I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: TRENT REZNOR & ATTICUS ROSS-“John Carpenter’s Halloween” (2017).

A lot of the music I listen to is weird and probably creepy to other people, but I don’t necessarily think of songs as appropriate for Halloween or not.  So for this year’s Ghost Box stories, I consulted an “expert”: The Esquire list of Halloween songs you’ll play all year long.  The list has 45 songs–most of which I do not like.  So I picked 11 of them to post about.

I didn’t actually know this version of the Halloween theme song and I was pretty excited to be super creeped out.

It turns out that this version is decidedly less creepy than the original.  But then again, nothing can outdo the starkness of that original piano score.

This version takes a while to get going (about 45 seconds of buildup) before a little keyboard riff that sounds a lot like the “spooky” riff in The Brady Bunch in Hawaii episode pops up.  Then some original piano comes in along with building synths and what sounds like distorted voices growling in the background.  This lasts until almost 2 minutes.  And I have to say it’s creepier than the actual familiar melody.

When the plinking piano comes in, it’s a little muted and the synth chords are louder.  As the song progresses you can hear–whispered voices (?), distorted rumblings (?) a choir from hell (?).  It’s that background soundscape that is seriously creepy.

Around five minutes, the music drops out and there’s just echoing, clacking sounds and possibly breathing.  Yeah, that’s nicely spooky.

Then the main melody returns.  It builds and turns into a rock song–with a drumbeat and everything.  But it being a song is a lot less creepy than the original solo piano playing in the middle of a an abandoned asylum.

Don’t get me wrong, this has some serious creep appeal, but the original wins hands down.

[READ: October 24, 2019] “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats”

Just in time for Halloween, from the people who brought me The Short Story Advent Calendar and The Ghost Box. and Ghost Box II. comes Ghost Box III.

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:

Oh god, it’s right behind me, isn’t it? There’s no use trying to run from Ghost Box III, the terrifying conclusion to our series of limited-edition horror box sets edited and introduced by Patton Oswalt.

There is no explicit “order” to these books; however, I’m going to read in the order they were stacked.

Even Patton Oswalt agrees that many people might not finish (or even start) this story.  I had the misfortune of reading it during breakfast.

James Tiptree Jr. was the pseudonym for Alice Bradley Sheldon (her real name was not revealed until 1977! (she died in 1987).

As I was reading it, I had no idea this story was so old.  It seemed like a current take on animal rights and animal welfare.  Although I did think the conditions in the lab were worse than I believe they actually are now (but what do I know?)

The psychologist is Tilman Lipsitz.  He hates his name and he hates that he is called Tilly by everyone.   He also hates where he works, and the first five or six pages are so gruesome about what is being done to the animals in these cages that one would wonder how anybody could work there.

The only solace he has here is Sheila and her “lovely hourglass-shaped ass.”  But Sheila likes another guy there so she is more grief than solace.

Tilly has his own rats, but he seems to spare them and feed them extra–thereby ruining any results he may have.  He also has to grade papers–a lot of papers.  He doesn’t care much for the students either.

He is called in front of the department head who questions everything about his research and his motivation.  He starts talking about his dream experiments with the rats–ones that don’t hurt them, ones that study their reaction to the edges and the shape of the environment, “I mean, it’s basic to living and nobody seems to have explored it.”  He starts to tell the head that psychologists are supposed to have a helpful attitude towards life and yet what they do here…

The head stops him and says he’d better have concrete results soon or he is out.

Tilly heads back home to grade papers.  He starts drinking and decides things have to change.  So he grabs some absinthe and some carrots and heads back to the lab.

His intention is to put all of his suffering rats out of their misery.  He thinks of philosophers and suffering.  He wonders if somewhere there is reservoir of pain waiting to be filed.  When it is full, will something rise from it?  Something created and summoned by torment?  Inhuman and alien super thing?

He notices a hole in one of the cages.  One of the rats has escaped.  He hears a clicking sound and goes to investigate and what he finds there is hideous, and yet somehow less hideous than what is being done to the rats in the cages.

The resulting passage is an absinthe-fueled nightmare but when Tilly wakes from it, his actual real ideas are far more frightening.

This was a hard story to read, no doubt.

Read Patton Oswalt’s take here.