Somehow I let Friday the 13th go by without comment. To rectify the gross oversight, here’s a short story, written in October of 1995 (that’s 22 years ago, for the folks who don’t like math):
The Weird Singing Draculas
By Andrea Lynn Schultz
Once upon a time, there were these three Draculas, who wanted to sing. Their names were Weirdo, Dodo, and Idiot. One day, they went to somebody’s house. The other monsters said they’d be back for them. At night the Draculas started singing the scariest thing they knew. It was “We will, we will, rock you, sock you, pick you up and drop you.” The person in the house got so scared he ran away. The Draculas laughed and laughed and laughed until they cried. One day the man came back. At night they started singing “We will, we will rock you, pick you up and drop you.” The man ran away again.
It was finally Halloween night. Finally the guy came back. He had a plan to get the Draculas out of his house. He dressed up as Frankenstein and went into his downstairs bathroom and waited for them to start singing. When the Draculas started singing the man came out of hiding and started singing “I will eat you when I’m ready. I will give you one second to run away from me.” Right at that moment the man’s black cat came running downstairs and hit a fake witch on a broomstick. The fake witch hit a switch that turned on a big Halloween set! There was a goblin, a vampire, and another witch! The vampire’s head hit a bucket with a gooey monster, covered with slime and it fell out. That ruckus made the fake ghost and bat make noise. The pumpkin was lit so it had red glowing eyes. The Draculas remembered what the other monsters said when they left. They got so scared that they fainted. When they wake up, they ran so fast that all that you could see of them was a blur! The man was so glad, but the real monsters came and they ate him. The monsters take over the house. So that’s that.
The End
Tag Archives: monsters
The X Denials
I just finished watching the first season of the X Files, after years of planning rather nebulously to give it a shot. I can trace my interest back to eighth or ninth grade, when my family rented and watched a couple of episodes. I specifically remember one episode in which a nice old lady meets her untimely demise at the hands of her tenant, though it’s the image of this guy’s teeth falling into the sink that really stuck with me. At the time I couldn’t handle the show (in fact I found out, years later, that I was the reason we stopped watching; I was both sorry and glad at the time that we stopped, but it would have shamed me to know it was my fault), but I’ve always wanted to re-explore the horrifying intrigue I associate with the X Files.
Twenty-four episodes on and I certainly like it (it’s entertaining, which is what I look for in, you know, entertainment), but I wouldn’t say I’m “into” the show. Not when the basic premise makes me laugh and/or roll my eyes, depending on the situation. I just can’t get on board with the super-secret government conspiracies. Not that governments don’t lie to their people – history, for one, says otherwise, and I know enough of human nature for another – but the fact is you cannot keep a secret between that many people for that long. Someone would blow the whistle eventually, either purposefully or accidentally. You can’t kill everyone.
That and, though magically omniscient (and able to clear top-secret lab facilities in point six seconds), they cannot, for some reason, kill off Mulder and Scully, despite the fact that Mulder commonly breaks into secret government facilities whose military personnel should be trained (and legally allowed) to remove trespassers with extreme prejudice. The last time I checked the military doesn’t laugh off breaking-and-entering. They don’t even yell. I’m pretty sure they just shoot. Mind you, if they did, the show would go something like this:
I’ve actually come up with my own pet theory about this. At first I suspected that Mulder was basically the government’s version of that crazy conspiracy-theorist Uncle everyone seems to have, the kind you humor because they served in Vietnam and Mom gives you a look across the dinner table if you don’t. Unfortunately, there are too many extraneous scenes that don’t involve our crime-fighting duo that imply otherwise. Fortunately, after Scully started cottoning on to the fact that everyone and their moms know that Mulder is extremely gullible because he wants to believe this stuff, I realized that the X-Files is the government’s version of a long-standing prank. Forget humoring the crazy Uncle, they’re going to encourage him to go on elaborate cross-country chases. Why? Because between all the political wrangling and the wars that constantly break out across the globe, it’s nice to have something to laugh about. Oh that rascal Mulder’s at it again.
My favorite episodes are the straight-up monster-of-the-week mashups. The season starts off with two aliens are among us episodes, which were entertaining but not particularly frightening, so I thought I was in for a long wait until we got to teeth falling into the sink. But then the third episode started in. Camera focuses on people. Camera focuses on an empty storm drain. Camera focuses on people. Back to the empty storm drain. At this point you know the storm drain isn’t empty, but I still wasn’t prepared for that moment when you suddenly realize there are eyes – in fact, an entire man – standing in that drain. I watch the X Files after the sun has gone down, alone and with the lights out, but that episode drove me out of the room to the kitchen (where I made myself a smoothie, as any creeped out person would do). I watched the rest of the episode with the light on. I’m going to need to get safety locks for all my toilets.
Special shout-outs to the two episodes that surprised me: the logging one and the Montana one. First off: Eco terrorists. And not romantic we-love-nature-and-we’re-totally-nice-guys-the-rest-of-you-evil-tree-cutting-capitalists-suck terrorists. Both loggers and tree huggers ended up hoisted on their own petards, as it were, and I appreciated the fair shake. Same thing on the one set in Montana. I was immediately on my guard anyways, and I stared rather suspiciously at the screen when it started off as a Rancher vs. Reservation situation, but that ended up being an interesting background to the real story. I particularly appreciated the rancher’s son’s speech on life and death, and the proper pronunciation of “coyote”: “Kai-oat,” not “Kai-yo-tee,” in these parts. Even if his dad did pull out a few “this heres” and “git goin’s.”
(Also, Mulder shot off the snout of a stuffed bear; I don’t know why I thought this was so funny, but I did.)
