Ghost Stories, Dir. Levi Morgan, Short Film Review by Case Wright

Posted on October 17, 2024 by casewright

Hello Horror Fans! My midterms are over and in 7 Months I will be digging for buried treasure in the Great State of Texas! BOOM!!! I wanted to celebrate my midterm conclusion with a review of a promising horror short film. The premise is intriguing: Ghost Stories, but the Ghosts are telling them. Now, this will either be great or truly truly terrible….. BRB. I was WRONG!

The film reminded me of Andrew Bird’s “Sisyphus”
Listen Here:

Wasn’t that great? Yeah, it was! The idea of just letting things go. Whatevs. Like that attitude, they didn’t really put in the effort to make the film pop. The stories just weren’t that funny.

The ghosts are in Walmart white sheets with holes cut out. We’re talkin 100 dollar budget so far.
The first story is a the ghost intends to scare a newlywed couple by hiding under the bed and then jumping out; instead, he’s trapped under the bed as the couple has 2 hour relations! Kinda Funny.

The second ghost story, I really couldn’t follow it. They did not put the extra time to make sure that the story and joke worked. The film headed into “C” territory and I was hoping that maybe it’ll have a strong finish? No. The ghosts like the film are mediocrities. Do the ghosts team up to scare someone? Yes, but it fell as flat as Sisyphus’ boulder.

This short did have a beginning, middle, and an end. They definitely spent time on it. The writing was not the greatest, but they tried to make the jokes and work and not beyond their proposed narrative. In that context, the short was pretty good.

Sadly, as Andrew Bird sang in “Sisyphus”:
“History Forgets the Moderates” Yes, you have to let art breathe and go places that are new, but that takes A LOT of work and they were NOT up to that commitment.
I think like “The Moderates” of Bird’s song, this short will be forgotten.

Art Profile: The Covers of Ghost Stories

Posted on October 16, 2017 by Dazzling Erin

From Wikipedia:

Ghost Stories was a U.S. pulp magazine that published 64 issues between 1926 and 1932. It was one of the earliest competitors to Weird Tales, the first magazine to specialize in the fantasy and occult fiction genre. It was a companion magazine to True Story and True Detective Stories, and focused almost entirely on stories about ghosts, many of which were written by staff writers but presented under pseudonyms as true confessions. These were often accompanied by faked photographs to make the stories appear more believable. Ghost Stories also ran original and reprinted contributions, including works by Robert E. Howard, Carl Jacobi, and Frank Belknap Long. Among the reprints were Agatha Christie’s “The Last Seance” (under the title “The Woman Who Stole a Ghost”), several stories by H.G. Wells, and Charles Dickens’ “The Signal-Man”. The magazine was initially successful, but began to lose readers, and in 1930 was sold to Harold Hersey. Hersey was unable to reverse the magazine’s decline, and Ghost Stories ceased publication at the start of 1932.

The covers below are all from Ghost Stories. Where possible, the artist has been credited:

by Edward Dalton Stevens

by Jean Oldham

by Edward Dalton Stevens

Ghosts in October

Posted on October 10, 2015 by Dazzling Erin

Ghost (photographed by Erin Nicole)

It’s October and a great time to appreciate all that ghosts do for us. The haunting covers below were created for Ghost Stories, a pulp magazine that published 64 issues between 1926 and 1932. All the stories in Ghost Stories were credited as being “as told to.”

Horror On TV: Ghost Stories Episode 2 “Last Flight Out”

Posted on October 19, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

When I first decided to feature episodes of televised horror, I very much wanted to include the classic Twilight Zone episode, Nightmare At 20,000 Feet. However, the full episode wasn’t available on YouTube and that was truly unfortunate. Along with being a scary episode of classic show, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet was all about flying, which is something that scares me.

However, as I was searching through YouTube, I did come across an episode of Ghost Stories entitled Last Flight Out, which also deals with this very primal fear that so many of us have. It’s no Nightmare at 20,000 Feet but it’s effective in its own way.

As for Ghost Stories, it was a horror anthology series that aired from 1996 to 1997 on the Fox Family Channel. As you can probably guess, each episode told a story about ghosts and, in the great anthology tradition, each story ended with a twist. Each episode was narrated by Rip Torn.