BOO-GLEECH

Written by Jonathan Wojcik

Nightmare Beings VIII

Unless I'm forgetting someone who was working on more, this is probably our very, very last batch of Nightmares for 2015's Halloween season. Boy did Halloween ever overflow this time around.

Anyway, we have four nightmares this time, illustrated by Margret Storm, A.K.A. Revereche, who is also the person I married! I guess that makes it pretty appropriate that this page is going up February 14th, 2016... because that's when Ghostbusters predicted the end of the world and Margret and I both really like movies about ghosts and also we like it when the world ends.

THE BILLOWING SKULL

There's a lot of weird stuff going on in this dream. A creepy old fairground, dwarves on ostriches, and a giant, flying skull made of flowing, empty cloth, like a deflating parade balloon. Not only that, but it has the power to control hedgehogs and its existence is apparently tied to some sort of movie. More than any other nightmare we've reviewed, this one feels the most like it was written via mad libs, but the nonsense elements still make a scary enough whole.

THE SLIME DOLL

This wide-mouthed, ooze-covered doll might be one of the most striking monstrosities ever describes on these pages, surreal enough to rank among my personal favorites but also menacing in a traditional, mainstream horror sort of way.

The grotesquery of this entity almost pales in comparison to the circumstances of the dream itself. Violet gets hit by a damn car, for real, and suffers a drug-induced waking dream in which they are mourned by a dribbling homunculus with a million teeth. This could not be a more picture-perfect, top tier nightmare. The kind of nightmare TV characters have, and you think, "nah, nightmares are never THAT coherently horrifying." This is nightmare poetry.

I'm glad VK was alright and could share with us this gem as well as really original horror stories like this one.

LA CARRA

I felt actual chills the first time I read this one. I've had my share of "hiding from a giant" dreams, and I can so easily imagine the feel of this one, the intensity of the dino-thing's eager face, excited trembling and smacking lips, this is absolutely one of the scariest damn things I've ever heard in my life. I'm surprised the end of the dream worked out as well as it did - when I try to will a dream-entity into not noticing me, it pretty much always immediately notices me.

THE HALF-LIFE WAR BOYS

After the dream itself credited Margret as an artist, she couldn't possibly not end up drawing the "Half Life War Boys," which would be otherwise unremarkable humanoid whatsits if not for those little dudes just quietly, calmly standing in their cockpit-like skulls. Are the outer bodies, or the little dudes the "real" Half-Life War Boys? I guess they're probably more of a collective consciousness, without an easy line you can draw between them.

This makes an even forty nightmares now illustrated this "Halloween II," a site feature we can finally, finally put to rest until next November. I hope you all have some juicy new night terrors in the meantime, and you'd better get ready - Halloween starts again in only five months, after all!

MORE HALLOWEEN FEATURES: