GJ Echternkamp

​Lust, love, depression, delusions of grandeur -- this is the stuff of cringe-inducing adolescent memories. As we mature, many of us purge the journals, photos, and ornately customized LiveJournals that documented our teen years before they cause humiliation for our adult selves -- not to mention missed job opportunities or divorce. But no matter how much we try to rewrite our personal histories, those memories persist. So it's with rueful admiration that we salute the brave participants in Mortified, the performance series that compels storytellers with adamantium balls to exhume the most shameful episodes from their adolescent lives. (Think the Colosseum with more laughs and a bit less viscera.) The latest round of wholesome humiliation and fun happens Thursday at the DNA Lounge.

Bad kisses, secret desires, petty disputes, abrading blowjobs, and other such mortifying experiences fuel these laughter- and squirm-inducing tales. After a decade of communal shamings, some of which have appeared on This American Life and the Sundance Channel, Mortified is taking the experience to the silver screen with Mortified Nation, a film compiling some of the most notorious stories from the series. See one of our favorite San Francisco comedians, Mary Van Note, skewer herself at a past event in the video clip below.

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October calls for scares, and despite the very scary state of the world, there is still a desire for entertainment that frightens us. Here we look at the broad, deep legacy of horror comics in a series that delves into the genre's many variations and highlights from the 1940s to the present.

Jack Cole

​The expansive visual format of comic books, along with the fact that they are published serially, encourages sprawling, epic stories with dozens of characters and webs of subplots. The possibility of epic storytelling in comics has served the horror genre particularly well. Several key horror epics have sold well, but, more importantly, stand as lasting contributions to the genre as a whole.

​With the 1888 Jack the Ripper killings as its basis, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell (1991-96) firmly broke from mainstream horror such as Tales from the Crypt and The Tomb of Dracula by taking a serious, historical approach to its subject. Moore's text is tight, literate, and deeply couched in English social history. Campbell's impressionistic black-and-white art evokes the London fog, the shadowy halls of ritual and power, and the inherent creepiness of the British royal family.

From Hell ravenously chews up and reassembles facets of the Jack the Ripper story -- many true, some famous speculation, and others invented. Moore and Campbell make familiar material compelling by creating characters who feel real, as opposed to just being types. And From Hell is nothing if not a series of miniature, detailed biographies, all of which interlock in ways that will seem surprising, even to those familiar with the Ripper story.

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For original Halloween costume ideas this year, look to the far East -- Hong Kong especially, for inspiration. Movies over there are always replete with a cornucopia of ragtag characters drawn from Wuxia mythology and Chinese folklore, and they all wear fantastic outfits. It really is surprising that some of Martial Arts cinema's most iconic personalities have not become a part of standard Halloween wardrobe. To get you started on newfound movie-geek/Halloween-party respect, here are some characters to model after:

Bride with White Hair: In this ultraviolent, fantasy Romeo and Juliet-esque love story, Bridget Lin is a deadly assassin who in a fit of romantic rage morphs into a white-haired fiend with supernatural attacking prowess. Supplies needed: a wig with four-foot-long white hair, plenty of face powder, and an optional pyrotechnics team to make your entry as grand as possible.

Be sure to walk up to the boring Darth Vader impersonator and strangle him with your hair.

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​Halloween is a natural time to think about horror movies -- and these days you can see anything you want (practically) on demand. As recently as 20 years ago, though, we were guided by what networks and local TV stations thought was cool. The local TV horror host was a big part of this -- that's how Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, got her start. Michael Monahan and Lon Huber a fascinating look at the history of local TV horror hosts -- such as KTVU's not-as-square-as-he-looks Bob Wilkins, pictured above -- in the book Shock It to Me: Golden Ghouls of the Golden Gate. Monahan and Luber read from the book and show rare clips Saturday (Oct. 29) at the Main Library. Read more about that here in our calendar section. We caught up with the horror host-orians for the spookiest Q&A ever.

What is a horror host?
MM: It starts with theatrical Spook Shows, which were a combination of Grand Guignol [1920s Parisian theater that focused on shock value] and vaudeville; with mad labs and guillotines on the stage, monsters running through the audience and ghosts flying overhead. When the Spook Show magicians added cheap monster movies to their acts, they essentially created the template for the modern TV horror host.

There were also dozens of colorful and creepy hosts who introduced horror stories on the radio, so the TV horror host synthesized the theatrical visual elements of Spook Shows with the music, sound effects, and traditional hosts of radio. Maila Nurmi created the first full-blown horror host when she brought Vampira to television in 1954.

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October calls for scares, and despite the very scary state of the world, there is still a desire for entertainment that frightens us. Here we look at the broad, deep legacy of horror comics in a series that delves into the genre's many variations and highlights from the 1940s to the present.

Jack Cole

​

The creak of a coffin lid. The silky whisk of a black cape. That whole Cure aesthetic, all sickly pale with doomed eyes. The slow, sensual draining of human life to sustain that of the parasitic yet tragic undead ghouls who take it -- shape-shifting phantoms who have seen the centuries pass by like so many weeks or hours, watching the world evolve from towering edifices long believed either abandoned or haunted.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula

​These Romantic notions, charged with sex, atmosphere, and dread, are exactly the reasons why -- just as we start to think that we are sick to death of vampires -- we are sucked right back into their ominous black folds.

Horror comics have not been immune to the charms of the vampire, having contributed mightily to their cultural oeuvre. After comic books gained strength in the 1930s, vampire stories were often featured in the Golden Age horror anthologies. Later, even the most well-known comic book superheroes have come face-to-face with vampires. Today, in the age of reboots and belated sequels, some comics continue to expand on -- rather than regurgitate -- the vast edifice of vampire lore.

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​Like the undead themselves, the zombie fad has overstayed its welcome. That's not to say it doesn't have its charm. That's also not to say we won't watch Night of the Living Dead and Zombieland again next month. Yet the deluge of new (and mostly derivative) zombie-inspired novels, movies, dolls, turkey basters, and who knows what else has dulled our senses. And the zombie walks -- oh, those cursed zombie walks! Please cease now!

So, paradoxically, we turn to the past to find a fresh perspective. Indeed, we would do well to page through a wonderfully thorough new anthology of short fiction called, straightforwardly enough, Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! This 800-page behemoth collects several dozen short stories, documenting the origins and development of zombie mythology -- and its first entry traces the Haitian "origin story" of the zombie.

Titled "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields," the story is an excerpt from W. B. Seabrook's 1929 book The Magic Island, which was primarily an ethnographic study of Haiti and voodoo practices. The book also introduced the zombie concept to an English-language readership. With contemporary hindsight, what is most striking about the story is that, in Haiti, the zombie legend held a significance that had nothing to do with brain-eating, but everything to do with the fact that Haiti was founded by former slaves.

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