The Howl – October 5 – Does The Shining Prove Nicholas Cage Faked The Great Pumpkin?

Greetings, ghoulies and goblins, and welcome to our continued Transylvania tabloid “The Howl”! Every Friday, the AllHorror Howl gives you a roundup of items of interest to you fear fans. Our former feature in this spot, the weekend entertainment guide “Wicked Weekend,” has instead become a newsletter: Get your email subscription from your friendly local sidebar ?.

JUST 26 DAYS TILL HALLOWEEN!

The news is going to get so busy now, our zombie research staff is pulling graveyard shifts to keep up!

Opening this weekend:

Venom: This Marvel offering is a dark take on Spiderman’s symbiotic antagonist. It’s rare to see comic franchises drop the hero altogether to focus on the villain, but it’s becoming the style. DC Comics will follow suit with a Joker movie sans Batman. It’s a noteworthy cultural shifting point, and we’re going to have a lot of fun analyzing why it’s happening.

October 4th through the 14th, Salem Horror Fest 2018 is in full swing!

Events for this weekend include: "Zombiecise with Linnea Quigley & Zumba Alejandro,” Tremors, My Bloody Valentine, Day of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and "A Conversation with George C. Romero,” to name just a few higlights.

They’ll be having the biggest swinging horror party on the East Coast all through the first half of the month. Anybody out there, feel free to comment here and let us know how it’s going.

Turner Classic Movies’ channel has an October schedule chock full of horror classics, and this post on Reddit /r/horror narrows it down to just the horror movies. You can double-check times with TCM’s own listing. Saturday sees the scifi-horror classic Demon Seed, which we recommend highly for having the audacity to be so far ahead of its time. Sunday will see 3 1940s films from The Mummy franchise.

Check back for more, keep your Trick ‘r’ Treat bag full!

Asteroid 2015 TB145, better known as the “Death Comet” | “The Great Pumpkin Comet” because it has a freaky face, will pass relatively close to Earth’s orbit near the date of Halloween this year. Nothing to worry about, it’s outside the moon’s orbit, we’re perfectly safe.

Like hell we are! We’ve seen way too many movies to not know where this is going!

Nicholas Cage, King of Batshit, gave The Guardian a typically batshit interview this week.

Cage of course stars in the recently released Cascadian psychedelic biker-devil-cult-revenge flick Mandy, in theaters now, where he predictably chomps the scenery with his rabid enthusiasm. Cage confesses to The Guardian that he has a self-destructive side that’s only held in check when he’s working, which explains why the guy never seems to turn down a role.

And finally, for our feature story... your humble Present Author, blissfully unaware of the calamitous path ahead, reviewed Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus The Shining this week. So far so good. Horror classic, top ten favorite, we ought to have something to say about it.

Then I compiled some accessory material, exploring the fandom around The Shining. I found all kinds of goodies, from a Universal Studios haunted house attraction to a parody commercial to a Minecraft build and more. Those were the good old days, when I was still an innocent, pure little lamb.

But if you explore Kubrick fandom deeply enough, you will eventually run into The Conspiracy Theory. This is the one where NASA is supposed to have faked the moon landing. And who could have provided such footage? Why, Stanley Kubrick was the only major director at the time who made a serious space movie, so it’s gotta be him, right?

Well, this derailed train of thought culminates in The Shining Code, a documentary put together to “prove” that Kubrick encoded a confession to the lunar landing hoax within the movie itself. And then brightly blathers along for an hour drawing diagrams onto the film stock, connecting initials with dates with Roman/Greek interpretations of words, and so on.

You wanna see it? Well too bad, because I’M GONNA SHOW IT TO YOU ANYWAY!