Eerie, Indiana Food Fest

[froodle]

Eerie has it’s fair share of great places to eat. There’s the Eerie Baitshop and Sushi Bar, the Eerie Bus Terminal and Supper Club, Everything Corn, Grandma’s Kitchen, the Dragon of the Black Pool Restaurant and, of course, the ice-cream counter at the World o’ Stuff.

If you’re more of a homebody, maybe you prefer twenty-year-old bologna sandwiches or buckwheat pancakes made from a ForeverWare recipe. Perhaps a celebrity couple called off their wedding a few days before your birthday and you bought their cake on sale, or you just like adding the prefix “Swedish” to everything you cook, Marilyn Teller-style.

Maybe you really enjoy toast made in a haunted toaster, or maybe you hate it whether or not it comes with bank-robbing ghosts. You could be a member of a corn-worshipping cult whose banquets consist of Cornade (or Cornade Lite), huge bowls of fresh-made popcorn and, of course, hot buttered corn on the cob.

Is your favourite snack a jumbo-sized bag of chocolate milk balls (“the balls that go moo!”) or just a carton of the Eerie Dairy’s finest scavenged from the site of another fatal milk-truck accident? Do you feast on a giant plate of ribs the night before a human sacrifice or serve up a portion of space noodles and moon sauce while you search for UFOs?

Whatever your preferences, it’s the tenth of the month, and that means it’s time for our Foods of Eerie Fest. Are you enjoying a refreshing Black Cow after a long day investigating haunted structures, or baking cupcakes decorated with ravens and eyeballs? Share your recipes, post your pics, get out those Eerie-themed travel mugs and head off for a picnic in some ill-advised supernatural hotspot. Eat something spookily delicious and tell us all about it!

A Foreverware Timeline

[friendof_dorothy]

So I've made a timeline of events related to Foreverware, and froodle has informed me that it may be of interest to the comm (fandom? I don't really know the right words) so...Here we go!

( Read more... )

Spooky Showdowns fight roster by MaxFunnies

[froodle]

I mean, personally I think Dipper and Mars are more likely to be teaming up rather than battling it out, but okay.

Tanis podcast, season 3, episode 12: "Between There and Here"

[froodle]

Has anyone listened to the latest episode of Tanis? It involves Nick heading off to Russia to investigate the Tunguska event, and I have to admit it, I was excited. Sadly, Ned does not put in an appearance, nor does an early iteration of the Loyal Order of Corn, and between Nick's... constant... pauses... and his relentless shilling of pointless crap, I don't see a crossover ending any way other than Dash walking off in disgust while Nick fails to complete a sentence in under an hour and Mars spending the whole time trying to unmask him as an agent of The Donald.

Today's Qwertee shirt is totally something Simon would bring home from the shelter...

[froodle]

"Cathulhu" is today's tee on https://t.co/LdSWa6Ss6H ReTweet for a chance at a FREE TEE! pic.twitter.com/8HOkKP7sFL

— Qwertee.com (@qwertee) August 9, 2017

Eerie, Indiana triple drabble: Shampoo

[froodle]

Syndi Teller, swathed in a thick, fluffy bathrobe the colour of the summer sky, stepped out into the hallway. Her bare feet left damp prints on the short-pile carpet as she padded downstairs, using a small hand towel to pat her dripping hair as she walked. Abruptly she stopped, running her fingers through the wet and tangled mass, and cursed.

"Shampoo bubbles again?" asked her brother from his seat on the couch. He didn't so much as glance up from his magazine as he spoke.

"Yeah," said Syndi, turning back towards the staircase. "I think it's this new brand Mom's been buying, I can never get all the lather out on the first try."

"You know," said Marshall, setting aside his comic book and turning to look at her over the back of the settee, "There could be a way around it-"

"Marshall, if you're about to tell me that the ghost of Hans Schwarzkopf is hanging about in our shower and I need to sacrifice a plate of bratwurst to get him to keep his foamy leavings out of my hair, I don't want to hear it."

Marshall looked hurt.

"I was going to say, use the massage setting on your hair before you put the shampoo on, so it's really wet," he said. "That's all."

"Oh," said Syndi. "Sorry."

Marshall laughed.

"I was just messing with you," he said. "It's probably a nuisance imp jamming up the water flow. Put some beer in the bottom of Mom's mixing bowl and leave it outside the stall next time you're in there. It should fall in and drown."

He went back to his magazine. Syndi stood for a long moment, one hand resting lightly on the bannister, staring at the back of his head.

She turned, heading for the kitchen.

( Read the rest of the Teller Family History here )

Eerie, Indiana triple drabble: Belt Match

[froodle]

Algernon the Invincible, all six foot eight inches and three hundred pounds of him, glistened beneath the hot white glare of the spotlights. His exposed skin was slick with baby oil and he stood tall and proud in his costume of gold and purple lycra. Around him, the screams of the crowd faded to a dull roar. Old Scratch slumped limply against the ropes, his horns askew, his face streaked with black and red where his makeup had run. Behind him, a rectangle of pulsing light hung in the air, the heat haze coming from within it making the image swim and buckle.

Algernon rushed forward, seizing the labouring devil with both hands. The other-worldly portal grew brighter, the temperature rising to almost unbearable levels as Algernon pushed forward, straining against his opponents' infernal strength. Behind the incandescent glow, something moved, dark and amorphous, and for a moment Algernon believed he could hear more than just the noise from the audience. He frowned, the motion pulling his gloriously waxed moustache down, and shook his head to dispel the troubling thought.

He lifted the King of Hell, his knees bending under a burden that seemed at odds with the Adversary's slight build, and pitched him through the shrieking gateway. The light snapped off, and Algernon was alone in the ring, illuminated only by the pale blue-green glow of the emergency lighting.

Satan was gone. The entrance to the Netherworld had been closed. The fans cheered and whistled and stamped their feet, while home-made placards waved madly in the murky, smoke-filled air.

"That was so fake," said Syndi Teller, pausing by the front door. She gave the television an incredulous look, shaking her head at the two boys who still knelt in front of it.

"Shows what you know," Marshall shot back.

( Read the rest of the Teller Family History here )

( Read the rest of the Trusted Associates verse here )

Jaunty Jersey Devil courtesy of Nightmare365

[froodle]

Love seeing the Jersey Devil places we visit...

Very Important Eerie Question: What Pokemon GO team would everyone be on?

[deifire]

I was talking about this with evilinsanemonkey last night and today decided to bring this very important question to the entire Eerie fandom: If people in Eerie played Pokémon Go, what teams would they be on?

A basic guide to the teams and philosophies at this link

( Thoughts so far under the cut )

BBC Culture's 2016 best-of round-up

[froodle]

Olivia Howitt, picture editor:

TV: Inspired by classic sci-fi, Stranger Things lived up to the hype – with a cracking synth-heavy soundtrack, it took me down a wormhole of childhood nostalgia, from ET to Eerie, Indiana.

TalkHorror's A-Z of Horror TV

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Eerie, Indiana

Marshall is a little boy that’s finding it hard to adjust to his new surroundings, seeing as how his parents moved the family from their home in New Jersey, all the way to a place called Eerie, Indiana. As you’d expect from the name, there’s weird things going on in this town, and Marshall embarks on adventures that further prove this point.

Geekspace Presents: the best anthology horror movies and tv shows

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There is a fundamental flaw with most multi-film horror storytelling. A single 90-minute film can usually get around it, but when a horror film series gets into the the fourth or fifth sequel, we have to face the problem of who the hero of the story is. You see, if a hero is faced with a supernatural killer, and they are successful in vanquishing their foe, then the story has ended. If the killer is resurrected for the sequel, you either have to have the same hero face them down a second time, making for a dull repetition, or you have to bring in a new hero to vanquish them, which would only serve to reveal how easily the supernatural killer can be killed; if anyone can do it, what’s the threat? The dramatic focus shifts away from the victim, and our sympathies begin to lie with the killer. And while I do revel in cheesy horror sequels as much as the next gorehound, I do get pangs watching a story arc form around a horrible murderer.

The best ways to tell a horror story are actually the shortest. A brief tale where someone is stalked, killed, or driven mad by an extreme situation, and are left triumphant in the best scenario, or dead in the worst. I’ve read Stephen King’s 1000-page horror tome It, and I have to say that by prolonging the tortures, the book becomes less scary. Far more scary is a ten-minute campfire story told at night to a group of skittish listeners. As Shakespeare once said, brevity is the soul of wit. A scary story is going to be scarier if you don’t necessarily know the hero or the villain, and anything can happen in the brief time you’re allotted.

Which brings me to the topic of this week’s list: Anthology horror. There are a few movies and TV shows in the world that have sought to capture this witty and scary brevity. Movies and that have, rather than stretching a horror movie into 90 minutes (pretty much guaranteeing cynical audience predictions about who will die next), tell three or four shorter movies together, connected by a storyteller of some kind. I love this approach to horror movies, and have always liked the horror form. The TV shows tend to do it even better, as it allows them to write whatever stories they like, disregarding distracting ideas like continuity and accumulating character arcs. They can just have a rotating bevy of popular actors, creative stories, and even vastly differing tones.

Here then is a look at ten pieces of anthology horror, five TV shows and five movies, that exemplify the form best.

Starting in the late 1980s, there seemed to be just as many anthology horror series for children as there were for adults. Thanks to the immense popularity of the Goosebumps books, conceived by author R.L. Stine, there was a great period in the early 1990s where kids got horror shows for themselves. It was during this time that we saw the TV version of “Goosebumps,” “The Nightmare Room,” “Are You Afraid of the Dark?,” “The Haunting Hour,” “So Weird,” and “Bone Chillers.”

The latter of these was probably my favorite, as “Bone Chillers” was conceived and directed by Richard Elfman, the mad genius behind weird-ass cult films like “Forbidden Zone” and “Shrunken Heads.” If you’ve seen his films, imagine that same sensibility applied to a low-budget horror series, and geared toward kids, and you’ll have a show that’s perfect to get high to.

The best of this wave of children’s horror, though, was probably “Eerie, Indiana,” a show about a young boy (Omri Katz) as he discovers increasingly bizarre occurrences in his small town. While the show did follow one young boy, I got the distinct impression that the creators tried really hard to leave him out of the picture as much as they could. It was the monsters that they really wanted to focus on. But that’s the thing about the show: It wasn’t just about monsters. It was about things like hyper-intelligent robots, or a mad being who keeps track of “lost” items.

In the shows’ best episode, a cursed record turntable begins to influence the mind of a local boy. He turns into an asshole metalhead, much to chagrin of his family. Our hero soon discovers that the record is implanting subliminal messages into the head of the listener, depending on their personal insecurities. At the end of the episode, we learn from the turntable that the boy has been abused by his father. It’s actually a brilliant revelation, and is not cheap in the very-special-episode kind of way that TV shows for kids usually pander to. It’s on DVD, and your better video stores will have them. Rent them.

September 20, 1991 Santa Cruz Sentinel reviews Eerie, Indiana

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'Eerie, Indiana,' NBC's oasis of quality in a strange year.

WELCOME TO EERIE, Indiana. Population: 16,661. Things look normal on the surface here. In fact, this is where advertisers come to test products on a supposedly "average" small town. Look closer, though, and things seem a bit ... strange. The Postman carries a gun. There's a guy living down the block who looks and talks just like an aging Elvis. A large shaggy monster - Big-foot? - rummages through trash cans in the early morning hours. And behind closed doors, a mother who sells plastic "Foreverwear" containers vacuum-packs her twin sons in for a good night's sleep each evening, preserving their youth.

It's kind of a "Twin Peaks" for kids and it's all about what happens when a young boy moves to town and begins discovering all the strange things going on here. Directed by Joe Dante, the show has just enough satirical bite to attract adults and enough spooky thrills to wow the kids.

The catch is that you never know whether all the strange stuff is going on in the kids' head or if it's really happening. It may be the best new show of the season. But, as always here in Eerie, things don't quite make sense. Instead of giving the show a prime slot, NBC has placed "Eerie, Indiana" at 7:30 p.m. on Sundays, opposite the mega-hit "60 Minutes" on CBS. A suicide slot where no show has survived in recent years.

How the Towns of Bland, Dull, and Boring Made Their Lame Names Work for Them

[froodle]

Last year, three little, oft-maligned towns across the world decided it was time to transcend their stigma and use their unfortunate names as a force for good. United by common pain—and the prospect of a little extra tourism—the municipalities of Bland, Australia; Boring, Oregon; and Dull, Scotland teamed up to create what they call the League of Extraordinary Communities, but which many have dubbed the Trinity of Tedium. Although part of the union is about reclaiming the joke of their names and having a good laugh themselves, it’s also just one of many strange bids by small towns to bring in a few extra dollars. And it appears to be working, which we can only hope means we’ll see more such confederacies soon.

For those unfamiliar with the villages, here’s a quick primer: Bland, full name Bland Shire, is a town of 6,400 in the dead center of Australia’s New South Wales state. Named after William Bland, one of Australia’s first medical practitioners and a convict shipped to the continent after killing a man in a duel in then-Bombay, the town now sports a small gold mine, but not much else. Boring, Oregon, the largest of the trio with 13,000 residents, is named for early settler William H. Boring, a Civil War Union solider. Home to a center for Seeing Eye Dog training, and some of the worst business puns known to man, residents have been known to post signs reading “the most exciting place to live” around town. And little Dull, Scotland, with just 84 residents living along one street in the Tay Valley, is by far the smallest of the group, but among the richest in history, featuring many historic Celtic and Christian sites alongside its rapidly declining modern structures and shrinking population.

Before Bland completed the trio last year, Boring and Dull linked up in 2012 after a Scottish woman on a cycling holiday in America passed a sign for Boring, and decided to tell the local Community Planning Organization about Dull. The result was a Dull & Boring Facebook page for residents to communicate together and some basic plans for cooperation and mutual promotion as a tourist duo. By doing so they followed in the tradition of Toledo, Ohio and Toledo, Spain, who became the world’s first sister cities based on an unlikely kinship in 1931.The union spawned 522 American communities with commercial and touristic ties to diverse and unexpected towns around the world. Last year, Neil Pokoney, mayor of Bland, heard about the partnership between Dull and Boring and decided he’d like to get in on the fun and profit—possibly after two Bland citizens visited Dull in 2013 and decided the union seemed like a great way to both channel and challenge the fun other Australians poked at them.

( Read more... )

Best Science Fiction Books reviews the best sci-fi tv shows of all time

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39: Eerie, Indiana

The weird small town is a classic for science fiction, from Twin Peaks to Super 8, there's little a writer loves more than getting to play with the inherent strangeness of isolation in the modern age. Eerie, Indiana takes full advantage of that, giving us a bizarre little town that is full of strangeness.

The stories are fun, funny, and more than a little post-modernist, with self-referential humor flying all over the place, including an episode where a script for the show Eerie, Indiana, makes everyone behave as if they're making Eerie, Indiana! The series took some silly premises and made them fun, and sometimes scary, but always worked with the feeling of a big screen feature film mentality in an hour-long television form. This sense of inner bigness may have come from the fact that the series featured a lot of incredibly talented filmmakers directing and writing each episode, like Joe Dante and Bob Balaban, and early appearances from stars like Nikki Cox and Tobey McGuire!

Why it's on the list:

It only got a single season, but Eerie, Indiana managed to gain a strong following around the world!

AVPGalaxy forum thread on good shows cancelled too soon

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Eerie Indiana

This show was pure gold. It was spooky, funny, fresh and full of great satirical wit. It featured a stand out performance by its young lead, had a vastly varying tone from edpisode to episode, and had an overall feel I have never seen before or since.

And it only lasted a season and a half.

In this season and a half we had an uprising by dogs against their human masters, the uncovering of a conspiracy where it turned out all misplaced items are stolen by special operatives to help the economy, a demon named Donald Chagenlagenhagenflagen getting everyone in the town to buy things on credit so he could take their souls when they fail to pay, kids being transformed into zombies by donning reading glasses, a tornado named Old Bob that attacked a town every year that was only appeased by a picnic being thrown in its honor, and the list goes on and on.

If it is any consolation, one of the final episodes did serve as a decent ending, though I really would have loved to see what other ideas the writers could have cooked up.
It was genius.

ElizaVictoria on the appeal of Super8

[froodle]

My brothers did not like Super 8, and I think I understand why. Super 8 as an adventure, as a coming-of-age tale, is adorable and pitch-perfect, but as a mystery monster movie, it’s 90 minutes of meh.

But I liked it. For some reason it reminded me of Eerie Indiana. (I miss that show.)

So how’s your long weekend?

PsychoBabble's A-Z of Twin Peaks

[froodle]

I is for Influence:

During a decade that has seen high-quality shows like “Deadwood”, “The Sopranos” “The Wire”, “Six Feet Under”, “Mad Men”, and “Breaking Bad” dominate cable, and relatively complex and intelligent shows like “Lost” are allowed several-season runs on network TV, it’s easy to forget what an anomaly “Twin Peaks” was way back in 1990. A series co-created and often written and directed by a filmmaker as daring and artful as David Lynch was a major breakthrough in the medium that gave us “Full House” and “The Facts of Life”. The seismic influence of “Twin Peaks” struck immediately. Its critically and culturally vital first season had barely ended when CBS went to work on its own quirky North-Western fantasy. Joshua Brand and John Falsey’s “Northern Exposure” may have dropped the strong sinister undercurrent of “Twin Peaks”, but the series retained the dreamy atmosphere, supernatural elements, off-kilter humor, and little-town appeal. “Northern Exposure” owed such a deep debt to “Twin Peaks” that its creators were moved to acknowledge this via a weirdly tacked-on parody-sequence during the first-season episode, “Russian Flu".

“Northern Exposure” was just the first of the early-‘90s parade of “Peaks”-inspired series. There were “strange things happening in suburbia” exercises like “Picket Fences” and the kid-oriented “Eerie, Indiana”. There was the creepy, rural “American Gothic”, and there was “Wild Palms”, a self-consciously odd miniseries also created by a well-known cinematic auteur: Oliver Stone. Without question, the most successful of these series was “The X-Files”, which picked up on the “FBI Agents investigating weird phenomena” theme of “Twin Peaks”. The X-Files, themselves, are suspiciously similar to Major Briggs’s “Project Blue Book”. The show even starred “Peaks”-alumnus David Duchovny (minus the lipstick and high heels) and featured guest spots by other former TP residents, including Don Davis, Michael Anderson, Michael Horse, Frances Bay, Kenneth Welsh, and Richard Beymer. Still, “X-Files” creator Chris Carter, claimed he was not particularly influenced by “Twin Peaks”. More recent show-creators have been more forthcoming about the influence of “Twin Peaks” on their work. David Chase has often cited the use of dream sequences in “Twin Peaks” as a major inspiration for “The Sopranos”. The British sci-fi series “Torchwood” paid direct tribute to “Peaks” during the “Combat” episode, which featured a real estate agency called “Lynch/Frost”! Other recent shows that most certainly would not exist if it hadn’t been for “Twin Peaks” include sci-fi mystery “Lost”, soap opera-parody “Desperate Housewives” (costarring Kyle MacLachlan; Sheryl Lee was originally cast to play the dead woman who narrates the series, but was replaced by fellow "Peaks" alumnus Brenda Strong), and the upcoming “Happy Town”.

Anomaly Flats by Clayton Smith

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Somewhere just off the interstate, in the heart of the American Midwest, there’s a quaint, quirky town where the stars in the sky circle a hypnotic void….where magnetic fields play havoc with time and perception…where metallic rain and plasma rivers and tentacles in the plumbing are simply part of the unsettling charm. Mallory Jenkins is about to experience the unique properties of this place for herself – she’ll have no choice, considering the collapsed bridge that rerouted her urgent and mysterious trip to Saskatchewan, forcing her straight into the heart of town, where her Impala has an inexplicable breakdown. She intends to stay overnight - just until the auto repair shop can make the fix in the morning and send her on her way. But Mallory will soon encounter Dr. Lewis Burnish, a scientist who’s studied the town for a dozen years and knows more about its strangeness than even the locals do. And when she accidentally-on-purpose creates his evil clone, she’ll set off a series of events that could unleash the ultimate evil upon the town and wreak havoc on the world at large.

Life in a small town is like that sometimes.

Welcome to Anomaly Flats. Have some waffles, meet the folks, and enjoy the scenery…and if you happen to be in Walmart, whatever you do, don’t go down aisle 8.

Don’t EVER go down aisle 8.

( Read more... )

Wilde Life webcomic

[froodle]

From a Halforums discussion thread on people's favourite webcomics:

Wilde Life http://www.wildelifecomic.com/

X-Files meets Eerie Indiana. A guy lives with a ghost from the 50s and has a teen werewolf for a reluctant friend. Everybody in town seems to have a secret.

Gizmodo: The Top 50 Scariest Television Episodes of All Time, Part 1

[froodle]

49) Eerie, Indiana, “Just Say No To Fun”

What it's about: In this kids' series, Marshall discovers that the school nurse is turning his fellow kids into zombies who are incapable of having fun.

Why it's scary: It's the spooky glasses, and the hypno-eye exam, and the general sense of repression and mind control, that make this a particularly nasty episode.

1998 Bram Stoker Award Nominees & Winners

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Work for Young Readers:

"Bigger than Death" by Nancy Etchemendy, Winner
The Dollhouse that Time Forgot (Eerie Indiana #11) by Mike Ford
The Angel Chronicles: A Novelization (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Vol. 1) by Nancy Holder
Hungry Ghosts: A Novelization (The X-Files No. 9) by Ellen Steiber

FatPie42 reviews Eerie, Indiana

[froodle]

Eerie Indiana (1991-1992)

Why the hell was there only one series of this? Such a great way to finish the series of Joe Dante's work since this has everything that is great about his work. Created in between Gremlins 2 and Matinee it feels like this was Joe Dante's golden era. I actually had seen the first episode about a family who keep themselves preserved in tuppleware before.

The leading role of Marshall is played by Omri Katz, who would go on to take the lead role in Matinee. However, real credit needs to be given to Justin Shenkarow who does a great job as his partner in crime, Simon. I was convinced that I'd seen Jason Marsden, who plays the mysterious Slash X towards the end of the series, in something before, but he actually mainly does voice work for cartoons and videogames (and appears to doing pretty well with that too).

Eerie Indiana is a comedy about a place that is supposed to be the most ordinary boring place in the world, yet Marshall and Simon discover it is actually the weirdest place on the planet. Bigfoot, Elvis and telepathic dogs are all fairly typical features. Each episode riffs on a new horror theme and sometimes references to classic horror movies are just randomly inserted into an episode. The whole thing feels like a cross between the randomness of Twilight Zone and the "kids solving stuff that adults miss" formula from Buffy. Essentially it's a pretty similar format to the first Buffy series (only Eerie Indiana came out more than 5 years earlier) and for absolutely no good reason, there's no second series of Eerie, so we have no idea if it would have progressed in a similarly successful way.

The series has way more hits than misses, it regularly had me laughing out loud and even though Dante only directed 5 episodes out of 19, it feels like he had his stamp on the entire project. (Heck, he even has an acting role in one of the episodes directed by someone else.)

If you love Joe Dante's work like I do, you really need to check this out.

A+