13 Spooktacular Free Movies
January 12th, 2006
John ‘the Cool Ghoul’ Zacherley is still going strong at 88, and updated his site with a message for the holidays:
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It’s been busy for me. I spent some time digging up old relatives in Transylvania. It’s so difficult putting them back. They just don’t like to stay buried.
Then My Dear and I went on a second honeymoon to tour the pyramids of Egypt . . . from the inside. She wanted to see her mummy again, and, well, I’m too nice to tell her, “No.”
...
I never got to see Zacherley’s show on TV, but he collaborated with Rob Zombie on the Halloween Hootenanny CD—which remains one of my all time favourites.
I think it would crazy fun to host a monster chiller movie show, full of campy costumes and spooky old films. I have an second-hand tuxedo from when I hosted the screenings when I was in film school, and a box full of monster masks and halloween stuff. If I ever decide to try my hand at video podcasting, maybe I’ll do that. A monsterific version of RocketBoom. Until then, in honour of the coolness that is Zacherley, here are 13 spooktacular films you can download for free from archive.org. If you want to get them on DVD, the pictures will take you to Amazon.
Enjoy the show… whatever you are.
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The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962)
Starring: Jason Evers, Virginia Leith
Director: Joseph Green
After a car crash, a man keeps his wife’s head alive in his laboratory. As if this weren’t enough, an evil beast pounds and screams from a locked room adjacent to the lab.
More Info -
Bride of the Gorilla (1951)
Starring: Barbara Payton, Lon Chaney Jr.
Director: Curt Siodmak
The owner of a plantation in the jungle marries a beautiful woman. Shortly afterward, he is plagued by a strange voodoo curse which transforms him into a gorilla.
More Info -
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921)
Starring: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt
Director: Robert Wiene
Dr. Caligari’s somnambulist, Cesare, and his deadly predictions.
More Info -
Carnival of Souls (1962)
Starring: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist
Director: Herk Harvey
After a traumatic accident, a woman becomes drawn to a mysterious abandoned carnival.
More Info -
City of the Dead (1960)
Starring: Patricia Jessel, Richard Barlow, Christopher Lee
Director: John Llewellyn Moxey
A young coed uses her winter vacation to research a paper on witchcraft in New England.
More Info -
Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)
Starring: Antony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland
Director: Roger Corman
American crook Sparks Moran sees a chance to make a bundle when a Caribbean island has a revolution. He plans to help loyalists (and the national treasury) escape on his boat, then kill the men and blame their deaths on a mythical sea monster. Trouble ensues when the real monster shows up!
More Info -
The Mad Monster (1942)
Starring: Johnny Downs, George Zucco
Director: Sam Newfield
Dr. Cameron has succeeded in his expierments with a serum which will turn a man into a wolf-like monster and is ready to avenge himself on the men who caused his professional failure.
More Info 
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Starring: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea
Director: George A. Romero
A group of people hide from bloodthirsty zombies in a farmhouse.
More Info-
Nightmare Castle (1966)
Starring: Barbara Steele, Paul Muller
Director: Mario Caiano
A woman and her lover are tortured and killed by her sadistic husband. The pair return from the grave to seek vengeance.
More Info -
Nosferatu (1922)
Starring: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim
Director: F.W. Murnau
Vampire Count Orlok expresses interest in a new residence and real estate agent Hutter’s wife.
More Info -
Prehistoric Women (1950)
Starring: Laurette Luez, Allan Nixon
Director: Gregg C. Tallas
See the invention of fire! See the world’s first swan dive! See the prehistoric beauties battle the giant caveman!
More Info -
Rogue’s Tavern (1936)
Starring: Wallace Ford, Barbara Pepper
Director: Robert F. Hill
The body count rises, the phone lines are dead, and the visitors discover that they are trapped inside the inn with no way to escape.
More Info -
The Wasp Woman (1960)
Starring: Susan Cabot, Anthony Eisley
Director: Roger Corman
A cosmetics queen develops a youth formula from jelly taken from queen wasps. She fails to anticipate the typical hoary side- effects.
More Info
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
Can You Digg It?
January 10th, 2006
Hello to everyone visiting from Digg.com and Del.icio.us today!
After publishing the X-Ray extension for Firefox last week I wasn’t exactly sure how to let people know about it. I applied to have it listed at addons.mozilla.org, but they’ve recently updated their policies and no longer accept extensions with external update URLs. That meant I’d have to republish the extension, and I hadn’t really wanted to do that unless I was adding some new features as well. So for the time being, mozilla.org wasn’t an option.
This morning I was checking out the new links at digg.com—a great social bookmarking site that’s very nicely designed too—and thought “what the hell—I’ll submit the link and see what happens.” While I figured that submitting a regular blog entry would probably be bad form, and wouldn’t have very many other people “digg” it (bookmark it), I really thought some people might like the new extension. The people I’d mentioned it to over on the blambot forum all seemed to like it, so I set up my new digg profile at and submitted the link.
I thought I’d get a few extra visitors and a little more feedback. I got a ton.
Today, the X-Ray Extension for Firefox was on the Digg.com homepage and currently has almost 1,000 people digging it. Del.icio.us users must have seen the link on Digg, because the extension also made it’s way to the del.icio.us popular page. Even better than the number of visitors was the great feedback. Lots of people emailed to say they liked the extension, and Thom Wetzel was nice enough to suggest a CSS fix for the background on the site! Thanks everyone. 
iTunes Meme
January 9th, 2006
I still haven’t rebuilt my iTunes library since the major hard drive failure during the summer (hey kids—remember to backup!), so my digital music collection isn’t as extensive as it used to be. Here are some hilights from the music I’m currently listening to, to go along with the iTunes Meme many bloggers are posting about right now.
Sort by song title:
First: 1959 by The Sisters of Mercy
Last: You could feel the sky by Boards of Canada
Sort by time:
Shortest: Kaini Industries by Boards of Canada, at 0:59
Longest: And then there was silence by Blind Guardian, at 14:06
Sort by artist:
First: Apoptygma Berzerk – Electricity
Last: Wumpscut – Hate is Mine
Sort by album:
First: A Night at the Opera by Blind Guardian
Last: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips
Top 5 most played songs:
1. Unicorns L.A. by My Barbarian
2. DaddyuWarbash by Skinny Puppy
3. Eclipse by Apoptygma Berzerk
4. Lucretia by The Sisters of Mercy
5. Circling Overland by Front 242
10 Most recently played songs:
1. A Pain that I’m Used To by Depeche Mode
2. Millenium by Killing Joke
3. Burning Heretics by Apoptygma Berzerk
4. Lightning Man by Nitzer Ebb
5. Louise by Clan of Xymox
6. Pro-Test by Skinny Puppy
7. Unicorns L.A. by My Barbarian
8. Mirror Mirror by Blind Guardian
9. Precious by Depeche Mode
10. Lovesong by Snake River Conspiracy
While not part of iTunes, I’m listening to various Rob Zombie CDs in my discman for the walk back and forth from work. No iPod for me—I’m so retro.
End of the Road for PV Comics?
January 8th, 2006
I just noticed that PV Comics, the webcomic collective I was helping with in 2004, seems to have closed up shop.
We here at PV Comics would like to thank you for the support and readership we’ve enjoyed since our launch two years ago. We’re taking a step back for a while, and wanted to take a second to thank everyone involved – creator and reader alike!
It looks like you can still read all the comics that were published there, as well as check out the sites to most of the 20 listed PV Comics alumni.
What you won’t be able to see anymore are some of the CSS techniques I used when putting the site together. It was the second site I designed using the CSS Imagemaps technique that I developed into an A List Apart article called Night of the Image Map. The first site was Nate Piekos’ Dead Ends, Massachusetts which gave me an excuse to use the spooky theme.
New Firefox Extension: X-Ray
January 6th, 2006
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to create an “interesting script, plugin, extension, or widget.” I didn’t think I’d write a Firefox Extension only six days into 2006, but after writing about using the CSS :before and :after pseudo elements to create CSS Curly Quotes, it got me thinking about other uses for that technique. I thought that wrapping the elements on a page with the actual tags from the sourcecode might be a good tool for learning and debugging, but wasn’t sure how to go about creating an extension. Fortunately, I found a great tutorial at roachfiend.com and with a little trial and error, I’ve finished my first extension.
The X-Ray Firefox Extension let’s you see the tags on a page without viewing the sourcecode.
Install X-Ray Extension for Firefox
One installed the X-Ray command is available by right-clicking as well as in the Tools menu. When applied to a page it can help you see how the document was constructed without having to go back and forth between the sourcecode and the page in your browser. Is that list made of li dd or p elements? Is that an h3 tag or just some bolded text? X-Ray shows you what’s beneath the surface of the page.
While I create webpages all the time, there’s something about writing a piece of code you have to install that’s very satisfying. Even better was finding that it was actually something I’d find helpful myself.
For version 0.5 the current list of supported tags is: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, ol, ul, li, dt, dd, font, div, span, blockquote, pre, a, b, i, strong, em. If some other people find this extension useful, I’ll probably add support for more tags, and possibly experiment with adding some other enhancements as well.
Update
By request from the nice folk at digg.com here’s a screenshot of the extension in use:
Donations to The X-Ray Tip Jar are greatly appreciated.
Feed Me Seymour
January 4th, 2006
If you’re subscribing to the feed for the site, you’ll see some changes today as I’ve started using Feedburner to add some extra features. The feed is now translated on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with the feed reader you’re using. CSS is also used to change the feed into something a little nicer looking when you preview it in your browser.
I’m happy to see the term “feed” being used more frequently and acronyms like XML, RSS, ATOM (is that an acronym?), RDF and so on being used less. Asa Dotzler from the Mozilla team led sums it up nicely:
I’m encouraged that we’re further distancing browsers from the awful “RSS” as a feature name and icon identifyer. We don’t call web pages “HTML+CSS+JavaScript Pages” and we don’t identify them in the browser using little icons containing “HTML” and “CSS” acronyms; We shouldn’t do it for feeds either.
So we’re beginning to see people standardize on the term “feed” and even on the image used to represent a feed. The Internet Explorer team has decided to use the same icon as you see in Firefox, and FeedIcons.com is providing a wide assortment of graphic formats to help encourage it’s use.
