by Wallace, Amy
½ shot of Bailey’s Irish Cream
grenadine
Pour schnapps into double shot glass. Add Bailey’s, which congeals into a brain-like lump of fissures. Top with grenadine for the bloody hemorrhage.
—Source: www.droogle.ca
10. HEADLESS HORSEMAN
1½ oz. vodka
3 dashes bitters
ginger ale
Pour the vodka and bitters into a collins glass and add several ice cubes. Fill with ginger ale and stir. Decorate with a slice of orange.
—Source: Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s and Party Guide
— Compiled by S.B. and J.S.
ELEVEN HORROR FOOD AND DRINK PRODUCTS
1–5. Count Chocula, Franken Berry, Boo Berry, Yummy Mummy, and Fruit Brute cereals: Arguably the best-known and most-beloved of all horror foods, this series of monster-themed breakfast cereals was manufactured by General Mills and debuted in 1971 with Count Chocula and Franken Berry. Each featured a different archetypal horror character as the name and logo for a different flavor: The vampire Count Chocula (chocolate), the Frankenstein’s monster-like Franken Berry (strawberry), and the ghost Boo Berry (blueberry). Less successful entries in the line were Yummy Mummy (fruit-flavored) and the werewolf Fruit Brute (also fruit-flavored). In 1999, The Onion ran a spoof article which revealed Count Chocula’s full name to be Vladimir Elysius von Chocula and reported on a press conference held by the Count at General Mills’ headquarters “to restate his longstanding advocacy of the presweetened breakfast cereal that bears his name.”
6. Monster Munch Corn Snacks: Chips (crisps) sold in the UK, manufactured by Walker, these also used the concept of different spokescreatures for each flavor: They were, to quote from the product’s Wikipedia entry,
Pink Monster (a tall, gangly creature who put in his main appearance on Roast Beef flavor), Orange Monster (who assumed various duties over the years, including both Pickled Onion and Bacon flavors), Blue Monster (a behatted, floppy-eared creature with four arms whose finest moment was his appearance on Salt and Vinegar), and Yellow Monster (a one-eyed, red-nosed creature found on Cheese and Cheese & Onion flavors). At some point there was also a Green Monster, although he may not have actually appeared on any packets. He is mentioned in the “monster munch munchers” club pack, most notably for his appearance in the story of the “monster’s bounce,” where he drank too much lemonade down the monster munch mine and had to be rescued by the other monsters.
The snacks themselves have been produced in two different shapes, a monster claw (which may also be a monster eye) and the shape of the Pink Monster. There have been no recent sightings of the Green Monster.
7. Gremlins Cereal: Produced by Ralston Foods from July 1984 to September 1985 as a tie-in with the blockbuster produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Joe Dante (concerning sweet, furry creatures that transform into malevolent reptilian monstrosities if fed after midnight), many have noted the suspicious similarity to another Ralston cereal, Cap’n Crunch, in taste, texture, and color. While cuddly Mogwai Gizmo appeared on the box cover (and was the basis for the shape of the cereal pieces themselves), stickers featuring Spike and other evil gremlins could be found inside as a prize.
8. Night of the Living Bar-B-Q Sauce: This potent number, from Kansas City’s Cowtown BBQ Products, features a label illustrated by nationally syndicated cartoonist Charlie Podrebarac depicting zombie pigs and cows pursuing a terrified BBQ chef. The bottle’s ad copy says: “Reanimate your taste buds with this killer hot sauce! Howling good when splattered on beef, pork, poultry or fish . . . repeat after me: ‘It’s only a Bar-B-Q sauce . . . it’s only a Bar-B-Q sauce . . . it’s only a Bar-B-Q sauce. . . .’ ” Night of the Living Bar-B-Q Sauce won first place in the hot sauce category (2002) and the People’s Choice Award (2007) at the American Royal BBQ Competition. It’s available on the web from www .cowtownbbq.com, and at Oklahoma Joe’s Barbecue, which describes itself as “a BBQ restaurant in a gas station” because it is, in fact, situated inside the Shamrock gas station at Forty-seventh and Mission in Kansas City, Kansas.
Night of the Living Bar-B-Q Sauce (Illustration by Charlie Podrebarac, used by permission of Cowtown Barbeque Products LLC)
9. Alien Fresh Jerky: This Area 51–themed store sells many varieties of homemade jerky, stuffed olives, nuts, and dry fruits, all festooned with slightly sinister-looking aliens of the Communion variety (some of them decked out in cowboy gear!). Originally launched in Lincoln County, Nevada, Alien Fresh Jerky has since relocated to Baker, California, on Interstate 15 (the main route between Las Vegas and Los Angeles). Of the jerky varieties sampled by The Book of Lists: Horror, the hot flavor was the hands-down favorite. More information is available at www .alienfreshjerky.com.
10. Monster Energy Drink: Appearing in 2002 as a competitor to the massively successful Red Bull Energy Drink, this product’s can features three claw-marks from, presumably, the eponymous monster as its logo. The can exhorts drinkers to “Unleash the Beast!” and says, “We went down to the lab and cooked up a double shot of killer energy brew. It’s a wicked mega hit that delivers twice the buzz of a regular energy drink.” Monster comes in a variety of flavors, including low-carb, and is available at most convenience and grocery stores.
11. Screamin’ Demon Pickled Sausage: The whole concept of the liquor/ convenience store staple that is the pickled sausage qualifies as a “horrifying” food for many, but this brand, manufactured by Jack Link, actually uses a horror motif—a green cartoon demon, seen on the wrapper munching on one of the sausages. According to the company’s Web site, the Screamin’ Demon is “300% hotter than our Hot Head Pickled Sausage.” The label lists, among the ingredients, “mechanically separated chicken, pork, pork hearts.” Leatherface would be proud!
—S.B.
AGUSTÍ VILLARONGA’S TOP FIVE WORKS OF HORROR
Spanish filmmaker Agustí Villaronga is the director of the infamous transgressive horror classic In a Glass Cage (Tras El Cristal). Among his other works are 99.9, the Aleister Crowley–inspired Moonchild, and The Sea (El Mar). His films have screened at numerous international film festivals, including those at Cannes, Berlin, Chicago, Montreal, and Torino.
1. Ron Mueck’s Sculptures
Ron Mueck is an Australian living in England who began doing special effects in cinema. His hyper-realistic sculptures reproduce the human body in detail. However, he alters the human scale to the extent that it becomes something monstrous. The first of these sculptures, “Dead Man,” reproduces his father’s dead body, but reduced to two-thirds of its real size. It is made of silicon and other materials, but uses, nonetheless, his father’s own hair. His next sculpture: “Boy” is five meters tall and is compressed inside a structure. Lastly, he has a newly born baby that is 15 meters long. A simple change in scale together with a most amazing realism ends up turning these human beings into monsters. The whole thing is, if not terrifying, at least quite disturbing.
2. The film Who Can Kill a Child? (¿Quién puede matar a un niño?) (1979)
Who Can Kill a Child? is a Spanish film directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador. This film shows to what extent evil can appear in the guise of innocence. The story begins with a young English couple who arrive on a small island off the coast of Spain for a vacation. The wife is pregnant with their child. Strangely enough, there are only children on this island. These children, who want to take revenge on all the evils that adults have inflicted upon them, have killed all the adults. It is very much in the spirit of The Birds, by Alfred Hitchcock. The couple is harassed to the point that they end up locked up in a room, guarded by the tribe of children, who clamour for their death. But when confronted with these innocent and virginal faces, and what they stand for, who can kill a child?
3. The Musical Composition Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima by Krzysztof Penderecki
Music, abstract or otherwise, produces emotions, and even more so when it makes allusion, as in this case, to an event whose conseq
uences are known to all of us. This piece was written in 1959 for fifty-two string instruments, which play continuous, loud, and dissonant notes without pause, creating a sensation both solemn and catastrophic. It was recently used by Alfonso Cuarón in the chaotic final sequence of his film Children of Men (2006). Penderecki remarked: “Let the Threnody express my firm belief that the sacrifice of Hiroshima will never be forgotten and lost.”
4. The novel Frisk, by Dennis Cooper
Cooper’s recurrent themes are violence, sex, youth culture, and the search for an object of desire. In Frisk, his second novel, the story is told through a series of letters the narrator sends from France and Holland to an old friend, explaining the crimes he is perpetuating. His fantasies almost always culminate in the murder and horrendous mutilation of young people who, at the moment he perpetuates the crime, are usually in a terrible state of confusion due to drugs, sickness, or agony. In his work, there are echoes of Bret Easton Ellis and even the Marquis de Sade, but Cooper goes so much farther that he has even received death threats from the gay community.
5. The book The Trial of Gilles de Rais, by Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille’s book takes as a starting point the judicial records of the trial of Gilles de Rais (the Bluebeard of the legend), accused of killing more than four hundred children whom he sodomized and beheaded amidst satanic orgies. Gilles de Rais, a good Catholic, was a noble marshal who fought with Joan of Arc during the Hundred Years War. He never lost his faith, not even while perpetuating his most cruel and degenerate crimes. The account of the confession of his crimes during the trial, in front of several of his victims’ mothers, is absolutely horrifying. Bataille says: “The crimes of Gilles de Rais are the crimes of the world he was living in.” He warns us that even today there may be in every one of us a potential Bluebeard “subdued by the conventions of the community that we live in.”
ANDY DIGGLE’S FIVE CREEPIEST MOMENTS FROM
ALAN MOORE’S SWAMP THING
Andy Diggle is the current writer of Vertigo’s flagship horror comic Hellblazer. His past credits include Swamp Thing, Silent Dragon, Green Arrow: Year One, Guy Ritchie’s Gamekeeper, and The Losers, the latter two of which are currently in feature film development at Warner Brothers.
This was going to be a list of the creepiest moments in comics, but then I realized that most of them were from Alan Moore comics . . . and most of them were from his legendary run on DC Comics’ Swamp Thing.
1. A Murder of Crows
The naïve punk Judith has made a terrible bargain with the Brujeria, a tribe of cave-dwelling sorcerers who have promised to change her into a bird. But this is no fairy-tale transformation. It seems almost a kindness to the reader that much of the scene is rendered in stark silhouette—except that what we picture in our imagination is infinitely worse. We hear only the awful gagging sounds she makes as she vomits her intestines into an earthenware bowl and, as her head comes away like an old tooth, crow talons scrabble and scrape their way out through the withered stump of her neck . . .
2. The Monkey King
“Whatever you’re scared of, that’s what it looks like . . .” Inadvertently summoned from Hell by an innocent Ouija game, the Monkey King has slipped into a home for mentally disturbed children to feed upon their deepest fears. Guilty little Roberta sees her baby brother reaching for her, his tiny hand cold and blue; hears the sound of polyethylene going in and out, very fast. Little Michael is terrified of cancer—but as nobody ever explained to him what cancer really is, his imagination fills in the rest, and fleshy tentacles swarm and flail above his bed. But worst of all is little Jessica, visited in the night by a leering, monstrously deformed simulacrum of her own father, its voice a slurred and mindless parody as it repeats over and over, “Mommy needn’t know . . .”
3. The Bogeyman
Our narrator is a nameless serial killer who haunts the lonely byways of the Louisiana bayou. He asks you to think of a number, any number, between one and 165 so that he can describe, in vivid detail, the eyes of that particular victim. He believes himself to be the Bogeyman; his predecessor—and first victim—being the old janitor at his childhood school, who would grab him by the hair of his temples for running in the hallway. Confronting the vengeful, thorn-encrusted Swamp Thing, our narrator flees in terror—straight into the swamp. And as he sinks down through the ink-black water, he begins to hear voices. “Who are you?” he asks. “That depends,” comes the reply. “Just think of a number . . .” “And in the darkness, somebody takes hold of the short hair at my temple and begins to tug. I try to scream, but my lungs are filled with mud . . .”
4. The Invunche
Elderly Catholic nun Sister Anne-Marie is taking the London tube home when she senses she’s being followed. Stepping off the train, she realizes only as it pulls away that this Underground station is dark and empty, closed for renovation. And whatever is following her is locked in down here with her. Inhumanly strong, clothed only in a loincloth made of human skin, the Invunche is a creature of black magic, powered by the pain of its own creation. One arm is twisted behind its back, the hand sewn into the shoulder blade. And, bizarrely, its neck is twisted around to face backwards, mouth foaming, eyes mad with pain and hate. Steeling her courage, Sister Anne-Marie resolves to look her attacker in the face—only to find, in her final moments, that it doesn’t seem to have one . . .
5. Still Waters
A group of boys bathing in a forest lake suddenly panic as they realize it’s infested with leeches. All of them, that is, but fat, slow Nicky, who remains in the water, motionless, his features slack, the color gradually draining from his body. Because there are worse things in the water than leeches. Once there was an entire town down there, long ago submerged by the building of a dam. And down in the deep dark where the sunlight cannot penetrate, the vampires feed and breed . . .
THE REAL NAMES OF ELEVEN HORROR LEGENDS
You Know Them As . . . But Their Real Name Is . . .
1. Boris Karloff (actor) … William Henry Pratt
2. Jack Ketchum (author) … Dallas Mayr
3. Marilyn Manson (musician/filmmaker) … Brian Hugh Warner
4. Charles Beaumont (author/screenwriter) … Charles Leroy Nutt
5. Rob Zombie (musician/filmmaker) … Robert Bartleh Cummings
6. Saki (author) … Hector Hugh Munro
7. Béla Lugosi (actor) … Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blaskó
8. Alice Cooper (musician) … Vincent Furnier
9. Michael Slade (author) … Jay Clarke and Rebecca Clarke
10. Lon Chaney, Sr. (actor) … Leonidas Frank Chaney
11. Ozzy Osbourne (musician) … John Michael Osbourne
— Compiled by S.B. and A.W.
BRIAN W. ALDISS’S EIGHT FAVORITE
WORKS OF HORROR
One of the legends of the science fiction genre, Brian W. Aldiss’s numerous novels include Frankenstein Unbound, Dracula Unbound, Moreau’s Other Island, Harm,and the Helliconia trilogy. His short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” was a long-time dream project for director Stanley Kubrick, and was eventually filmed after Kubrick’s death as A. I.: Artificial Intelligence, by Steven Spielberg. He resides in Oxford, England.
I. Literature
1. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus
Of course. The immortal horror story: poor creature without parents.
2. Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Read first as a boy by candlelight, when electricity had failed.
3. Oliver Onions’s “Beckoning Fair One”
To think that women could be so weird. . .
I’m not really into horror in book form—unless you include Family Health, a fat encyclopedia which tells you of a thousand things of which you could die.
II. Films
4. Again, Frankenstein, by James Whale
With Boris Karloff as the Creature.
5. Stanley Kubrick’s Shining
Some scenes of outstanding ghas
tliness, almost too horrific too watch.
6. Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor
My family did not find this Swedish film funny; I love its delicious sly wit and its depiction of worldwide mental breakdown. Surreal, unique.
7. Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques
A rundown boarding school. Chief characters: the headmaster, his rich wife, and a female teacher who becomes his mistress. The interplay between these three characters is chilling and motivated by human cruelty. Full marks for a horrifying ending. Tremendously wily direction of a classic!
III. Television
8. Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under
Probably brave HBO’s masterpiece. Close-ups of entire family ghastliness. Never criticize U.S. television again after this shuddersome wonder!
CHAPTER 5
“I’m Your Biggest Fan.”
SHRIEKS FROM THE GALLERY
We decided to end The Book of Lists: Horror with a clawful of contenders we just couldn’t resist, submitted by fans of the genre. They may not be famous, but they too brought the passion and enthusiasm that is the bloody heart and transcendent soul of horror.
—Eds.