Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 As someone with a lifelong love of both Valentine's Day and Halloween, it always excites me when the two things combine.  I talk every year (including in my previous post) about how amazing it's been to see "Valloween" really rise to prominence in recent years. And this year, the release of the Valentine's Day slasher film, Heart Eyes seemed to really solidify that. As you can imagine, I was extremely excited about this movie from the get-go. Slasher films are, currently, my most preferred brand of horror for the most part, and add in the Valentine's Day twist? Sounds like a match made in heaven to me. I'm only aware of two other horror films (or I suppose three if you count one remake) that are set on Valentine's Day, and, I don't know, something about the fact that Heart Eyes was born in the age of the online Halloween community, just makes my heart soar. I feel seen. I finally saw the movie on Valentine's Day morning, and I'm thanking m...

    Ah, Valentine's Day.  When I started this blog, just five years ago, I always felt like it was so weird to talk about how Valentine's Day was my second-favorite holiday.  Honestly, I felt like it was a strange thing to say in general, as I had for most of my life.  I was never the romantic type. I wasn't a little girl who dreamed of my wedding day or anything like that...I honestly didn't even tend to get crushes all that often. The other girls thought it was weird or that I was hiding something when they'd ask the age-old question, "Who do you like?" and I never had an answer.  Yet somehow, I was also the little girl whose heart leapt when the pink-and-red explosion of Valentine's Day started making its way into the world. The Cupid silhouettes, the punny cards, and especially the little anthropomorphic heart people, all held a special place in my heart, only rivaled by the space permanently occupied by the pumpkins and ghosts and skeletons of Hal...

In my personal opinion, 2024 was a great year for horror movies. I came away from it with so many new favorites, literally a handful of new movies sitting right among some of my almost-lifelong favorites. It was exciting, inspiring, and on some level, healing. I don't know if there will ever be another year like that for me again. I haven't been nearly as excited for much of anything in 2025...the main movie I'm looking forward to seeing is Wicked: For Good and that's not until Thanksgiving-time. And if the rest of the year drags on anything like January has, we may never get there. There are a couple of things in the coming weeks that I'm interested in. Of course my Valentine's-Day-loving self will be seeing Heart Eyes, and if you know me at all, you probably know how much I love Longlegs,  so The Monkey is obviously a priority. Still, though, it doesn't seem like much compared to last year.  But, given that I'm always in need of a spooky escape, I deci...

 I may be a little late to the party on this, but I recently watched I Saw The TV Glow. I am absolutely obsessed with the dreamcore aesthetic, liminal spaces, and lost episode creepypastas. This movie honestly sounded like the perfect thing for me to watch.  However, despite its glowing (no pun intended) reviews within the community, I personally did not find I Saw The TV Glow to necessarily be a  horror movie. It had some creepy imagery, and the atmosphere was a bit unsettling, but overall I found it to be more of a...psychological thriller, I guess? Maybe even coming-of-age drama?  It was not at all what I was expecting and I'm unsure how it's been billed exclusively as horror all this time, especially given how much the horror community likes to cry "That's not scary!"  However, just because I did not personally think it fit into the horror genre, I still found I Saw The TV Glow to be an interesting movie with some pretty incredible symbolism and messages, wh...

 Five years ago today, I started this blog.  I've never truly been one for "New Year's resolutions", or New Year's at all, really, but just before 2020, I promised myself that I would start blogging again. I've loved to write since I was six years old. I very clearly remember the first little "picture book" I put together. I had actually just watched an episode of Lamb Chop's Play-Along,  where Shari Lewis gave instructions on how to make a little flip book of sorts of a girl jumping rope. I've always been a DIY disaster, so my attempt at recreating this little scene did not go according to plan. It frustrated me, but I somehow got the idea to turn it into a story that I titled "Jill's Bike". I don't remember the specifics of the story, but I believe it was about a girl, obviously named Jill, getting frustrated with her attempts to jump rope, and finally deciding to go and ride her bike instead. It was a short little story, ...