Tag: Horrordailies

Hayloween

I’ve been playing HayDay since 2017. It’s a farming game: You can grow crops, make food items, take care of farm animals, manage stables, go fishing, serve customers in your town, take care of pets, or head into the valley to deliver goods. You can also play for prizes in derbies, but I don’t play that part of the game because I get too competitive with it and the next thing you know I’ve dumped $100 into the game to get diamonds to speed up my production.

Oops.

The thing I love most about this particular farm game is that you don’t sacrifice the animals when you get goods from them. For example, when you need bacon from your pigs, they put on shower caps and go into little individual saunas, then they slide out the bottom all skinny and you get the bacon. You feed them, and a few hours later they get fat again, so you put them back into their saunas.

The developers are Finnish, so of course there are saunas. And a fellow named Tom. If you know, you know. (But if you don’t know, whatever you do, do not Google “Tom of Finland” while you’re at work, please.)

HayDay has seasonal events, and of course Halloween is my favorite. Even if I haven’t played in months, I’ll come back for Halloween. The farm animals wear costumes, and the chickens’ pumpkin sweaters are the cutest thing ever.

HayDay game chickens wearing pumpkin sweaters.

You can also decorate your town and farm for the season. Here’s my sorry excuse for a cemetery in my town. It’s next to my gift shop, just in case you forgot to bring flowers for your loved ones and chickens who have shed their mortal coil. It’s also next to my beach café, but we won’t get into that.

HayDay game cemetery decorations.

I put up a pumpkin scarecrow at the farm, but you can see how effective it is.  It’s a pretty good bet that jack-o’-lantern is a bit fermented, judging by the expression on that one Crow’s face and how unfazed he is about the ghost coming up the stairs behind him.

HayDay Halloween Crow decorations.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some eggs to gather.

Thanks, Mom!

It’s Saturday night in October, which for me can mean only one thing: watching something spooky. Today is also my mother’s birthday, although she passed away in 2000. I have her to thank for my love of horror movies and TV shows. She used to let me stay up late to watch Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a series about a reporter who often ends up writing investigative pieces about homicides that involve the supernatural, none of which ever get published because his editor thinks he’s off his rocker. It was a great little series, and NBC made it available to watch online, so I’ll be indulging in that in her honor starting tonight.

TV character Carl Kolchak at a typewriter writing.
I’ll bet that typewriter is a Royal. (Image: NBC)

Ya know, I’ve always credited my choice of journalism as a career to watching too many episodes of Lou Grant as a kid, but now that I think of it, maybe Carl Kolchak had something to do with it.

Another of my mother’s favorites was was Trilogy of Terror. One night we watched it while we were on the phone, she on Long Island, me in Virginia. That’s one of my favorite memories of her, actually. We would both yell at our TVs at the same time, “Don’t open the door!”

An evil doll carrying a knife in its mouth.
Peace was never an option. (Image: ABC)

I wonder what my mother would think of today’s horror. It’s so much more graphic than it was when I was growing up, and the most popular shows, like American Horror Story (AHS), have an element of dark psychological suspense that can be triggering or traumatizing for some folks. She probably would have loved AHS, actually, although maybe not the seasons with Jessica Lange. My mother couldn’t stand her. She thought Lange “always had the same face, putting a puss on.” But my mother definitely would have loved the seasons with Kathy Bates, who became one of her heroes because of Fried Green Tomatoes.

My mother loved mysteries, as well, and would have loved shows that blended mystery with genres like southern gothic, like the first season of True Detectives—which I find to be some of the most terrifying TV ever made simply because it’s entirely possible that somewhere in the rural South, some dude is right this second walking around wearing tighty-whities and a gasmask and wielding a machete.

I don’t know how my mother would have felt about some of the darker movies, though. She might have liked the Conjuring series,but maybe the Sinister series would have been a little too dark. On the other hand, she probably would have found anything by Ari Aster as ridiculous as I do. Indeed, Florence Pugh very nearly became my Jessica Lange as the first time I saw her was her performance in Midsommar, where she ugly-cried through the whole thing. If I hadn’t decided to ignore my initial reaction to seeing her name as the lead in Don’t Worry Darling and consequently enjoyed the movie, I might still be avoiding her. However, only my deep and abiding adoration of Joaquin Phoenix will compel me to watch Aster’s latest effort, Beau is Afraid, and I’m hoping that Phoenix’s talent will override Aster’s penchant for downright stupid climaxes and flat endings.

What have you been watching this month? And are you a year-rounder like me?