1978 Halloween movie marathon at MacArthur Drive-In in Orange, Texas

This newspaper advertisement (via Newspapers.com) was in the October 27, 1978, edition of The Orange Leader of Orange, Texas. It showcases a five-film Halloween movie lineup that was slated for the next night, Saturday, at the MacArthur Drive-In. It's an interesting slate that would have ended just a few hours before dawn, for those who stuck it out (or fell asleep in their cars).

Based upon movie lengths and allowing for about five-minute intermissions between movies, this is roughly when the movies would have started:

7:30 p.m. — The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972, PG)

9:05 p.m. — Return to Boggy Creek (1977, G)

10:35 p.m. — Nurse Sherri (1977, R)

12:10 a.m. — House of Psychotic Women (1976, R)

1:45 a.m. — The Mysterious Monsters (1975, G)

3:15 a.m. — It's over! Go home!

Children under age 12 were allowed to attend. I reckon the idea was that they'd have fallen asleep in the back seat by the time the R-rated films started, lest they see something that scars them for life.

The Legend of Boggy Creek is a super-low-budget, documentary-style horror film about an Arkansas cryptid that was fairly popular on the 1970s drive-in circuit. Parts of it served as an inspiration for The Blair Witch Project, decades later.

Its unauthorized sequel, Return to Boggy Creek, has nothing to do with the original and can barely be termed a horror movie. It's definitely the clunker of this MacArthur Drive-In lineup and was probably included because the licensing rights were dirt cheap. Of note, it features Gilligan's Island's Dawn Wells and Diff'rent Strokes' Dana Plato. One reviewer on IMDb called it "a movie that would make some Walt Disney movies look dark. Really, this movie was just a bunch of light fluff with virtually no boggy creek creature to be seen."

Nurse Sherri has a rating of 3.8 out of 10 on IMDb, so it was no prize either. But, in attempting to follow in the footsteps of The Exorcist, it probably had enough shocks, blood and titillation to keep the adults awake and eating popcorn from the snack bar. It also features the horror of this sofa; imagine that on a huge drive-in screen.

At first I was confused in attempting to research House of Psychotic Women, because that's also the title of a 2012 memoir/film studies book written by Kier-La Janisse. It's also the title of a themed collection of movies that Severin and Janisse teamed up to release a few years ago. Then I figured out that House of Psychotic Women is the title of the edited American release of the 1974 Spanish horror film Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, starring Paul Naschy. The American title served as the inspiration for Janisse's book title. Anyway ... Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is definitely not a film you'd want your kids in the backseat to wake up during. They might catch an eyeful of eyeballs in a bowl of water, for one thing. 

Last up was The Mysterious Monsters. Its rating is incorrect in the advertisement. It's a G-rated documentary hosted by Peter Graves that discusses Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and other popular 1970s cryptids. It's fairly well-regarded, as that genre goes, but I can't imagine it was keeping many people awake that deep into the witching hour. Maybe it should have replaced Return to Boggy Creek as the second movie! 

I'd love to program a Halloween movie marathon for a group of horror fans. I think it would be more fun at an indoor theater, with quality picture, quality sound and no worries about weather or bugs. Maybe, after some ruminating, I'll do a post later this month about what movies I would include in such a marathon. And I'd love to hear in the comments what your dream Halloween movie marathon would be!

But drive-in theaters represented a wonderful time in the history of movies, too. And they definitely helped to further the horror genre through the 1970s. There's a Facebook page devoted to memories of the MacArthur Drive-In in Orange, Texas. According to that page, the drive-in opened in 1950 and, in January 1983, "slipped into history like most drive-ins."

Intellivision's "Night Stalker," my first survival horror video game

Thanks to Dad's business connections, we were among the very early owners of an Intellivision home video game system. Sometime in 1979, we hooked it up to the hefty television set in our living room in Clayton, New Jersey, and played Major League Baseball, The Electric Company: Math Fun, and Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack.

(Interestingly, our next-door neighbor was an early adopter of a different sort — upstairs, he had a massive personal computer that, from my memory anyway, took up a third of a room with its CPU, monitor, and disk — or cassette — drive. He wowed my friend Mike and I with a computer baseball game, a game that involved exploring underground passages and avoiding a troll and, as I very hazily recall, a detective game that was mostly text. It seemed, in retrospect, to be something that he put together himself, not one of the smaller commercial computers that would have been available at the time, such as an Apple II or TRS-80. But I'm trusting my memory as an 8-year-old here.)

Over the new few years, we acquired many more Intellivision cartridges through Dad's ongoing business relationship with Mattel. It was an awesome perk, and it made us bit of an outlier in a world where the more-popular Atari home video game system was outselling Intellivision about 6 to 1. 

One Intellivision game we eventually had was Night Stalker, which was released in 1982 and became a family favorite, although perhaps not quite as addictive or popular within the household as Astrosmash. (Other family favorites included Snafu, B-17 Bomber, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin, and Utopia, which was a bit ahead of its time as a sim game.)

Looking back, I view Intellivision's Night Stalker as forerunner of the gaming genre that would eventually be called Survival Horror. That term came into popular usage around 1996 with Resident Evil, and, generally speaking, it describes games in which the player has limited resources and other obstacles to overcome while facing overwhelming supernatural enemies. The website Retro Refurbs agreed in this 2021 post that Night Stalker fits the bill as early survival horror.

I haven't played a ton of survival horror over the years, because I'm fairly mediocre at videogaming. But some that I've played are Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Resident Evil – Code: Veronica and Realms of the Haunting (a PC game). I dabbled with Silent Hill and Dino Crisis, but didn't get very far. I think Infocom's The Lurking Horror also counts, even though it's a text-based game. The Lovecraftian writing by Dave Lebling is terrifying at times. The most recent survival horror I've played, probably, was a Slender Man game on my iPhone. That creepypasta creep is too creepy for me.

Anyway, Night Stalker is a great game that's still deeply embedded in my memory. All you can do is try to survive to until the next level. There is no winning. It's just mounting panic and stress until your lives run out and you die. Fun times! The gist is that you're stuck in a maze with bats, spiders and an endlessly spawning battalion of killer robots that are increasingly deadly. Your ammo is limited and it's a constant scramble to acquire more. So, half the time you're totally defenseless, unless you choose to hide in your centrally located bunker, a strategy that merely delays the inevitable. The killer robots start out stupid and escalate to Terminator level, even gaining the ability to destroy your only sanctuary. The most advanced killer robot is invisible. Death is inevitable, and there is no catharsis beyond shutting off the gaming console and going outside for some fresh air. Maybe I'm taking the analogy too far, but it was perhaps a fitting game for the 1980s, in which we lived with the constant fear of nuclear armageddon.

Retro Refurbs wrote: "There’s no way to win. But in many ways, this means that it is survival horror in the purest sense: the entire point of the game is simply to survive for as long as you can. And that’s it."

Night Stalker's sound effects are limited mostly to bullets being fired and explosions. But behind them on the soundtrack, there's an unwavering electronic pulse that fits perfectly with the game's existential dread. As one YouTube commenter noted: "I remember the sheer terror and excitement of this game. That deep, twanging bass noise in the background haunts me to this day."

As a final note, I wonder now if the title of this 1982 game is a tip of the hat to the 1972 TV movie The Night Stalker, which featured the debut of Carl Kolchak, the journalist who investigates supernatural phenomena. Killer robots would have been right up his alley, though he would have found a way to actually defeat them.

Here are some of the pages from the Night Stalker manual...
 

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Spooky frontispiece in an Edward Bulwer-Lytton omnibus

This is a perfect-for-October frontispiece from an omnibus edition of Edward Bulwer-Lytton supernatural fiction published by Hooper, Clarke & Co. of Chicago (year unknown, probably circa 1880-1890). The hardcover book is falling apart, with a fully detached spine. I picked it up super cheap in order to read the 1859 short story "The Haunted and the Haunters: Or, The House and the Brain," which H.P. Lovecraft praised as "one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written." There are modern collections that include "The Haunted and the Haunters," but if you'd rather just read a critical summary, here's one from Dark Worlds Quarterly.

The frontispiece, meanwhile, is from the novel A Strange Story, which leads off the omnibus. That novel, which was first published as a serial, deals with a physician who is staunchly on the side of science and rationalism, yet finds his worldview shaken as he confronts dark magic and supernatural forces. Some reviewers say it's a bit on the bloated side and filled with lengthy tangents in the footnotes, which is both par for the course for Bulwer-Lytton and makes sense if you're getting paid by the word for a serial novel. The woman standing beside the tree in the frontispiece is likely meant to be Lillian, the doctor's love interest in A Strange Story. Perhaps she's been mesmerized — not by the doctor, but by Evil Forces^TM.

The final Bulwer-Lytton offering in the omnibus is his 1842 novel Zanoni. It is also occult-themed, centered around Rosicrucians and the secret of eternal life. But, as one Goodreads reviewer notes, "This is most emphatically not a novel that treats the occult as something evil. The occult in this novel is rather a seeking for wisdom. On the very rare occasions on which Mejnour does interfere in the affairs of humanity it is always on the side of good. Zanoni frequently intervenes in human affairs, and again always on the side of good."

Here's LP, aka Licorice Pizza, aka Lady Samantha Penguin.

Scholastic book: "Chilling Ghost Stories"

We must have at least one spooky Scholastic book from the olden days each October!

• Title: Chilling Ghost Stories
• Author: Bernhardt J. Hurwood (1926-1987). Another of his books was featured in this 2021 post.
• Awesome cover illustration: Don Dyen. There's also one uncredited interior illustration of a skeleton standing at a child's bedside.
• Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
• Year: First published in 1973. This is a Scholastic reprint from the late 1980s or early 1990s, though there's no confirmation on the copyright page. The front cover is missing the TK 2167 that appears on the original editions.
• Pages: 110
• Format: Paperback. 
• Dedication: "To Laura"
• Some of the story titles: The House That Didn't Want Anyone to Live in It; What the Gravedigger Saw; The Pirate Ghost of Gombi Island; The Woman in Green Velvet; The Headless Princess; The Banshee Whose Feelings Were Hurt; and The Poltergeist with the Heart of a Genie.
• Random excerpt from the middle #1: He was mean to his family and to his hired hands alike, so when he died no one was particularly sorry to see him go.
• Random excerpt from the middle #2: Of course, everyone in the village tried to guess what it was that the ghost had told Tom, but he never would say anything more about it. 
• Random excerpt from the middle #3: Moya loved to tell wild and hair-raising tales about ghosts and goblins and wolf-men and fairies.
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.32 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review: In 2020, Gary Sites wrote: "This is one of the first books I owned. I was 10 years old when I selected it from the Scholastic reader at school. What wonderful memories of going through that thing, choosing a few books. (They averaged about .75 cents) Then, in two or three weeks, we'd walk into the classroom one morning, and find stacks of new paperbacks that our teacher would pass out at lunch time. Do they still do this in schools? I hope so. This book of little ghost stories isn't very remarkable, but I loved it as a ten year old." (Yes! I remember walking into my classrooms and seeing the new books on the teacher's desk and/or along the long shelf under the window.)
• Rating on Amazon: 3.8 stars (out of 5)
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2013, Mark Geary wrote: "I was about eight years old when I bought this book from a Scholastic Book Fair, and it was probably my favorite book for the longest time. ... While there were other collections and anthologies put together over the years from Scholastic, 'Chilling Ghost Stories' still stands out as the best, at least, the best to me. I recently was able to get a copy and after 35+ years, I went back and read it. The book still holds up fairly well, and I look forward to sharing it with my Grandchildren."
• Another view: Kristi Petersen Schoonover raved about this book on her blog in 2011, concluding "Even if you’re an adult, you’ll want to own this. I can guarantee a scare in under three minutes. And if you’re as busy as I am — well, then there’s a certain beauty in that, too." [Her blog is still going strong, too.]

What vintage Scholastic books most say

"October" or "Halloween" to you? 

Share your memories in the comments section.

I believe this is Socks' first photo appearance on Papergreat 

Postcard: The haunted hotel that spooks Bryce Harper

This vintage Micro-Color postcard features the "friendly lobby" of The Pfister Hotel Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It opened in 1893, has the largest hotel collection of Victorian art in the world and has AAA Four Diamond standing.

And it's haunted.

According to HauntedUS.com, the list of paranormal occurrences at the Pfister include electronic devices, such as TVs and radios, turning on and off without warning; sounds of mysterious footsteps; apparition sightings in hallways; knockings that cannot be accounted for; and even objects moving around.

The hotel also spooks a lot of visiting Major League Baseball players when they stay in Milwaukee for games against the Brewers. Some players even refuse to stay there again.

In a Halloween 2021 article on MLB.com, Michael Clair details some of the stories that baseball players (by definition a superstitious lot) say they have experienced at the Pfister. You should go read the whole article. But, for an appetizer, here's the story about the Philadelphia Phillies' Bryce Harper, from his days as a member of the Washington Nationals:

"While staying in the Pfister in 2012, Harper had laid out his shirt and pants on a table by the end of the bed before going to sleep for the night.

"'When I woke up in the morning — I swear on everything — the clothes were on the floor and the table was on the opposite side of the room against the wall, Harper said. "I was so flustered. I honestly thought there might be someone in my room. I had no idea what the hell just happened, so I actually looked around, and then I checked to see if the door was still latched, and it was.'

"Harper thought that perhaps it was a prank from a teammate, but no one came forward. The slugger then requested to be moved to a different room."

(Hopefully they didn't move him to 237 or 1408.)

October Postcrossings with witches and ghosts

Autumn and Christmas/New Year's are my two favorite times of year to ramp up my Postcrossing participation. Sending and receiving Halloween-themed postcards during spooky season adds to the fun, especially at a time when the daily 100+ temperatures here in Arizona are making it hard to think about pumpkins and hayrides. (Having COVID-19 isn't helping, either.)

Show above are two of the postcards that have come to our mailbox in recent days. The witchy cat is from a woman in Germany who says her postcard interests include castles, ruins, cemeteries and skulls. I wonder if I could get an outfit like that onto one of our cats. I could see Brave Sir Oliver or Spice fitting the bill, if they'd stay still.

The ghost parent with the baby carriage was sent by a longtime Postcrosser from Lithuania — she's mailed more than 10,000 cards — who is also a mother of three, harvests mushrooms and is a Pokémon Go trainer. Phew! 

Shown below is one of the postcards I've been mailing out to some Postcrosser this autumn. I love the vintage illustration. It's a reproduction of an image that was used on a Gibson pop-up Halloween greeting card in the middle of the 20th century. (Gibson, which dates to 1855, is now part of American Greetings.)

RIP, Charlie Hustle & Mount Mutombo

(This is the first Pete Rose-related item I could lay my hands on: Street and Smith's Official Yearbook 1982 for baseball. From about 1981 to 1986, this was the most anticipated annual magazine for me each spring. It was the bible for the statistics from the previous MLB season and the rosters/previews for the upcoming season. For me, USA Today's daily sports section and then USA Today Baseball Weekly gradually took its place. These days, the magazine I most look forward to is Fortean Times. Don't judge.)

SEPTEMBER 30, 2024 — On this day, as the southeastern U.S. continues search-and-rescues and picking up the shattered pieces after the depredations of Helene; as Israel widens its military operations against terrorist states throughout the tinderbox of the Middle East; as we continue a stifling streak of unseasonable 100-plus-degree days in bone-dry central Arizona; as we consider what a presidential candidate truly meant when he talked about the need for "one really violent day" to combat crime; and as we prepare to celebrate former President Jimmy Carter's 100th birthday tomorrow, two baseball teams teams played a regular-season-ending doubleheader in Atlanta's suburbs, not far from a massive plume of dark smoke smelling of chemicals emanating from an industrial plant fire that forced thousands across multiple counties to either evacuate or shelter in place. 

As the second game of the doubleheader that sent both the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves into the MLB playoffs ended, the world learned of the death at age 83 of Peter Edward Rose Sr., who is MLB's all-time hits leader but was banned from the sport in 1989 for gambling on baseball games. Rose's great hustle and talent on the baseball diamond will forever be intertwined with the shame he brought upon himself by betting on games, including his own team's games, and then denying and lying about his misdeeds for many years thereafter. It should also be remembered as part of Rose's legacy that he faced credible accusations of statutory rape. 

I first became aware of Pete Rose around 1979, when I was 8 and living in southern New Jersey and he was playing in his first season with the Philadelphia Phillies, at age 38. The next year, Rose helped the Phillies win their first World Series championship and became a legend in the city, at least until the summer of 1989, when the permanent ban issued by Bart Giamatti, who himself would be dead in eight days, broke the hearts of many of his fans. Not long after, Rose served five months in federal prison for tax evasion.

* * *

Another professional athlete who played in Philadelphia died today. His full name was Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo. 

Dikembe Mutombo brought his 7-foot-2 frame to Philadelphia and played basketball for the 76ers in the 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 NBA seasons. He specialty was blocking shots. Off the court, his specialty was doing humanitarian work. As The Associated Press noted: "He became a global ambassador for the NBA and served on the boards of many organizations, including Special Olympics International, the CDC Foundation and the National Board for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. While he was playing for Atlanta in 1997, he founded the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation to improve living conditions in his home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo."

“He loved others with every ounce of his being. That’s what made him so accessible. That’s what made him real. Dikembe Mutombo was salt and light, and today, on the 30th of September, 2024, he has been called to rest," his son, Ryan Mutombo, said.

Mutombo was 58. He died — and doesn't everything just seem interconnected these days? — in Atlanta.

Surviving on Spaceship Earth

In this heartbreaking weekend of the Hurricane Helene aftermath, I've had this 1971 Ballantine paperback sitting at my desk for a while. I kind of just want to blog it while things are already depressing and then just shuffle it out of the way.

How to Be a Survivor: A Plan to Save Spaceship Earth, by Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich and Richard L. Harriman, isn't the cheeriest of topics, but it caught my interest a year ago when I was looking at advertisements in the back of Ray Bradbury's The October Country and other vintage paperbacks.

If it isn't clear from the cover, this is an alarmist book. In the opening pages, Ehrlich and Harriman write: "But crowded, hungry, and miserable as much of mankind is today, tomorrow seems destined to be much worse." Their primary concern was that the world's population was, in 1971, at a tipping point that would imminently cause cascading failures in global food and health systems. Or that simmering geopolitics would lead to a world war, waged with nuclear and chemical weapons, that would be too catastrophic for civilization to rebound from. 

Like I said, cheery stuff. But not too terribly unlike the news and stressors we deal with on a daily basis in 2024. Our Spaceship Earth (a phrase popularized, but not invented, by Adlai Stevenson in a 1965 speech to the United Nations) is certainly listing to the side a bit.

We could generously say that the authors' alarmism was correct but somewhat misfocused. Others of that era already knew about the ways in which we were degrading the environment and warming the Earth with fossil fuels. But Ehrlich and Harriman seemed much more concerned with the global birthrate and overcrowding.

Other critics aren't so generous, especially when it comes to Ehrlich, who also wrote 1967's The Population Bomb and who, at age 92, is still warning about doomsday. In 2023, James Woudhuysen, a journalist and professor of forecasting and innovation, wrote:

"All forecasters make mistakes. But few forecasters have been as consistently wrong as biologist Paul Ehrlich. ... It is important to understand just how consistently and absurdly wrong Ehrlich’s predictions have been. ... The reason Ehrlich always misses the mark is not just down to bad luck. He relies on a kindergarten understanding of political economy, in which multiplying human beings always run up against the limits of Spaceship Earth. What all his forecasts ignore is how human ingenuity, risk-taking ambition and technological innovation can overcome the apparent physical limits of the planet."

* * *

There are some interesting and divergent takes about How to Be a Survivor from reviewers on Goodreads. One writes: "A book with some good ideas, most of which are based in fantasyland. For example, the authors rightly spend appreciable time blasting the incompetence, inefficiency and corruption of the federal government, yet inexplicably suggest an alternative of even more bureaucracy to take its place." That's a fair point.

A recent reviewer discusses the urgent need for meaningful political action, though she's clearly discussing the climate crisis more than global overpopulation: "This [book] explains why anyone's chance of survival is directly dependent on political action forcing the governments of the world to face up to the environmental crisis. Individual efforts without political action just aren't enough."

Finally, there's this Goodreads viewpoint from 2011, which I find incredibly discouraging: "Thankfully this has proven to be total bunk with time. I regretfully read this as an impressionable freshmen in college in 1971. I keep around to remind myself to be skeptical."

"Total bunk" is taking it a bit far. Maybe the alarmism of Ehrlich and Harriman was, in part, a schtick to sell books. But I think it might also be argued that their hearts were in the right place. They want a better planet and more hope for human civilization. Consider what they're getting at in this passage:

"In the new society, education will be a subject of great importance. Children will learn early that their own well-being is dependent upon the well-being of all other human beings and upon the well-being of the world's ecological systems. They will also learn how to care for Spaceship Earth, to keep it running smoothly into the indefinite future. They will grow up to consider it their pleasant duty to spend at least part of their time serving as crewmen on Spaceship Earth. They will expect to participate on a regular basis in the governance and maintenance of the ship, and to spend part of their time in the service of the fellow passengers. They will also expect to continue their education throughout their lives so as to maximize the value of both their contribution to society and of their own existence."

To bring this to a conclusion and circle back to Hurricane Helene, I think these weekend tweets about the devastation in Appalachia may seem alarmist, but they represent the truthful urgency of the situation we find ourselves in right now on our rapidly warming and changing planet:

Anna Jane Joyner: "I’ve told my family many times that we can never sell our houses in Asheville because it’s one of the safer places in the US re: climate impacts. Never ever imagined it would get wiped out by a hurricane before our home on the Gulf Coast. Nowhere is safe. It doesn’t feel real."

Jeff McFadden: "People keep talking like collapse is some future event. Modern society cannot build towns, cities, roads, bridges, dams, and interstate electric grids as fast as they're burning up and washing away. This is a collapsing system."

Sarah Richardson: "Hardly any news about entire towns being destroyed, and hardly any national news about Phoenix reaching 114 degrees at the end of September ... the climate change denial is strong."

* * *

 

Meanwhile, Old Man Banjo just wants naps, cuddles and Temptations treats,

but, then again, he's not an elected official tasked with solving problems