It was sometime around midday when Nils Gustafsson’s body was found on the shore of Lake Bodom. The 18 year old was alive, however, despite his broken jaw and the concussion. 

The three people lying next to him were not.

In the early hours of June 5th 1960, Nils, Irmeli Bjorklund, Tuulikki Makiwer, and Seppo Boisman were attacked by an unknown person armed with a knife whilst camping at one of Finland’s most serene tourist spots.

12 years later, a former suspect confessed to the crime. The local kiosk keeper was known to be irritated by the presence of the youngsters in the area and it was assumed he took his rage into his own hands.

He alleged that he did indeed commit the murders in a suicide note before drowning himself in the lake that overlooked them. His wife has since provided evidence that refutes this.

This tragic story is still under investigation to this day, with the sole survivor being put up for trial for killing his own girlfriend and her friends himself. But what makes this tale quite so terrifying is that we’ve heard this story before.

We’ve read it on r/nosleep, we’ve heard it at a sleepover, and we’ve told it round the campfire. We’ve even seen it on the TV, too.

It’s been 41 years since the terrifying events at Camp Crystal Lake were recounted in the horror classic Friday The 13th (1980). But what happened at Lake Bodom is not the only time the stories we tell around the campfire actually happened. And right by the crackling logs, too.

Today we unmask the dark inspiration behind Friday The 13th and make some smores at the most haunted campsites in the US, each with their own tale as terrifying (and tragic) as what happened at Camp Crystal Lake.

Originally posted by vhs-ninja

Keep reading

If you try hard enough, you can blame just about anything on video games.

Violence, murder, sexism, racism; every ill in society can be traced back to the pixelated gangsters, medieval knights, and fantasy creatures roaming your laptop screen. Most school shootings have been traced back to the joy stick, or at least the world one enters into when they press ‘play’.

Horror films have experienced a similar treatment.

Whilst they might not put you behind the trigger of an imaginary gun, you can see the effects of it being pulled.

Fervent gun supporters in the US have always slumped the blame of mass shootings and other horrific tragedies on the video games and the movies that play out these scenarios. But most of us can agree that having access to the weapons to carry out these events is actually the underlying cause.

(Well, I mean, it’s not underlying. Like it’s right f*cking there.)

Regardless of this, horror films and video games in the wrong hands can traumatise unstable people and lead to tragic events. And they already have. Horror films are often inspired by true stories. 

But sometimes, they serve as the basis for reality, too.

Originally posted by grunge-horror

Keep reading

It’s been a hard year.

Easter was cancelled, the Olympics is off the table, and it’s starting to look like Christmas is going to be a quiet one.

Halloween is facing a similar fate.

But just as much as we are pressing pause on trick-or-treating and going to the pub in a pair of cat ears, there are plenty of ways to make up for the misery.

Yep, you can get spooky and socially distance.

All Hallow’s Eve is the one night a year that the boundaries between the spirit world the mortal realm blurred - and horror film binges have always neatly fit into how we celebrate it.

Our favourite streaming services have picked up on this. They know that this year people will be opting for a night in with a cult classic and bowl of burnt microwave popcorn.

(I mean it’s all just kernels at this point.)

So, to make sure you have the happiest Halloween you can, I’ve compiled the best horror movies on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

They’ve been organised into a number of categories - including family-friendly films in case you don’t want to traumatise you or any children - and each have a link to the trailer so you can wet your appetite for somethin’ seriously spooky.

I’ve put an asterisk (*) next to my personal faves, too.

Happy Halloween, kids!

Originally posted by halloweenatdusk

Keep reading

This week, I wanted to try something *new*. Inspired by Jaime French who does these hilarious recap/bitch-fest videos ‘bout classic 90s ‘n’ 00s films, I thought I could do my own hilarious reviews of films. You know how hilarious I am.

But, I don’t know, I kinda felt like I was nicking her idea and not being ori-gi-nal. Then I remembered that a blog like this could solve a problem I face a lot with the horror genre: I don’t always like to watch horror films.

They’re a commitment. They scawy. 

I don’t always want to force myself to watch a movie full of jump-scares and freak myself out, and other days I’m just not in the headspace to be immersed in some of the gory issues they cover. As you can imagine that makes being a horror blogger, uhhhh, well, impossible.

So here’s the plan, Stan - I’m gonna take one for the team. I’m going to write a fully-fledged recap, review and analysis of classic horror films so you don’t have to sit through the crap ones or hide behind the sofa for the traumatising ones, and we can just soak in our favourite genre together.

Now, when I first considered doing this blog series, I thought I’d review the last horror film I saw: The Wicker Man (1973). But I quickly realised it’s hard to really review something you last saw months ago - you need to connect with the vibe, pick up on mistakes and give a detailed view of it backed up by facts. So, obviously, I thought I’d catch it on Prime, right? While the ‘73 flick wasn’t available for free, the ‘06 one was.

Yes, one of the most infamous horror films ever produced featuring Nicolas Cage and a whole lotta bees, the poster child of so-bad-it’s-good movies.

In today’s review, I’m going to recap the plot, deep-dive the good and the bad of The Wicker Man (2006), and finish up with whether it’s worth a watch.

But first, let’s start with a spoiler-free review, so you can consider whether you want to watch it and then come back to this post.

While I don’t hate this film and think it had buckets of potential, I’m not sure it’s worth a film night with dimmed lights, surround sound and microwave popcorn. It’s a pretty un-engaging, gentle watch, even if you love Nicolas Cage and memes.

1.8/5 stars

Keep reading

I decided to challenge myself this week: I’m going to write a blogpost for the second Saturday in a row (given I’m posting this on a Wednesday, I didn’t make it - but I was close!). A feat I was able to manage for literal years until about eight months ago, but that’s a story for another time. And when I’ve had a drink.

To motivate myself to get started, I wanted to find a really interesting topic. And since last week’s post was about Silent Hill, ghost towns were on the brain. For some reason, it wasn’t until after I posted it that I remembered about basically the most famous ghost town of all time:

Chernobyl, of course.

But when I began my research for the post one humble Wednesday evening, I stumbled across something else I’d forgotten somehow:

Chernobyl’s in Ukraine.

You see, I’m torn on this one. I don’t know, I feel like I’m propping up a macabre history of Ukraine that involves me wittering on about the ghost workers of reactor 4, completely ignoring the fact that its citizens are actually fighting a war over there? It’s a bit like writing an article about Candyman and not talking racism about in America.

So, I decided I’m going to try to write this blogpost - but I’m really going to try to do it right. The story of Chernobyl is integral to the history of the Soviet Union, and the invasion of Ukraine this year will unfortunately fall on the same timeline.

Fact is, Chernobyl isn’t a place crawling with ghosts and spooky stories. This is a man-made horror, and most would agree its far more terrifying - and tragic - than any tale of the supernatural.

Let’s start with the history of Chernobyl - before the accident

Like most eastern European cities, a lot of Chernobyl’s history is about how frequently it changes hands. In the 13th century, it was just a crown village of Lithuania’s Grand Ducy. By the 16th century, it was part of the Kingdom of Poland. In the 18th century, it was part of the Russian Empire. And it was in that century that it’s tragic history began.

For two hundred years the city had been a prominent Jewish community, and as soon as the 18th century it was a major centre of Hasidic Judaism. But it faced a wave of pogroms by extreme nationalists (riots that typically involved massacring specific ethnic groups) in the early 20th century. Throughout the first few decades, the city was taken back by the Polish Army, and then went back to the Red Army before finally being incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Only decades later, the Jewish community faced tragedy yet again during the Holocaust.

But it was in the second half of the century that Chernobyl became a household name. In 1977,  government commissioned the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, the first in Ukraine. The first reactor was built in 1977, with three others following shortly after. It generated about 10% of Ukraine’s electricity before the 1986 accident, but interestingly enough prior to that event it faced a whole host of crises.

In 1982, a partial core meltdown went unnoticed for several hours, releasing a signifcant amount of radiation. And in 1984, “serious incidents” occurred in two reactors (the KGB documents were only declassified in April ‘21, so I think that’s all we’re gonna get).

Now, I was going to give a description of the surrounding area of the plant before the accident in 1986, like whether there was a hospital, a couple of schools, how much housing and other amenities. And we know that there were these things - the intrigue surrounding Chernobyl is that there are all these abandoned building to visit at one’s own peril. There’s even a funfair, apparently. But no one’s actually given any account of what life was like before the accident. That being said, I’m pretty sure there was a relatively well-developed community that centred around the employment the plant provided.

26th April 1986

It started with a routine safety test. A routine safety test that caused an unexpected power surge and a lot of steam build up. Steam build up that caused explosions. Explosions that blew reactor 4 apart.

The 1000 ton roof of the reactor is shot off into the sky. Walls and equipment cave in. Fires begin. Within five minutes, firefighters have arrived, unaware of the impact of the radiation and wearing no protective clothing.

A day later, residents are finally told they are being evacuated from Pripyat (the nearest settlement) and surrounding towns and villages. They’re told it’s temporary. Another day passes, and the outside world becomes aware that something is wrong: radiation is detected in the atmosphere in Sweden that they trace back to the USSR - they confirm an accident has happened, but give no details. Only spy satellite photos show the extent of the mysterious accident and its damage.

The next month, a huge cleanup begins, involving nearly a million people, including bulldozing villages and culling animals contaminated by the radiation.

Throughout May workers continue to carry out measures to minimise the spread of the radiation, like installing the sarcophagus (a concrete and metal structure to encase what’s left of reactor 4). 14 years later, the final working reactor was shut down.

The impact of the accident

Chernobyl is astounding. The statistics are jaw-dropping, it’s like my brain can’t compute that this happened and this will stay like this for a very, very long time.

There was seven times more radiation released at Chernobyl than created by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Radioactivity spread as far afield at France. Today, it is largely considered the worst disaster in the history of nuclear power generation.

That being said, our estimates of the impact of the tragedy are probably a bit cloudy: some sources claim two people were killed in the first explosions, others state 50. In 2005, the UN predicted a further 4,000 will die (which is probably a different number now, unfortunately) as a result of radiation exposure. Official documents from different authorities all put forward clashing statistics, each as tragic as the next. And some say people as far away as Moscow were reporting signs of radiation poisoning.

We think about five million citizens of the former USSR were affected by the disaster, and today the Ukrainian government (well, at least prior to the invasion, not sure how these systems are running now) pays over 30,000 women widowed by the disaster benefits.

But most staggerlingly, Chernobyl will be unsafe to live in for the next 20,000 years, according to today’s scientists. Where will humans be in 20,000 years? Will they still exist? Will we still have record of what happened in this place? Will our descendants thousands of years in the future develop urban legends of this mysterious place where people go and get ill? Or will medical science have developed to a place where we can limit the impact of radiation or cure cancer?

In 2006, Gorbachev - the leader of the USSR at that time - claimed that Chernobyl was “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union”.

So, what’s Chernobyl like today?

Your first thought is “abandoned”, right? Empty buildings, swathes of vegetation, crumbling roads with the debris and litter of four odd decades ago still being blown across it? In most cases that’s true.

But even in the exclusion zone, where it’s illegal to live, about 150 people have flouted risk to live their old lives. And they regularly have visitors from so-called ‘dark tourists’: people that visit locations where the most horrendous human events have happened, like genocide, war and natural disasters.

Although I wouldn’t necessarily encourage anyone to try this kind of vacationing, I do understand the desire to visit such a location.

The peculiar sights of the abandoned city

While civilisation decays, nature has taken over

It’s the trademark aesthetic of a ghost town: being overrun by forests, bushes and weeds. But according to studies with soy beans, plants can become stronger in radiation: they weigh more, they take up water faster and they show signs of “protecting” themselves against radiation. Within three years, vegetation had recovered and breathed life back into the region, like the spread of the Red Forest.

The Red Forest was dense woodland consisting of pine trees from which the needles, when poisoned by the radiation, turned red. What was once a wasteland soon regenerated and is now full of silver birch. And all this vegetation has helped the local wildlife flourish.

The mutant monsters of Chernobyl?

Of all the urban legends surrounding it, one-eyed birds and two-headed dogs are among the stereotypical images conjured of the region. According to one study, the genetic mutations of animals increased by a factor of 20. But there are few reported physical mutations, most of which only include partial albinism.

In fact, Chernobyl is actually known these days for its huge populations of wild animals - including lil’ puppies. Dark tourists are advised not to pet the wild animals, no matters now cute the dogs are, because of the radioactive particles in their fur.

Wolves are seven times as abundant there than non-radioactive zones (and are supposedly mating with local wild dogs), and moose and wild boar have taken over the area. Even an endangered breed of horse is making a comeback, due to the lack of human activity. And as recently as 2014, they had the first brown bear sighting there in over a century.

Dark tourists have created the horror movie aesthetic

As much as the tragic backstory to Chernobyl sounds like the perfect urban legend, the rumours surrounding it have largely been put in place by non-supernatural forces: that means us.

A classic example of this is the number of creepy dolls that have been left on abandoned children’s beds in attempt to create Insta-worthy photo shoots. Fact is, what happened in Chernobyl doesn’t need legends of ghosts and long-lost spirits, nor conspiracy theories, to rouse fear in all of us.

We can see what it would really be like if some apocalyptic incident, like nuclear war, took place. And how well the rest of the world apparently gets on without us.

Originally posted by carlagiguno

What if you woke up one day and everyone had just disappeared?

No white noise from cars roaring down the motorway. No clatter of people putting out their bins. No yelling from that about-to-get-divorced-please-get-on-with-it couple down the road. Just silence. The population of your entire town vanished into thin air.

But by far the most terrifying thing about this scenario is that it’s happened. Ghost towns (and cities or villages) are a very real fact of life, often attributed to natural disasters or a slump in economic activity.

This inherent fear has gone on to inspire many urban legends, campfire stories and horror films. In fact, it’s the basis for one of the most infamous horror franchises that defined the survival horror genre.

Today, we’re talking about Silent Hill.

Originally posted by hhellboy

Keep reading

As spring finally settles in and makes way for a glorious British summer (*insert joke about rain, I guess?*), it’s time I commence my annual hobby of dreaming about adventurous things I never actually get around to doing.

But this time, I thought if I shared my plans - including a full list of where to go, the route to take *and* how much it’s gonna cost ya - someone would as least be able to be adventurous for me.

And hey - this time it’s on you!

I’m probably going to be spinning out a few of these this summer, including a haunted pub crawl and a haunted house road trip, so you best be staying tuned.

Buckle your seatbelts, kids. It’s gonna be a wiiiillllld ride.  

Originally posted by jamesmaygif

Keep reading

Japanese horror films are world renowned for their artistic prowess, intricate stories and folkloric-inspiration. But no one really talks about the latter. From my research for previous blogposts, I’ve fallen down many a rabbit hole and gotten lost in ancient stories that inspired our favourite scary movies, like The Ring and The Grudge.

So, when I saw that a paranormal Japanese legend had hit the press, last week, I knew what today’s blog would be about.

Turns out, the ‘killing stone’ - or Sessho-seki - has split in half, releasing the demon spirit of Tamamo-no-Mae after 1000 years.

dun dun duuh

Of course, what’s really happened here is that the volanic rock has been splitting over several years due to weathering. And its lethal name? Probably because of the poisonous gases it emits.  

And science, yeah, is cool, right. But today we’re talking about some spooky shizz.

Let’s get started.

*snaps latex glove*

Keep reading

I remember the first time I went to Pluckley. 

I *think* it was the summer of 2017, so it was one of those long, university summers where I did feck all for 3 months. I had just started exploring the world of the paranormal, so, of course, Kent’s most haunted village was on my to-do list.

I came armed with a screenshot of a village map on my phone, some sunscreen and a best mate in-tow.

Originally posted by basicheadache

Pluckley is legendary amongst us paranormalists, with no less than 12 ghosts laying claim to the small village - which only has a living population of around 1000. But we didn’t bump into the Red Lady in the local churchyard, or the ghostly monk wandering the local roads. Instead, we spent about and hour and a half walking along 60mph roads in 27 degree heat, trying to find out where the haunted pub was and how far was it to Dering Woods and holy shit the next train home is in 23 minutes!

Frustrating as the experience was, it resonated with something I had uncovered in my earlier research of the area.

The residents of Pluckley hate people like me visiting their village. They hate randoms traipsing round the gravestones of their relatives looking to catch a glimpse of a ghost at St Nick’s. They hate people clogging up the local pub and inquiring about the spirits lingering there. And they hate the wave of tourists that crash onto their shores in the week preceding Halloween.

“It’s a nice village and these stories ruin it and give us hassle we don’t need.”
Source

Over the years, journalists have trooped to the village just outside of Ashford and asked locals what they think of the legends. They typically claim they joined in on the fun as kids, pulling pranks and sharing stories to keep the dead, well, alive, or had no idea their hometown was famous around the world for its legends.

Even the beating heart of the village - their local pub, The Black Horse - has been recently taken over by owners determined to distance themselves from its paranormal past. That being said, even as the renovated their latest purchase, they experienced a series of strange occurrences. Most notably, equipment mysteriously breaking.

Whether these legends are to be believed is of course up to you. And of course, you do have a right to park up, wander ‘round and harass locals about these ghost stories until they tell you to f*ck off. But Pluckley, like so many other supposedly haunted locations, is just a place. It’s sleepy, it’s small and it’s not that enjoyable to wander around its residential areas for an entire day.

(Don’t get me wrong, it does have some lovely footpaths, but most of the time I was stuck walking at the side of the road trying to find the spookiest places.)

So, here’s some of my top tips for being respectful when you visit paranormal places like Pluckley.

Keep reading

Every woman keeps their first chick flick close to their heart.

No matter how tone-deaf, no matter how te-rr-ible, I will forever have a soft spot for Jennifer Garner doing the Thriller in 13 Going On 30.

One of the most notable scenes was magazine-editor-Madonna-megafan Jenna Rink exploring her walk-in wardrobe, stroking silks, satins and sequins in every colour.

And then there’s the shoes. The wall of shoes towering above our sample size protagonist.

You see, 13 Going On 30 is not only a darn good film, it’s also unique in the chick flick film industry: there’s no makeover scene. There’s no straightening of the *frizzy* hair, and there’s no ceremonial removal of the glasses. She simply wakes up in her swanky NYC apartment 17 years older and thousands of dollars richer, apparently.

But at the same time, the film’s all about transformation. We see a young teen wake up to the life she always dreamt of. She’s changed - she just can’t remember changing.

And that’s what all chick flicks inevitably come down to: change. It’s rooted in our perception of women, it’s engraved in the history of the genre. And it’s time we talked about it.

Originally posted by chewbacca

Keep reading