"Beaten, Bedraggled -- and HAUNTED !"
(originally published on www.countgore.com)

As Count Gore pointed out in a post to the members of his Horrorhosts mailing list this past week, the Fall TV season has hit the table with a taste-tempting "Splat !". In the immortal words once spoken by my inimitable mentor and illegitimate step-daddy, Baron Von Wolfstein, ( Well, he actually spit all this out just a minute ago...)"The public appetite has consumed all the new fare that has hit the table, and now it's repeating on us."

Then The Baron broke into a song, projecting in full voice, " Do you smell what I smell ???".

That was a bit of fun, but has also attracted attention to the fact that I've not only slipped a guest onto the Castle grounds without a backstage pass, or even a blood sample, but have him ghost-writing for me as well...

Yep, we've been spotted. Here comes Gore with that accursed cane again. Looks like I'll have to get back to this rant once I return to consciousness after yet another round of bludgeoning about the head and shoulders. I'd make an obvious "Jeffery Dahmer's shampoo" joke here ordinarily, but you understand. Priorities...

 RUN BARON !!!!

Oh wow. The colors... The stars...

Hey, are you all still here, my fellow Morlocks ? Gathered around to see me through to a speedy recovery -- or taking bets on how long I'd be in a coma ? I thought as much.

Ah well, besides a splitting headache and double-vision, it looks like Gore left me a subtle hint ( 'bout time I got a clue !) as to one possible direction he'd like to see The Gallows column be taken. It's a TV Guide, with the listings for HAUNTED, JOHN DOE, and FIREFLY circled in blood. I think it's MY blood !

Man, I had a nice little rant all planned, confronting the hard-hitting issue of "Horror Host Makeovers: Greasepaint Tips for the Host-Over-40". Guess we'll save that one for sweeps week.

As it would happen -- and luckily for me, it would seem -- I did happen to catch HAUNTED the other night during a brief rest from galavanting, cavorting and capering around the Country. The ABC FAMILY CHANNEL's take on the In Search Of/ Sightings! format doesn't take the documentary style in any particularly new directions, but does take full advantage of all the conventions developed by those shows that came before it. 
 
What I appreciated most about Haunted was that the stories weren't, for the most part, re-retellings of ones we've seen or heard too many times before. True, false, or the ravings of a lunatic mind, the stories here were all engrossing and evocative.  Each seemed familiar in the way that a good ghost-story does, and brought to mind the many childhood hours spent rifling through the yellowed pages of my Great-Grandma's back-issues of FATE magazine.

The hour-long time slot allows for the telling of several tales in each installment, each told from the point of view of encounterees from different and diverse backgrounds and varying degrees of credibility, allowing the series to connect more directly with viewers on a personal level. One installment may be about a haunted children's theater, while the next involves a couple of rough-and-tumble Civil War buffs, but each segment is recounted and recreated by the persons claiming to have experienced said psychic phenomena. As the vernacular of the advertising linguist, the technique, "brings it home" to the audience. Just add the prerequisite creepy voice-over, a minor-key soundtrack and the editor's alchemy is complete; Presto-Brillo, you have spun hayseed into gold !  Well, at least ectoplasm into entertainment.

So much for excessively analytical overview and heavyhanded spelunking into the black caves of thesis. The gut-level Ghastlee reaction to Haunted is to recommend to the Morlock masses that you pop a batch o' corn, turn out all the lights, and watch it ALONE to see if it raises the hair on the back of YOUR neck. That is the only true test of any spookshow, and on the exponential scale of 1-10, Haunted raised about a 6 on my hackles. Not bad for an old ghoul who's not only jaded but losing his hackles.

Bottom line; give me HAUNTED over a whack in the head with a leaded stick any day --and overall it's good to see the genre popping up on the tube with increasing frequency. Check out ABC Family's foray into the freaky, and until then I'll be consulting the bumps on my head as a roadmap to my future here on The Gallows...

Just noticed that Gore has circled a few Cinemax features in the ol' TV Guide too-- and they aren't circled in BLOOD. 

Eeeewww !

'Til next we swing, and mine eyes are held open with clothes-pins to watch and report on the latest doin's on the infernal television; stay loose and please don't neglect to terrorize your inner-child on occassion with treats like HAUNTED.

 Your ol' pal,

Ghastlee