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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!

    Horror Nostalgia

    The ‘Child’s Play 2’ Trailer Was Out Of This World! 

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    Sometimes watching a good horror teaser can be as much fun as watching the actual movie. Trailers give us a sneak peek into the dark realm awaiting us once the theater lights dim and the movie starts to roll. I’ve always found them to be a lot of fun and whenever a horror trailer was released we all quickly learned to pay attention. Back then trailers didn’t spoil the movie by showing the whole damn thing. Instead only showed enough to give us a ravenous need to go see what they were advertising. Child’s Play 2 did this in spades!

    With the tagline ‘Sorry Jack, Chucky’s back’ our tickets were as good as already bought!

    REWIND THE CLOCK

    Child’s Play was a huge hit upon its release and scared the bejeezus out of us bratty little kids. We were at that tender age when playing with toys was a sacred pastime. Saturday mornings were entirely dedicated to brainwashing us into rushing out and buying the newest and best thing to fill the toy box.

    I mean these were the days when grown-ass men and women broke out into literal fistfights while in line at K-Mart over Cabbage Patch Kids of all things. Toys were a red hot topic and even our parents were getting in on the insanity. 

    So, gliding a razor’s edge across our societal vein, a little movie about a doll named Chucky (a cleaver resemblance to the famous My Buddy doll was not coincidental) hit theaters with ferocity, and if the idea of a killer doll wasn’t already a subconscious fear malignantly growing in the back of our cultural mind once Child’s Play released it was a full-blown phobia. 

    No, Chucky was not the first killer doll to darken our minds. Stuart Gordon’s malicious Dolls had already come out and scared people silly. Not to mention years prior little Talky Tina scared people out of their skin thanks to the Twilight Zone.

    But all the chills these guys introduced to the cultural zeitgeist Chucky took to a whole new level. And his infamy lives on today proving what a demonic powerhouse of a monster the little guy has always been.

    The idea of a killer doll was amped up on some serious coke thanks to Child’s Play so to introduce its inevitable sequel the marketing team put together one of my absolute favorite little horror trailers of all time. Those psychopathic bastards took a Jack-in-the-Box, something that plays on the fears of a lot of people already, and then showed it being crushed beneath Chucky’s feet. The killer doll was back and was carving out a bloody franchise for himself. He wasn’t playing around this time.

    Today Chucky is as recognizable as his bigger brothers like Jason, Freddy, and Leatherface, and has left a landslide of creative carnage across his macabre legacy. Chucky is celebrated for his wit, humor, and that pure love for murder that drives him. He’s become a husband, a father, and overall terrible influence and downright satanic pain in the ass to all who encounter him.

    Naturally, we love him for it. It’s also worth noting Spirit Halloween is selling the Jack featured in the trailer. That’s the impact Child’s Play 2 had on us. What a time to be alive!

    Relive the thrills of seeing Child's Play 2 in this beloved teaser from the past

    There’s no better time than the spooky Halloween season to relive the thrills and chills invested in this psychopathic little guy. So turn down the lights and cuddle up close to the ghoul of your dreams because the fun is about to begin!

    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!