Haunting History Returns for October 2011

The Everleigh Social Club & magician David Parr invite you to haunt the shadowy corners of the past, and discover a mysterious world of ghosts and grave robbers, poisoners, poltergeists, and the spirits of Halloween!

Step into Chicago’s Everleigh Social Club and experience Haunting History, a unique Halloween show, equal parts history and magic. With David Parr as your host, you’re sure to encounter the uncanny side of the past:

• Learn the grisly skills of an old “resurrection man” — a professional body snatcher.
• Drop in for dinner with the Borgias, circa 1500, for a lesson in the subtle arts of poisoning and politics.
• Sit in on a 19th-century séance, where restless spirits make their presence known in mystifying ways.

As the performance unfolds, you may begin to doubt your senses: objects move of their own accord, cryptic messages are written by invisible hands, hidden thoughts are revealed. Is some mysterious force at work in the Everleigh Social Club?

The answer is yes — his name is David Parr.

“History is much weirder than the version we learn in school,” explains Parr, the creator of Haunting History. “People in the past were surrounded by the strange and supernatural — especially during the Halloween season. Haunting History gives a sense of what it might have been like to live in that world.”

Haunting History: October 20–29 at the Everleigh Social Club, 939 W. Randolph St.

Tickets $20 at the door, $15 in advance. No one under 18 admitted.

Only Seven Shows — Seating is Limited — Reserve your Tickets Today!

Thursday, October 20, 8:30pm

Friday, October 21, 8:30pm

Saturday, October 22, 8:30pm

Sunday, October 23, 7:30pm

Friday, October 28, Special Midnight Show

Saturday, October 29, 8:30pm & 10:30pm

Get tickets online at the Everleigh Social Club website: http://everleighsocialclub.com/haunting-history-with-david-parr/

I’ve been a fan of the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer for quite a while now. Recently, Dark Horse comics invited me and several other fans to guest blog about the show and the upcoming Buffy Season 9 comic books. You can read my blogitude on the Dark Horse comics website:

http://www.darkhorse.com/Blog/595/mybuffylife-guest-blog-david-parr

Hey, folks. The book I spent nearly a year editing is now in print! Just released by Squash Publishing: Memoirs of an Elusive Moth. Adele Friel Rhindress tells the story of how she toured with Blackstone Senior’s Show of 1001 Wonders in the late 1940s. She was seventeen years old when she joined the show! It’s a fab firsthand glimpse into a fascinating era in showbiz history and a unique perspective on one of the greats of the Golden Age. Get it here:

http://www.squashpublishing.com/product_info.php?cPath=4&products_id=256&osCsid=15e5bd58d169faf534a4bdc0444e467d

The Horror! The Horror!

The Horror! The Horror! is a fun collection of words and images. It’s great to read the more obscure stories that haven’t been reprinted before, and to see the amazing artwork, a significant portion of which was done as work-for-hire by uncredited artists. The publishers of this book went all-out on lavish full-color reproductions of these vintage comics covers and pages. And while the accompanying text by editor Jim Trombetta, who selected the comics included in this collection, tends to be more than a tad overheated — his interpretations of the subtext and themes of the stories and artwork are sometimes just as wacky as the projections of repressed “experts” from the 1950s — it does serve to place the work in a social context. And for an even better glimpse into the social climate of the day, the book comes with a delightful bonus feature: a thirty-minute DVD that contains an episode of the TV show Confidential File, which aired in October of 1955. The episode is dedicated to the “problem” of horror comics and their corrupting effect on the nation’s youth. It’s presented as hard-hitting reportage, of course, but it’s a trove of pure comedy gold. The lengths these people went to in the effort to prove that comic books were a danger to society are wonderfully ludicrous. You will laugh and shake your head in disbelief. The program is made even more absurd in light of the fact that the ban on horror comics was already in place by 1955. The arseheads who made Confidential File were trying to kick the last bit of drama out of a dead horse.

Here’s a link to the book on Amazon.com. At twenty dollars, it’s a bargain. http://www.amazon.com/Horror-Comic-Books-Government-Didnt/dp/0810955954/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1290442289&sr=8-1

Fans of this stuff should also seek out Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s, edited by Greg Sadowski. Like The Horror! The Horror!, this book puts the focus on the non-EC horror titles that flooded the stands every month. These are straight-up reprints of the best stories from those comics, complete and uninterrupted by modern commentary. (The book does include end notes about the artists, authors, and stories.) While there’s a bit of overlap between the two books, Four Color Fear has many more stories in it. It’s well worth getting if you’re into vintage horror comics and want to read the stories that haven’t been reprinted before. My favorites include “Green Horror,” which is the tale of a murderously jealous cactus — yes, you read that correctly — and “The Flapping Head,” which begins with the following words: “There was a night when the ancient castle harbored three presences no human would want to see! The first was death itself — the second a phantom fated for a grisly mission — and the third was the thing that became THE FLAPPING HEAD!”

There’s more than twenty dollars’ worth of fun in this book, so it’s a bargain too. Here’s a link: http://www.amazon.com/Four-Color-Fear-Forgotten-Horror/dp/1606993437/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1290552347&sr=8-1

I’m currently hooked on an Xbox Live Arcade game called Limbo. When I saw a teaser trailer for this game, my first thought was “I must buy this.” Developed by Playdead Studios in Copenhagen, Denmark, and released exclusively for the Xbox 360, Limbo has garnered almost universal praise for its striking design aesthetic and unusual approach to gameplay. No other game looks like this. It bears a strong resemblance to silent cinema of the early 20th century, especially the German expressionist style, with its shadowy forbidding landscapes and eerily luminous skies. Picture the films of F.W. Murnau — Nosferatu, Faust, The Haunted Castle — and you’re in the right neighborhood. Limbo takes place in a flickering, grainy, black-and-white world. It’s a world that I’ve been drawn into, again and again, for the past several weeks.

The game is deceptively simple — at first. You awaken in a forest. The character you control is a little boy, depicted in silhouette, with a pair of glowing white eyes. None of the familiar tokens of video games are visible: no health bar, no weapons or ammo, no onscreen text to tell you what to do. Using three basic controls — the thumbstick to move, a button for jump and climb, and a button for grabbing and interacting with objects — you’re left to explore the environment, which will quickly prove to be just as weird and threatening as it looks.

Your objective is to move forward, avoiding or removing obstacles that lie in your path. Doing so requires manipulating the environment and the objects in it. Some obstacles are simple and easy to overcome; others are complex and call for experimentation, creativity, and lateral thinking. Limbo is, at its foundation, a platform/puzzle game, but its approach to the genre is unconventional. There is nothing cute here. There is nothing sexy here. One of the first things you’ll encounter is a corpse, swarmed by flies. And soon after that, you’ll encounter your death. Yes, the little boy will die — over and over, and in the most gruesome ways imaginable. He — which is to say, you — will be decapitated, drowned, crushed, torn to pieces, and run through with spikes. In fact, there are many puzzles that will be practically impossible to solve without trial and error, which in Limboland means “doing something crazy, just to see what will happen.” Most times, what will happen is that you’ll plunge headlong into the arms of the Grim Reaper. But unlike most games, you won’t be punished for doing so. There’s no “game over” screen. You’re not sent back to the beginning of the level or some distant save point. Death is but a learning experience here. In the blink of an eye, you’ll be reincarnated at the same puzzle where you met a grisly fate, so you can give it another go. If a puzzle proves to be particularly difficult, take a moment to remind yourself that all of the tools to allow you to progress are present in the environment. You just have to figure out how to use them.

I won’t mention anything more about the encounters you’ll have and the obstacles you’ll face. That would spoil the sense of discovery that is one of the rewards of the game. I’ll just conclude by saying that Limbo is one of the best games I’ve ever played. It haunts my thoughts. Check out the game trailer and see if it doesn’t hook you in, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4HSyVXKYz8&feature=related

See the full story at TravelChannel.com

Let’s play Psychic Rock-Paper-Scissors!

The poster was created by our super artist-designer pal Kevin McGroarty, who also happens to be a practitioner of the magical arts. Kevin designed the poster to be reversible, like a playing card:

Come to the Greenhouse Theater Center to marvel at the poster and the many wonders of The Magic Cabaret! Tickets are on sale now at Tix.com!