It’s that time of year again! Way back when I first started this blog, I became one of the “Cryptkeepers” at the Countdown to Halloween in an effort to bring traffic here. Haven’t figured out if it worked.

Be that as it may, I’ve been posting a few Halloween things in the Octobers since. You can check them out with the “Halloween” tag over in the “Tag Cloud” on the right. You might also find a few scary movies under “Movie Reviews”.

For this post, I’ve just got a few odds and ends for the season that don’t justify their own post.

First of all, the Countdown to Halloween is still going strong. Check out the Cryptkeepers; there are something like 200 bloggers who cover everything relevant. Movie reviews, music, artwork, crafts… if it’s Halloween related, someone’s writing about it.

You’re probably going to find at least a couple of “Best Horror Movie” lists as October 31 draws nearer. My favorite is the one at Time Out: London. They’ve polled people in the horror movie business on their faves, so this isn’t just some fanboy compilation. And it’s up-to-date, with recent films as well as classics from the Silent Era.

H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is his best known work. It’s been adapted many times for different media. But the adaptation that stays closest to the source material is actually the most unusual – an album version that made it a musical! Jeff Wayne turned the story into a “rock opera”, and managed to get Richard Burton (!) to star as “The Journalist”.

Here’s the whole long and strange story behind it’s creation, and if you want to hear it, over at WFMU, Evan “Funk” Davies played it last Halloween, and the whole show is in their archives. Or you could buy a copy, I suppose.

Finally, I don’t doubt The Simpsons will be doing another “Treehouse of Horror” anthology this year. Sometimes, the best thing about the whole show is when they get a Guest Animator (like Don Hertzfeldt) to do the “Couch Gag”. For Season 26, they tapped Guillermo del Toro to “direct” the intro for “Treehouse of Horror XXIV”. How many of the horror references can you spot?