I’m probably the last horror blog on the planet to link to the terminally cool 7 Black Notes, but I can resist no longer. The proprieter of that blog has pieced together various musical scores from Italian genre cinema that have never been released commercially into a collection of mini-scores. It must have taken an incredible amount of work to sift through all those films and mix together all those disparate tracks. Make sure you check it out. If you don’t get aroused listening to Images In A Convent, there’s no hope for you.

Let me introduce a ghost that’s… out of this world. Caspar the Friendly Ghost.

I’ve been digging through a lot of mash-ups the past few days, and unfortunately too many of them are simply slapped together. By far one of my favourites, and most successful, is Music for Maniacs’ Caspar the Friendly Queen. Mr. Fab has concocted a sweet little mash-up composed of the Caspar the Friendly Ghost theme and the instrumental bits of Bohemian Rhapsody, and it seems as if they were always made for one another.

We miss you, Freddie.

I attended the Toronto Fan Expo over the weekend and had one of the best shows in my decade of attending the convention. I just got home, I’m already halfway through reading Jack Ketchum’s incredible novel Ladies Night and I have another 8 or 9 DVDs calling out to me. And I missed a day on the blog and I’m feeling a little torn.

One of the bonuses of attempting to post every weekday is that it becomes almost second nature. One of the drawbacks is that when you skip a day it throws you right off your game and you have to take some time to get into gear. Not only that, but all the news and intertesting tidbits I keep up on have grown in size to the point where it’s overwhelming. It would be so easy to just kick back and watch Party at Horror Beach, y’know?

In the meantime, one of the things I did on my trip was get together with a bunch of my friends from the Rose City, including my brothers who were visiting from Vancouver. We spent an evening at Horror Roundtable contributor Doug Nagy’s place, where he recorded his most recent installment of Nagical Radio. Everyone in attendance contributed to his newest feature, Reproduce The Animal Noise. I was off my game. I attempted to pull off the noise the monsters from the Hercules cartoon all seemed to make, but even after years of training I still choked. Still, if you decide to vote for your favourite pterodactyl noise, please consider my rendition.

When I was first introduced to vinyl sharity sites I had to do a lot of scrounging to find horror soundtracks, and I wondered how long it would take someone to fill that niche. Just a couple months later and I’m wondering how many albums the numerous horror-related sharity sites can post before they run out of material.

I’ve been busy, so I only just stumbled across The Manchester Morgue recently. It contains a couple albums I felt a craving for in the past few months like Fright Night and Return of the living Dead, as well as standards like Phantasm and Nightbreed, and some truly wonderous cult films like Blue Underground and Psycho Beach Party. I could spend all day in there.

This post cements today as the greatest in The Horror Blog’s short history. A few months ago I was visiting my friends in The Rose City where we were planning on having one of our infrequent roleplaying sessions. I was tired from my trip and wasn’t in the mood to concoct something taxing. My afternoon was spent trying to come up with a quick Coke-and-Doritos game to waste a few hours with. That’s when I remembered the Snakes on a Plane roleplaying game.

The following podcast is the first part of an ongoing serial, recorded off the floor with all the awkward pauses, excessive swearing, racous laughter and potato chip bag crinkling that make up a night of pure geekery. If you’re not familiar with roleplaying, please keep in mind that listening to this podcast will most likely be an excruciating experience. And if you’re a current or former gamer, hopefully you’ll manage a wistful smile through the pain. You have been warned!

Now fasten your motherfucking seatbelt and download Snakes on a Plane - The Roleplaying Game.

X-Y-Z-Cosmonaut’s CosmoBlog is one of my favourite sharity sites. I was going to post a clip of the day to his extensive Dr. Who selection way back when I first began The Horror Blog, but one thing led to another and it got lost in the shuffle. Recently, after a short hiatus, the X-Y-Z-Cosmonaut has produced a whopping 15 soundtracks from various Toho giant monster movies, including Godzilla Vs. The Thing, Godzilla Vs. Monster Zero, and a symphony presentation of some of Akira Ifukube’s more memorable themes. Sprinkled throughout are a smattering of other Japanese fantasy treats, from children’s Godzilla storybook records to the Mahou Sentai MagiRanger album and much more. In fact, all this kaiju talk has inspired me to crack out a dozen or so Godzilla films for a Tokyo-destroying movie marathon.

The Kaiju madness begins here and moves forward to the present.

An alleged rough cut of the theme for Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake can be found at the website for composer and previous Zombie collaborator Tyler Bates. According to the Rue Mortuary, where I first heard the news, this track has been used as background music during Zombie’s tour, further cementing the reliability of the claim.  Before hearing it, I was worried that he was going to jettison the classic theme entirely, which is arguably the best part of the entire movie.  Upon listening to the track, it seems as if Bates is going for a mash-up of Carpenter’s nerve-wracking score with the underlying industrial sound of Zombie’s ouvre, with a few creaky doors and muffled screams from Wal-mart Haunted House theme CDs thrown in for good measure.  I wouldn’t say this is entirely a bad thing.  I like the idea of combining the wholesome sound of suburban Halloween with more sophisticated scares, but it comes off as a bit of overkill when compared to the simplicity of the original.

DVD Maniacs has a great thread devoted to some of the best funky disco music to ever grace sleazy European exploitation movies. And for a limited time only, you can sample some of the Continent’s greatest horror bootyshakers. These include, but are not limited to, Cannibal Ferox, House at the Edge of the Park, and The Pyjama Girl Case. And don’t forget my favourite, the main theme from Porno Holocaust. If this don’t get you moving, you’re already dead.

The groovy vinyl sharity site Mondo Daddykin has closed up shop. While there may not have been a whole lot of horror content, there sure was plenty of music from The Archies, which is great since I fucking adore Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie and the rest of the gang (Take that, T. Van!).

In honour of this maestro of the bubblegum arts, I present to you one of the as-yet-unsullied files, otherwise inaccessible as of Mondo Daddykin’s retirement; Rods and Rat Finks!

As a kid in the 60’s, I couldn’t resist Roth’s awesome hot rod designs. They were on everything from gum cards and stickers to model cars of his classic “Outlaw” and “Beatnik Bandit,” just to name a couple. Big Daddy’s character Rat Fink became a cultural icon of the hot rod world.

So sayeth Mondo Daddykin! He will be missed, and I hope to see him return some day.

This is what horror blogging does to me. I spend so much time writing that I have far less time to watch, read or listen. My movie consumption has decreased to the point that my purchases are at a 2-to-1 ratio with what I actually sit down and watch. My beloved reading hammock swings lonely on my balcony. And I haven’t listened to a soundtrack album in ages.

I’m hoping other bloggers can relate to the above. I also hope that they can relate to those glorious moments when something stops the downward spiral and demands your attention, pushing self-imposed deadlines out of your head if only for a moment. This was the case when I stumbled across Rick Trembles’ Motion Picture Purgatory Radio Show while looking for information on the film Neighbourhood Watch. Maybe stumbled isn’t the right word. I’ve been reading Trembles’ comic strip for years, and I’ve been aware of his podcast for months. It wasn’t until I was forced to sit down and listen to an episode for the sake of research that I realized what I was missing.

The most recent episode was particularly engaging as Trembles sits down with FAB Press owner Harvey Fenton and Fangoria associate editor Michael Gingold to discuss the golden age of horror ‘zines. If you’re like me, and you can’t shake that nostalgic feeling for the days when horror fandom required blood, sweat and staples, be sure to check it out.

Doctor Who is hands-down the scariest fucking television show ever broadcast. It’s so damn frightening that legions of people who have never met can immediately relate to one another based solely upon their experiences hiding behind the sofa during the scary bits. I have a friend who is unafraid of nearly anything, but when I showed him a Doctor Who novelization with his childhood bogeyman on the cover, he shrieked and averted his eyes.

The Whomix Project collects well over 100 variations on the show’s theme, from the expected ambient, electronic and techno mixes to more daring compositions in metal, ska, funk and kazoo.

Doctor Who scars children for life. And it all starts with that theme song.

With the rise in mp3blogs and vinyl sharity, it’s become remarkably easy to find obscure horror soundtracks. Most of these treasures are collected together under a specific film which, while great, has the disadvantage of not giving a very diverse sampling of various composers’ styles. It’s rare to find a site which has that kind of diversity, but the Giallo Index is one such animal. While the sound quality isn’t the greatest, it does have the advantage of letting you sample tracks from 26 different gialli before committing yourself. Click on the CD covers to dowload the mp3s. Enjoy!

It’s not often two of my passions, horror and ska, come together, the most notable exception being The Toasters’ song Frankenska. Here’s another to add to the list. The entire soundtrack for the stage musical Giant Killer Shark has been placed online, and included in the set is a song called Ska Fishing. I was as surprised as anyone.

Check it out. The entire soundtrack is hilarious and bears absolutely no resemblance to any other kinds of giant killer shark entertainment.

Remember the days when they incorporated decent songs into horror pictures? Yeah, me neither. The Winged Avenger snaps us out of it with some finger-snapping loveliness from Bava’s Five Dolls For An August Moon. Believe it or not, they’re just perfect for whiling away a summer day, swinging on a hammock and enjoying a cool glass of lemonade.

I’ve been sick the past couple days, but I woke up this morning feeling better and with a profound need to dance like I have ass in my pants. Quite possibly the funkiest damn soundtrack for a horror movie, the entire Blacula album can be found over at Dust to Dust.

My fever may have broke last night, but I’ve still got the fever, if you know what I mean. As an added bonus, here’s discotheque fave Soul Dracula (among others), which I originally picked up from the much-missed Dr. Mysterian. I strongly suggest you check his site anyway, if only for a brief history of vampires and their connection with the dancefloor.

You’ve got to get up to get down.