Ghost Graduation

Trying to find a good spooky movie on Netflix is always something of a challenge. So, when we saw that a movie stupidly titled “Ghost Graduation” had over four stars, we were unconvinced. (The best horror movies on Netflix usually have a rating just under three stars, for some reason.)

But we watched it.

And it was fantastic! It was like, kind of, if Beetlejuice and The Breakfast Club had an affair and left their baby in Spain to be raised by rabid Bonnie Tyler fans.

I would love to know why Spain churns out such satisfying ghost stories. I thought The Orphanage was tremendous, intensely satisfying, and utterly horrible.

There are so many ghost stories I love–The Orphanage, The Haunting of Hill House, The Red Tree, Lake Mungo, The Devil’s Backbone–that I keep thinking I would like to try my hands at one. Not that I don’t already write ghost stories, but something spooky and sad and lovely.

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I Don’t Even Like Zombies

I tend not to find zombies, the current pop culture zombies we have anyway, very scary. But holy shit, last night I had the worst zombie dream. I woke up early and took the dog for a walk (which was thwarted by the bog, but whatever) to clear my head.

We watched Battle Creek and I had mixed feelings. I love Dean Winters. I loved the whole Battle Creek police department. But I hated the FBI guy and the show doesn’t really feel very Battle Creek specific. They could benefit from doing a week-long ride-along with my uncle and learning where people hang out and what they talk about. Believe me, it’s just highly improbable that anyone could move to town–like the FBI guy did–and not have simply everyone he meets telling him about cereal and their connection to it.

It’s like when you live here and you know people in the music industry and in healthcare. You live in Battle Creek, someone works at Kellogg’s or Post. It’s a company town, pretty much. One of my dead uncles even lived in the Post company houses.

We were also laughing because it looked like their establishing shots were all taken within like five blocks of each other. So, yeah, clearly, they came to town. And clearly, they did not venture very far out of downtown. Which, considering how dominated by Kellogg’s the downtown is, makes the complete absence of cereal even stranger.

So, it’s quirky–the coffee cakes–but not quirky in the ways you’d expect–mentions of cereal, Sojourner Truth, the Seventh Day Adventists, etc.

I spent some time recently, too, listening to Nebraska as a whole album, not just stumbling across random songs from it. God, that’s a good album. But the person who had the idea that it’s a better, albeit more depressing, album if you listen to the songs in backwards order is right.