Spanish Plane Crash Near Madrid Airport

Minute-By-Minute Updates On Crash

1758 Sky News: Reports of the number on board are still ambiguous, with a SAS release putting the number at 173 (nine crew, 164 passengers) and a reported Spanair release putting it at 172 (six crew, 166 passengers).

1754 Sky News: Spanair press conference may take place as soon as 1800.

1753 Sky News: Eyewitnesses say the airport is “hot and high”, adding to the tough conditions faced by emergency services.

1747 El Pais: Confirmed reports that Spanish government have confirmed at least 100 dead.

1745 AP: Reporting now that only 23 survived, which puts the unofficial death toll at 150.

1740 Sky News: SAS confirm they will give a press conference at 1845 BST.

1734 AP: Emergency rescue official says only 26 people survived Madrid plane crash - which would make the death toll 146-147, depending on total figures.

1732 Sky News: Expert tells Sky News that causes can range from a bird caught in the engine, to engine failure or an explosion in the engine. As fire was seen from the enginge on the runway, expert adds that explosion of engine is likely cause. Another remote possibility is that debris on runway got sucked into the engine.

Read more …

The South Shields Poltergeist

Danny Penman: Marc and Marianne undressed themselves and quickly slipped under the duvet. Although the heating had been on for many hours, it was unusually cold in their normally snug bedroom. Soon they hoped to be as warm as toast and drifting off to sleep after a hard day looking after their boisterous three-year-old son Robert.

Seconds later, Marianne was hit on the head by their son’s toy dog. She sat bolt upright in bed with a bemused look in her eyes. The cuddly toy was clearly aimed at her but who - or what - could have thrown it? Moments later another stuffed dog hit her on the head.

She hardly saw it move. It seemed to have appeared on the edge of vision a fraction of a second before hitting her. And this time it hit with far greater force and, if she was honest, malevolence. Soon the air was thick with flying toys. All seemed to appear in mid flight, apparently from nowhere, and were hurled with great force at the petrified couple.

Marc and Marianne hugged the duvet closer to try and protect themselves from the flying toys. The poltergeist had the same idea. An invisible hand grabbed the far corner of the duvet and pulled in the opposite direction. Read more …

Brotherhood of Blood (V) October 14, 2008; Postal and Synopsis

SYNOPSIS

Sequel to the International horror thriller hit Reeker, in which a Sheriff and his son try to apprehend bank robbers on their way to Mexico only to find that they are both being stalked by a far more deadly enemy, the fire-wielding Reeker.

Release Date: October 14, 2008
Director: Dave Payne
Writer: Dave Payne
Starring: Desmond Askew Lew Temple Valerie Cruz Robert Pine Stephen Martines Mircea Monroe Michael Muhney Wilmer Calderon Alejandro Patino Shelly Desai
Studio: Ghost House Underground, Lionsgate

Mass Culture and The Paranormal

Anthony North: I’ve often said that the paranormal is usually defined by our cultural expectation. And looking back over the last 200 years or so, we can perhaps see this in action.

Mass culture has placed various definitions upon us, especially through literature. When we think of the archetypal ghost, for instance, this has more to do with Gothic literature than we believe.

Prior to its arrival, most ghosts formed part of a morality tale, the encounter being what you can expect if you are not moral. With the gothic, the ghost changed: It appeared as part of a personal transition in the viewer, and, interestingly, became frightening.

How much did this reclassification have to do with our increasing belief in the individual? Such a change also included a new adaptation of the vampire, best described in Dracula. And again, this was very much an individualistic interpretation, emphasizing the ability of man to be a monster.

Predictably, sightings of ghosts and vampires changed in kind: And as the 19th century became more and more disturbing to live in, eventually leading to the Great War early in the 20th, our popular paranormality reflected this. Read more …

Horror Photos, Photograph (34 HQ Pics)

A photograph (often shortened to photo) is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene’s visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the human eye would see. The process of creating photographs is called photography. The word “photograph” coined 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is based on the Greek φώς (phos), “light” + γραφίς (graphis), “stylus”, “paintbrush” or γραφή (graphê), “representation by means of lines” or “drawing”, together meaning “drawing with light”.

The first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by a French inventor, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, building on a discovery by Johann Heinrich Schultz (1724): that a silver and chalk mixture darkens under exposure to light. Niépce and Louis Daguerre refined this process. Daguerre discovered that exposing the silver first to iodine vapor, before exposure to light, and then to mercury fumes after the photograph was taken, could form a latent image; bathing the plate in a salt bath then fixes the image. These ideas led to the famous daguerreotype.

The daguerreotype had its problems, notably the fragility of the resulting picture, and that it was a positive-only process and thus could not be re-printed. Inventors set about looking for improved processes that would be more practical. Several processes were introduced and used for a short time between Niépce’s first image and the introduction of the collodion process in 1848. Collodion-based wet-glass plate negatives with prints made on albumen paper remained the preferred photographic method for some time, even after the introduction of the even more practical gelatin process in 1871. Adaptations of the gelatin process have remained the primary black-and-white photographic process to this day, differing primarily in the film material itself, originally glass and then a variety of flexible films. Read more …

Has Montague Keen Returned From The Dead?

Danny Penman: The spirit of Montague Keen watched helplessly as his body was loaded into an ambulance.

His wife, Veronica, stared blankly into the distance, tears flooding down her face. Her friends whispered words of hope, but in her heart she knew her husband was dead. Moments before his, Montague was engaged in a passionate debate on the paranormal at the Royal Society of Arts in London. But then a massive heart attack felled his mortal body in the blink of an eye.

As his life slipped away, the 78-year-old reaffirmed the pact he had made with his wife. Both promised that whoever died first would work from the spirit world to prove that life continued after death. It was a romantic pledge on an epic scale and one that Monty was determined to keep. Read more …

Dark Floors (Finland release) (V), Poster, Synopsis and Trailer

SYNOPSIS

Concerned for her autistic daughter’s health, a father sees her removal from the hospital by force as the only option. An elevator breakdown prevents a smooth exit and renders them trapped with others. Yet the incident is only the beginning of a descent into nightmare. As the doors open, the hospital appears mysteriously deserted. When mutilated bodies are found, creatures from a dark world start a frightening attack. It soon becomes clear that the survival of the group may rest solely on the little girl.

MOVIE REVIEW

“Even though it’s plastered in heavy clichés and predictable plot-twists, has no sense of mood or tempo and features some of the least scary monsters ever to grace the silver screen, it’s still remarkably entertaining. It balances on a razor’s edge with a serious, bordering pretentious, storyline on one side and those goofy-looking Lordi-monsters on the other. Well played, ironic horror-comedy or a serious, bloody misfire? You’ll have to judge for yourself.”

By: Michael Panduro

To be honest, I’m having a hard time writing this review. Where does one begin with the Lordi Motion Picture? Going in to it I had no idea what to expect. Was it going to be serious, scary, funny, ridiculous? Turns out all of the above (well, except maybe scary).

We find ourselves in familiar territory as the film opens in a scary hospital. Following a near-fatal accident with a hospital scanning-device, Ben (Noah Huntley), a noble father, has decided to leave with his autistic daughter Sarah (Skye Bennett) and her piles of scary monster-drawings. Their unapproved exit is foiled, however, by a mysterious elevator that leaves them at “not six, not seven, not hell, nor heaven” (how’s that for cheap nursery rhymes!?). Together with four strangers they find themselves stranded in some sort of parallel universe where the hospital is deserted, or rather: full of dead people and haunted by stupid looking heavy metal monsters. Read more …