(Blah! I have an octopus!)
Here’s a picture from this windy but fine Autumn morning.
Vince Guaraldi is a genius. “The Great Pumpkin Waltz” is almost too good of a song to be on the soundtrack for a cartoon. Lucky that this cartoon is pretty legend, too.
Okay, if I have to pick my favorite horror movie – not the best horror movie, just my favorite; I gotta go with Friday the 13th.
Happy Halloween, Ya’ll!
(The short story “Something Out of a Horror Movie,” by Mario Aliberto III appeared on February 27th, 2025 in Milk Candy Review.)
(Image from Milk Candy Review)
When I was a teenager, and well into my twenties and beyond, I spent hours debating with my friends about the mechanics, tropes, and clichés of horror movies. How most horror movies, more than any other genre of film, are made up of an uncountable number of rip offs and copies of more successful horror movies. For myself, as a person who loves awful movies, bad horror films are an entertaining gift that just keeps on giving.
So, when I started reading Mario Aliberto III’s “Something Out of a Horror Movie,” I was intrigued as to what he was wanting to accomplish is this flash fiction story. It reads like it was written but someone who loves the awful character clichés of the genre. What I appreciated in this piece was that as I started reading it, I couldn’t put my finger on if this is a story about characters in a horror movie, or if they are characters in “real life” that find themselves in a horror movie situation, or if these are characters that have seen too many horror movies and went to that places because of the situation they were in. By doing that, structuring the story that way, left me feeling off balance which played very well to the theme of the piece, and ultimately the climax of the story.
But what I enjoyed most was that this story took a stock clichéd character that I have seen in millions of horror movies, and made me think of her differently, and also made me view her actions in a fully well-rounded way for that character. Aliberto does this rather effortlessly, and compactly. The last paragraph is just great.
I will never look at the Bad Girl trope character the same way again.
