Welcome back to the show, I hope 2024 is treating you well so far! Before jumping into this new year, I’m finishing up the previous. That includes wrapping up the Dastardly Holiday Horror Advent Calendar which I posted about daily on my horror Instagram account SimplyMrDastardly, and running down my favorite book, comic and movie horror experiences of the year.

To finish up the Advent Calendar, I decided to do one of those tier lists the kids seem to dig. Here are the results! After talking a bout the first half in Episodes 2 and 3, I added the following to the mix: Day Of The Beast, Silent Night (2021), A Christmas Horror Story, A Christmas Carol (1938), Red Snow, Gremlins, The Dorm That Dripped Blood, Deadly Games, Await Further Instructions, All The Creatures Were Stirring, Retaliators, Silent Night Deadly Night 4, I Trapped The Devil, Anna And The Apocalypse, Hosts and Dead End.

If you’re interested in the Valancourt book series’ I mentioned, you can check out the Paperbacks From Hell and Monster, She Wrote sections. I totally forgot that I already wrote about How To Sell A Haunted House, but I did. I also did an episode of The High Five not long ago about the rest of Hendrix’s books which might make for a fun listen. I also delved deeper into the Escape Room movies, the first season of Yellowjackets, Grizzly and all the Scream movies in a pair of posts.

Hi all, with the holidays a-raging, I’ve got presents to wrap and meals to figure out, so there won’t be an all new episode this week. However, I am reposting this first episode of an old podcast called The Midnight Comic Club I used to do to give you something to listen to. I will still be posting to the best of my ability over on SimplyMrDastrardly on Instagram. I’m hoping to get back to it next week with a major Dastardly Holiday Horror Advent Calendar catch-up!

I’m still making my way through the Dastardly Holiday Horror Advent Calendar both on the podcast and over on my Instagram account SimplyMrDastardly. If you scroll back a bit, you can see all of the box-opening videos for this films as well as a variety of other posts in the holiday horror vein.

This week I’m talking about Better Watch Out, Christmas Blood Christmas, Batman Returns, Rare Exports, Pooka, Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 and Silent Night, Deadly Night 3.

In the episode, I also talk about the NECA Elvira Xmas figure, The Last Christmas comic, and Andrew Shaffer’s delightful Secret Santa. Don’t you just love that Geof Darrow cover?!

I also mentioned the letter that Mickey Rooney wrote about the original Silent Night, Deadly Night. Scream Factory included a part of it along with many other communiques from parents that you can see here!

And here’s Patton Oswalt’s bit I referenced when I made the science being about coulda not shoulda. It’s from 2007 album Werewolves and Lollipops, which is excellent.

I’m celebrating this entire month with the Dastardly Holiday Horror Advent Calendar, a little project I made up that I’ve been posting about daily over on SimplyMrDastardly. It’s been a fun way of surprising myself with what I’m going to watch as the month carries on. In this week’s episode, I’m talking about the first eight films I’ve watched, which range from cream of the crop to, well, not very good. Still, it’s been fun!

In order I’ve gone through Sint, Who Slew Auntie Roo, The Mean One, Krampus, Violent Night, Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, Silent Night, Bloody Night and Red Christmas. In the episode, I also mentioned a list I wrote for Topless Robot called The Ten Craziest Old People In Horror, which you can still read, though the site looks pretty bad now. Of all the places I’ve freelanced for, that’s the one I miss the most!

By the way, I forgot to say in the episode that, while I stand by everything I said about Silent Night, Bloody Night, I also meant to note that, since it was shot in 1970 and released in 1972, it is a very interesting piece when looking at the history of slasher movies and the conventions they utilize, especially around the holidays. This one even has an early scene where someone in first person breaks out of an institution and drives a car right off the grounds which sounds pretty familiar…

Finally, I wrapped up by talking about RL Stine’s Silent Night and Mike Mignola’s holiday Hellboy stuff. The art came from his Twitter, the ornament from Dark Horse Direct and can still be purchased.

Hi gang, you may have noticed that my posting her on the blog fell off a cliff partway through the year. There were a lot of reasons for that, but one of them was that I decided to regroup and focus an Instagram account on my love of horror. It’s called Simply Mr. Dastardly — a nod to the very weird podcast I did some time back — and I’m having a great time posting about movies, comics, books, collectibles and other bits of horror goodness I come across.

But, I feel like I have more to say. Instagram is great because it’s quick and I can stretch a few different creative muscles, but I still like digging into a little more detail, so now we have The Dastardly Dispatch podcast. I got delayed and waylaid during Thanksgiving which meant that I watched a bunch of holiday-themed horror movies and didn’t have anywhere to post about them. So, let’s start there.

In this episode I talked about Blood Rage, which I love, but was not able to watch again this year. I did enjoy Into The Dark: Pilgrim, The Last Thanksgiving, Home Sweet Home, Alien Abduction: Incident In Lake County, Kristy, Black Friday (2021) and The Oath (2018) though Thankskilling and Ghost Note, were not my bag.

If you’re looking for links, here are the ones for Home Sweet Home and Alien Abduction. For further reading, I mentioned Dance Of The Dead which I’ve written about here. Oh and if you haven’t heard of Body By Jake or just want a reminder of what that time was like, here’s a clip:

With December kicking off, I have a lot of fun plans including a custom made Holiday Horror Advent Calendar that will guide my daily viewing this season! Keep an eye on the IG for those reveals, but next week I’ll be back with a rundown of those films and a few other topics! Have a great one and thanks for listening!