WEIRDO WEDNESDAYS : HORROR RELATED NOSTALGIA POST

(Edit: This post has been recently updated.) 

Thought I'd lighten up this blog with a bit of horror related nostalgia. 

It's sort of a childhood top 5 I suppose.

1.       “Scary Stories to tell in the dark” 

is an amazingly illustrated series of children’s books from the eighties.

Written by Alvin Schwartz and inked by Stephen Gammell, the books contain bizarre and eerie short horror stories accompanied by incredibly creepy black ink visuals.  It’s worth checking them out for the illustrations alone.

2.       Speaking of Eerie, remember “Eerie Indiana?”

I used to love this show. It ran from ’91 – ’93 and followed the story of the protagonist, a teen named Marshall Teller, whose family moves to a small town in Eerie, Indiana – population 16,661. Eerie is a hotspot of bizarre and paranormal events of which Marshall investigates each episode.

Check out the intro. So Awesome.

Also, if we're mentioning Omri Katz, we can't forget to put Hocus Pocus on the list.

3. Hocus Pocus 

(picture source)

I've lost count of how many times I watched this movie as a kid. 

Max moves to Salem, Massachusetts where he accidentally resurrects three infamous witch sisters on Halloween night. He spends the entire night trying to send them back where they came from, with the help of his little sister, new found love interest and an immortal cat named Binks.

        4.“Are you afraid of the dark?"

Yes, yes I am.

A product of Nickelodeon here- a horror fantasy series about a group of kids who refer to themselves as “The midnight society”. They meet each night and tell scary stories around a campfire, which is dramatized for each episode.

Some of the episode ideas were actually pretty creepy as a young kid, people getting trapped in alternate mirror dimensions and screaming through the glass. Other episodes focused on the paranormal, ghosts and demons etc.

       5.“Garbage pail kids”

Awesome and extremely gross “Topps” trading cards from the eighties.

Check out the illustrations on these.

  6. Stephen King. 

I was never afraid of clowns, until Pennywise.

Thanks Stephen king. 

Pennywise was the monster from King's TV mini-series "It."

 haunted my nightmares when I was a kid.

Seeing Pennywise climb out through the plug hole in the locker room shower scene destroyed my tiny mind.

7. Fiendish feet yogurt

(Image source)

I only just remember these. 

I ate them solely due to the fact they were little skeletons and monsters.

I had no idea what the link between horror and yogurt was and I didn't care.

8. Trash bag bunch

(image source: figure realm) 

Trash bag bunch were these awesome toys that came in a dissoluble bag. You'd drop the bag in water and it would bubble and dissolve, revealing a toy. Usually they were little monster type toys, however after doing a quick search they were supposed to be environmental themed, which I totally didn't understand at the time. My favorite was trasher #30, Junk jackal. 

I found the above image on a great blog called "Toys from the past" check it out!

9. R.L Stine

Every time my parents would go grocery shopping I would try and get them to buy me a Goosebumps book. There were a lot of horror novellas for kids at the time, but this was probably the most popular. Also they had the best cover art. I believe he also wrote some "Point horror" books, which I also enjoyed until I grew up and moved on to Stephen King earlier than I probably should of. 

10. Aaahh!!! Real Monsters

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This is a Cartoon from Nickleodeon about young monsters in NYC who study at a monster school beneath a dump yard where they learn how to scare humans. I still really like this cartoon, the characters are great.