Countdown to Halloween

Like any red-blooded American kid, Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. However, Halloween has always been a close second. Since elementary school I've loved horrific imagery (although I have a limited tolerance for explicit visual depictions of gore). Well, Halloween gives me a whole month to revel in that imagery. I don't much care for the candy, but I love the plastic skeletons, Styrofoam tombstones, and cardboard monsters.

Inspired by a comic book artist's blog that I frequent (who got the idea from another blog), I decided to post about a Halloween-appropriate subject every day this October. Again taking inspiration from the artist's blog, I decided to feature a different monster for each day. Each monster is one that particularly interests me because of cultural significance, novelty, influence on other writers, filmmakers, etc., or its strength as an object of horror. They have been been selected from mythology, pop culture, literature, and film and range from supernatural beings of classic horror novels to alien creatures from modern science fiction movies. Some are sentient agents of evil while others represent mindless brutality. Being a traditionalist, I've saved some of the most famous monsters for last.

Each post will list the real world origin of the respective monster as well as an "in-universe" (i.e., within the context of the story or myth) description. Tomorrow I'll start with creatures from Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings. Oh, and these blog entries will have been scheduled in advance; I'm not actually staying up until midnight to post them.