I was very excited to stumble on this TV commercial from 1985 for the Nikon One Touch instant camera. Their slogan? “It puts great photography at everybody’s fingertips.” Their mascot? A dismembered hand, of course! Thing (sometimes spelled “Thingg”) — the ambulatory hand that lives in a box and serves as a literal “handyman” to… Continue reading Thing Addams, Photographer
Author: Michael Arnzen
Michael Arnzen holds four Bram Stoker Awards and an International Horror Guild Award for his disturbing (and often funny) fiction, poetry and literary experiments. He has been teaching as a Professor of English in the MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University since 1999.
Animated Weeds and Supernatural Pesticides
Lawncare season is in full bloom, if the television is any indication. More and more, I’ve been noticing advertisements for riding mowers, hedge trimmers, and all sorts of products targeting the green thumb. But one popular subgenre of these gardening ads have been employing the medium in a way that is undeniably uncanny: commercials for… Continue reading Animated Weeds and Supernatural Pesticides
You Don’t Eat Your Own Kind
My favorite Bizarro comic of recent days involves Mr. Peanut — that dapper mascot of Planter’s nuts — in a scenario that makes plain the inherent contradiction of advertisements that employ cartoon mascots to represent the very same products they sell. What IS the appeal of these imaginary spokespeanuts and mascots and similar characters in… Continue reading You Don’t Eat Your Own Kind
Review of Pea Green Boat (Spring 2012) — Special Issue on The Uncanny
Pea Green Boat is an online magazine of curious and compelling miscellany, publishing issues that collect articles and snippets on unique themes. The current issue of PGB (Spring 2012) focuses on The Uncanny. I should say up front that one of my articles, on “Eyebombing,” is reprinted from this very site. But PGB’s Uncanny issue… Continue reading Review of Pea Green Boat (Spring 2012) — Special Issue on The Uncanny
The Uncanny in your Inbox — and a Book in your Mailbox
A brief alert to let readers of this blog and fans of all things “uncanny” know that my latest book is a large collection of micropoetry — called The Gorelets Omnibus. Aside from hundreds of twisted (and sometimes funny) horror poems, it features a collection of academic articles written about the gorelets project (by critics… Continue reading The Uncanny in your Inbox — and a Book in your Mailbox
JC Penney — Screaming For Retail
In their latest campaign, “Enough. Is. Enough,” JC Penney is running what is, to my mind, a hilarious television commercial, involving a serial montage of consumers shouting for outrageously loud and extended time periods at sales tags and other marketing tricks familiar to us all. What makes this commercial so great is all the horror… Continue reading JC Penney — Screaming For Retail