Branded Funk and Horror

Darkness falls across the land, the midnight hour is close at hand. Creatures crawl in search of blood, to terrorize the neighborhood—and whosoever shall be found without the soul for getting down, must stand and face the hounds of hell. We bring the funk of forty thousand years, while grizzly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom. Fight though you might to stay alive, your body starts to shiver. For no mere mortal can resist the evil of the ... thriller*!

The werewolf—found in ancient texts as far back as those by Herodotus, references to werewolves were not flights of fanciful horror. They were believed real and several accounts given by eyewitnesses. Indeed, it was reported that a Scythian tribe morphed into werewolves one each year, changing back after a few days. Here is more ancient evidence of the werewolf's curse.    

The mummy’s initial service in the horror genre began with The Mummy! Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century. This science fiction novel made mummies weird right from the start. Written in 1827, the odd twist was dropping an ancient mummy into the 22nd Century. It’s like a demented Buck Rogers. Of course, Bram Stoker (of Dracula fame) did his part to stoke the horror perceptions of the gift-wrapped demons. Together with other storytellers, Loudon and Stoker built the foundations for mummy awareness. Here is the answer to what spurred fascination with these mindless, stomping corpses of the past.

Dracula impaled victims made up of political opponents or Turks captured on the battlefield, and left them to slowly slide down a wooden spike in agony and without mercy, until they bled out. Death often took days. The near dead and corpses were left on the spikes as birds pecked and tore at their rotting flesh. Here are the answers to why Dracula scare invading Turks.

*Introduction unabashedly lifted from Michael Jackson's song, Thriller.