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News

Nightmare Nostalgia’s 5-Year Celebration Halloween Giveaway!

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Well, here we are nostalgic nuggets! Another year and another nostalgic Halloween giveaway is upon us, However, this one is a little special to me because NN is celebrating five years old on the giant interwebs!

This calls for some bony booty slappin’.

Back in 2014, a friend of mine pitched the idea of me writing for a horror website that was looking for writers, and it wasn’t a tiny website either. It had a rather well-established following and although that was a little intimidating; I said fuck it, why not? Who cares that I had ZERO experience writing a blog or for any website. I was knowledgeable, passionate and said fuck a lot. That’s pretty much all you need to write about horror movies, right? My first piece was of course, about the “Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark” books and the owner loved it so much he took me on as a regular writer, and later one of the three head editors for the site, which had grown from 300,000 followers when I joined, to over 4 million to when I departed.

Why leave a good thing, you may ask? Well, I had already dipped my toes into other horror websites, very well-known ones, written for a couple horror magazines, and staying where I was would just leave me stagnant and unfulfilled. I wasn’t freely able to express myself and rant about the things I wanted to scream and with the toxic environment that is the internet, I wanted to build an escape mechanism for people like me to walk down memory lane, and get those nostalgic fuzzies about the first time they walked the aisles of their Mom and Pop Video Store. Or perhaps the first time they ever watched THE FUNHOUSE. Or hell, that time you actually tried out some of Maurice’s pranks from LITTLE MONSTERS on your parents. These are the little things that we remember that make life a little less shitty, and the community we’ve built here together into an army of nostalgic nuggets makes my pet monster heart melt. So, in return, I’ve gathered up a pretty cool giveaway to readers that have followed me for a decade, and those just discovering this snake pit of utter nostalgic madness!

For a little context, I wanted to make this easy and just post a picture on Facebook, but the Zuck is cracking down on those types of posts and flagging them as spam. But honestly, this kinda works out, so I could write an essay on the gratitude that I have for all of you.

Anyway, let’s get to it! Here’s the haul that is a perfect nostalgic Halloween treat for some lucky person! Rules are posted at the bottom of the page!

First up is a Frankenstein mash-up of a 1993 McDonald’s Halloween Pail with a Carl’s JR handle from their line of Halloween buckets from the same year! It’s one-of-a-kind, and I can almost guarantee probably no one else has sitting in their bedroom right now.

A Jason Voorhees coffee mug since there’s a Friday the 13th in October and a plushy handpicked by me because nothing wakes you up faster than a Leatherface in your cup.

MONSTER CRUNCH! THE BREAKFAST BATTLE GAME featuring our Monster Cereal heroes! If you’re not into board games, the pieces included in the box itself are worth just staring at for hours.

Something old and something new! Next up, we have the Unofficial Horror Movie Coloring Book that is filled with AMAZING pages of drawn art from our favorite horror movies for you to color in! Also, is a copy of a Universal Monsters Frightening Facts Movie Book from 1992! If this doesn’t ring a bell, also how dare you, this is a quiz book essentially where you take the marker, choose a question and pick an answer, and color over it and see if you got it right! Plus it’s got some sick cut-outs of all the Universal Monsters!

And finally, some handpicked NN favorites from my own collection because it ain’t Halloween without some slasher movies! Blu-ray of HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH, a first pressing copy DVD of HALLOWEEN 666: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS, and the killer cut Blu-ray of 2009’s FRIDAY THE 13TH!

The Rules:

Obviously, I wanted to keep this open to as many people as possible so all you have to do to enter is to do one, or all of the following- if you do all four that means you get four entries!

  1. Comment on this blog post your favorite Halloween memory!
  2. Share this post on Facebook from the original post on NN’s facebook page! (must be public for me to see)
  3. Share the NN’s giveaway post on Instagram! Look for my post regarding the giveaway @nightmarenostalgia
  4. Tweet this out on Twitter. Or X. Or whatever the fuck it’s being called today.

Must be a US resident and the contest will run from Friday, October 13th, 2023 until Monday, October 16th. Good luck nuggets and thanks for sticking around to hear me rant about Halloween 4 500 times!

    Interviews, News

    “Halloween 4” Director Returns To Roots With Halloween Film “Natty Knocks” and New Book

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    It’s no secret to anyone here how much I adore HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS, so when I was asked to interview Dwight Little, the master director of Halloween aesthetics, I never said yes to something so fast in my life. A visual showman and a pure fan of the holiday we all love, Little returns to his roots with a brand-new horror movie set on Halloween Eve called NATTY KNOCKS which, ironically, roots itself into some old-fashioned Halloween tropes and lore makes this holy matrimony of Halloween delight, what Dwight Little calls, “A Seasonal Halloween Movie“

    Dwight Little’s new Halloween visceral venture, NATTY KNOCKS, brings back former alumni he’s worked with Robert Englund, Danielle Harris, and newcomer to the director’s world, Bill Moseley as the film’s crazed antagonist Abner Honeywell in a horror genre-mash-up mixed with supernatural and urban legend elements. Honeywell (Moseley) is traumatized as a child via his witness of his Grind House actress turned prostitute mother, Natty’s untimely and brutal death by the hands of vengeful women who proclaim she’s a witch; giving the small town where they reside, a horrible crime turned into an infamous legend over the years and setting us up for a sweet Halloween treat filled with vengeance. Dwight Little describes the set-up as “a Roger Corman inspired B-Movie within a B-movie”.

    Protagonists Danielle Harris and our film’s John Houseman(as Dwight Little describes his character), Robert Englund, who unravels the ghost story of Natty so beautifully, round out the family reunion of Halloween film nostalgia which is a true love letter to the fans of HALLOWEEN 4 in retrospect. Little states that filming with the horror alumni again, more than 30 years after both HALLOWEEN 4 and PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, brought back both great memories and fuzzy feelings-which is a whole ‘nother piece in its own right of which we will explore in Part 2 of my interview with Mr. Little where we celebrate the 35th anniversary of HALLOWEEN 4.

    Speaking of HALLOWEEN 4, D.L. says he purposely inserted some Easter Eggs, including maybe some ominous images from a particular movie intro, honoring the 1988 fan-favorite film of the franchise inside NATTY KNOCKS, so make sure to look for that while watching! There’s just something about watching a Halloween horror film with Bill Moseley and Robert Englund that has The Return of Michael Myers sprinkled throughout the movie, that just makes me feel so damn good inside.

    NATTY KNOCKS is currently streaming FOR FREE on TUBI, which Dwight highly praises as a “wonderful opportunity for horror fans to enjoy good horror movies on a budget,” and I couldn’t agree more. The Blu-ray is now available on AMAZON, which you can buy here!

    Dwight Little also has a new memoir, Still Rolling: Inside the Hollywood Dream Factory, where the director talks make or break creative battles, Hollywood intrigues, unpredictable studio executives, and temperamental actors are all documented in colorful detail. That being said, I asked D.L just how scandalous this book really is?!

    D.L.- “There is actually some gossip, and it’s not a takedown of anybody, but I’ve worked with enough well-known profiled people like Wesley Snipes, Keifer Sutherland, etc… and there’s some good, interesting stuff about movies and TV stars. But there’s mostly a lot of behind the curtain stuff, and I think film fans are going to like it… Especially those who love HALLOWEEN 4. It’s really a must-read for any big fans of that movie as there’s some deep dives into both that and PHANTOM and horror fans, I think, will really love it.“

    Horror fans and Hollywood aficionados can pick up the book here at Amazon!

    Stay tuned for Part 2 of this interview, where we talk all things HALLOWEEN 4!

    Editorials

    Stephen King’s “Silver Bullet”- The Criminally Underrated Halloween Movie

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    In 2020, the full moon came on Halloween, and a happy coincidence left me fully convinced in the All Hallows Blue Moonlight on a notion that I had always known deep down. That Stephen King’s Silver Bullet was truly a criminally underrated Halloween film.

    Heh. I hope you read that in your best Jane voice.

    Now, it’s obvious that the film itself models a timeline of sorts from the 1983 novella; which acts like a calendar of chapters rummaging through each month of a chaotic year where a werewolf is violently tormenting the residents of Tarkers’ Mills. The movie starts off in late Spring and the majority of the film is actually set in the Summer, with a few big scenes leading up to and taking place on Independence Day. In which case, makes my argument here a tad trying, but I’m here to fight and will die on the hill that’s forever a Halloween movie.

    Midway through the movie, Fall sets in with the climatic final confrontation and ending landing on Halloween itself and although as stated, most of the film is staged at different points of time throughout the year, the last half of the movie really sells that Autumn ambiance flowing into the Halloween Full Moon final chapter. The changing of the leaves, that you can hear crunching in between scenes. The sinister aura surrounding the town is much heavier now, giving off that Halloween lurking around the corner feeling-you all know exactly what I’m talking about. You can practically SMELL the Autumn atmosphere. Especially when we get to the last ten minutes or so of the movie, where Jack-O-Lanterns and die-cut paper skeletons are seen outside the Coslaw residence.

    So to me, it feels more like a Halloween flick than anything else. And I’m kind of pissed that AMC Fearfest opts to show Stephen King’s Carrie 20 times a month in October and Silver Bullet a mere ONE TIME. Sure, I get films like Carrie are more universally popular. However, the fact that Silver Bullet consistently gets the shaft, both in the cinematic horrorthons and in the horror community, kind of bums me out. It’s underappreciated, underrated, and the best werewolf movie out of the slew of Lycanthrope films that came out in the early 80s’,

    YEAH, I SAID IT. Corey Haim in a gas-powered motorcycle of a wheelchair and Gary Busey wrasslin’ reverend werewolves? Sorry, but there’s no competition happening here.

    Stephen King’s first handwritten screenplay from his own novella adaption deserves a little more respect this Halloween. Give it a viewing closer to the holiday, and you’ll get the same Halloween ambient fuzzies as I do every time I watch it.

    Pick it up here from Amazon if you don’t own this cinematic masterpiece yet!