It’s finally here—the spookiest time of the year—Halloween!! A personal favorite of mine, for which reason I have been stockpiling material with which to shower you on this most frightful night. Also, please appreciate that this post is going live at 6:25 pm, the precise time of sunset in my local time zone.
THE SPOOP AGENDA
Click on a link to navigate to that section of the post
- Database of Demons and Death Gods 1-year Anniversary
- Hey There Demons (TV Shows)
- Short and Sweet Top 3 Halloween Songs
- Scary Story Recommendations
- Shameless Self Promotion
Database of Demons and Death Gods 1-year Anniversary
As of today, it has officially been one year since the launch of the Database of Demons and Death Gods, which my regular readers are probably familiar with due to my frequent promotions of it. I haven’t been able to add to it as much as I would have liked over the course of its first year of life, but here’s hoping its second year will be much livelier (but still, y’know, death and demony).
To celebrate this 1-year anniversary, I have created a somewhat enigmatic reading guide to the database. Please enjoy trying to determine which stories from the database the guide is referring to.
Hey There Demons (TV Shows)
It’s me, ya friendly neighborhood blogger, with some TV shows featuring demons for your viewing pleasure. Please note the season indicates the seasons which I personally have watched, and the number of demon emojis indicates the rating, not the quantity of demons. >:)
1: Crazyhead: Season 1 😈😈
2: Diablero: Season 1 😈😈😈😈
3: From Dusk Till Dawn The Series: Seasons 1-3 😈😈😈😈😈
4: Kingdom: Season 1 😈😈😈
5: Wynonna Earp: S1-S3 😈😈😈😈
And obviously, the title’s namesake:
6: Buzzfeed Unsolved Supernatural: Seasons 1-6 😈😈😈😈😈
Short and Sweet Top 3 Halloween Songs
Being as much of a Halloween fan as I am, I naturally have a gigantic Halloween playlist that is my pride and joy. BUT if I had to pick just three songs to be my absolute top 3 Halloween songs, they would be these:
3 Jesters of the Moon — Disc One — Final Fantasy IX OST
A lively, sort of haunted house kind of vibe. Very aesthetic, nice on repeat, or extended length.
2 Ghostbusters — Ray Parker Jr. — Billboard Top Hits 1984
An obvious pick for a Halloween playlist, but I just love it so much. Even when it’s not Halloween. Honestly, this song is totally a tie with #1.
1 The C.N. Tower Belongs to the Dead —Owen Pallett (formerly Final Fantasy) — Has a Good Home
So this song has the death-graveyard-spookytime themes that make it a fantastic Halloween song, but also, IT’S JUST FRIGGING AMAZING, seriously do yourself a favor and listen to it.
Scary Story Recommendations
My all-time favorite scary-story author is William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918). He was an English author who wrote in the genres of fantasy, horror, and weird fiction, and if you are wondering about that year of death—yes, he very sadly died in WWI or else we might have been blessed with more works from him.
Not that he wasn’t prolific, but you know how it is when you find an author you really love and then they die.
Anyhow, there are two works from Hodgson that I particularly recommend for Halloween purposes.
1 The first is Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, previously featured on the blog. This is a series of shorter stories, and it’s a great collection of ghost stories, kind of in the same vein as Buzzfeed Unsolved Supernatural really, except obviously it was written roughly a hundred years ago, so there’s some differences in ghost-hunting technology associated with that.
TAKEAWAY: These stories are good if you want that fun, scary-ghost-story-telling vibe, but don’t actually want to be scared out of your mind.
2 If you DO want to be scared ABSOLUTELY witless, like seriously, “oh my God there is something outside the window/door and it is coming for me” levels of scared, I wholeheartedly recommend The House on the Borderland. It’s got it all: monsters (lots and LOTS of monsters), super DUPER creepy house, and various other horrors, which I will not spoil for you.
In the interest of full disclosure, H. P. Lovecraft (of immortal fame) wrote that there are a few touches of “commonplace sentimentality” that in his opinion prevent HotB from being a “classic of the first water”. I’m not denying that those so-called touches of sentimentality are there, but in my (less august than H.P. Lovecraft’s) opinion, they don’t detract from the overall horrifying experience that is The House on the Borderland.
TAKEAWAY: Come here for your nightmare fuel.
Shameless Self Promotion
The art from this post (excluding the reading guide, and the YouTube videos obviously) has been added to my RedBubble shop on a variety of products which are rather enticing if I say so myself, and I do.
There is also some new, vaguely Halloween-related and even more vaguely blog-related art you can buy if you would like to support the blog monetarily, although reading and liking/commenting on the posts is the best support and feeds my soul.
Anyway, here is a sampling of some of the new products. You can click on them to make them bigger.
Short and Sweet WTF 