It’s October, which means I’ll be culling my column headlines from various horror artifacts from pop culture. This week’s title comes from the 1993 Super Nintendo video game that I wasted many glorious childhood hours on during the twilight of the last century. A fun romp through dead-brained suburban wastelands full of invading monster movie scaries from the matinee era before my youth — and with a bitchin’ soundtrack I’ll return to in a moment — this fun run ‘n‘ shoot romp has a name which perfectly encapsulates the paranoia of the cold war age of creature features, nuclear annihilation and the red scare. So many post-war sci-fi and horror films, TV episodes, comics and short stories dealt with the fear of the neighborhood being captured, household by household, by a malignant invading presence. The collective American popular imagination was primed for the specter of secret invasions from a dark external force turning the pristine Kodachrome postcards of happy days into a technicolor nightmare of rampaging hordes enjoying a cannibalistic fondue orgy of blood and guts over the gentle firelight of melting astroturf and white-hot aluminum siding.
I plan to write about the subversive side of this cultural zeitgeist next week, the clever responses crafted by wise minds always on the verge of being blacklisted. But for now, I want to simply snap a quick a pic of the paranoid past as a prologue for the current age. Our time of blind idiocy and reactionary state repression against the organic bodies of conscientious resistance to the appalling horror of mass dehumanization as official policy, foreign and domestic. Or more simply put, I want to encourage you, dear reader, to look past the absurd hyper-violence saturating the madness-inducing 24-hour news cycle and not give in to the urge to consider thy neighbors zombified. Let’s invert that old saying about the first day in a tough-to-pass class and switch it up: Look to your left and now look to your right. You are surrounded by people who you are able to help and who you may need to seek help from as well sometime. Go with that in mind and peace in your heart.
And finally, check out the original soundtrack of Zombies Ate My Neighbors. It’s a wild ride of spooky polka beats and tango trots under an electric landscape of horror sound samples and classic organ tones. It reminds me of snippets of Krysztoff Komeda’s soundtrack to Cul de Sac rendered into a 16-bit haunted-house rave. It’s certainly one of the least damaging YouTube searches you can do today.
Thursday
When the doors open today at 4 p.m. and the music kicks off a couple hours later at the Adorni Center and the Eagle House, it will mark the beginning of the four-day Redwood Coast Music Festival. Today’s acts include Clint Baker’s Jazz Band, Noir, Redwood Dixie Gators and more. Early bird passes for the entire shebang are going for $175 online, and for more information about pricing and scheduling, check out rcmfest.org. Viva.
Friday
Another kick-off night of happy returns, this time over at the Arkley Center for the Performing Arts, where at 7:30 p.m. you can catch the first performance of the Eureka Symphony’s new season. Tonight’s program Contrast and Transformation features pianist John Chernoff for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, along with a piece by Borodin and early 20th century German composer Paul Hindemith’s transformative interpretation of the works of early German Romantic composer Carl Maria von Weber. It should make for an excellent evening and, with general admission tickets going for $21-$54, along with $15 ($10 for students) tickets available at the box office after 6 p.m., an affordable evening as well.
Saturday
Brooklyn’s Shilpa Ray is a lady who has been churning out the art-punk jams for quite some time, with her band of merry freaks bringing the guts to undergird her growl. She’ll be stalking the boards of the Miniplex tonight at 8:30 p.m., along with an absolutely perfect support band: local melodic punk rawk chanter and ranter The Bored Again. Come have some fun while you can still bang your head against the kicks and pricks ($15).
Sunday
Street folk and dive country singer/songwriter John Moreland has been self-producing his own albums of soulful Tulsa heat very prodigiously for most of his breathing life. Heartworn and permanently highway-bound, he makes what my late father used to refer to approvingly as “dirty boots music.” You can hear for yourself what that means in a live setting, which is Moreland’s best medium, at the Arcata Theatre Lounge at 7 p.m. Canadian folkstress Mariel Buckley is also on the ticket, which goes for $30.
Monday
Movie night over at Savage Henry Comedy Club begins spooky season with one of the horror genre’s greatest offerings, if not one of the finest innovative works of cinema ever made for on a shoestring and for a dream. It’s none-other than Night of the Living Dead (1968), a masterpiece that lives forever in the shortlist of the Yeo Canon. If you are uninitiated or looking for a revisit to this classic, roll through at 6 p.m. with $10 in hand.
Tuesday
All you lovers of traditional Irish music take heed: Guitarist John Doyle, one of the finest cross-continental practitioners of the form will be at the Arcata Playhouse tonight at 7 p.m., an excellent venue for all things warm and acoustic. If you’re keen for some keening and have a heart afire with an unmet desire for the soul’s food of song, come by with $20 for the door.
Wednesday
Nigerien Tuareg-rocker Mdou Moctar has broken through into the global touring scene with his unique mix of desert travelin’ tunes and punk rock worldbeat chug should need no introduction to those of you who love the sounds of an electric blues hum under the sheltering sky. However, his rhythm section are no slouches either, and have branched off to form the group Takaat. The name comes from the Berber-dialect Tamashek word for “noise,” and what a glorious noise it is. Something as bold as love the axis of which turns a cosmic radio dial whose sounds crest the peaks of a glorious cross-continent dune sea. You can really take flight with this stuff and I recommend doing so tonight at the Miniplex at 7:30 p.m., where local contrapuntal tone genius LK will be opening. Door tickets will be going for $25 but, if I were you, I’d try to snag one of the $20 advance ones as an insurance against the possibility of a sold-out show. Get after it.
Collin Yeo (he/him) has been designated the “Ayatollah of Rock n’ Rolla” by the State Department. He lives in the badlands of Arcata.
This article appears in Red-Light Women, Part II.