Halloween Hookends: Best of Spotify's creepiest old radio shows + Eerie Electronic Scores

It's October and for us on the trick-or-treat dole it's a holiday best spent in long strange walks through crisp leaves with a terrified or terrifying hound on a leash, or failing that, a strange and enigmatic aura about you that makes people wonder as you go rustling past them, as oddly foreboding as the ghost of an old crackhead still visible occasionally in the shadows of streetlights as you walk through a deserted Bed-Stuy at 3 AM.

The old radio shows are the best of what I've been listening to all year, and all my life. Creepy offerings from The Inner Sanctum, The Shadow, Mystery House and more, with Bela Lugosi, Orson Welles, and many others. Enjoy!

Bold, Bloody and Dissolute: (After the War isn't Over) - An Erich Kuersten Spotify Meisterwerke

Have you a Spotify? If... Listen. This melange of strange sound bytes, poetry, news clippings, weird songs, and old radio shows and speeches--played in order--can help you make, as Colonel Kurz would say, a friend of horror. You will laugh, cry, have a Joycean aesthetic arrest, a cosmic epiphany, and come to learn an ancient secret: only by accepting the violent hypocrisy and seething madness of the universe, to embrace it all as 'good'--the cold devouring chthonic as well as the lean solar Apollonian; the rending incisors of the frenzied maenads as well as the warm absolving caress of mother; the cold and greedy lawyers eviscerating their own innards in their frenzy as well as the still Zen master gazing enraptured at a sunflower--can one find peace. Loving your opponents doesn't mean necessarily putting down the gun. Accepting that we will always fight to not fight means we can succeed in attaining something greater, a kind of blood-splattered self-knowledge.

But that too is fleeting.

Not this mix though. Listen well, and let us take you past colonialism, mass murder, and Shakespeare. There will be the good and bad of booze, and of psychedelics: the four stages of Sanislov Grof's LSD rebirth cycle, the horror that leads to Hunter and the bliss that leads to Ram Dass, the weird that leads to McKenna, the evil that leads to Manson and the brown acid psych wards that lead to Burroughs. Good morning Starshine and Good morning Vietnam, this is Bob 'What am I doing in Da Nang?' Hope." Death. Hope and Death. It's what's for dinner. Allow it. Eat yourself and when the last bite of mouth swallows its final act of swallowing, what is left?

That was no Martian - it's Halloween.

SPOTIFY DESC: The ghost of British colonization claws our epitaph within the genetic code of the future monsters. Crystal meth in Wermacht travel kits, Manson, Leary, the burning joys of apocalypse - Bob Hope entertains the troops in Da Nang, Robert Oppenheimer rides the tachyons

ROLLER MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE and other forgotten (OOP) tripper comedy gems from Firesign and Folk

Groovy - It's easy to forget all the 'forgotten' tripping comedy albums Firesign Theater and its inhabitants made in the early 70s, as only the big ones via Columbia seem to be in any kind of reprint schedule (and the latter stuff can't quite measure up - whose can?). Here's a pretty groovy solo project, based on the cover, the first ten minutes or so I've heard, and the raves of D.W. Rayger, it's pretty trippy. Certainly its mention of a 'television mission' evokes Brian Oblivion as well as Jesus, and Austin does a pretty dead-on Kris Kristofferson impression singing "Come on, Jesus, show yourself!" I remember seeing it in record stores back in the day, and mighty scary it seemed to my child's eye and wild imagination. Not sure if any of these approach the complicated majesty of DONT CRUSH THAT DWARF HAND ME THE PLIERS, or side one of WAITING FOR THE ELECTRICIAN, but hey - they're surely worth a cursory tumble.

Spookiest Synth Scores of 2016 (Erich's Spotify Mix)

It's mighty balmy for October, which is unfortunate. All my sweaters are hanging around like delayed airline passengers. But in the meantime, there were a lot of great soundtracks this year, including Netflix's  STRANGER THINGS' synthesizers capturing a mix of both John Carpenter and Brad Fiedel. Also seek out SOUTHBOUND's great soundtrack from The Gifted, as well as THE WITCH, GREEN ROOM, NEON DEMON.... well, it's all here, and it's all... including some from last year and such because time is immoral.

Dig the Surreal Howling Banshee Opening of this Pre-code Movie.

Just when you thought you'd seen it all, the helpful Screen Test brings us this uber-bizarre pre-code. Haven't seen beyond the opening, but it's so weird and surreal it's worth watching even if the rest of it sucks.

(PS from 10/17/16 - the movie is gone, and I forgot the name of it!! HAhahaha)

THE ASTOUNDING SHE MONSTER is Amok

I keep forgetting what a treasure trove of odd rarities is to be found over on Daily Motion. I was just wondering why I never bought the old Image DVD of this, and viola! I'm sure the quality isn't as good as the disc, but that's kind of a joke in and of itself. Enjoy, as I will, and forgive us our lazy reliance on narration to cover MOS the way we forgive Ed Wood his... ah hell, Ed needs no forgiveness. His movies are our life. Mr. Narrator, this is Bob Dylan to me!
The Astounding She Monster (1957) - Feature by FilmGorillas

NOTES:
Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime ("Our Band could be your Life")

Michele Soavi's LA SETTA

Mighty glad to see this barely available stateside Michele Soavi gem, LA SETTA, on youtube... but... for how long? A kind of Rosemary's Baby gone gonzo loco, it could be the prequel, in a sense, of THE VISITOR...rather than the DEMONS 4 it's sometimes billed as. But DEMONS was never a good series. When it comes to directorial vision and skill, the apple fell far from the tree with heavy-handed--if crowd pleasing--Lamberto Bava. But Argento's other DP, Soavi, soared... until he stopped doing horror and moved over to TV. Who can blame him, really? But look how long this movie's been seen and treasured, man. It's my favorite Herbert Lom performance. Hard to believe it came out in 1991. Dude, it looks like it was made in the 70s, early 80s at most. I mean that in the best way...

Soavi also did THE CHURCH and CEMETERY  MAN, the latter is great; the former is kind of bland, to me, just a lot of terrifying vignettes in a beautiful, weird setting. But hey, as the cowboy on the hill said to Justin Theroux, sometimes there's a buggy... (see Shrouds of Soavi)

(PS 3/30/17 - It's gone)
(PS 6/02/18 - now it's on Blu-ray!)