Here's a gem from 1999: This is a self-aware Scooby-Doo-themed parody of the popular low-budget "found footage" horror flick, The Blair Witch Project.
It's called The Scooby-Doo Project and those meddling kids at Cartoon Network got away with it too.
In 2016, Paste reported this:
The Scooby-Doo Project. The odds are good that, even if you are a huge Adult Swim fan, you are hearing about this for the first time. It aired, it would seem, one day only, on Halloween in 1999. The special debuted in chunks spread out during commercial breaks of a Scooby-Doo marathon, before airing in its entirety at the end of the marathon. And yet, in spite of these humble beginnings, what we have in The Scooby-Doo Project is essentially an Adult Swim show that aired two years before Adult Swim debuted.
Scooby Doo would eventually feature in the Adult Swim lineup, when the gang appeared in an episode of Harvey Birdman. The joke was that Scooby and crew were arrested for marijuana possession, and were being defended by Harvey. The plot, of course, is based on a longstanding joke that presupposes these kids and their dog were bigtime stoners.
Another project that came out in 1999 was The Blair Witch Project, so you probably know by now where this whole thing is going. Blair Witch was a huge cultural phenomenon when it came out, but it has largely been forgotten now. Still, the film was important and influential in its own way, because it was a super cheap found footage horror movie that turned a huge profit.
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For $1.5 million, you can be the proud new owner of Westland, Michigan's Eloise Complex, a building that started in 1839 as a poorhouse and has served as a tuberculosis ward and insane asylum before closing in 1984. During the Great Depression, it had as many as 10,000 residents. Oh, did I mention that it's haunted?
The main five-story building is 150,000 square feet wile the site contains a 19th century fire station, decommissioned power plant, and two maintenance building. Bonus, it backs up to an eighteen hole championship golf course!
Here's the real estate listing.
"Own a former mental asylum" (MLive)
"Haunted Former Mental Asylum For Sale in Michigan" (Mysterious Universe)
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A gorgeously retro-spooky series of stereoscopic GIFs from The Saline Project: "Monsters, Villains, Heroes, and Victims (MVHV)." Read the rest
Every year, The Scarehouse, 10 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh, puts on what many locals consider the best Halloween haunted house-type show in the region--with USA Today and Yahoo both ranking it among America's best. This year, I headed over to check it out, and received a highly-polished and extremely scary experience--and a backstage tour! Here, a makeup artist turns a performer's face into a gruesome work of art. Read the rest
Ossian Brown was a member of the dark, magical electronic music group Coil and is currently in
Cyclobe, a duo with his partner Stephen Thrower. Here is his exquisite collection of antique Halloween photos, dating between 1875 and 1955, as collected in
Haunted Air, with remarks from David Lynch and Geoff Cox
I finished Bradford Morrow's The Diviner's Tale over the weekend, galloping through the last third of the book with gooseflesh on my arms, completely spellbound by this cut-above-the-rest literary ghost story.
Diviner's Tale's protagonist is Cassandra Brooks, a misfit schoolteacher in rural Delaware. Cassandra is also the daughter of Nep Brooks, and like her father, and her grandfather, and her male relatives back as far as they can trace, she is a diviner, and can find water by walking land with a forked stick in her hand. Half the time, she's not sure if she's kidding herself or not, but she finds water, and everyone around town -- including her twin sons, whom she is raising on her own -- knows it's true.
But Cassandra doesn't just divine water. Sometimes, she divines the future, something she discovered as a little girl, when she unsuccessfully begged her heroic older brother to skip a road-trip, a trip that proved to be fatal. These "forevisions" have driven her half mad at times, but she thinks she has things under control.
Until the day she finds a hanged girl in the woods where she is dowsing for water for a new housing development. Terrified, she calls the police, who can't find her girl -- but who do later find a mysterious runaway girl nearby. This kicks off a series of ever-more terrifying visions that are made all the worse by her deteriorating relationship with her family and the mysterious, threatening notes she's started to receive. Read the rest
