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Archive for the ‘Halloween Horror’ Category

Preparing for the upcoming Halloween party? Be sure to wear Halloween contact lenses to complement your Halloween costume. Nowadays Halloween costume party does not only refer to the clothes you want to wear because they are designed especially for themed parties like Halloween.

For Halloween fanatics it’s essential to wear the spookiest costume in the party — they want to make their costume really different from the rest. If you plan to wear vampire-like clothes, then wearing vampire contact lenses will enhance your appearance. Or, do you want to deviate from the common for these Halloween? You can prepare a Halloween costume idea of someone rarely used and get a pair of special effect contact lenses that best suit the personality.

No matter what Halloween costume you wear always remember that the look of your eyes is what makes you really shine at a Halloween party.

Which Halloween Contact Lenses To Wear?

Two popular brands of contacts that are recommended by eye doctors and preferred by party goers are WildEyes and Crazy Eyes. Both brands have colors and designs that would match with the costume that you prepare. You can choose the colors and the style that best fits your Halloween costume concept. The costume contact lenses will bring out the best shocking looks in you — they will make you really look horrifying.

If you haven’t worn contact lenses you need not worry. Some special effect contact lenses are made solely for costume purposes and come with no prescription. Wearing them will not in any way affect your vision. There are also ones for Halloween costume parties that have correction power, which suit your needs if you have refraction problems.

You can buy Halloween contacts can over the counter — with or without prescription. They are sold anytime of the year via your doctor office, optical retail chains and the virtual market. For your own eye protection and safety it’s advisable to have a contact lens prescription even if it is just for the Halloween. You should consult your eye doctor if you want to wear contact lenses from the previous Halloween.

How Contact Lenses Enhance Your Halloween Costume

Want to scare everyone just by the look in your eyes? Contact lenses for Halloween can increase the fearful look of your Halloween costume. These contacts can catch other’s attention even in the absence of a creepy outfit. If you want to look like the appearance of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the Interview With the Vampire you need Halloween contacts that exactly look like their eyes. Crazy contact lenses are what you need to provide the kind of horrifying looks that you want to project.

Glaring red eyes and other horror designs are found among the many designs of Halloween contact lenses. These costume contact lenses can complement the horrific image you want to achieve. Just create some experiments to find the best fit between your Halloween costume and your contact lenses for the next Halloween party. You will never know a talent scout will spot you for a future horror film casting.

Nostalgia

When it came to my father’s movie theatres in the small western Illinois towns of
Carthage and Warsaw, I was one puerile youth who bubbled over with promotional ideas on how to locally ballyhoo the low-budget horror films he played.

The Warsaw Theatre, a Quonset hut building on Main Street in a town of two thousand people overlooking the Mississippi River, was, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, open only on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights and sometimes played a different picture each night. The Woodbine Theatre in Carthage, twenty miles east of the river and with a larger population, tried to remain open every night, but rarely played a single film as long as a week. In the Warsaw Theatre, my father often ran double-feature material – older films and re-issues, eighty minute color westerns billed with black-and-white “lower half” films. Occasionally, when he listened to my pleas, he would run horror films, and these were the films I would go out of my way to promote. This was a very small town, so our limited resources left me with a few opportunities to be imaginative, creating lobby displays, storefront cardboard displays, and telephone posters – all made of cardboard and ink.

Some horror films of the era, however, came equipped with their own promotional gimmicks – the most well-known being those created by schlock director and producer William Castle. His first gimmick was in 1958, a promo involving a Lloyd’s of London insurance policy covering the movie patron in the unlikely event that he or she died of fright while watching MACABRE.

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MACABRE is a small-budgeted but tightly paced black-and-white thriller with a few shots inserted for obvious shock value: a bloody faced corpse which falls over inside a mausoleum, a small dummy corpse with a skull face in a casket shown during a funeral at night, the sudden hand on the shoulder of a doctor who is searching through a cemetery for his daughter who has supposedly been buried alive. The final resolution is perhaps the biggest shock of all, perhaps because it is quite plausible. Greedy human beings, such as in the next Castle film HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, are the real horrors, not supernatural beings. Nonetheless, the shocks are still effective – at least for audiences not requiring gore (as in the remake of the film with the same title). To this date, only two Castle films have been remade with updated gore: HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and THIRTEEN GHOSTS. Teen audiences today, at least in America, would probably find the original versions of the films to be quite tame.*

When Allied Artist’s MACABRE played at the Warsaw Theatre, I ordered extra 8 x 10 still photos from the film from National Screen Service and decorated the window of a local drug store with a cardboard cut-out cemetery. I drew my own tombstones, but the druggist balked when I wrote the names of local people on the graves. I meant it as a joke, but black humor (sick humor) was not in.

* In the same year, Hammer Films released its version of the Dracula story with the title, in the US, HORROR OF DRACULA. In 1958, it was startling to some audiences and quite tame to others. When I showed the film in the 1990s to a college class in Atlanta, they found it to be slow-paced in spots and not very frightening or shocking. However, when I showed the film to a British literature class in China in 2004, several college girls asked to be dismissed from the classroom. They were thoroughly frightened, and I was shocked by their reaction.

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Despite my cardboard artistry, however, the film attracted only a small portion of our small population. We had the usual football games as competition.

For a Halloween midnight showing one year, Dad played two hokey horror films geared for teenage audiences: I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN and THE RETURN OF DRACULA. For this late 1950s double-bill, I constructed a cardboard castle over one of the inside exits next to the screen and ran a wire from it to the projection booth. I draped a section of white sheet over a hangar and tied a string to the hanger. During a high point of one of the films, I stood in the exit and pulled on the string, hoping to pull the ghost across the top of the audience. The ghost came out of the projection booth window on cue, but the hanger stuck halfway down. I jerked harder on the string and it snapped, leaving my deus ex machina suspended above the audience until the end of the showing when the houselights revealed my attempted stunt.

More successful was my huge cobweb made out of regular white yarn that I draped over the doorways and the one-sheet and 14 x 36 frames in the lobby.

Both I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTIEN and THE RETURN OF DRACULA feature their own internal gimmicks – the use of color in otherwise black-and-white films. One may recall how a short color segment was used in the 1940s films THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and THE PORTRAIT OF JENNY; in each case, only the portrait of the title character was shown in color in sharp contrast with the rest of the film. Both inserted shots are quite effective. Less can be said the use of color in the aforementioned Halloween hits. In the Frankenstein film, color is used only at the end when the monster destroys himself through shock therapy. The scene is not shocking, only surprising (as in Why?).

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The Dracula film, a much more frightening film (because of skillful directing and editing, not internal gimmicks), uses color for the close shot where vampire hunters plunge a stake into the heart of a female vampire. Color gushing out of a heart wound in this black-and-white film is much more effective as a shocking contrast than the sudden jolt of color used in Castle’s THE TINGLER, which shows a bathtub filled with blood and a human arm reaching out to a woman who is deathly afraid of the sight of blood.

In 1960, Nikolai Gogal’s short story “The Vij” was transformed into an Italian horror film by shock-for-shock’s sake director Mario Bava. The film was released in the US as BLACK SUNDAY (and THE MASK OF SATAN in Europe). BLACK SUNDAY was later used as the title of a John Frankenheimer film which dealt with pre-9-11 terrorists trying to decimate a football stadium full of fans. The first BLACK SUNDAY was released by American-International Pictures, a company famous for producing its own low-budgeted but heavily promoted quickies like I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN.

The 1960s BLACK SUNDAY, however, is unlike other formula flicks for teens at the drive-in theatres. Clever if self-conscious camera work utilizes an abundance of zoom lens shots and focuses our attention on the gamut of gothic trappings brought to life in low key black-and-white; some of the scenes feature stark imagery as crisp as anything shown in Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA, while others effectively use soft focus to create a nightmarish world. It is almost a textbook of gothic examples: black-robed hooded figures executing witches with a spike-studded mask before the titles are even shown, paintings changing and rotating to reveal secret passageways, trap doors opening onto pits with long spikes at the bottom, lanterns floating in mid-air, corpses found hanging in corridors, and huge bats flying around in the crypt.

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Barbara Steele, identified in many Italian horror flicks (and even in Fellini’s landmark film 8

Story telling sessions at Halloween are a great tradition. Children love to be scared but take care when choosing relevant stories as their imaginations don’t need much prompting, especially on this night when spirits are supposed to roam our world!

As well as frightening tales you could also tell mystery stories. Story sessions allow you to bring a quiet section to your Halloween party. While this is going on preparations for other parts of the party can take place.

Where can you find scary tales? The internet contains several sites you can find such stories of Halloween horror.

You may have stories of your own – you could embellish personal experiences. Children find it more believable if it is an experience of the narrator. A personal touch is achieved and is more believable.

Don’t over do it! You do not want your guests to go home to suffer from nightmares or you will not be popular amongst their parents! Now that would be a real scary situation!

There are lots of classic ghost stories out there. Most children won’t have come across them yet even though they may be old favorites of yours.

One such tale is ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. Washington Irving’s headless horseman will go down a storm. Another treacherous tale is of the ‘Flying Dutchman’. This strange ship brings doom to those who cross its path. Another popular story is that of Dr Frankenstein’s monstrous creation.

Also available is ‘A Ghost Story’ – Mark Twain. There have been several adaptations suitable for your children’s enjoyment. Some people say that ‘The Willows’ by Algernon Blackwood is one of the best ghost stories ever. ‘The Empty House’ by the same author is another classic that might wet their ghastly appetites. Other creepy tales can be obtained on the internet or from the local book store.

Remember you audience will be mainly children. Certain versions will be easier for them to understand so choose accordingly. Short and simple is a good guideline for kids. If you are entertaining adults it is a different matter. Here, the more eloquent the better.

Alternatively, you could acquire a CD or DVD of scary tales to entertain the troops. Easily bought from local stores or the internet there are several available to buy.

Keep your options open. Of course, Halloween parties need to be lively with games and dancing, but equally a ghostly tales or two won’t go amiss.