Browsing: The Bizarre

A Brief History On October 22, 2014 and again on October 29, 2014, the FX channel television production American Horror Story: Freak Show features a two-faced character based on an alleged real-life human freak named Edward Mordrake. Digging Deeper With actor Wes Bentley portraying the unfortunate, two-faced man, the show takes us back to 1952 in Jupiter, Florida where a troupe of human freaks is assembled as a carnival sideshow.  If you have ever seen the iconic 1932 film Freaks, you might know that by that time in history, the public was beginning to not take too kindly to deformed humans…

A Brief History On October 21, 1995, Spanish illustrator and author Jesús Blasco died at age 76.  Although largely unknown in the United States, he worked extensively on British comics in the 1960s and 70s. His parents had seen fit to name him after the son of God, something that is not so common outside of Catholic Spanish-speaking countries.  Granted there are many Mohammeds, how many people who go by the first name of Buddha, Allah, Jehovah or God do you know?  You might have better luck meeting someone named after a mythological god such as Zeus, Thor, Odin, Aphrodite, Athena, Venus, etc.  History…

A Brief History On October 20, 1967, Roger Patterson shot his famous footage of a bigfoot at Bluff Creek, California.  The creature was later determined to be female and became known as “Patty.”  Digging Deeper Patterson was someone who might be considered an amateur bigfoot hunter.  Together with Robert “Bob” Gimlin, a rancher and horse trainer who acted as a guide, he set out on horseback to capture a bigfoot, or sasquatch as they are also known, on film.  They followed various sets of tracks (Patty’s were later found to have been the medium-sized ones…) until they reached Bluff Creek where the horses reeled upon catching sight of…

A Brief History On October 9, 1992, an unidentified flying object (UFO) crashed in a driveway in Peekskill, New York, crushing the trunk of the 1980 Chevy Malibu that was parked there. Digging Deeper The UFO did not remain unidentified for long;  it turned out to be a 26-pound meteorite that had fallen in the area, an event caught on video by at least 16 people and witnessed by thousands more in several US states as a “huge, greenish fireball.”  Since it was a Friday night, plenty of camcorders were already filming high school football games when the meteorite passed. It was a foot in diameter…

A Brief History On October 8, 2014, the latest iteration of American Horror Story debuts with series regular Jessica Lange portraying a character based on a real-life actress of early twentieth-century cinema! Digging Deeper According to E Online and Entertainment Weekly, the persona of Lange’s character was molded after Marlene Dietrich who ranked fourth on History and Headlines’s list of German-speaking actresses of the early years.  American Horror Story: Freak Show (AHS: FS) is set in Florida in the early 1950s, around the time when Dietrich starred in such American and British films as Stage Fright (1950), No Highway in the Sky (1951) and Rancho Notorious (1952). Other aspects of the show also drew inspiration from reality.  First,…