31 Days of Halloween - Day 31

HJere is my final Halloween cut paper piece made for this countdown. It is based on an old postcard. The original art will be soon made available for purchase at my art store.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 30 - Movie

Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) haunted by his childhood experiences at the Overlook Hotel is a wreck of a man trying to put his life together. He takes a job at a hospice where he is able to to his his shining to help send the dying peacefully on their way.  He finds himself in psychic contact with Abra  (Kyliegh Curran)teenage girl also possessing the shining. The two seem destined to never meet until terrible events become known to Abra. A group calling itself The True Knot is crisscrossing the country feeding on children who shine, and now they have Abra in their sites.

Doctor Sleep (2019), based on the novel by Stephen King is a sequel to The Shining. I liked the book quite a lot, even though I went into it thinking The Shining didn't really require a sequel, and still skeptical when Dan Torrance ended up having his life impacted by yet another type of supernatural beings, but King really pulled it off. Mike Flanagan, who wrote and directed this film adaptation realized that more people would be familiar with the movie version of The Shining than the novel version, so chose to adapt this sequel to fit Kubrick's movie. Kubrick made some changes to King's story that made a straight up adaptation of King's sequel to his own book impossible, but Flanagan is to be commended for finding ways to incorporate scenes from King's sequel into this adaptation that remain true to the spirit of King's book and Kubrick's movie. Flanagan was also able to replicate authentically sets and costumes from the 1980 film and even threw in a number of Easter eggs to King's Dark Tower series of books, and a nod to Frankenstein (1931).

The heart of this film is its characters and the actors portraying them. This is an exceptional cast, and their performances in this completely engrossing and carefully paced film make this a must watch. I've seen this movie three times now, and it is one of my favorite genre films of recent years.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 30

Here's part two of my visual tour of Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France. To see part one simply scroll down to yesterday's midnight post.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 29 - Book

Ghostland by Edward Parnell. William Collins. 2019 This is not a travel guide to haunted England, but a travelogue of the country and of personal history. Edward Parnell who has loved ghost stories from an early age, traverses the country to sites connected with various authors of ghost stories, the stories themselves, and even BBC and cinematic adaptations. His travels often intersect with places that he'd lived, or visited on familiy excursions, and the memories associated with those trips often entangles with those of the ghost stories. Not all of the ghosts are literary. Parnell has suffered devastating loss, and this book is as much a love letter to those who left him as it is to the stories that inspired him. This was a very engaging read. Even if, like myself, you've read countless ghost stories, this book will make you want to return to old favorites as well as seek out some you may have missed. I'm also really dying to see all those BBC adaptations, especially of the M.R. James stories. I've known about them for ages but have never seen any. The trick for me with Ghostland is not knowing where to shelve it. I actually have a number of regional ghost tour books, but I'm not sure this belongs with them, or with my collections of ghost stories.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 29

The last of my travel photo posts takes us to Père Lachaise Cemetery covering 110 acres in Paris, France. It truly is a city of the dead and is filled with amazing monuments, crypts and tombs. There are also many notable people buried there. You can find out its incredible history and the names of its most famous inhabitants at the official website. This post will be in two parts. Part two will appear tomorrow.