Hello, friends, and welcome to the inaugural post of our Historical Curiosities column! History is full of the weird, the spooky, and the confounding. In this column we’ll share fun anecdotes that fit the bill. So, join me as we kick things off with one of my favourite strange tales — the werewolves of Ossory.
Continue readingWe’re well into October now, which is possibly the best month if you live in New England. The weather is pretty perfect, and the atmosphere can be Hallmark Channel beatific or downright creepy, depending on which way you’re leaning. It also means that I go on my annual pilgrimage to the amazing Haunted Overload, in Lee, New Hampsire!
This attraction has been around since the early 2000s, and now has a permanent home at the lovely DeMerrit Hill Farm. It’s consistently ranked as one of the best haunted attractions in the country, and it is super deserving of the accolades. The scale of the place is difficult to capture in pictures; the figures, from giant scarecrows to looming hooded skeletons to the amazing Komodo dragon, are huge. Seamlessly integrated into the landscape, truly looking like they belong to the woods around them, these creatures really do dwarf you. The effect is cool and striking, and the sweep and variety of the tableaus, and their size, stand in stark contrast to more claustrophobic haunted house attractions.
As many large-scale models and areas as there are to explore at Haunted Overload, it’s the clear delight taken in the smaller details, too, which make it so unique and special to me. That nature is allowed to work on the built elements is so effective and allows for unexpected, eerie surprises- last year we found a beautiful oyster mushroom sprouting in a tree still growing through a dilapidated house. A Blair Witch-esque bower, woven out of mountains of sticks, has a deer head pushing out of a wall. Haunted Overload goes for the unusual rather than the safe; its folk-horrific leanings and arboreal setting allow the artists who design it to try out frights you don’t often see explored. This year the biggest new feature was a gargantuan wasp nest, complete with giant, malevolent insects, sacrificial victims bound in the hives, and weird, Mothman-ish wasp cultists. It’s so great and creative, and so exciting to see spooky designers refuse to repeat familiar tropes.
Haunted Overload is also immensely welcoming, which might be an odd descriptor for a place which features many examples of (fake!) dismemberment, horrifying circuses, malevolent woods-dwellers and the like. But its organizers understand that not everyone likes every level of fright, and they make many provisions for that. While going at night gives you the full gamut of jumpscares, with scare actors, lights, and sound effects, there are also nights with no actors lurking to scare the bejesus out of you, where you’re free to move at your own pace. My favorite are the weekend day hours, where you can appreciate the sheer imaginative exuberance of the place in full daylight; it’s also fun to see families enjoying it all during the days, too, where it is often touchingly obvious which kids are discovering their taste for horror and the spooky and which would prefer not to. Their staff and volunteers are unfailingly super friendly and clearly take well-deserved pride in how impressive the attraction is. It’s a running joke among my family and friends that this is the real happiest place on Earth, and for those of us who love this season and horror more generally, Haunted Overload comes pretty close to fitting that bill. I can’t recommend a trip more highly.
When it was first announced that another Hellboy movie was in the works, I was tentatively excited. The comics are, of course, a perennial favorite, as is the Guillermo del Toro version.1 The 2019 movie had one truly brilliant scene2 but was largely an oddly-paced, muddled mess. Still, I never turn down Hellboy, and the title was a promising start. The Crooked Man is a wonderfully spooky story, and I liked the idea of a new movie taking on one of the standalone tales rather than diving into the end game. So, I waited to hear more, and… nothing. Having assumed that the movie — like so many titles — was a project that had simply dropped into the ether, never to be seen again, I forgot about it until people started making noise about a trailer. The trailer looked low-budget but creepy (which, as you all may have noticed, is my favorite kind of horror movie). I went back to being excited.
Then, once again, nothing. No updates, no theatrical release, just radio silence about it being available in the United States.
I will admit, by the time I saw it available to purchase online, I was feeling my doubts. As of sitting down to do so, it had a 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.3 Combined with the decision to release it direct to streaming, I was braced for it to be bad. Imagine my shock, dear reader, when it was not bad. In fact, I greatly enjoyed it. It’s not perfect — and we’ll get back to that — but it’s creepy, atmospheric, and fun. And, it feels like the comics. Honestly, go watch it with an open mind and you’re going to have a good evening.
For those of you who are less familiar, here is the basic shape:
While in southern Appalachia in the late 1950s, Hellboy comes across a local resident who has been harmed by a witch. Together with a recently-returned local named Tom Ferrell, who has his own history with the witchcraft and evil in the region, he sets out to look into the matter. Together, they go to bury Tom’s father and confront the local manifestation of the devil — the so-called “Crooked Man”. Sounds simple? It’s a horror movie, friends, you know better than that.
Now, let’s dig in a little more. (A warning: there are going to be spoilers. I will leave out some details, but I will be hitting both the main plot points and things that struck me as being worth some extra discussion. The majority of them are straight from the comic, but there are a few places where the movie differs. Proceed with caution if this bothers you.)
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