Make Tech Easier: 5 Sites to Stream Free Scary Movies for Halloween. “What’s your favorite scary movie? If you’re in the mood to spice up your Halloween with some delightfully spooky movies, you’re in luck. While movies on the big screen like ‘It’ and the upcoming ‘Jigsaw’ will be scaring cinema-goers, you’ll be happy to know you don’t have to stray from the couch to get in the Halloween spirit.”
USC Viterbi School of Engineering: Is it A Horror Film or a Rom-Com? AI Can Predict Based Solely on Music.. “[Professor Shrikanth] Narayanan and team’s study was the first to apply deep learning models to the music used in a film to see if a computer could predict the genre of a film based on the soundtrack alone. They found that these models were able to accurately classify a film’s genre using machine learning, supporting the notion that musical features can be powerful indicators in how we perceive different films.”
Mashable: 25 Stephen King short films are being shown at this virtual festival. Some have never been released.. “The Stephen King Rules Dollar Baby Film Festival, a virtual event which will stream a number of short film adaptations based on the author’s work (including some which haven’t previously been released), is set to run from April 23 to 25 — and the best part is, the whole thing is free to join. 25 adaptations will be shown in total, each based on King short stories like Popsy, The Woman in the Room, and The Last Rung on the Ladder.”
Bungalower: New website brings Horror Nights houses online. “A new website by a former theme park designer and blogger has just been launched to bring the screams of Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights online….Virtual Frights is the first effort by Pseudonym and it shares video walk-throughs of five years of Halloween Horror Nights haunted houses using easy-to-navigate videos sourced from local vloggers and media sites.”
Mashable: Haunted TikTok is the next evolution of internet horror. “Despite being an app best known for attractive teens going viral with trendy challenges, a sinister niche has been quietly growing since 2018. Haunted TikTok (aka #HorrorTikTok, #CursedTikTok, #GhostTikTok, #CreepyTikTok, #ScaryTikTok) now pulls in anywhere from one to 11 billion views. That doesn’t even count the stuff without tags, either.”
BoingBoing: Get 35 free audio books from Tor’s new horror imprint. “Renowned sci-fi and fantasy publisher Tor just launched a new book imprint called Nightfire, focusing on new horror fiction. And to celebrate, they’re giving away 35 free short horror stories as audiobooks. The list includes stories by Alyssa Wong, Chuck Wendig, China Miéville, Carmen Maria Machado, and more.”
The Verge: One of the creepiest series in YouTube history is now a decade old and can’t seem to die. “Ten years ago this week, a video appeared on the Something Awful forum describing a trove of unlabeled tapes that had been recorded as part of a student film project. The director had supposedly instructed for the tapes to be burned. But years after the project was suddenly ended, the video’s narrator reveals that he kept them intact and decided to parse through the footage.”
Ars Technica: Authors’ viral Twitter thread is now a horror film starring Alyson Hannigan. “Last July, Twitter denizens relished a hilarious improvisational thread between fantasy authors Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes, in which the latter was a summer camp counselor in the midst of a massacre, wondering if, you know, he might be the killer. Now, Wendig has announced on his website that the impromptu story is a feature-length slasher film: You Might Be the Killer, starring Whedonverse superstar Alyson Hannigan (Buffy, How I Met Your Mother) and Fran Kranz (Cabin in the Woods).”
PR Newswire: AllHorror.com – New Horror Movie Database by Horror Fans, for Horror Fans (PRESS RELEASE). “A horror movie might have 8 stars, but what does that mean? How many people who rated the movie share your exact same taste? AllHorror solves this problem by organizing nearly 7,000 horror movies into 20 separate horror genres (none of which are the common but unhelpful “Horror” or “Thriller”). Some of these horror genres include Supernatural, Slasher, Gore, Classics and Creature Features. In addition to genres, AllHorror further organizes all movies into over 100 horror sub genres including 5 varieties of Haunted House movies, Urban Legends, Mutants, Mind Benders, Wilderness, Road Trips, Medical, Sci-Fi, Religion, Dangerous Exploration and even Internet Horror.”
Quartz: MIT researchers trained AI to write horror stories based on 140,000 Reddit posts. “Sometimes the scariest place to be is your own mind. Or Reddit at night. Shelley is an AI program that generates the beginnings of horror stories, and it’s trained by original horror fiction posted to Reddit. Designed by researchers from MIT Media Lab, Shelley launched on Twitter on Oct. 21.”
University of Iowa: Fanzines of science fiction, fantasy and horror available to read and transcribe. “What would you do with thousands of fragile leaflets, known as fanzines, that chronicle the history of science fiction? Such fanzines hold rich information too valuable to sit untouched, yet the materials cannot be handled without risking destruction. At the University of Iowa Libraries, a digitization project is underway to save a large, notable zine collection.”
New-to-me, and you might find it useful for Halloween: https://www.scaredtowatch.com/ . It’s a database of scary horror movies. On the home page especially gory movies are highlighted, as are recently-released and upcoming movies.
Do you love horror movies? Here ya go: a database of jump scares. “Where’s The Jump? does exactly what it says on the tin: consisting of a fairly cohesive catalogue of major horror movies and all the jump scares hiding within, including a listing of each individual moment and the time in the movie in which it occurs. Then, there’s an additional star rating to let people know the exact intensity and frequency of said jump scares.”
The first movie on SnapChat is a horror film. “While filmmakers have experimented with shooting with contemporary technological media—2015’s Unfriended, for example, was shot exclusively on Skype—few have endeavored to marry a medium with a distribution method. Like a modern-day reincarnation of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast, Sickhouse tricks the audience into participating in and ultimately disseminating the story itself—via the very platform on which it was conceived. (After the initial Snapchat release, the filmmakers released an expanded 80-minute version of Sickhouse on Vimeo On Demand, which you can buy below.)”
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