1800's BEER ADS ARE THE G.O.A.T.

I found this series of brewery ads from the late 1800s on the Library of Congress website while doing some research on a project unrelated to bock beer and goats. The LOC is like the tumblr rabbit hole of public domain materials; before you know it, hours are lost while searching the most random terms. 

As for why bock beer was once, or still is, synonymous with goats, allow me to lazily lift an explanation from the website of Anchor Brewing in San Francisco:

There’s a lot of lore surrounding bock beer. What is it? What’s up with the goat? How did it get its name? Is it really made from the residue at the bottom of the tank?

The beer we now know as bock originated in the Northern German city of Einbeck, probably as far back as the 1400s. By the 1600s it was being brewed in the Munich area of Southern Germany. The name “Einbeck” was pronounced as “Einbock” in the Bavarian accent of the region – and “einbock” means “billy goat” in German. Shortened to “bock,” the name remains with us today, as does the visual pun of the goat on the label.

Some of these are definitely destined to become wall art somewhere in my abode...bulbous, pendulum-like goat balls notwithstanding. 

GAGE, WHAT DID YOU DO?

I stumbled upon this artist's rendering of Pet Sematary's Gage Creed via Twitter the other day and it's been living just behind my eyes ever since. Had this been inserted into the 1989 film adaptation, it would've easily been the scariest Stephen King film ever.

Art by Dan Peacock.

HALLOWEEN PARTY (1989)

I love everything about this—just everything—from the borrowed soundtrack selections of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Halloween (...and Halloween 2...and Halloween 4) to the laughter of the high-school-aged actors after they knowingly botch a line or fumble with the set decoration while fleeing in terror. This is charming as fuck. As FUCK. And I absolutely plan on loading this one up every October until this miserable world kills me to death. Welcome to your newest Halloween tradition, boneheads.

As for the plot, some kind of flanneled ghoul inexplicably rises from the grave and begins picking off local teens at a Halloween party down the road. I think said ghoul is given a backstory about being a murderous farmer who'd killed his family, but to be honest, it was kinda hard to make out. But it doesn't matter. It's the tops. It can't be said enough: I love everything about this. 

Evidently, Halloween Party aired on Connecticut cable access in 1989, which I think is genuinely terrific because I'm sure writer/director David Skowronski and his creative team felt like gods that night. And they deserved to. This right here is better than most of the Halloween franchise.

Samples of this brilliance are below, but if you're not sparing yourself the lousy 38 minutes to watch the whole vid, you don't deserve joy. Plus, the very end has a blooper reel and the cast performing a dance routine to The Monster Mash!

THE MONSTER MASH! 

C'MON!

VCR HORRORS (1987)

Time capsules like these are always amusing and occasionally irritating to revisit. If you came of age in the late '80s and early '90s like I did and grew up watching the titles featured in this exposé, you'll note immediately how wrong-headed much of the talking points are, collected from alarmed parents and so-called experts who are clearly grasping at straws and making points after having seen, at best, five horror films. 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is specifically noted as being one of the first films to introduce the aspect of graphic violence to the horror genre, essentially putting to bed more chaste films like Psycho and Frankenstein. Of course, if you know a single thing about the genre, you'll know that Chain Saw Massacre is actually very low on violence, at least on-screen, and features exactly one chainsaw murder, most of which is left to the imagination. Though these parents admit in the same interview that they had "no idea" how graphic some horror films were until they sat down and watched them specifically for this report, they still managed to rattle off oversimplifications of horror's main thrust, which is "rape and torture," in which most of the victims are females, and that most of the kill scenes have a sexual connotation behind them. I dunno, you tell me: this was the '80s, after all, a time in which the majority of on-screen sexual trysts featured a girl and a boy. You mean to tell me the boyfriends escape the killer while the girlfriends fall victim? Have you seen a slasher movie before?

Though this report does feature notable pro-genre people like Linnea Quigley and critic Chas Balun, both of their collected soundbites are limited to out-of-context blurbs that only support the main thesis. Quigley rattles off every way in which her characters bit the dust in her past movies while Balun just sounds like a mimbo, telling the audience kids want faster and louder horror experiences because of MTV. Good grief.

Refreshingly, the report ends with a level-headed and rational argument for why horror films aren't the scourge of society that most of the talking heads argue and shouldn't be blamed for motivating real-world violence...which comes courtesy of a ten-year-old kid. Go figure.