SOUNDTRACK: MARILYN MANSON-“This is Halloween” (2006).
Thirteen years after The Nightmare Before Christmas, Marilyn Manson covered this song for the Nightmare Revisited project.
He’s the obvious choice to cover this song. Manson is a cartoon character himself and he was, at one time, feared, perhaps, by some.
Manson has proven himself over and over to be a chameleon with looks and voices, and that attribute makes his version work pretty well.
His version uses crunchy metal guitars instead of Elfman’s synths. But I think the synths and strings are scarier.
There is also something far more sinister about the voices in the original. Manson may be able to “do” voices, but they are for all intents and purposes, him. The wonderful range of voices on display in the original are entirely more creepy.
Having said all that if the original wasn’t as good, this version would be pretty cool too.
[READ: October 20, 2018] “The Watcher”
Just in time for Halloween, from the people who brought me The Short Story Advent Calendar and The Ghost Box. comes Ghost Box II.
This is once again a nifty little box (with a magnetic opening and a ribbon) which contains 11 stories for Halloween. It is lovingly described thusly:
The Ghost Box returns, like a mummy or a batman, to once again make your pupils dilate and the hair on your arms stand straight up—it’s another collection of individually bound scary stories, edited and introduced by comedian and spooky specialist Patton Oswalt.
There is no explicit “order” to these books; however, Patton Oswalt will be reviewing a book a day on his Facebook page.
Much respect to Oswalt, but I will not be following his order. So there.
This is a strange little story.
A man walks out with an older man. The older man sees a dead mouse. He picks it up and begins to tear up. Then he wonders why he disturbed the creature’s resting place. After muttering an earth to earth, ashes to ashes, the pair move on.
The older man continues his story. He was given a pistol as a young lad. He loved the feeling of power. He enjoyed shooting at targets, but soon felt the need to see a living thing stop living.
After giving a caveat that he thinks sport is necessary, but he believes now that it as not necessary for him.
After a full day’s hunting where he caught nothing, he was about to give up when a thrush sprung out of the brush and he shot it.
He was filled with remorse and as he went looking for the bird beating about in the weeds, he saw “a face looking down from the higher branches…. and it smiled with sheer delight, not at me, but at the thrush’s body.”
It may come as no surprise to learn that author Robert Hugh Benson was also an Anglican priest.
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