Tom Baker

Joined June 2018

878 stories

Bio

Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com

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That is Not Dead...
"Nyarlathotep...the Crawling Chaos...I am the last....I will tell the audient void." --H.P.Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep. His dour image remains to us as much of an enigma as the searing, maddening, alien intelligence that burned behind it. H.P. Lovecraft, the Great Panjandrum of Occult Horrors from beyond the stars, the strange seer of visions who fathered a brand of intercelestial, gothic surrealist nightmare that has come down to us today as an entire subgenre all its own--the "Cthulu Mythos," so called because of the many-tentacled horror rising from the brackish waters of an unforgiving, eternal ocean; who sleeps and dreams, buried in his underwater home of R'lyeh, vast sarcophagi of non-Euclidean angles and stinking, miasmic funk of forty thousand dead, and rotting creatures. Lovecraft, the writer, conceived of Great Cthulhu emerging once more, to plague the world again, to reclaim, for the Ancient Ones, the "Great Old Ones," tiny, insignificant MAN; whom one day, Idiot Chaos would "blow Earth's dust away."
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Horror
Dream Voyages
"If you see the dead in your dreams, it portends good fortune. If they speak to you, prepare to die." The above is not an exact quote from The Witches' Book of Fortune Telling and Dream Interpretation. It's close enough. You get the point. The dead visit me in my dreams. Sometimes, I can hear their sing-song voices taunting me. Sometimes, I wake a dead relative lying cold and stiff in their shroud, tucked away in eternal repose. But they are there. And, like in Dr. Caligari (1920), they are watching.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Horror
Jack Kerouac Saved My Lives
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time. The ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” --Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Journal
Into the Labyrinth (1980-82)
Back when I was a wee tot, around the Good Year 1982 or 83, Nickelodeon, which was and is a children's television network on cable that, at the time, required an ungainly yellow box with a sliding clicker on it, featured a more "adult-themed" fantasy and horror-themed show that was a collection of BBC programs that ran for short periods of time Over There. The show was called "The Third Eye," and the opener was super creepy actually, and was probably a part of some Illuminati mind control programming to get kids to sell their souls, dress in black, snort butane, and WORSHIP THE INFERNAL ONE.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Futurism
Ghost Voices
To read my first article about EVPs, please follow this link: Hello. My name is Tom Baker, and I'm the author of a number of books on very creepy subjects, including ghosts, UFOs, psychic powers and Spiritualism, serial killers, true crime, grave robbers and necrophiles, horror flicks, and a couple of children's books as well. When I'm not doing that, I paint macabre art, do macabre music, and read Tarot cards for paying customers seven nights a week, or thereabouts. I've been like this for years.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Horror
On the Birthday of Johnny Cash
"God has his hand on you."--Carrie Cloveree Cash The image of Johnny Cash is as indelible as that of Elvis Presley or James Dean, Marilyn, or Judy Garland--an American Icon, an original from a country that once was known for birthing the cultural milestones that would rock the rest of the world. I'm no expert on the man's life; I know that his father laughed sardonically when someone quipped "John's going places," laughed, and replied. 'Yeah, he's going right back into those cotton fields."
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Beat
Re-Animator (1985)
Re-Animator is an old love: a grisly horror adaptation of one of H.P. Lovecraft's more obscure tales (printed in the crumbling pages of a forgotten magazine called Home Brew sometime about the Good Year 1920), first serialized and then lost for a short period. It's his take on the Frankenstein theme of "reanimating" the dead. The unnamed narrator and the titular "Re-Animator" (Mr. Herbert West) embark on a series of ghoulish experiments that lead to West, in Lovecraft's original story, being pulled below the earth by hordes of the infernal, unclean "tomb legions." Make of that whatever thou wilt.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Horror
A Boy and His Dog (1975)
A Boy and His Dog is a movie they use to play on veritable rotation on cable TV when I was a kid. Being that here, in the far-flung, futuristic year of 2023, I'm all awash and aflutter and aglow and melancholy, all at once, when I think about the late, great 1980s, I decided I must review this cinematic milestone in the evolution of desert-nomad post-apocalyptic fantasies about young, hot-headed dudes who can communicate telepathically with their animal companions. And, since it WAS penned by the late, great Harlan Ellison, who in the hell, I ask you, could resist?
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Futurism
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
"One day Winston, we will meet in that place where there is no darkness." George Orwell, 1984 (1949) I was with John Hurt last night, eating in a studio commissary. This in itself is a little unusual, as he died on January 25th, 2017, of cancer. He was seventy-seven.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Futurism
Halloween 3
Halloween 3, some will be surprised to learn, has nothing to do with the popular horror franchise or the two films that preceded it. Michael Myers and slashers in a general sense do NOT appear in this weird, pseudo-supernatural techno-thriller with Tom "Creepshow" Atkins playing Dr. Shelling, and the lovely Stacy Nelkin as "Ellie Grimbridge," town people who travel to the fictional town of Santa Mira, California, which is a factory town producing a single product: a trio of Halloween Masks called "Silver Shamrock" (the town is populated and run by Irish immigrants).
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Horror
Halloween 2 (1981)
Halloween 2 is a film that starts smack dab in the place where Halloween left off: with Michael Myers getting blasted by Dr. Loomis's (Donald Pleasance) six slugs off of a balcony and out onto the lawn...and disappearing. As such, it almost feels like a weird, half-completed series of outtakes or "leftovers" from the original. There's a sense that we're just hanging -on" here, not building to anything.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Horror
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
The Wizard of Oz is a film so endearingly perfect in every way, it has, in the eighty-four years since its release, transcended cinema to become a cultural archetype, an icon for all that is fantastic, playful, terrifying, hopeful, beautifully dark and dream-like. It is a film, much like Star Wars, that everyone or nearly everyone has seen once, and to many, it will recall the more carefree and less-burdened age of their childhood, where the young and the young at heart could come together and dream of a world, "over the rainbow," wherein life made sense, tragedy did not lurk like a beast of prey, and the Kansas twister of TIME was not so brutal and devastating a force of nature.
By Tom Baker3 years ago in Geeks

Tom Baker

Bio

Stories .css-1svwz57-Text{display:inline-block;color:var(--text-default-mute);}(878)

Filter by community

That is Not Dead...

Dream Voyages

Jack Kerouac Saved My Lives

Into the Labyrinth (1980-82)

Ghost Voices

On the Birthday of Johnny Cash

Re-Animator (1985)

A Boy and His Dog (1975)

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

Halloween 3

Halloween 2 (1981)

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Stories (878)