Pictured: Your typical sea squid in the ocean, all slimey and pretty

 

[Editor's note: Yeah, I know what time it is but it's STILL Wednesday in Alaska!]

Isn’t July fun, Merry Readers? The warm, sunny weather and the endless days of vacation filled with magnificent barbecues and ever-flowing Kool Aid. Yes, that time of year when we invite our neighbors over to enjoy the pool or toss lawn darts while we secretly hope one lands on the bad neighbor’s roof. The very month that the glorious bastion of freedom we now know as America burst forth from the womb of Europe to declare itself independent of kingly rule. The month when a slippery, screaming Red Hawk (Happy birthday, dude!) squirted out into the world never knowing that he’d one day write for us here at Happy Horror. Also there are fireworks!

Yes, July offers us all the pleasures of summer that we can’t get from Newports or Marlboros alone. Since we were kids we’ve looked forward to the sunburns, the wasp infestations and the perennial torching of California which is unfailingly followed by Florida’s hurricane beatdowns. There’s no substitute for summer, really, especially if you’re a kid.

So this week, in celebration of the year’s hottest month I’d like to offer up what’s perhaps the hottest story I’ve ever offered here at the world headquarters of horror entertainment.

Relax and let me tell you a little story. Sit back, grab a cold one and pop the top because we’re about to go where no Hollywood flick has ever gone and when we get there, there ain’t no comin’ back because the tentacles of my imagination never let go and grow back EVEN IF YOU CUT THEM OFF WITH YOUR SOURPUSS ATTITUDES. I mean I’m gonna unroll a gripping story. Really.

Okay, so we got a summer camp. Let’s call it Camp Aspenbrook. For decades, the camp’s served as one of the hottest locales for upscale suburbanites to send their pubescent offspring. Kids whose lives are rich with opportunity, promise and the latest fashions. Kids who enjoy buying albums the day they come out and get digital cable in their rooms. Kids who get a car on their 18th birthday and have all their freakin’ college paid for them including books and money to party with even though they totally won’t even buy you a beer unless they think you’re cool enough and honestly, who’s cool enough? Right? Still with me?

All right, these high school Dawson’s Creek wanna-be’s get up to Camp Aspenbrook and start unpacking. Of course, the camp directors pride themselves on rustic accomodations meant to build character so they won’t have sattelite TV or any of that, but they’ve got internet access via their cellphones because they cut a deal with Verizon to install a tower about twenty minutes from the camp. And that’s good. We want that. We want them sending frantic cellphone pics and videos as things get interesting.

Of course, these are teens we’re talking about and you know teenagers - they want to get frisky and with a whole gaggle of good lookin’ guys and girls you know that they’ll be up to more than roasting weenies and getting sticky marshmellow goop all over them. These hormone-laced hotties sneak off repeatedly into the woods to score.

However, we got Ivan the caretaker. He’s a local in the small village that’s the only
civilization close to camp at all. He got hired because he understands the local wildlife. He arrived in town back after the fall of the glorious Soviet Union and back in dear sweet Russia he used to be a fisherman. A whaler, in fact. A salt of the sea who still bears the scars of his former career and has grey-hair-covered bulk of muscles to back it. Obviously his English is poor and deeply accented. He’s also generally in a terrible mood, hates the capitalist piglets he’s paid to deal with and drinks on the job as he’s done for decades.

Thing is, Ivan lives with a secret guilt. He never did want to whale but that’s what his daddy did and his daddy before him, etc. And killing whales pays good money. Not necessarily to the sailors themselves, but you get the pride of saying you kills Earths largest mammals. You also get exposed to squids. Giant squids. And if you’re tripping on acid at the time, you hear messages from those squids. Death threats and promises that, "I will stalk you until the end of your days, Ivan." Except in Russian so this part would be subtitled so you unilingual types could still understand the Message of the Squid.

Ivan knows it’s impossible for a squid to be anywhere near the Rocky Mountains. He moved there for a reason - to get away from any kind of squid. He’s secretly in fear that the message will one day come true because that was one nasty LSD trip and he still gets flashbacks. Especially if he drinks and ole Ivan drinks like the proverbial fish if you’ll pardon the cheap irony.

When he begins suffering from a series of awful nightmares, he knows things are going bad for him. When he begins noticing small tremors in the earth, he gets the hell out of camp as fast as his beat up Isuzu will take him.

The kids, though, they stay at the camp. They ignore the ground shakes and keep working to bang each other other. They do some white water rafting and sing a few awful campfire songs along the way, but mainly they’re each on a quest to dabble in the desires of the flesh. That means lots of boobies and that’s a critical component in a film like this.

Then one day, tentacles begin to appear and grab campers one by one at first. Gradually we work our way up to a spectacle to rival King Kong where the squid erups right in the middle of the main lodge and begins squeezing people so hard they pop like ripe grapes! Some he flings about and dashes to pieces. Then the National Guard’s called in but they can’t make it so the Marines arrive and a huge tank-flinging, Apache-slapping battle ensues.

As you can see, this movie will sink the Titanic’s level of popularity and outshine any other monster movie ever created. Tickets will clearly go for twice the price by scalpers milking the E-bay masses. You guys make it happen and the Oscars will follow!

Welcome back to yet another traipse into the fantastic, horrific unknown that we’ve so lovingly to come to cherish. That’s right, the very weekly feature that you’ve come to set your clock by: Monster Laboratory!

Before we begin, I’d like to point you back in time, back to last week’s entry, the ever
infamous Shapeshifting Android Trolls! As you’ll see when you take a peek, our favorite artist Rey from Illustrated Movie Reviews has crafted a tremendously AWESOME rendition of the beasties that devour in order to transform. Take a look because I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of the art - it’s precisely what I had in mind when I wrote the piece!

Now that you’ve got a glimpse of one of my diabolical fantasies come to graphic reality, let us progress further down the demented path I’ve delighted in rendering for you here this evening. Let us go back centuries in time, to the mud-splattered reality of the old days. Back to Europe during the time of the great Black Plague that brought so much horror to peasants across those lands. Let us peer through the distorting glass of history.

Listen to the clop of horses carrying knights in clinking armor, listen to the village dogs
barking and carrying on long before leash laws. Listen to the merry and unruly children
screech and giggle in the filthy streets, playing with the carcasses of rats and other such childish games I’m positive were popular back in those days. Smell the dirt, the sweat, the endless piles of horse manure buzzing with crop after crop of pestilence-spreading flies! Yes, these were times of sickness and poverty and surely among them were painters, struggling in a newborn medium and trying to convey the spirit of those days as best they could.

We’ll zoom in on the grimey figure of Porlon Grumschnickle, a deathly thin man clad in a crud-coated cloak that maybe once was black. A beady-eyed, greasy-haired savant of sorts, capable of majestic colors by paint only he knew the secret of properly mixing. A guarded, distrustful sort of man with long fingernails and few teeth, fond of wine and women though of no ability to attract even the lowest class of village whore. Yes, Grumschnickle was something of an outcast, frequently pelted with rocks or rotten apples whenever he dared encroach upon the territories of others so mostly he kept in the shadows, feverishly splashing paint upon canvas. He knew nothing of other artists or even that painting was an artform.

Grumschnickle slid down the slippery slopes of madness, over time. He wandered from village to village and nearly always ended up being chased away for fear he might disease the local dogs.

He took to cutting himself and mixing his blood into the paints. This gave his work a rather unique appearance and upon his death these works of art he so ardently strove to create would find themselves in the homes of collectors worldwide. His name would be toasted by nobles as that drank wine that cost more than he ever earned his entire life. Each painting he sold somehow found its way into the home of these art fanciers and eventually even museums.

These days a Grumschnickle goes for well over $200 million and so only the most well-to-do collectors could possibly afford to own one. Those who have them seem obsessed by them, staring for hours into the grim paintings that show people living and dying during the Black Plague. Images so stark and evocative that historians consider them to be likely the most accurate portrayals of life during that era that remain in existence today. The twisted faces, the running sores, the flies feasting on the fluids of the dead - all is shown in reddish shades of sorrow. Grumschnickle’s enchanting artwork far outlived him. Of course, no one knows his real name.

The name they toast is merely what he scrawled on the back of each painting. Porlon
Grumschnickle happens to be a poorly translated English version of what he wrote, but old Grumschnickle wrote in a long dead tongue that no translator on Earth could possibly interpret. He was writing in a magical language of glyphs and what each painting bears is the phrase, "You shall know my madness." As you might guess, each and every collector doesn’t last too many years before tasting the final results of owning the sad painter’s art.

You see, the spell on each painting, activated by Grumschnickle’s blood, causes it to act as an energy sponge. The painting absorbs the focus of those gazing upon it and collects it. As it collects the energy, it seems to grow more vibrant, more intriguing. People stare and stare and the painting grows stronger by the minute. Until eventually, the figures within the painting exit the frame and step into reality. Every Grumschnickle owner who’s ever kept a painting for longer than five years has died a grisly but artistic death at the hands of killers who are never found.

Why are they never found? Because they are artistic avatars summoned by the very people who worship the paintings! Those Black Plague victims leap forth and have their merry way with the art collectors in a gruesome ceremony that often lasts hours, but never leaves any physical evidence. If you think about it, Grumschnickle’s the perfect serial killer, continuing his mad reign down through the centuries from beyond the grave!

There’s no reason why this story should not be made into AT LEAST a book if not a full length feature film. Let’s make it happen, Merry Readers! Let’s make Grumschnickle a household name!

Well, Merry Readers, we come once again to woeful Wednesday and that implies yet another installment of Monster Laboratory! I know what you’re thinking… yes, the rent’s due and no, when she says get milk at the store she doesn’t mean Nestle Quik. Gawd, you people!

 

No doubt you’re curious at to what sort of foul sacrement I’ll offer up for this week’s ritual
of monsterness. So am I. I’ve been so freakin’ busy this week that I’ve not taken the five or six pages of notes that usually lead up to my grand creations. I’m also lying, but you’ll need to use all the tools at your disposal to figure out WHAT I’m lying about! Clever.

I do believe I’ve struck upon something both disgusting and fearful. It’ll make the finest
movie ever, too! Which is good since "poopdidoop" accused me of plagiarism last week in a round-about way over my Mushroom Zombies.

Honestly, I’d not read David Wellington’s take on zombies so I’ll plead innocence on that one. I can’t be expected to read every damned novel in the universe hacked off by some two bit writer! Not saying Wellington’s a hack or a two-bit writer, I’m merely saying that if he WERE I’d have quite a bit more leeway but as it stands I STILL cannot be expected to know everything about everything. If you want an oracle, go read Warren Buffet and put yourselves to sleep.

/end.rant

Alright, now that I’ve tugged that outta my chest, on to this week’s exercise in
pseudo-scientific dabbling. What I’m about to offer you is perhaps the most terrifying vision that’s ever struck my mind. It’s so evil, heinous and disturbing that many of you may not be able to finish the article. I promise not to include pictures, but I *do* encourage you to photochop up a few examples if you’re skilled with Adobe’s magical Photoshop (or, if like me you’re a total cheapass and use the GIMP). I know there are those of you reading this who know how to make marvelous creations and IF YOU MUSTER THE COURAGE TO ACCEPT MY CHALLENGE I promise to display your works right here on the site, okay?

But, Glow, wtf are you getting at? What could be so frightening that I’ll soil this thong I
borrowed from my sister? I hear you, Merry Readers, I truly do. I also think that’s gross.

We open our mind movie on a sunny field in mid-June when all the world’s groovy for elementary kids across our great cornfed nation of America. We’ve got three kids throwing a ball around out there and catching solar radiation like it’s 1982 - but it isn’t 1982 and as a result these little rapscallions may be heading towards an early grave due to their careless lack of sunscreen. Who are these three stars of our mental cinema? Why it’s Kyle (with the obnoxious red curly hair), Melanie (our leggy little slut-to-be) and Justin (a crew-cut snotnose who’s got a strong lisp and will totally pinch you in class when the teacher’s not looking). They have a little conversation that goes something like this:

JUSTIN: Kyle, you’re such a pansy! No one beweaves (believes) in ghofs (ghosts)!

MELANIE: My mom does.

(Remember this is set in modern times)

JUSTIN: You’re mom’s a slut any how!

MELANIE: *glaring* You shut up! Just because me, Theresa, Dylan, Monica and Tyler all have different dads doesn’t mean anything!

*both boys laugh while MELANIE continues to glare*

MELANIE: SHUT UP or I’ll turn YOU into a ghost!

JUSTIN: Whooo. Scawee (Scary)!

MELANIE: Mom says ghosts are just people who haven’t passed over.

KYLE: Passed over what? Like they’re Jewish?

MELANIE: No, dorkstick, like died. Like they passed over into Heaven or whatever.

JUSTIN: Only babies beweave in heaven. Any way, ghofs aren’t scawee unless you’re a weetard (retard) so you guys must be weetards.

MELANIE: You’re just jealous because your dad still works at McDonald’s.

JUSTIN: He’s a manajo (manager)!

KYLE: Manager of what? Chicken nuggets?

JUSTIN: Shut up, dooth (douche) bag, or I’ll tell your sisto (sister) you found her webcam videoth (videos)!

*KYLE blushes, MELANIE looks sympathetic, intrigued*

JUSTIN: So ghofs are the scaweeiest (scariest) thing you guys can think of? Seriouswee (Seriously)?

KYLE: I heard this story once…

JUSTIN: Oh gwate (great), here he goes again!

MELANIE: Let him finish, queerbait!

*JUSTIN’s shocked into silence*

KYLE: Well… My great grandma said that in the Old Country, where she came from before she migrated to America, they have trolls. Kind of like in World of Warcraft, except smaller like the gnomes.

JUSTIN: My Blood Elf’s a level-

*KYLE and MELANIE glare JUSTIN back to silence*

MELANIE: What do the trolls do? Did your Grandma say?

KYLE: Well, she talks kind of funny because of her accent and the fake teeth, but I think she said the eat people. That or they eat pebbles, I’m not sure.

MELANIE: Did she mean the Flintstone’s cereal?

KYLE: I don’t think so. She looked kind of scared to tell us. She says trolls live in
basements and dark places and that you only see them when you’re by yourself. They pick on little kids the most.

MELANIE *shivers*: Maybe they eat spiders and rats, too, then. What do they look like?

KYLE: That’s the scary part. She says that they’re short and stumpy. Real fat and ugly, too, with gross hairs and moles and stuff.

MELANIE: Ew!

*JUSTIN simply watches, wide-eyed, wrinkling his little queerbait nose*

KYLE: Except trolls don’t have their own look. They steal it from the people they kill. Like
if they kill you and eat you then they look like you except all fat and nasty.

JUSTIN: Imagine if you went home and one of them popped out fwom (from) behind the couch and wooked wike (looked like) your mom or something! I’d fweak (freak) out!

MELANIE *shudders*: Oh my god, I hope I never see one!

But she will, Merry Readers, she certainly will. For the sake of our motion picture, Melanie MUST confront the trolls in her own home. Of course, these aren’t the trolls that Kyle’s dementia-drunk grandmother was babbling about. No, these nightmare are not from Hungary, they’re from - outer space! In fact, they’re not actual life forms as we currently understand them. Instead, they’re products of an extra terrestrial race who are unable to survive within our atmosphere. As a result, they turn to their own hybrid of magic and science to create artificial life forms that ‘research’ our fragile species. We come to call them: Shapeshifting Android Trolls! Or SAT for short.

Here’s how Rey from Illustrated Movie Review pictures them!

Now the SATs might’ve been harmless, except the aliens really weren’t looking to preserve life while they carried out their research. They noticed that unlike their kind, creatures on Earth ‘feed’ on things by stuffing the food into their mouths. They designed their trolls to operate in a similar fashion, cramming humans into their mouths and allowing them to break down in the stomach area. The stomach of an SAT is designed to sift through the physical matter of the digesting human and beam back the data in alien-friendly laser code. Then, the data’s used by the troll’s internal systems to attempt to re-create the person it just gorged on. This means that Kyle’s grandma wasn’t far off: each meal alters the troll’s appearance to resemble the last victim.

Imagine, if you will, a fat, short and totally gross version of any person you can think of.
When I say fat, I mean similar to Fat Bastard in the Austin Powers movies. A sludge-like blimp of a person no taller than three and a half feet. Perhaps they’ve got bulbous, misshapen eyes and oddly arranged teeth - use your creative powers here! Obviously they’re ungodly strong and cannot be "killed" so they’ll be able to rampage through our world terrorizing children for ages to come!

I’m kind of creeped out now so I’m going to go into another room where the lights are on.

 

Until next time, this has been GlowStormLion reminding you that children and the elderly should never, EVER be left alone together.

Wednesday’s almost gone but if you’re on the West Coast or the insurgent state of Arizona, then it’s not yet midnight and that means I got this week’s Monster Laboratory in on time! I took a long time because I almost decided on Giant Killer Snakes, but at the last moment I swerved into deliciously disgusting new territory. I believe you’ll find this week’s monster to be the most disturbing that I’ve yet set up. I’ve taken a classic horror mainstay, zombies, and bred in a bit of my own evil genius to create a new species of zombie that I promise shall re-invent the zombie movie as we know it today!

Without further banter, let’s take a trip down into the Lab and learn what abomination I’ve put together. I’m not going to give you the passkey, I’ll unlock the vault myself and now you’re in a dimly lit corridor strung with bare bulbs. It’s low budget but that’s what we’ve got to work with. Follow me and be sure NOT to touch anything. Ignore the piercing shrieks from that door over there, it’s simply a longterm experiment and the world’s currently unprepared to view that particular simian at this point. We make a sharp turn and I believe you can see him there through the glass once I’ve turned the lights on, but first take a gander at this:

 

Looks harmless enough, right? And it is. That’s a ‘powder puff mushroom’ and it’s quite similar to those that grew in the Pacific Northwest neighborhood Red Hawk and I used to play in. We had bark dust in my front yard and combined with the damp, mild weather it proved to be fertile grounds for these types of mushrooms. They start as little round balls and then swell over time. Fascinating, really.

However, the real joy came when it was time to play war! We’d gather these suckers up and toss them at one another as makeshift grenades. You see, upon impact they burst open and a dust cloud of spores is released. For poor kids like us, these were wonderful for imitation explosive devices and hurt a hell of a lot less than pine cones, too!

In case you’re unaware, spores are the ’seeds’ of mushrooms and being fungus, mushrooms take root just about anywhere that’s got soil (preferably decaying matter) and moisture. They’re incredibly primitive plants that are wildly effective at scavenging the environment and growing themselves in colonies. In fact, certain kinds of mushrooms actually only bloom in odd cycles like once every five years or something like that. Even today there’s a great deal of mystery and intrigue that surrounds the humble mushroom.

So, I decided that if mushrooms could spread themselves by spores what a terrific way to create a monster! Imagine spores, spread wildly by wind when these mushrooms explode in the forest. The spores are carried into the oral and nasal cavities of humans where the moisture there gives them all they need to begin to grow - INSIDE THE HUMAN BODY! Then, having taken root and siphoning off the necessary oxygen and fluids, they take firm hold and work towards blossoming.

While that, in itself, seemed horrific enough, I’m going a step further. As you’re most likely aware, certain mushrooms produce halleucenogenic effects - they alter the mind. By interacting with the chemistry of the human body (in fact, intoxicating it as literal poison), these mushrooms alter the perceptions of the individuals who consume them whether on purpose for recreational use (ie, "shrooming" as drug users call it) or accidentally. Either way, the effects are profound and generally last several hours. But that’s if you EAT the mushrooms. What if the mushrooms were reproducing inside the body? Far more profound effects! And if those mushrooms caused far stronger effects, perhaps the infested individual would be prone to disturbing things such as: cannibalistic tendencies!

These sinister mushrooms could spring up in a highly unusual cycle, blossoming maybe every 200 years. Thus our movie would show a group of people out in the woods near a small town. Perhaps enjoying the ‘great outdoors’ and going on a hike. One of them discovers this small circle of unusual looking brightly colored mushrooms. They check their field guides but there’s nothing even remotely similar in the pages. One of the group points out that they might’ve stumbled across a brand new species that’s completely unknown to science! They decide not to disturb the shrooms and instead, set about taking photographs. One amateur photographer leans in close wanting to capture the exquisite details of a particular bulbous mushroom. As he gets in on it, POOF! it explodes and reels backwards, choking on the dust it released. The other hikers freak out but then it all becomes quite hilarious. He gets some more pictures and they continue on their way.

Later the group returns to the small village where they began their hike. They’re proud of themselves for not exploiting nature to make a quick buck or a splash of fame. They swear each other to secrecy, agreeing to check on the mushroom patch from time to time and enjoy a private piece of the woods only they know about. Of course, you’ve got the one girl who’s a sneak and after every one’s left the village to return to their home town, she lingers and harvests a few of the mushrooms. If she gets big money for them from scientific researchers, she won’t need these lousy friends anyways, right?

That, then, is how it all begins. The guy who got a lungful of dust continues on his merry way and it’ll be weeks before anyone notices changes in him. The sneak girl accidentally inhales a smaller burst of spore cloud herself while harvesting the mushrooms, but she goes on to contact someone over the internet who agrees to pay her several thousand dollars for the fungi. She’ll never make it to the secret meeting to receive her money, though, because the guy who’s offering that payment is the same guy who started the patch in the woods! He’s an evil genius of a teenager who not only cooked up these genetically altered mushrooms, he also hacks satellite information to find the girl’s house. He waits until she’s not home and then he gathers up his precious creations. We won’t see him until far later in the film, of course, so that’s all I’ll say about this guy.

Weeks roll past and finally the effects begin to show in the photographer guy and the sneaky girl. They seem a bit glazed over, their friends complain. It’s like they’re not listening, they’re too busy staring at strangers. They lose their appetites - for normal food that is. Within a few days of the first effects, these two no longer bathe or change their clothing. They quit sleeping altogether and they no longer are capable of holding conversations. And the cough - a terrible, wracking cough that grosses everyone around them out. The mushrooms have blossomed inside them and each cough now spreads fresh spores. Before long, the entire town will be sick before the government’s had time to take notice of the infestation.

Then it’s nationwide news. People growing gradually delerious and then turning sharply predatory. Not the lumbering dead goons we’ve seen time and again, these are filthy living people who care about nothing but the decimation of their own kind. They dig up graves to gnaw the bones, they invade hospitals to finish off the sick and dying. If it’s living and human, they’re obsessed with killing it. If anything, their mental powers are heightened. They’ve become killing machines who’ll use any and all weapons at their disposal to do away with the unifested. Knives, guns, even ramming vehicles through shopping malls! The carnage won’t quit until they’ve annihilated anyone who won’t house the mushrooms within their body. It’s as if the fungus itself has declared war on the human race.

That sums it up for me. Utter chaos and blind prejudice all rolled up into one big ball of gore. A planet crawling with zombie ninjas, that’s what I’m proposing. Now it’s time for you Merry Readers to get out there and drum up the financial resources to make this happen! Mushroom Zombies will give the world nightmares for decades to come! Move over Romero, there’s a new breed invading the zombie genre: Mushroom Zombies!

Oh, and did I mention how the fungus’ life cycle culminates? They overcrowd their host and it results in a messy explosion with the person’s body splattered far and wide.