T and I spent the day off together watching Hysteria on Peacock and carving pumpkins. I do not like to brag, because I do not have a single skill to speak of, but I carved a big boy of a jolly pumpkin yesterday, and I'm proud of this guy. He is awesome. He weighed, sans gutting, about 40 pounds! This is the largest pumpkin I have ever picked up. I love him heartily.

Murder, She Wrote I could go over the more Halloween-adjacent episodes, such as The Witch's Curse (S8 E12), or Night of the Headless Horseman (S3 E11), or one of my favorites, the obligatory vampire episode The Legacy of the Borbey House (S10 E3), but I thought it more appropriate to discuss the overarching plot of the show in its entirety, and that is that Jessica Fletcher is in Hell!!! She has to be in her own private hell. How else do you explain that nearly every single person or acquaintance Jessica knows, every family member or movie star or who the hell ever she knows gets involved in a murder or is murdered? Every place Jess visits whether for vacation or to help a friend in need invariably turns into a whodunit. I get it, the show wouldn't be very entertaining without the murder in Murder, She Wrote. But, if one human must entertain all that death, then surely you would be in hell, either mental or literal. She is either A., killing people and ingeniously setting up ot

The 3rd annual Dolan Family pumpkin carving contest. This year a bunch of new family jumped into the carving fun.

My extended reading for this Halloweentober starts with this pile right here: Halloween anthologies are some of my favorite books to read during Halloween. Dozens of short stories to enjoy from just a couple of books.  The End of Summer: 13 Tales of Halloween  has one particular story that has quickly become my favorite. It revolves around a niece spending Halloween with her aunt and uncle who live on a farm, and all seems quaint and cozy, until shit gets dark! Which it does rather quickly and unexpectedly. Highly recommend this book for autumn reading. And last Halloween I read Cameron Chaney's Autumncrow, one of my favorite Halloween anthologies I've ever read. It was an absolute pleasure, and Fresh Hell is Cameron's first full story in the town of Autumncrow, and something I am very happy to get into. These are books I will read all autumn season long and not just until Halloween. As long as there are pumpkins on porches and co

Nosferatu The Vampire. Warner Herzog's remaining of Nosferatu and Bram Stoker's Dracula. This movie is incredibly unsettling. This very well may be the most intriguing, yet scary, vampire film I've ever watched. I added this movie to my collection thanks to Scream Factory. This is certainly a movie to revisit on dark and dreary weather. The entire film, the setting to the characters, makes me feel icky for lack of a better word. The movie opens with enchanting, haunting music over horrifying corpses and dramatic slow-motion cinematography that is so unsettling. The character of Renfield may be one of the most, again to use this word for lack of a better one, unsettling of the character I have ever seen in a film. In all the hundreds of movies I have watched over 40 years, this one character makes my skin crawl and my soul want to leap from my body and hide in the shadows. He's a horrific laughing little man and I'd prefer never to see him ever again to be honest wit

Vampires, the immortal creatures of the night, are the first monsters I can remember being afraid of but also endlessly infatuated with. And what's Halloweentober without the undead?! After all, if it wasn't for vampires I probably never would have developed such a fondness for Halloween in the first place... The 1980s especially hosted a smorgasbord of the undead for me to, uh, sink my teeth into. From the hilarious to the horrific, the vampire films of my childhood were the things that kept me up at night. I was blessed with having my own television in my bedroom at an early age, with parents who were kind enough to respect my privacy and leave me alone when the door was shut. So staying up to watch vampire flicks until dawn was quite normal for me in adolescence. Once Bitten was one the first I can remember staying up late for and was Jim Carrey's movie introduction to me years before In Living Color debuted on Fox in 1990. Jim's affable virgin Mark Kendall, hounded