Month: November 2015

What’s your favorite villain/monster from MTV’s series TEEN WOLF? I’d have to say mine is the Nogitsune. I’m not a huge mark for the show, honestly, but it is at its best when serving up new and different types of evil baddies for its heroes to have to face. I enjoy the sampling from other…

I’ve written about the Lykoi, or “werewolf kitten,” before, but they’re getting coverage in the news again, so for those who might have missed it the first time, here’s the skinny on these cute (depending on who you ask) little feline lycanthropes. They are the result of selective breeding processes, and, as there are some…

It wasn’t a bad plan, as far as plans go, if one takes any trace of morality out of it, any considerations of human decency, and looks at it from strictly a pragmatic point of view. Russia, under the brutal Bolshevik reign of Joseph Stalin, had lots of land the government couldn’t make use of,…

This would seem to be a case of standard crime, and thus not warrant mentioning here, were it not for the “ritual” connection. A young woman, unidentified by police, was kidnapped by 32-year-old Mercedes Salazar and three cohorts in San Antonio, Texas about a month back. The 25-year-old female had been dating Salazar’s brother when…

Any writer can tell you, the old adage “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story” is an important rubric of great value and should be frequently put into practice. Screenwriters understand this better than most, and sometimes take it a step farther than necessary, seeking to fix what isn’t broken…

Here is the formula: Human beings move into an area, clearing the land, transforming the forests into farmland and killing off the indigenous apex predators: wolves, bears, and mountain lions. These people bring with them their dogs, quadruped companions of our species for tens of thousands of years. It isn’t as easy to kill off…

I do feel bad for the owners of the house featured in the movie THE CONJURING. (A well-made film, but perhaps a little critically overrated, as the events recounted in the movie, ostensibly based on a true story, are all the same pretty familiar to genre fans.) The house shown in the movie is NOT…

When you hear some right-wing Christian fundamentalists today crying about persecution, what they are really bemoaning is that they are no longer afforded preferential treatment. And when those same zealots start touting “freedom of religion” as their mantra, what they really are saying is they demand the right to force their religion on YOU. These…

I’d seen something on this before, on Travel Channel or something. There’s a bridal shop in Chihuahua, Mexico, called ‘La Popular,” with a mannequin in the front window that may be the mummified corpse of the previous owner’s daughter, Pascualita. The young woman, so the story goes, died on her wedding day from a spider…

The human brain is programmed to recognize faces. That’s why we so often see them in places where they don’t really exist. How many times has the Virgin Mary shown up in cake batter, or in the grain pattern in hardwood flooring? Anybody remember Jesus’s face on that billboard shilling spaghetti? Our tendency to spot…