I enjoy many genres of film so when I get ask anything like. What is your favorite genre or what is your favorite movie, director etc. I prefer to not respond other then it depends on my mood. I decided to highlight five silent horror movies that are worth watching. Some are better known than others on this list but by no means is this a movie ranking list rather then a highlighted kind of list.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) directed by Robert Wiene and starring Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt and Lil Dagover. This film marked the German expressionist film movement and is considered a favorite among many film directors. The plot centers around a fair and a man who is able to control a other man into doing his evil bidding.  The other man is powerless because he is unable to control his own actions because he is sleepwalking when he is committing these unspeakable horrors!

To watch link is below:

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

Directed by Benjamin Christensen and starring Clara Pontoppidan, Oscar Stribolt and Astrid Holm. This movie done in a documentary style talks about the miscommunication of how mental illnesses in people lead to the massive witch hunts  in earlier decades.

The Criterion Collection is re releasing this onto blu-ray in October! Link is below to buy:

Haxan: Witchcraft through the ages

Destiny (1921) directed by Fritz Lang and starring Lil Dagover, Walter Janssen and Bernhard Goetzke.

Love makes you do crazy or impossible things that you never thought you had to do. Like when the love of your life dies and you have to barter with the Grim Reaper himself in order to get him back. The Grim Reaper presents the broken heart-ed lady with three tests in order to try to get what she wants.

Link to watch is below:

Destiny 1921

The Unknown (1927):

Directed by Tod Browning and starring Joan Crawford, Lon Chaney and Norman Kerry.

Lon Chaney is Alonzo plays an “armless “man who escapes from a prison and is on the run. So he hides in the circus as a knife throwing performance act. He falls in love with Nanon (who is played by Joan Crawford) who is the daughter of the owner of the circus and does not like to be touch at all. However she finally gets over that phobia with another man and then the horror ensues!

I could only find this movie as part of the TCM Lon Chaney collection. Hopefully they will release on it’s own in the future! Link is below:

TMC ARCHIVES: The Lon Chaney Collection

Eerie Tales (1919):

Directed by Richard Oswald and starring Conard Veidt, Anita Berber and Reinhold Schunzel. One night a demon a ghost and a lady of the night decided to act out five short horror stories at midnight in a book store.

Link to watch is below:

Eerie Tales (1919)

Would you guys also be interested in a continuation of this blog? If so please write in the comments for me to do a part two of this!

Until next time!

Source: Wikipedia and IMBD

It was an interesting evening on November 22, 1987 in Chicago, Illinois. TV viewers in that area got an unexpected interruption  while watching TV:

Max Headroom made an unannounced appearance on their TV screens not one but twice in a span of an evening to late night.

For those who do not know who Max Headroom he was the creation of writer and actor George Stone. Max was a character that only existed on TV and had a robotic voice. There was even a couple of TV series and a TV movie in the mid 1980’s based on the character:

Max Headroom was so popular that he even did a segment for Sesame Street!:

The Max Headroom incident happen almost 32 years ago and no one knows who was responsible for these random TV takeovers.

The facts are:

-They certain of is that two people were behind the incident.

-It happened twice only on November 22,1987.

-It effected only TV viewers in the Chicago, Illinois area.

-The two channels that were hacked into received hundreds of calls and complaints about the incident.

-The two interruptions were:

First was on Channel 9 (TV station WGN-TV). It happen when the 9’o clock news was showing the feature points of a Chicago Bears football game. It was around 9:14 pm when the Max Headroom take over took place. Even the news reporter on the screen seemed extremely confused as to what just happened:

The second time was on a different channel around the 11:30-midnight time frame. A PBS station (WTTW station) was showing a Dr.Who episode when it was also interrupted by the same team of people who hacked into the 9’o’ clock news hour. However this interruption had a distorted voice to go along with the Max Headroom that was on the screen. It was a little bit longer than the first interruption but even though this one had audio and had a little bit more random action. Whatever they were saying did not make sense at all.

During the second TV hack the fake Max Headroom was able to do a quick pug for Pepsi. Because at the time the fictionalized real Max Headroom had a sponsorship of Coke products. So I guess if you are going to be a fake version of a character you might as well root for their competitor:

Also there is a couple of seconds that you see the fake Max Headroom getting spanked. So they how they know there was a least two people involved in this.

Even though these interruptions happened twice in a span one evening the people who did this were never caught! The same news team that were victim to this TV interruption did a segment about what happen to them the very next day. They even referred this team of people as a video pirate:

Even with the threats of supposed heavy fines and possible jail time they were hardly any leads as to who could of done this. Even to this day I find this event so random and I consider it one of the most bizarre events that has ever happen.

Until next time!

The Haunted Mansion ride has always been one of my favorite rides EVER!!!! I have been on the ride at least 50 times. Every single time you go you notice something new or different that you did not see before. So I am beyond THRILLED that tomorrow, August 9, 2019. The Haunted Mansion will celebrate fifty years of being a home to some extraordinarily happy ghosts!

Now I won’t go into a full history of the ride rather I decide to share some well know or not so well known facts about this ride.

The Haunted Mansion was not a first day open attraction. It actually opened almost 14 years after the park opened on August 9, 1969. On that day it was just a soft opening where some park members were able to go on the ride. It was officially opened to the public on August 12, 1969.

The Haunted Mansion exterior was actually made first in 1963 but the ride was not done and ready until 1969. There was couple of reasons for that time gap. First Walt Disney was working on an attraction for the 1964’s World Fair. (please see my blog post : It’s small world ride

Then other reason for the time gap was Walt Disney sudden death in 1966. Which halted production on the Haunted Mansion because the Imagineers were unsure what to do with the ride.

Walt Disney wanted this ride to be a “Museum of the Weird.”

Disney view this ride to be more like  a walk through exhibition rather then an attraction. However due to the long pause of completion of the Haunted Mansion a new thing called the “Omnimover”.  Which is a way the visitors can sit down and enjoy riding in a cart through the mansion rather than walk.

In the main dining room scene where the ghost are eating and dancing. That effect was called “Ghost Pepper.” Imagineer Rolly Crump (who worked on the Haunted Mansion)  explains the process on how that effect was done:

This is one of my favorite parts of the ride to go through.

The Haunted Mansion exterior was inspired by two mansions. One was the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California:

This house belonged to Sarah Winchester. She was the heiress of the Winchester firearm magnet fortress. She also believed the spirits of those who were killed by her family’s invention would get to her. So she kept building a house with many rooms and paths that lead to no where. When Walt Disney went to visited this house he was inspired by it’s beauty and also it’s eeriness of it’s haunted past.

The Shipley-Lydecker House In Baltimore, Maryland.

When Imagineer Ken Anderson was put in charge of making up the idea of how the Haunted Mansion exterior should look like he came across a photo of the Shipley-Lydecker House and it just automatically clicked that this is what the Haunted Mansion should look like.

The imgineers for the  Haunted Mansion were inspire by three movies when creating the design, aesthetic and theme of the  ride:

La Belle et la Bete directed by Jean Cocteau (1946):

The Cat and the Canary directed by Paul Leni (1927):

The House on Haunted Hill directed by Robert Wise (1963):

The Haunted Mansion will forever be my favorite thing at Disney. I enjoy everything about the ride and I hope it will be there for another 50 years! Here is the main theme song from the ride:

Until Next time!!!

Hello and welcome to this week’s installment of Welcome to the Insta-hood. Where I interview fascinating people and their Instagram Accounts. This week I interviewed IG account:

@alittleclownnamedfergus

Many people know this movie or least seen the poster. (side note it is one of my favorites movies)

However do you remember this lady who was an extra in this movie?

Her name is Tammy Lynn Leppert and she has been missing since 1983 which was 36 years ago.

Tammy Lynn Leppert started her entertainment career as a  child model and started to enter beauty queen pageants until her late teens.

Even though she won a majority of these pageants she was still yearning to do more with her life. She decided that her best route is to become an actress. She was able to nab various extra roles and is probably best known as the woman who distracted Manny who was in the getaway car during that infamous chainsaw scene from the movie Scarface.

She was also  known for the movie called “Spring Break.” She was an extra during the boxing match scene.

There are also a report that the movie poster has Tammy Lynn’s middle section on it:

Things started to get weird for Tammy Lynn Leppert after the movie “Spring Break” was completed. She apparently went to a party over the weekend by herself and came back a totally different person. Here in this Unsolved Mystery Episode (season 5 Episode 1) her family recalls the odd behavior that Tammy Lynn was displaying before she vanished:

Her mother noticed her troubling behavior when Tammy  to her mother’s home. She realize a mental flag read. Tammy was back home only after four days of shooting the movie “Scarface”. Tammy’s increasing paranoia of something really bad happening to herself caused her mother to make Tammy go see a doctor to check out her overall health. With being checked into doctor’s care for about three days she left. The doctor could not find anything wrong with her. She had no drugs or alcohol in her system to suggest something was enhancing her  paranoid state.

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Her last known sighting was on July 6, 1983 and that day doesn’t seem a hundred percent accurate as to what happened to her. There were reports that she was seen without shoes and did not have any money with her. There was also a report that she left with a friend that day from her house in Rockledge, Florida. They got into an argument while in route to their destination. The argument got so bad they the driver of the car left Tammy at a parking lot and that was the last time she was reportedly seen. The friend that got in an argument with her that day is not a suspect in her disappearance and no charges were ever brought upon him. But her mother was quoted as saying that Tammy herself said that she was scare of this particular friend.

There are a couple of theories as to what happened to her:

Some believe that she was murder by know serial killer Christopher Bernard Wilder. He was known as the “Beauty Queen Killer” because he was linked to killing, kidnapping and rapping 12 women between California to Florida. He would lure these women claiming to be a modeling agent and have auditions or gigs in his house. This theory was never confirm because Wilder died in 1984. Tammy’s mother even sued Wilder’s estate for her daughter’s death but also felt he did not do it nor did the police link her death to him.

There was also another serial killer and rapist in the area at the time of Tammy’s disappearance. A man named  John Brennan Crutchley but again no evidence was match with Tammy either.

Tammy’s mother believe that her daughter had knowledge of a drug ring that was happening in the area at the time and become a threat to the drug ring and something happened to Tammy through them.

Unfortunately Tammy’s mother never found out what happened to her daughter because she passed away in 1995. However Tammy’s sister is still active in finding out what happen.

She runs a facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/findtammyleppert/

If you have any information or knowledge  about what happen to Tammy Lynn Leppert please contact the link above.  If you know or have any knowledge about her missing case or anyone’s please use the link below:

https://www.justice.gov/actioncenter/report-and-identify-missing-persons

Until next time!

Source:

Wikipedia

Tammy Lynn Leppert- The Scarface Extra and model who Vanished