totally expect Gillman to rape the girl. Why can’t he just kidnap her? Why can’t he just want someone to talk to, some company? Why is that so unbelievable? Oh yeah, because he’s a fish man. And that is exactly what makes Gillman so tragic: He’s a fish that is in love with a woman… not even Shakespeare could have written a story that compelling. Gillman, the eunuch child of creationism and evolution, is in love with a white woman in 1954. And, in the end it isn’t tragic, or cute, or anything lasting, it’s just unnatural, unreal, unbelievable. But, like any good love affair, totally frightening and worth dying for.

Sitting there in my room watching the movie for the first time in years with The Swimmer I had to consider our own unnatural love affair and how deep and weird and wet it was. I had to think about how long I’d known Wynston, how I’d met her, and how we’d gotten where we were, sitting there across my bed. When I first met Wynston I was all over her, just like Gillman. But unlike Gillman, her and I are really good friends now, and I didn’t get shot and lit on fire and drugged and killed for loving her.

I really do love her; she’s my best friend. And it really is weird and wet and deep, but it’s also real, and like any good friendship totally frightening sometimes and absolutly unnatural.

I think in the end what is most upsetting about The Creature’s story is that the very people that came looking for him kill him. They chased him down, they cornered him, they made him fall in love. And isn’t that the way it always is? We ask for it, we want it, we know the score and the price, but we still fall in love, we still go looking for it. That’s the point though. We fall in love and risk the weirdness of it all, the possible pains and growths and fears, but we still do it. And like we’re being transported through the Amazon or back to childhood we’re struck with the sudden fear and excitement and thrill of being scared. And it’s that thrill, that horror, that funny feeling that makes us laugh out loud when we know we love someone and are scared as hell that we do. And it’s that laugh that makes the search and the pain and the black waters all worth the while.



“Why is a movie about a black lagoon so reflective to me?”
“I wonder what color their clothes are.”

-Caleb, The Eunuch Child of Creationism and Evolution + Wynston Rose, The Swimmer

"Check it out… he’s a DRACULA!!”

So, you know the Universal Monsters? Yeah. Me too. And, for a while, I thought everyone did. But no.

I’m not even going to get into Frankenstein (that’ll come another time), but Dracula; aw boy. He’s a pimp, that’s a fact. Not only does he live in a castle swerving game all over some nasty vixen , dress to impress rockin’ a cape, and suck on necks like it ain’t no thing, but he’s also been the father to more horror stories and creations than any other of the Universal Monsters. Don't believe me, check it out: Blacula, Count Von Count “the Count”, Dr. Acula, Alucard, and any guy that whore Buffy ever got down with. Oh, and about a googolplex of porno characters. Yeah boiiiiiii! Oh, and Batman. Oh, and Nelson too.


But honestly, Dracula, he’s taking a beating. I kind of feel bad for him. No, I really do feel bad for him. Bram Stoker wrote him as a caricature of evil, a stereotypes of the dark and the dirty and the incredibly sexy. Dracula was those things that go bump in the night, who actually could go bump in the night, and did.

-“I don’t see nothing wrong with a little bump and grind with a little bump and grind”

Dracula was a frustration and contradiction, and it must have worn on him. He was a lover who could not love, an undead living out death as a man of action who was not a man. And he did it all in the dark… in England…with a bunch of protestants….sort of…for a little while.

But what is Dracula now? As I said, Stoker wrote him as a caricature of other, short sighted fears. But now, he is even a caricature of that, of his once strong self. He’s a joke. A sharp orifice with a widow’s peak. That’s not sexy, that’s not money baby.
And Count Dracula was money baby. He was fresh.

So looking past Stoker and Nosferatu, and Batman and Manbat, and Count Dooku and Saruman and let’s talk about the man, the one that deserves the credit, the love, the cash and the women: Bela Lugosi. The man made Count Dracula, Dracula. Lugosi is the reason some little kids and foreigners and those people I mentioned who don’t know the Universal Monsters yell “he’s a DRACULA!,” and not “he’s a vampire!” Because Dracula’s the only one that even matters! BECAUSE HE’S A DRACULA! HE IS DRACULA!

Bela Lugosi was a holy cross burnt on film. A ghost, so lifeless and empty of anything but evil his character wasn’t a reflection of light on film, but a burn mark or a vacuum. Lugosi was Dracula, he did travel to America from Eastern Europe, and I bet his boat had a few dead crewmen and rats, and he couldn’t really speak very well, and he kind of looked sickly and grotesque, but he was rolling in it. Yeah boiii. Yes boy.

And people don’t know who he is? HE’S A DRACULA!

So that’s it, I’m going to tell them all. A piece for each, of last words, or a eulogy, an epitaph, or a salute, or a shout out; for the biggies, the masters, those monsters, the terrors and inspirations. Who? The Universal Monsters! Those DRACULAS!:
-Frankenstein’s Monster
-The Phantom
-The Mummy
-The Invisible Man
-The Bride of Frankenstein
-The Wolf Man
-And The Creature from the Black Lagoon

…but fuck the hunchback, and his Disney gypsy…

So, if you have no idea who the Universal Monsters are, if you don’t know Dracula's a vampire, or you think that the Invisible Man is the same thing as the Headless Horseman, or that Frankenstein "has bolts in his head an shit...and he's green, right?”, and you have no clue about the Wolf man, or you just think mummies look like “someone wrapped in toilet paper or something... and they walk around with there arms out...or something...no those are zombies right? Or do mummies do that too?”…

Or, if you just think that, well, "monsters are green,” than you might enjoy some of this. Or you might just want to pretend you’re a little kid again, and that all of this is true, and is happening in your neighborhood, and in your closet, and under your bed, and you might just want to enjoy that feeling instead, while you still can. Because one day the only thing that’ll be left to be scared of, will be the really scary things, those things that really are a Dracula.

Oh, and remember, like my good friend Wynston taught me one frightful night:

“Monsters are green…Apples are green. Apples, are green.”
(…and no Biasman, she wasn’t high)

-CML, The Invisible Dr.Glogger’s Monster from the Blacula Lagoon…. Returned….’s bride….
In Black and White