By Nerdy Trivia | October 31, 2024
Every October, partygoers worldwide dunk their heads into water-filled basins, desperately trying to grab floating apples with their teeth. Which empire do we have to thank for this peculiar pastime?
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By Classic Nerd | October 27, 2023
For those of us who grew up or had our formative years during the 1980s, we're familiar with the rampant anxiety issues thanks to some of the movies that were for some reason marketed to kids. That said, they were usually also pretty awesome movies, even if a bit traumatizing. And every year when Halloween was getting close, my brothers and I would bust out a few well-worn classics to get our fix of ghouls and ghosts and pirates and monsters and Fred Savage. Despite the fact that these movies
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By Classic Nerd | October 5, 2023
It’s that spooky time of year when your spine begins to tingle with a familiar feeling: being judged by your friends based solely on your Halloween playlist. But fear not — I’ve been refining mine since I was but a wee vampire. If you’re looking for some killer songs for your Halloween playlist that straddle the line between obvious, clever, and retro, you’ve come to the right place. These old-school songs will fill out your playlist, get the dancefloor howling, and ensure your street cred rem
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By Guest Contributor | October 24, 2022
While he’ll probably never be regarded in the same literary echelon as H. P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe, you can’t deny Stephen King has commercialized horror on a scale that’s never been seen before him or since. He could take a sweatshirt and turn it into an instrument of evil that would have his readers walking around shivering in their T-shirts in the dead of winter. That’s been King’s modus operandi since day one: finding horror in the everyday. A dreamy hotel, a girl going through puber
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By Jesse Lennox | October 10, 2022
Halloween is the best holiday and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. Halloween specials were some of the most exciting events as a kid leading into the spooky season. These specials were a chance for a show to really go off the rails and get nuts with concepts and stories. Sure, most of the time they either weren’t “canon” or ended up being just a wacky series of normal events, but that didn’t make them any less fun. Somewhere along the way, TV shows decided holiday specials were lame or di
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By Guest Contributor | November 17, 2021
Thanks to directors like David Fincher (Madonna’s “Vogue”), Michel Gondry (Kylie Minogue’s “Come into My World”), and Spike Jonze (Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” and Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice”) the music video has been elevated to an art form—one that challenges filmmakers to tell a complete narrative and forcibly remove socks with masterful storyboarding within a mere few minutes. In many cases, music videos have become the fun-sized versions of their big-screen counterparts, and every artist
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By Classic Nerd | October 7, 2021
Halloween’s a pretty theatrical holiday. Maybe the most theatrical holiday. I mean, we carve faces in pumpkins and light them up with candles, dress our lawns with cardboard tombstones and cotton cobwebs and creaking coffins, and go out in elaborate costumes — or stay in and scare ourselves sleepless with spooky movies. It’s a little surprising therefore that there aren’t more movies that really push the actual holiday itself front and center. Sure, films like Ginger Snaps (2000) or Dark Night
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By Guest Contributor | October 19, 2020
There’s something about Friday the 13th… Friday the 13th certainly wasn’t the first of its kind. Well before 1980 you had a long history of slashers and proto-slashers from the likes of Hitchcock, Bava, Fulci, Argento, Canada… Friday the 13th’s writer Victor Miller was even given the explicit order to go to a screening of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and to write that, in the process unknowingly setting in stone just about all of the tropes we know the genre for today. But Friday the 13th
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By Classic Nerd | December 23, 2019
With each generation comes a little more worry and supervision from parents. I can’t imagine being a kid nowadays; asking your parents to watch a movie, and them scouring the internet for reviews, warnings, and general advice from other parents about what is and isn’t okay. The '90s were a great time to be a kid, because while we weren’t quite the latchkey kids of the '80s, most of us didn’t have true helicopter parents. But, it came with a few drawbacks. Some of the children’s movies we saw d
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By Classic Nerd | October 9, 2019
There’s nothing like expecting to not get invited to anything for Halloween only to get an invite to a sweet party at the last second because someone cooler than you couldn’t make it. Not that I would have any personal experience with pity invites… Of course, the challenge is pulling together a top-notch costume at the last minute. And, being the nerd that you are, you need to show come up with something that will keep your nerd-cred solid in the public sphere. These costumes are easy to put t
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By Guest Contributor | October 7, 2019
Growing up, a lot of us had our video game systems connected to the TV in the basement. This was usually a fantastic setup, as we could turn our volume loud and yell at each other even louder. Mom would just shut the door, and she wouldn’t have to hear us scream about blue shells and final bosses. However, there were a few select games that playing in the basement was slightly unsettling. You wouldn’t want to play them at night, nor with the lights out. You might ask one of your siblings to wat
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By Guest Contributor | September 27, 2019
It’s finally that time of year again. The temperature drops about two degrees from the scorching summer, and suddenly we’re all excited for leaves, pumpkins, and being terrified under a blanket fort. That’s right, blow the inches of dust off your VCR and get the blankets out of the linen closet because it’s Halloween movie time! It doesn’t matter how old you are, those crisp, cold fall nights are always memorable. Going down to the local Blockbuster (gone, but never forgotten) and perusing the
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By Guest Contributor | September 11, 2019
Halloween is just around the corner, which means it’s time for an annual binge of horror films. But sometimes picking the right movie isn’t as simple as plopping down on the couch and firing up the first classic scream flick you see. We’re humans, and humans have moods. So, to help you decipher which '80s horror film you should watch (the '80s being the most important decade for horror films), we’re breaking it down here based on the current status of your headspace. If you’re feeling a littl
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