Category Archives: Creature Features

Creature Features: The Mucho-Ecological, Man-Eating Lake Blob From “Creepshow 2”

Image April 29, 2023 Patti PaulterGeist 3 Comments

Nightmare Nostalgia Presents Creature Features: An ongoing tip of the hat to some of horror’s greatest monsters throughout the genre that don’t seem to get the recognition they wholeheartedly deserve.

Firstly, I would never bullshit you guys. Outside of a slimy little extraterrestrial asshole with an unnaturally long neck pointing his glowing fingers at everything trying to phone home, and a demon reverend with 20,000 teeth singing hymns on rainy days, and a mechanical shark, not a whole lot scared me as a kid. In fact, I grew up on horror movies and was schooled at the tender age of three with the beautiful Universal Monsters collection via my grandfather, and my father who introduced me to Halloween. Apparently, I used to dance around to Halloween music with poms-poms at this age- I still don’t want to believe I was that cool that early on, but I’m just going to go with that. So yeah, embracing the horror since the potty-training days made me somewhat desensitized to a lot, it took something special to get me shakin’. Aside from what I mentioned above, and to be honest here there’s probably more that I’m just not thinking of at this moment, one thing I DO recall from my youngin’ years scaring the ever-loving shit out of me, was the mucho-ecological Lake Blob from Creepshow 2‘s, The Raft.

What the hell is that thing, Poncho? Well, this pre-1988 Blob of sludge is never really explained, even thirty years after its theatrical release. We know it’s hungry, (I guess), and once it nabs its carnivorous entrée, the object completely dissolves into the Lake Blob and seemingly becomes a part of it. As we can see through various shots throughout The Raft, this “oil slick”, as the four teens refer to it, has pockets of waste and I swear I’ve seen bones in this damn thing, as it moves along patiently awaiting its next meal. I’ve looked for these answers friends as to WHAT EXACTLY IT IS or WHERE IT CAME FROM. And until I have the opportunity to actually ask Stephen King himself, or anyone who worked on the film, I may never fully know for sure. However, I have my own theory…

I could just be taking this whole thing to an unnecessary level of deep-rooted fuckery, but hear me out. What if, the Lake Blob is a metaphor for Mother Nature and the havoc we have wreaked on poor Mother Earth. Let’s face it guys. We’re kind of dicks to this planet, and history and well, science has shown us those facts. Maybe this Lake Blob is Earth’s middle finger to humankind; because clearly, it has a thing for humanoids with an occasional side of passerby duck. With each death via Lake Blob, the victim is engulfed by the slick creature’s globule tendons and pulled into its aura, dissolving into its sludgy mass. Thus, making the prey part of the predator now. Or for lack of a better term, back to the Earth you go you polluting Homo Sapien. With the initial meeting of the Blob and the four teens at the lake, this thing immediately comes and confronts them. Randy does point out that this thing, “doesn’t look like an accident… it looks like it’s on purpose.” Then it proceeds to consume Rachel in the most horrifying way imaginable. And for the record, is the scene that totally scared the crap out of me from wanting to swim in ANY LAKE EVER.

Although, I bet Tarman from ROLD would be into her.

Of course, feel free to tell me I’m completely way off base here. If that be the case, let’s hear your theories below! Until next time kiddies and in the meantime, steer clear of any isolated bodies of water.

Creature Features

Rise of The Zuni Fetish Doll! A Brief History of Trilogy of Terror’s Scariest Entry

Image July 25, 2022 Patti PaulterGeist 5 Comments

When I was a young kid, I remember walking down the hall late one night to the kitchen to grab a drink and while passing by our living room area, my parents were watching some late-night movie. I paused for a minute in curiosity and what I saw gave me nightmares for DAYS. This poor lady screaming for life while some psychotic tiny doll- thing with about 100 teeth chased her around her bedroom wielding the tiniest knife I had ever did see. Upon discovering the midnight-child invasion of the parental movie night, I was squawked at to get back to bed but the visionary terror I had witnessed on the Magnavox screen was clear as day. For years, until I was old enough to ride my bike to the video store on my own, the image haunted me until I was able to remedy it with a full viewing, and when I finally did around the tender age of eleven, Trilogy Of Terror became a tried and true favorite of mine that I would revisit many times; my go-to especially on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

So, let’s talk about THEE absolute scariest entry of Trilogy of Terror: “AMELIA“.

Born on ABC on March 4, 1975, Trilogy of Terror was a made-for-tv special presentation of primetime horror. Directed by Dan Curtis and starring Karen Black in three stories (Julie, Millicent and Therese, Amelia) consisting of different roles, each tale unrelated to the other but compelling in nature with each entry inducing uneasiness in the next. However, it was ultimately Amelia that stirred the most attention and well, nightmares for those who watched and became the signature face for the anthology film.

Famed author Richard Matheson, who is well known for his novels, “I Am Legend”, “What Dreams May Come”, and many more including writing several scripts for the original Twilight Zone series also penned the stories for the film. As it turns out, the story of “Amelia” and the Zuni fetish doll was actually a rejected storyline for one of Matheson’s most iconic Twilight Zone scripts, “The Invaders”.

Matheson explained in Dimensions Behind The Twilight Zone: A Backstage Tribute to Television’s Groundbreaking Series:

“I’m sure that Rod, being the consummate writer he was, did not think, for a moment, of making every Twilight Zone as though made with a cookie cutter. Their variety was perfectly in keeping with his creative awareness. What the story called for, we did. If the notion was serious, we wrote it that way. If it was comedic, we did it that way. Interestingly enough – I have said this before – the original submission for ‘A World of His Own’ was very grim and serious indeed. They suggested making it a comedy, which I did gladly. A similar occurrence was on ‘The Invaders.’ My original story was not to their taste, so I turned it into a science-fiction approach. Many years later, the grim approach to the story – not that ‘The Invaders’ is exactly comedy – became one of the stories on Trilogy of Terror, the Zuni doll chasing Karen Black all over her apartment.”

Both stories are based on Matheson’s short story, “Prey”. In “The Invaders,” Agnes Moorehead plays a woman who is stalked in her humble home by invading miniature spacemen. In “Amelia,” Karen Black plays a woman who is stalked in her apartment by a small warrior doll. So the similarities are pretty significant.

Beyond the detailed, horrifying looks of the Zuni fetish doll, one of the keynotes in what made this thing absolutely terrifying, was the high-pitched warrior voice that screamed relentlessly toward our Karen. That voice is of one Walker Edmiston, who was uncredited for the role. Edmiston is a famous voice-over actor you’ve probably heard plenty of times growing up in cartoons and film as he is most famous for voicing the likes of Inferno in the Transformers Movie and TV series, Dr. Blinky in H.R. Pufnstuf, the radio announcer in Dick Tracy, and infamously the voice of Mr. Slugworth in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory! Walker made notable on-screen cameos throughout his nearly 50-year career in show biz as well as appearing in Land of the Lost, Get Smart, and Knot’s Landing.

One of the actual dolls was sold at an auction in 2019 for a whopping $217,600, making it one of the most expensive horror props in horror history even beating out Jack’s ax from The Shining which sold for a little less than that year. Not bad considering the TV movie was probably made for a quarter of that.

I think we can all agree the Zuni doll is the stuff of fucking nightmares, and in my opinion, scarier than any doll I’ve ever seen on the cinematic screen. This thing is not only visually horrifying, but it has a Terminator-like quality as it doesn’t stop until you’re dead. He’s fast as FUCK, and if all else fails, will just possess your soul. As a matter of fact, Amelia being possessed by the little shit is almost more terrifying than the doll itself.

For you wonderful physical media lovers, you can grab the beautiful Blu-Ray over at Amazon here for less than $20. For anyone else that is on a budget, for now, you can totally watch for free on youtube, which I’ve taken the liberty to stick right here in this article.

Sweet dreams Zuni warriors.

Creature Features

Believe It’s Magic! The Painstaking Special Effects of “Ghostbusters”

Image June 7, 2022 Patti PaulterGeist Leave a comment

I think it goes without saying Ghostbusters is a once-in-a-lifetime movie experience that can and never will be replicated, and a lot of that credit goes towards the special effects of the film. In 1984, this sort of visual sorcery wasn’t running rampant across filmmaking. With few exceptions like Star Wars and Poltergeist, (both of which Ghostbusters visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund worked on) audiences were bedazzled with the hypnotic effects the movie presented within.

Let’s take a ride and talk about that.

A mere year after the visual stunner of Poltergiest, Ivan Reitman and his crew were tasked to make Ghostbusters in UNDER A YEAR. In this case, is asking the impossible with the sort of movie that called for such heavy special effects to sell the story. But according to Ivan Reitman, it had to be done in such a way as to balance the comedy with the “ghosts” so as to not make it too silly, or too scary as doing so would damage the film entirely.

“The special effects are just as important as the comedy. We’ve never seen this level of first-class effects in a comedy film before and it has to be evened out.” – Ivan Reitman

Much of Dan Akroyd’s vision for the creatures were on a large scale, some of which even ended up in space if you can just picture that! However, the budget for the film was about $5 million and Reitman worked with Akroyd to rewrite the script and the creatures in a way that would work in a beautiful balance of comedy and terror. Though they ended up around $700,000 over by the time the film was locked, if Dan Aykroyd’s original script had been filmed, according to associate producer Joe Medjuck, it would have had “50 large scale monsters”.

Enter Richard Enlund, head honcho of Boss studios. Launched in 1983 specifically for Ghostbusters, who knew the importance of not making these creatures into flat-out jokes for the film. And what we ended up with was some of the best damn practical effects of apparations still to this day.

In the instance of the Marshmallow Man, Edlund and his team went through dozens of ideas and designs before opting for the simple, yet practical 100-foot monstrosity we all know and love.

Part of what made the effects so, well, effective, was their practical nature. You just can’t beat practical movie magic no matter how much technology you throw in front of it. The clip below from Ghostbusters.net gives us a short and sweet breakdown of some of the wizardry undertaken in bringing the Library Ghost, Slimer, and more to life in the film.

Made in just ten months and filmed in 55 days, Ghostbusters is the prime example of practical effects done in a time-crunch without the technology of a computer. Cliche to say it has aged like fine wine, so we’ll just say it has aged as well as Keanu Reeves in 2022. Charming, beautiful, breathtaking, and as soft and nostalgic as a twinkie.

With that, I’ll leave here with my personal favorite shot from the movie- the ghost escape from the firehouse that wreaks havoc on New York City all leading up to the climax of Gozer. I’m actually kind of obsessed with this scene as it has everything that is great about this movie all rolled into two minutes of spectacular energy. It’s ominous, a bit silly, but not so much to where you can’t overlook the sense of dread that is coming. Paired with Mick Smiley’s “I Believe It’s Magic”, this is just cinematic gold right here. And I believe what Ivan Reitman set out to do in balancing terror and comedy, marries perfectly in this one scene alone.