The Staff Of Popshifter’s Halloween Issue 2008

Big Bang Day: The Legendary Pink Dots’ Plutonium Blonde

By Hanna

The Paard, The Hague, Netherlands
September 13, 2008
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Rue Morgue’s Festival of Fear: Toronto FanExpo 2008

By Less Lee Moore

Being a tremendous fan of things Halloween- and horror-related, I look forward to the Rue Morgue Festival of Fear each year at the Toronto FanExpo. It’s a genuine thrill for me to look at original artwork, drool over horror movie posters, create my ongoing DVD wish list at the Anchor Bay store, and watch people wander around in costume.
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Five More Instruments Of Evil: Horror Movie Picks

By Less Lee Moore

Here are five more horror movie picks, just in time for Halloween viewing!
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Kings of the Wild Frontier: An Analysis of Music-Related Halloween Costumes

By Hanna

Every music nerd knows dressing up is serious business. Halloween is the big night for us to pull out the stops on our [insert favorite obscure artist here] costume, and gives us a chance to show it off outside of gigs and poorly lit clubs in the harsh light of the work and family circle.
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Halloween Horror Favorite: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

By Emily C.

“Some places are like people: some shine and some don’t.”

True confession: I have never read Stephen King’s The Shining.
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Look Who’s Growling, Too: Our Deep, Abiding Love of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby

By John Lane and Less Lee Moore

Hands-down, Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby is one of our favorite horror movies of all time. We love it as much for what it doesn’t do as for what it does do. It seems that there’s a storm cloud of creepiness that settled upon this movie before, during, and after which makes it all the more fascinating. Like a lot of other things from the late sixties, it is a sinister relic from a haunted time. So here are our reasons why Rosemary’s Baby—behind and in front of the camera—is one of the most enduring, complex horror films ever committed to celluloid.
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New Orleans Is Halloween

By Lisa Haviland

The first time I drove my new-resident ass down Pine Street in 2000, dodgin’ craters, I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell I’d done, even as I knew I belonged in this witchy, subtropic gingerbreadland. Halloween is much better as an ethos, a lifestyle, than a holiday whose significance ebbs with age, and Halloween had manifested in the form of this secret city. Constraints didn’t exist in New Orleans the way they did elsewhere—to where they swallowed you, to where people somberly did their day-to-day and duty trumped joy after all. The thick air vibrated me right out of regular America’s orbit.
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Acid Leaves No Trace: Ten Morbid Melodies from Garbo’s Daughter

By Kristin Messina, Mandy Mullins, and Jaime Sparrowhawk

This issue, the lovely ladies from Garbo’s Daughter share their favorite songs about death, including car crashes, motorbike crashes, violent beatings, and getting poisoned!
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The Music of the Scares: A Soundtrack for Halloween

By Less Lee Moore

Halloween conjures many images: candy, costumes, decorations, haunted houses, and horror movies. While these are all integral parts of the holiday, there is one factor that is often overlooked but which is vital to embracing the spirit of the season: music.
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