What do you get when a family-owned hardware store mistakenly hires Marilyn Manson and/or Rob Zombie to direct a TV commercial? This:

Updated: 10/30! (original post 10/20)

Welcome to the Hanttula’s 2009
HALLOWEEN PHENOMETHON of LINKS

Games

1. Days 2 Die: defend yourself from the oncoming cartoon zombie attack (side-scrolling shooter)
2. Days 2 Die – The Other Side: More side-scrolling, zombie shooting action; with advanced interactivity & game-play.
3. Springed Spooks Attack: Fend off attacks from spring-bound spooks to save the princess {fun cartoon style!}
4. Night of 1000 Zombies: You are a jack-o-lantern, tossing your own head to smash approaching zombies
5. Blood Red: fend off wave-after-wave of rising zombies (in spooky silhouette against a setting sun)
6. Monster Match: Stack matching monsters to remove them in this reverse-Tetris style game
7. Dead Frontier – Night One: Can you survive the night during an onslaught of malicious zombies? (a top-down Zombie survival game)
8. Dead Frontier: Outbreak – a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-type text (and audio) based story (a promotion for the MMORPG version of the “Dead Frontier” shooting game above)
9. Mon-Buster: Match monster tiles to remove them in this timed memory game
10. Whack-a-Ghoul: like Whack-a-Mole but with ghouls
11. Ghost Town: a club-wielding baby in a cemetery makes battle with ghosts & other haunting baddies.
12. De-Animator: a shooting game in which you play the part of a regretful scientist who chooses to undo his “reanimation” of corpses… one bullet at a time.
13. Ghoul Academy: side-scrolling shooter action in this early 90′s style video game
14. Pumpkin Toss: a shooting-gallery type game in which you toss pumpkins at approaching ghosts, ghouls & skeletons.
15. Halloween Pumpkins: a stacking-puzzle/strategy game… with pumpkins!
16. Halloween Hangman: just what you would imagine.
17. All Hallow’s Eve: Defend your home from attacking zombies. Aim for the head.
18. Candy Toss: toss treats to trick-or-treaters on the street below.
19. Halloween on Creepy Street: kind of like Super Mario Bros. expect you’re trick-or-treater dressed as a ghost.
20. Ghost Bowling: Roll jack-o-lanterns at ghostly pins!
21. Bill the Demon: Find souls. Eat them.
22. Halloween Smash: like Bejeweled, but with Halloween-related items.
23. Pumpkin Remover: solve puzzles based around falling pumpkins

Inspiration/Entertainment

1. Music & Sounds – “Doctor Druid’s Haunted Seance”: a spooky sound recording from the 1970′s
2. Carved Robot Pumpkins: 10 carved pumpkins, modified to look like robots.
   See also: The Automatonic Gourd (a fully robotized pumpkin)
3. Make a Realistic Stitched Wound: part of Instructables’ DIY Halloween
4. Para Abnormal: a web comic with posts for the “31 Days of Halloween”
5. Crumpkin’s Pumpkins: visit this haunted pumpkin patch and click (and click and click) around to see what surprises await you.
   {or just go to listen to the creepy ambient soundtrack }.
6. Pompor: the {faux} IKEA, flat-packed pumpkin
7. Create and Draw Monsters: classic monster & Halloween coloring book pages
8. Virtual Pumpkin Carving: illuminates when you are done!
9. Vintage Halloween: decorations & designs (on Flickr)
10. Java’s Cosmic Halloween Special: a podcast mix of retro-lounge Halloween tunes and an eerie radio play with zombies, car races & possessed pumpkins.

How-To

1. Make a Meatloaf Severed Hand: a visually gruesome (and potentially tasty) Halloween dinner
2. Make a Realistic Stitched Wound: part of Instructables’ DIY Halloween
3. How to Make a Cylon Jack-o-Lantern: Battlestar Galactica meets Halloween.
4. Make a Living Severed Hand: a somewhat convincing & semi-subtle Halloween costume
5. The Snap-o-lantern: how to make a robotic, snapping jack-o-lantern
6. Drilled Pumpkins: Carving pumpkins with a drill. Not very ‘traditional-looking,’ but makes for some interesting lanterns.
7. Very cool & simple (to make) Halloween Mask: [video] if you have two large sheets of paper & about 15 minutes you can create a mask that gives the impression of the wearer’s head being twisted all the way around his/her body
8. Low-Cost Halloween Pop-Up Character: build your own creature to pop out of a container and scare trick-or-treaters. Here’s a video of the device in action.
9. Halloween Candy Code: Hobo signs reinterpreted to mark houses for their Halloween candy content. For those interested, more on hobo signs/code.
10. Breadstick Mummy Dogs: hot dogs wrapped in dough to look like mummies. Frightfully tasty!
11. MonsterList: a massive list of Halloween projects.

Improv Everywhere continues to demonstrate that they are one of the most relevant creative groups today with Grocery Store Musical:

‘We’ve got some work to do now‘ is a rather good Threadless t-shirt design that presents Velma & Scooby Doo (the only remaining members of the team) as vampire & zombie hunters.

I’m happy to announce that Seeing Double, a new Hanttula exhibit, is now open!

This exhibit investigates the mysteriously similar films that will often be released at or around the same time, then pits them in a head-to-head battle where YOU get to decide the victor.

It’s admittedly bare at the moment, but there’s a large list of the film battles that are “coming soon to this website near you.”

Visit ‘Seeing Double‘ now!

The brilliant chaps at Mustache & Monocle have taken the saddening security video footage of a drunk attempting to buy more beer and have turned it in to a comical, old-timey flick. Ah, what a little ragtime piano can add to an otherwise dismal scene.

If this YouTube video existed several years ago, perhaps George Lucas could have used it as an example of improving old films with re-editing… rather than whatever he did.

For anything that ails you this Sunday morning, Dr. Hanttula prescribes a simple viewing of the beat-boxing chipmunk. He also recommends clicking “replay” at least 7 times…

Life Magazine shows us ‘30 Dumb Inventions‘ from the 50′s & 60′s. While most are pretty pointless (like the device to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes at once), I will throw down with anyone that tries to say jetpacks are “dumb.” That’s right, Life Magazine, you and I have a date for fisticuffs.

In a time when fear-mongering is becoming a new American pastime,Volkswagen introduces their “Fun Theory” — getting people to improve their behavior by making activities fun.

Yay for fun!

Throwing Trash into a Bin

Taking the Stairs (instead of an escalator)