Thrills and Chills Issue #4

(Click on any images to view monster-size.)

Well, the month-long celebration of Halloween, the Monster Kid national holiday, is underway. It's a lot of fun this year as various blogs take part in the Halloween Countdown, and I'm happy to be a part of it. Today we look back at Issue #4 of the Scholastic kid's magazine "Thrills and Chills," published in 1994. (We looked at Issue #2 in a recent posting.) The awesome cover is a great rendition of an inspired idea. We horror fans would certainly flock to see such a sightseeing thrill!

Each issue had movie recommendations for the month of October, and the spotlight some classics each time. I saw "The Deadly Mantis" when about 11 years old in 1969 on the Saturday afternoon "Creature Feature" which I watched each week faithfully. I saw a lot of the classics there for the first time.

On the back of each issue was a creepily illustrated epitaph from a real headstone... although I'm sure only the epitaph was accurate and that the tombstone didn't resemble the one drawn.

As a bonus today, we look at a fun book that took the "Where's Waldo?" concept and applied it to Halloween. I bought this in 1992, and the densely-packed book entertained me and my then-young daughter for hours on end, as we picked out items in the scenes for the other to find. Try it yourself with the sample page! You could get lost in that cemetery...

And just in case this seems a trifle juvenile to you, for the grown-up kids out there, here is an ad from around 1985 for Elvira's new videos... it makes the "look and find" game more fun and even easier!

Thrills & Chills Issue #2

Today's Monster Memories are of:

Scholastic's "Thrills and Chills" magazine #2

Published in 1994, the "Thrills and Chills" magazine by Scholastic was made available for ordering to schoolchildren. My daughter was in the second grade when she got three issues second hand from a friend who was through with them. We put them with the Halloween books that we saved and put out each year with the inside decorations. I thought I'd scan some pages in of those three issues we have for your enjoyment. The pages scanned this time are from Issue #2. The riff on "American Gothic" with the Monster and the Bride is genius!

A note here about my posts; I have just about become paralyzed lately when it comes to posting. You want to know why? Well, I'll tell you. I would go through my stuff and think 'here's a neat item to share" and scan it in, or write a blog on a certain subject, and then I'd find out that someone else in the circle of blogs I regularly visit had already done a post on it! They would either have posted the exact same item, or written about the same topic, and usually better. And I'd end up deleting the post I had prepared, or in some cases already posted. It got discouraging. I felt I'd come too late to the party, and someone else had already given the same present I brought to the birthday kid. It happened again with this post, and I said, "another blog entry down the toilet!" I had my hand on the handle ready to flush, via the "delete" button.

But then I realised that if I kept on doing that, I'd never post again, because it's almost impossible to post something completely unique. Someone, somewhere has already done it. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't. Perhaps I could bring some slightly unique perspective or memory to the table, and maybe my readers simply hadn't seen the other already.

So, I'm not going to avoid a subject or item because another blogger has already done it. I'm not going to worry about it or become paranoid. If they did it, well, I'm doing it too. Hope that's alright with you.

Halloweephemera:To the right is a candy bag I saved from a party I went to as a kid.

A Halloween card I got some years ago. I save them all and display them each year. I'll share more with you over the month of Halloween... I mean, October. And I'll also share many of the books in our Halloween bookshelf, as well as photos of our decorations. Hope you enjoy it!