Some people I'd like you to meet

Halloweeeeeeeeeeeen movies.  Monsters and that.  YEAH!

I love monsters, me.

From being terrified of Daleks at the age of five, to being terrified of Smash Martians at the age of five, to being terrified of Rainbow at the age of 42, monsters have kept me nervous and spellbound all my life.  The first dreams I had were about monsters.  Clown monsters.  Puppet monsters.  A man with a painted face called the Carrot Man (he ate carrots and sometimes people).  A thing like an egg with teeth.  I suffer from night terrors (yet another autism symptom, it turns out - possibly triggered by my hypersenses kicking in during deep sleep, apparently) and you'd think I'd run like bloody hell from looking at the wretched growling things in the real world.  But no.  I just can't keep away.

So lists; dated, everyone's done them five years ago.  Bugger off then.  I've got chronic toothache and I couldn't give a fuck what you think.  These are some monsters.  Perhaps not the best or the most famous.  But some of them are nicely obscure and may encourage you to watch a little further.

THIS IS THE LIST OF THE MOST GHOST TRANSMISSIONY MONSTERS THAT THERE EVER COULD BE, PROBABLY, WRITTEN USING WORDS IN SENTENCE USING MY MIND AND HANDS MAINLY

There is no order.  Neither in the list, nor in human existence.  There will be some spoilers.

10) The Thing in the Rocking Chair: Baby (part of the Beasts series)
Jesus.  Beasts was an anthology series written by Nigel Kneale, a man whose work I like a lot, even though he appears to despise humanity.  Seriously, about 90% of his protagonists are foul, violent, corrupt, broken, debauched, shallow, cruel or being controlled by alien meteor slugs.
Baby is an episode of this series.  I'm not going to spoil it, much.  It's all about the atmosphere.  There's this couple, renovating a remote country cottage.  The house has a History of Bad Stuff.  Spooky things happen, usually off screen.  Then at the end...well.  There's a Thing.  In a rocking chair.  I watched this as a cynical, media literate teacher of film, at the age of 38.  And pretty much shat myself.  It's fucking horrible.

9)  The Thing in the Corridor: The Stone Tape
Nigel Kneale again, I'm afraid.  The Stone Tape is legendary; if you read this blog regularly and you've never watched it, please seek it out.  You're in for an early 70s treat.  Short version; science team try to analyse a haunted house, convinced that they're onto a new form of technology and that ghosts are mainly just recordings impressed onto stone structures.  You will be unsurprised to learn that things go wrong.  Very wrong.  The theory is correct, but that recording of the ghosts?  It belonged to...something else.  Something we don't really see.  Something dark with what might be glowing eyes or what might be just little balls of bright light.  The Thing in the Corridor.  It needs a new recording now...

I'm aware that this isn't a corridor. The Thing is OUTSIDE, alright?  It hasn't got there yet.

8)  A big pile of entrails that kills you with swan puppets: Sapphire and Steel 
Sapphire and Steel had lots of great monsters; it's just that they tended to be abstract.  Little bits of light that bring nursery rhymes to life using dead Roundhead soldiers.  A cloud of darkness that makes you relive WW1 deaths.  Mr Shape, about whom I blogged long ago (he really should have his own entry here, but I don't want to spoil his papery horror any more - search the archives if you want to read about him).
So instead, I decided to lead with the aforementioned pile of entrails.  It's not a subtle story.  The last, agonised, vivisected fragments of animal life on earth hijack a time machine and wreak unsettling havoc on their tormentors.  They bring things to life and fuck with time and space generally.  I could cope with all this at 7pm on a weeknight, but not the creature's manifestation as a big pile of guts, intercut with slaughterhouse footage.

And yes.  It turns a pillow into a swan puppet and tries to peck Steel to death.  It also wins at the end, to my great delight.

A swan puppet monster, yesterday.

7) Smash Martians.  Metal.  Knives.

6) The Space Ghost Monster: Look and Read
Look and Read is a schools' TV show.  The Boy from Space is a serial it ran.  They showed it once in 1973 and again in 1981; rather brilliantly, the repeat was framed with the now adult actors playing the same parts and remembering that long ago summer when they met aliens in the woods.  This premise has haunted my imagination for years.  Firstly, it speaks to me about the power of childhood memory.  If you were part of a kids' TV adventure, would you believe it when you grew up?  Or would you try to forget it? For what it's worth, that's a tiny aspect of the plot of Alan Garner's astonishing and beautiful novel Boneland.

Secondly, the stilted "only use 50 basic words" script comes across as though it contains hidden esoteric meanings.  Strange looks to camera and stress on lines like "they'd think we were making it all up", in a way that suggests some comment on metafiction and childhood perceptions.  Or at least, it does if you're watching it on DVD in 2015 and you're an autistic English/Film teacher with a Grant Morrison obsession.

This week; opening the third eye to explore the higher realms.  Have your drills ready.

It's got two great monsters in it.  One's more of a villain: the Tall Spaceman (I like to think he's related to the Tall Man from Phantasm) and a cartoon ghost monster that crops up in the animated educations sequences.  The Tall Spaceman creeps around, hides in bushes, fires energy weapons at classic cars and generally does alien abduction stuff.  The cartoon ghost monster eats other cartoon characters in an attempt to teach tenses and so forth.
I was shit scared of the cartoon monster.  Thought the Tall Spaceman was kinda cool. Like a BBC Terminator.

5) Mr. Babadook: The Babadook
A recent film!  A modern text!
The Babadook is WONDERFUL.  It's one of the best, and most moving, horror films I've ever seen.  I don't want to tell you anything about it.  Mr. Babadook sneaks into your house in a pop up book.  He has his own special rhymes.  So he's a bloody great monster, in all his funny disguises.  But this is a film about class and gender and mental health and isolation.  And the ending...so much more than just another jump scare and cut to black.  So much deeper.  It made me cry, in an oddly happy way.  There's a metaphor in there and it spoke to me on a very primal and powerful level.  Like the film repeats, you can't get rid of the Babadook.  You really can't.  So maybe you need to think about that, and see beyond the essentially meaningless good/evil, sane/insane binary oppositions we fill our culture with.  WATCH THIS FILM.

Yes.  Watch the film.  So my fancy dress idea makes sense.

4) The Sheet: Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You
M.R. James.  You devil, you.  The stories are wonderful.  This 1960s adaptation is astonishing.  The 21st century version is shite.
However, this small, slow, monochrome story of a lonely, mumbling academic who unwittingly stirs up a horrid spectral force in a deserted, out-of-season seaside town leaves quite a few viewers with the desire to sleep with the light on.  It's all about the sleep.  And the way your bedclothes get all messed up.  And the word "dirty", and having alone time.  It's possible there may be a subtext.
The monster is a filthy bedsheet that groans and roars, except that we suddenly understand the sounds are the noises that our terrified, thumb-sucking protagonist is making.  Until a big man bursts in and saves him, causing the dirty sheets, which have risen up high, to lie back down again.
Like I say, I'm sure that there's some hidden agenda here, but I just can't spot it.

3) The Thing in the Map: Mr. Humphries and his Inheritance
More M.R. James.  This wasn't even a 'real' adaptation; it was a schools' TV job for ITV, designed to demonstrate the power of music in a film piece.  Presumably, they used this story as it was out of copyright.  Dude inherits big house, with spooky maze.  Dude investigates and finds evidence of dodgy ancestor doing dodgy magicy things in the maze.  Dude makes map of maze.  One night, map comes to life and horrible rotting face claymation zombie ghoul thing comes out of it.  Dude screams.  Your current author howls in terror at the age of six on a sick day from school and never, ever forgets it.
Please note: I use the word 'dude' in the correct sense of 'a city dweller unused to country ways', as in 'dude ranch' because I am ridiculous.

Just imagine what it could have been like.  Go on.

2) Everything on Dramarama ever: Dramarama
Possessed sailor dolls.  Evil reflections.  Malevolent invisible forces that mess with your Scrabble game to send threatening notes.  The voice of God on a radio phone in.  Thanks for fucking with us so much, Dramarama.  Because everyone expects a cheap version of Poltergeist to be on at 4:45 in the afternoon, don't they?

1)  The Greatest Monster of Them All:  but you'll have to watch from 1:29:20 in to find out.  Or watch the whole thing.  It's got VINCENT PRICE in it, you fools.  Why would you not watch Vincent Price at Halloween?
NB: it might not be a massive surprise.  I mean, they don't announce "It's...Dracula!" or anything like that. It would be good if they did.   But the don't.  However, this is The Monster Club and it needs watching like anything, because it's the most fantastic fusion of 40s/50s/60s/70s horror tropes and stars with the styles, fashions and dreadful music of the early 1980s.

Vincent!

And yeah, I could have said the Tall Man (who's actually my personal favourite) or Dracula (Lugosi?  Lee?) or any of the classic Universal monsters, or the Daleks.  But the thing is; I find all those monsters oddly re-assuring.  The ones above?  They're the ones that got to me, just a bit.  Writing about them gave me a little, genuine chill.  Just a flicker of unease that's going to stay with me for a while tonight.

Well, apart from the last one, that is.