Silver Screen Scares

by Lillian Csernica on October 7, 2023

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Horror movies are a long tradition in my family. Back in the 1930s, my grandfather worked at Universal Studios, home of the classic monster movies such as Frankenstein and The Mummy. I grew up on Seymour’s Creature Features and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, along with The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. Allow me to share with you my Top Ten Scary Movies.

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Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum — This gem comes from Korea and tells the story of the fateful night the crew of The Horror Times web series investigates an abandoned psychiatric asylum with a very dark past. If that sounds trite, believe me, this movie is anything but. I’m fond of paranormal movies from Asia because the cultural factors are so different from what we’re all used to here in the largely Judeo-Christian West. The intrepid explorers who go inside the asylum are directed by their leader who holes up in a big tent with all the computer equipment necessary for the livestream. There are some classic jump scares, but they’re mixed into many fresh moments. The story will keep you guessing right up until the chilling finale.

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21 Days — Jacob, his girlfriend Shauna, and his buddy Kurt pack up their ghost hunting gear and set off to spend twenty-one days inside and abandoned house that may or may not be haunted. Rumor has it that anyone living in the house for more than twenty-one days comes to a bad end thanks to the evil spirits there. One family faced such a disaster. Another family got out in time. Jacob thinks the local First Nations tribe is fueling rumors about evil spirits because the tribe wants their land back. Neither family will say a word about their experiences, so fearful are they of supernatural vengeance. A strong set up for Jacob & Co. having themselves boarded up inside the house so they can make the documentary that will lead to fame and fortune. The steady escalation of wrongness on the property makes for good tension and suspense.

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The Abominable Dr. Phibes — Vincent Price plays Dr. Anton Phibes, a brilliant but twisted man who blames his wife’s medical team for her untimely death. Dr. Phibes unleashes vengeance in the form of attacks based on the Ten Plagues of Egypt. This gets a whole lot weirder before it’s over. The art deco production design and Dr. Phibes’ own makeup must be seen to be believed. If you want to have your own freaky film festival, watch this plus the sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again followed by Theatre of Blood.

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Creature From The Black Lagoon — A team of scientists go on an expedition to the Amazon, hoping to find the mysterious “Gill-Man” whose existence has been revealed by fossils of a webbed claw. They find the Creature, who wears one of the greatest suits in cinematic history. Released in 1954, this movie combines the classic story of Beauty and the Beast with the xenophobia of the time. I think I was in elementary school when I first discovered the Creature. I couldn’t understand why the scientists were bothering the Creature, taking the tramp steamer with its smoke and gasoline and oil into the waters where the Creature lived. My child’s mind already saw that as bad for the environment. I already wanted to be a marine biologist, so I was firmly on the Creature’s side.

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The Legend of Hell House — Based on the book Hell House by Richard Matheson, this movie is intense. A scientific paranormal investigation results in the investigators getting attacked, possessed, and exposed to at least two generations of nastiness. No way should I have seen this movie when I was still a kid. We’re not talking Mario Bava or Dario Argento levels of kink, but still. This movie exposed me to the kind of evil that can exist among both the living and the dead. (This is no relation to The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, aside from being in the supernatural horror genre.)

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Grave Encounters — Released in 2011, Grave Encounters was among the earlier movies about a team of paranormal investigators who lock themselves into an abandoned mental asylum for the night hoping to document the activity reported to arise from the evil doctor who experimented on his patients. I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say the investigation does not end well. The story held my interest. The characters are worth watching, especially team leader Lance Preston, played by Seth Rogerson. The ending is hard to take, but it does deliver on everything leading up to it. The sequel, Grave Encounters 2, is also good thanks again to a strong performance by Seth Rogerson.

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Phantasm — To describe this movie at all is to give away some of the twists. If you know, you know. I found Phantasm really disturbing not least because it’s tricky knowing whether what’s happening onscreen is happening in the real world, in a dream, in another dimension, or another reality altogether. Beware the Tall Man and his silver sphere! Watching this movie will make you sleep with the lights on!

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Aliens — I’m not a big fan of science fiction or space opera, but I really enjoyed Aliens. I’ve watched it four or five times. I did watch the first movie, Alien, as well. Thanks to H.R. Geiger, the aliens raised the bar when it came to scary monsters. Sigourney Weaver as Ripley has become an iconic female bad ass. Lance Henriksen, that horror rockstar, does a great job in his role as Ash.

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REC — In Spain, a news crew riding along with a fire and rescue team enter an apartment building where the outbreak of an unknown illness leaves them sealed inside by the law enforcement and the military. As the infection spreads from person to person, the news crew starts piecing together the strange events tied to the building’s history. The actual source of the illness is one of the weirdest and most impressive plot twists I’ve seen in the zombie/found footage genre.

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Bad Ben — Tom Riley sinks all of his money into a house available at a Sheriff’s auction. Problems start right away, prompting Tom to have security cameras installed. This leads to the viewer seeing strange activity both inside and outside the house. Tom digs into the history of the property and finds a whole lot that’s bizarre. The suspense, the occult forces at work, and Tom’s own pragmatic approach to the problem is a lot of fun to watch. There are now eleven movies in the series. I found the first three are the best, but they’re all a hoot.

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Mom’s Personal Poltergeist

by Lillian Csernica on October 3, 2023

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I grew up on ghost stories, monster movies, Halloween celebrations, and books about folkloric beliefs all over the world. A cynical person might say all that would leave me predisposed to believe in the phenomenon I’m about to describe. I’d like to think all that research left me with the ability to separate what’s real from what’s only make-believe. My aunts and uncles talked about family ghosts with a mixture of pride and apprehension. However many ancestral ghosts might be haunting my father’s branches of the family tree, I defy them all to match the power of pure aggravation caused by my mother’s personal poltergeist.

Ever since I was a little girl, I can remember scenes of panic as my mother rushed around looking for whatever she’d lost that time. Just as we were about to leave for some big event such as a wedding or graduation, Mom couldn’t find her car keys. Didn’t know where she’d put her glasses. The paper with the directions on it had been right there a minute ago. She’d run all over the house looking in some of the unlikeliest places, coming up empty every time. Just when she was about to lose it completely, she’d check her purse or coat pocket or glove compartment or wherever she’d looked first, and there the item would be. Mom had simply overlooked it in her hurry the first time, right? That’s what my brother, my sister and I thought, but things began to happen that made that explanation less and less believable.

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The smart thing to do when Mom was in one of her “Where did I put that?” panics was to stay out of the way. After my brother and sister moved out of the house and then my parents divorced, that left me as the only witness. Mom would swear up and down she felt like somebody was hiding whatever she was looking for and doing it on purpose. Wasn’t me, that’s for sure. I’d be in just as much of a hurry to leave. I started keeping an eye on the items Mom lost most frequently: keys, glasses, purse, wallet, directions, and any special gifts we’d be taking along. Because I kept a close eye on these items, they often did not go missing at all. And then I hit that awkward stage between ten and thirteen, when I wasn’t a little kid anymore, but I wasn’t quite a teenager.

Why was this important? Some paranormal investigators believe the physical and psychological upheaval of adolescence has a corresponding psychic turbulence that might manifest as psychokinetic activity. Poltergeist activity has been shown to occur most often in locations where a prepubescent or pubescent child is present. If the child is removed from the location where the poltergeist activity is taking place, does the activity stop? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. As technology continues to develop, investigators get closer and closer to their dream of solid empirical evidence.

So who was causing the problem of the disappearing objects? Was it the poltergeist, some mischievous spirit who just happened to decide my mother made a good target? Was it Mom, running around like a chicken with its head cut off so much that she’d put something down and forget where she left it, so it seemed to vanish? Or was I the cause, directly or indirectly? I never hid anything of my mother’s, and especially not on a day when we needed to get somewhere on time. Did the stress Mom worked up over getting ready for a special event attract the poltergeist? Did all that uproar trigger the response in me that brought on the seemingly poltergeist-based phenomena? Or did the poltergeist come first and get us all wound up and nervous so we created a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Here comes the part that really freaked me out. There were a number of times when I watched my mother put an item into her purse or pocket, her closet or a drawer. Later on when she’d need that item, she’d call me over to look in the exact place she’d put it, and it simply wasn’t there! It’s not like Mom had reason to suddenly move the object, changing the pocket or drawer. Even the possibility of something falling out of her coat pockets was rather remote because my mother favored coats with deep pockets to prevent this exact problem. The point here is as long as my mother had been the one to put the object in its “safe place,” there was a definite risk of the poltergeist making it disappear. If Mom gave the object to me to put on the dinner table or out to the trunk of the car, then we stood a good chance of finding it where I’d put it. My teenage years with my mother were full of all kinds of stress, money and hormones and attitude and the fallout from my parents’ divorce. One of the few areas where Mom did have faith in me was her belief that I had some kind of ability to make the poltergeist back off.

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Unless, of course, Mom was behind it all, making those items appear and disappear. Was Mom having a good time, getting her laughs making me believe there was a poltergeist in the house?

I don’t think so. I can’t believe Mom would have put that kind of effort into a prank that went on for years, a prank that resulted in her freaking out a lot more than I ever did.

So the question remains. What kept making all those items appear and disappear?

Too Scared To Move

by Lillian Csernica on October 2, 20023

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Some people believe the Winchester Mystery House is haunted. They believe in the curse said to be laid on the Winchester family by the First Nations people who were slaughtered in such staggering numbers by Winchester rifles. Sarah Winchester held seances in one noteworthy room of the house, partly to contact the spirits of her family who died too suddenly and too young. She’s also said to have made an effort to contact the spirits of the First Nations people who laid the curse on her family. Fear of this curse drove her to keep building more rooms, adding on to the house as a means of holding off the fulfillment of the curse: the moment she stopped building, she would die.

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This makes a great story, and it generates considerable income from the tours offered at the Winchester Mystery House. There are flashlight tours offered at night in the Halloween season, and you can even take a tour of the basement. I lived in San Jose for several years, just a few blocks away from the grand old building. For all of my interest in ghost stories and the occult, I never bothered to visit this famous landmark. Then came my 25th Wedding anniversary. When you’ve been married that long, you start running out of things to do. So my husband and I decided it was time to see if the stories were true. We would tour the Winchester Mystery House.

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The tricky part about going to a place that has a famous reputation for being haunted is the power of suggestion. If you’re already disposed to think you’re going to see ghosts or have some kind of paranormal experience, it’s entirely possible that you will interpret whatever you see and feel in terms that confirm that expectation. I know myself pretty well when it comes to looking for the supernatural. I have such an overactive imagination I’m perfectly capable of scaring myself silly. No, I do not believe the Winchester Mystery House is haunted. I believe Sarah Winchester led a life full of tragedy and sorrow. That state of intense and lingering emotion has permeated the house and grounds.

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One could also consider the Winchester Mystery House in the context of feng shui. To put it in simple terms, feng shui is the art of placement. How your house is oriented according to the compass and how your possessions are arranged inside can affect the flow of chi, or life energy. The Winchester Mystery House is a mind-boggling tangle of rooms and stairways and closets and bathrooms and fireplaces. There are two thousand doors in the House. Some of them open onto brick walls. At least one of them opens out into thin air. This is especially disturbing given that the door is on the second floor. Trapped energy, blocked energy, and energy that flows too quickly can all have an effect on the perceptions and experience of a person dwelling inside such a building or even just passing through.

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Then there’s the issue of what people who visit the Winchester Mystery House bring into the house with them. Thousands of people tour the Winchester Mystery House every year. A given percentage of them go there hoping to see something so they can take home a ghost story like their own personal souvenir. When you have that many people generating that much energy, that much concentrated desire, it might very well attract certain types of spiritual entities. In the late 19th Century, spiritualism was very popular. Its followers believed the dead can and do interact with the world of the living all the time. One room in the House is called the Seance Room. It’s a very strange room, with three entrances but only one exit. To leave the room, you have to pass through a doorway hung with double doors. That would seem easy enough, wouldn’t it? My wedding anniversary falls in early July. San Jose is quite warm at that time of year. The Seance Room does not have any kind of climate control or air conditioning. As soon as I walked into the room, I felt cold and slightly sick to my stomach. The tour guide’s comments on the history of the seance room took maybe five minutes, but those minutes seemed to drag on and on. I really wanted to get out of that room.

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And now, for the really weird moment. As much as I wanted to leave, I could not pass through the double doorway. I was stuck, as if the air itself had thickened around me. People passed by me, but I could not cross that threshold. My husband had already stepped through. He looked back at me, knowing me well enough to know I was having some sort of trouble. All I could do was hold out my hand to him so he could pull me through. That worked. Once I was out of the room, that creepy sense of coldness and the sick feeling went away. The welcome heat of the day warmed me up again.

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Is the Winchester Mystery House haunted? All I can say is I believe it may have become a focal point for a mixture of energies. If it wasn’t haunted to begin with thanks to the curse, the House has quite likely attracted several low grade spiritual entities. It all depends on your sensitivity and what you might or might not want to see. I have no intention of returning to the Winchester Mystery House. Whatever the truth is, I am content not to know.

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A-Haunting We Will Go!

by Lillian Csernica on October 1, 2023

It’s October! Let’s kick off the 30 Days of Scary Fun with a ghost story.

I once had the delightful experience of volunteering in my younger son John’s seventh grade Creative Writing Class. On Back to School Night I’d been chatting with John’s teacher and she discovered that I write for a living. John’s Reading 180 workbook, which included a unit on Edgar Allen Poe. With Halloween right around the corner, I thought a writing lesson about something spooky might be fun. And then the real inspiration struck. What could be more perfect for Halloween than a haunted house story? We’d start out by thinking up all the different kinds of places a haunted house might be. A grass hut on the beach in Tahiti, an igloo in Alaska, a hotel or a camping tent or the traditional shabby manor house with strange lights and weird noises. Then we’d explore the basic idea using the journalist’s five questions: Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How!

The Haunted House

I asked the students what makes a classic haunted house. I encouraged them to think beyond what they’d already seen on TV or read about in books. What other kinds of buildings could be haunted? What other places where people could live might have ghosts? One young lady suggested a haunted fort. That was a great idea and I said so. One of the quieter boys spoke up about a space station. Another wonderful idea. When the students caught on to my enthusiasm and encouragement, more and more of them started speaking up.

Who

Who would be the main character? Would it be a living person? A ghost? Maybe even the house itself? I talked about each of these options, doing my best to keep it simple so the students had clear choices. It’s best to keep the number of characters small when writing a short story. This led to another major step in fiction writing, giving the main character a name. I spent a few minutes on the importance of names, where to find them, and how to make them up in a way that makes sense and sounds right.

What

What’s haunting the house? Is it a traditional ghost? One boy had chosen a pyramid as his “house.” The clear choice there: a mummy. The students were quick to mention the classic monsters such as werewolves, vampires, and Frankenstein. Cara, the student teacher, asked about different types of ghosts. I collect ghost story anthologies from the turn of the century. I’ve read about the mournful ghost, the vengeful ghost, the banshee, the Black Coach and the poltergeist. We focused on the poltergeist, the “noisy ghost,” a favorite element in scary movies. Once I explained this ghost’s talent for throwing dishes and furniture around, I saw the face of one boy light up. He wanted that kind of ghost. He started scribbling on his notepaper with a speed I recognized. Inspiration had struck!

Where

“Where?” is multifaceted question. There’s the location of the haunted house itself. The students talked about clifftops and deserts and swamps and the main street of a big city. I explained how the different countries and cultures where the story was set in are also key elements. A haunted house in Japan would be very different from a haunted house in New York City. Again I saw that faraway look in the eyes of the boys and girls as the wheels of their imaginations kept turning.

Why

Of all the five W Questions, “Why?” is my favorite. I asked the students to think about why the ghost was haunting that particular place. The young lady who chose a haunted fort told me her ghost was a soldier who wanted to go on guarding the fort. I said that made sense to me. The soldier had been dedicated to his duty in life, and that dedication remained even after he died in the line of duty. I asked for more ideas about why a ghost would haunt a particular place. We came up with buried treasure, some business the ghost hadn’t finished before he or she died, and the frequent motivation of revenge.

When

The question of when requires some complex thinking. When does the ghost do its haunting? At sunset? Midnight? When could also be the time of year. There are summertime ghosts, but the most dramatic time of year is the long winter night. I told the students about some of the greatest ghost stories ever written by such enduring names as A.M. Burrage, M.R. James and E.F. Benson. On the subject of winter, I used Hugh Walpole‘s “Snow” as my example. A truly chilling story, in many senses.

How

Every good story starts with a problem the main character has to solve. If the main character is the ghost, the question becomes how is the ghost haunting the house and how is that going to solve the problem? The kids had some great ideas, from scary noises and faces at the window to seeing weird things in mirrors. One of the boys really got into his story. He must have filled in at least three notebook pages and showed no sign of slowing down.

The students had done well, paying attention and participating. Then came time to bring out the art supplies. Construction paper, fuzzy black spiders, Halloween pumpkin stickers, googly eyes, and a big bag of cotton balls. I challenged the kids to tell me how many ways they could use the cotton balls to create a picture of their haunted houses. John himself suggested clouds. Another boy said spiderwebs. Someone else said ghosts. I showed the kids how to stretch the cotton very thin and glue it along the ground level to make the kind of low-lying mist you might see in graveyards. Those kids went at it with such energy and pleasure, making their visions become real before their eyes. The pyramid was marvelous. The space station was terrific. And John’s hotel looked positively grand.