First! The winners of our last poll: in Cascadia, blackberry is the leader of our four horseplants of the botanical apocalypse; outside Cascadia, in North America at large, kudzu is our winner.

And based on total votes, let’s hear it our all-star continental dream team of planty death: blackberry, horsetail, kudzu, and English ivy! Well strangled, all around.

Let’s all just hope there’s never zombie virus variant for plants, shall we?

It’s October! And I literally 20 minutes ago returned from a preview showing of The Thing, the prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter film The Thing, which is, in turn, a remake of the 1951 The Thing from Another World, based on John Campbell’s rather excellent 1938 novella, “Who Goes There?

It’s getting pretty damn meta at this point, because this film covers the events in the Norwegian research base, and we see the end of those events at the start of the 1982 movie, and earlier moments from it through the 1982 film, and all of those were in that movie because the ’82 film used footage from the ’51 film to show events from that base!

Also, the pronouns are getting a mite tricky.

All in all, they did a pretty good job of capturing the atmosphere of Carpenter’s take, and not just in set design. They made one pretty significant change to the events seen or implied in the ’82 film, and from a film standpoint, I can see why you’d do that, tho’ I’m still not convinced it’s necessary. A good skiffy horror romp; not groundbreaking, but fun.

But that brings us to this week’s poll! It’s October, Halloween month, so we’re going to have a series of horror polls! Since we’re starting the month off with a skiffy horror flick, we’ll start with a skiffy horror poll – a roll call of skiffy horrors so terrible, so rampant, so utterly indescribable, that they can only be known by their pronouns! Or, in some cases, their indefinite nouns.

As usual, if an answer you want isn’t available, comment, I’ll add it, and you can come back and vote for it.

EVERYONE! PICK YOUR TERRORS!

[poll id=”13″]

[poll id=”14″]