AEIOU...and Sometimes Why

Oct 14, 2025

Now Hear This - Son of Halloween 2025

Keep your radio tuned to KRPT for more spooky sounds of the season!

Click on the album cover to go to its Bandcamp page where you can purchase it or listen for free. I am not affiliated with Bandcamp or any of the artists, just spreading the word on good music.

Every horror fan knows you can't keep a good slasher down! Slasher Dave recently dropped his Halloween Store EP with art designed by Chad Savage. The EP draws on 80s/90s mom & pop Halloween shop vibes, Halloween masks, and spooky sounds cassettes. He's got a few new things since I wrote this post, so be sure to check it all out!

Creeping all the way back to 2014, the debut album from goth rock duo The Long Losts is worth unearthing. The music is suitably spooky and the vocals have a ghostly, ethereal quality.

Horror rocker duo Bloody Hammers have a new acoustic album appropriately called The Acoustic Halloween Special. They describe it as dark folk or gothic blues. It's different from a lot of stuff you might encounter on a Halloween playlist.

Wrapping up this week is not an album but a Trick or Treat LoFi Spotify playlist. I've really taken to this genre over the past couple years and while it may not all be horror-centric, the LoFi aesthetic really vibes with Halloween for me.

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Oct 13, 2025

Archie Comics Trick and Treat

Way back in 2013, Archie comics put one foot in the grave with the Afterlife with Archie series which brought Riverdale residents into a zombie apocalypse. This also kicked off a a whole new imprint called "Archie Horror" which gave us titles like Vampironica and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina which became a Netflix series. I'm a sucker for "What If?"/alternate universe type stories so I was all in on anything Archive Horror put out. Ironically, these darker stories lead me to reconnecting with the timeless characters that I enjoyed so much as a kid.

I'm not a regular reader by any means. I mainly pick up the Halloween themed books which are a lot of fun because in addition to a new story or two, they reprint older Halloween stories ranging from recent years to decades ago. All this is a long road to get to the stars of the post: Trick and Treat.

Trick and Treat are relatively new characters in the Archie-verse. They first appeared in the Archie Halloween Spectacular from October 2022.

Trick is an imp that can shapeshift. As you might imagine, he enjoys playing tricks. He's also more into the scary side of the holiday and is always in fierce competition with Treat. Trick may seem like the "bad one" but both can be mischievous.

Treat is the spirit (in more ways than one) of Halloween. He's all about spooky fun and candy. He's been known to help out trick or treaters needing a boost in the costume department to help them bring home a big haul. In case you're wondering, the string around his neck is meant to be like he's a ghost decoration hung from a tree and not anything more macabre.

The character designs are simple but so much fun and let them lean into their whimsical nature. Given their dispositions, they remind me of the classic angel and devil that pop up on cartoon characters shoulders.

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Oct 12, 2025

Classic Creepy Comics - Baffling Mysteries

Welcome to the fifth year of Classic Creepy Comics where I talk about horror comics from the pre-code days. Most of the books I'll be talking about are public domain and available for free at Comic Book+. You can read them online or, if you create a free account, you can download them.

Baffling Mysteries was published mostly bi-monthly by Ace Magazines from November 1951 - October 1955 and ran for a total of 22 issues. The series starts with issue 5 having been under the title Indian Braves for the first four issues. I still haven't really looked into this weird practice of re-titling a book and keeping the numbering scheme.

One thing there's no shortage of on Baffling Mysteries covers is a damsel in distress!

Baffling Mysteries #7 came out in 1952, two years before The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The cover may have some similarities but the story itself is about an entire race of these weird bearded creatures that live underwater. It's a fun story because although they live underwater, their lair is sort of a giant air bubble that you can only get to by swimming through a whirlpool.

Baffling's covers aren't quite as horrific or grotesque as some of the other books I've mentioned over the years. Even though the interior features monster or supernatural stories, the covers give more of a pulp adventure vibe.

As the series ran on, it would occasionally reprint a story from another book to fill out its page count. Issue 24 was one of the last pre-Code books Ace put out. Most of the issue was reprints with only one original story. The final two issues were made up entirely of reprints from other Ace books and some of the stories were retouched to comply with the new Comics Code Authority.

You can find the complete run of Baffling Mysteries at Comic Book+.

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