Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

Yesterday morning, I decided to finally watch a movie that's been very controversial and divisive among horror fans:  Skinamarink. I won't lie, I really hadn't heard much of anything positive about this movie, but I'd always been curious about it, and my love of anything dreamcore and liminal wouldn't let me leave it alone. When I saw it was finally available to watch on Hulu, I was excited to finally see it, although I wasn't expecting much based on reviews I've seen. I will start this off by saying, I can most definitely understand why people wouldn't like it. It's shot in a very different sort of way, all angles of spaces in the house, with the characters never really being seen or having real dialogues, and I can see how that would be off-putting to viewers. But, as someone who loves eerie imagery, particularly of the liminal and nightmarish variety, I was loving the strange shots.  What I wasn't expecting to love, though, was the movie itsel...

 We've probably all heard it said that Halloween is the one day of the year where "you don't have to be yourself". It's a tagline of the holiday, ever since I was a child. And I suppose, when I was younger, I felt that my love of Halloween could be connected to my imagination; my desire to play pretend.  I was always big on imaginative play, whether it was physically playing dress-up, or talking to a doll or stuffed animal as if they could hear (I have a very distinct memory of staying up until 11PM one night talking to my Princess Jasmine doll, trying to psychoanalyze my second-grade bullies!) or whether it was a more internal thing, imagining myself in a world outside my own, as a character in a favorite piece of media, or a celebrity in some alternate life. Sometimes I even imagined my own life, but different. Maybe I was best friends with the popular girls, or the first girl in class to have a boyfriend, or even just simply had siblings (such as the twin siste...

 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...