The Mracek family, living in the house, say they have to extinguish several small fires, up to 60 a day, of plastic bags, pictures as well as sockets though they have been disconnected from electricity supply. Moreover, window panes, electric bulbs and thermometers are cracking in the house and once water in the aquarium started boiling all of a sudden . . . "We are only waiting where it will start burning again. Our son has moved to his grandma, but we must stay here to be able to extinguish fires. It is our house, we built it ourselves and everything was all right for ten years. We cannot let it burn down," Hana Mrackova told the daily.

Apparently paranormal experts have been brought in, as well as a geophysicist and operators from the local Prague telecom and energy companies. But here's the good part. Though the family doesn't want to leave the house they built, the mayor of their town has promised they'll be given another place to live in a few weeks if the haunting continues:

Strašice Mayor Jiri Hahner is concerned about the paranormal phenomena in the house . . . "We do not want to fall for occultism. We will try to explain it in a scientific way. However it is hard as these phenomena are really unexplainable," Hahner [said]. If the situation does not improve within three weeks, the municipality will offer them another housing since it is dangerous to live in the house, he added.

If the weird events continue, he's contemplating having the house torn down.

Hey, I have ghosts in my shower who say they won't leave until the City of San Francisco remodels my bathroom. You hear that, Mayor Gavin Newsom? You think you're better than the mayor of Strašice or something?

via Prague Monitor (via Bonnie!)

Syfy president Dave Howe explains to the Hollywood Reporter:

"We've always been keen on vampires and werewolves, and we loved the originality of Being Human, the fact that the fantastical creatures in it are very young, accessible and charming."

They loved the originality of it so much, they decided to remake it.

Syfy has ordered 13 episodes of a remade Being Human, which could appear on screens as early at next fall. Across the pond the original Being Human gears up for its second season this January. Howe promised this won't be a poor recreation of the series, seeing as most Syfy watchers probably have seen the original, but we've been burned before.

I was one of the loudest haters of the American-ized Office before it aired, because British humor and sensibilities don't translate well in the States. But the show hired good writers, invested in the production and found a wonderful cast. It's engaging, even though it lacks that dry British wit that made me fall in love with the original, and despite the lack of Ricky Gervais and the arguable fact that the American version has been around for far too long, it's still funny. (Though I shudder to think of Jim and Pam, "the baby years.") That said, for every successful Americanized show, there are many dismal translations, such as Life on Mars, Coupling, and a host of other terribly translated or poorly copied series.

Being Human is a completely different show from The Office. You can not translate the kind of dark humor that parallels the main characters lives, without the flippant British style that manages to just slip in a turn of phrase here and there. That humor is what makes the whole idea that a ghost, vampire and werewolf all living together in real life believable, the whole casualness of it all.

The writing is woven together so perfectly. Take the shocking weirdness that comes when we see one character's vampire porno, in which one person cannot be recorded because they're a vampire. The vampire porno itself becomes a whole other plot point, which I won't ruin here. But it's a good example of how Being Human blends darkness and humor together so perfectly. I highly doubt we can make these kinds of jokes on the Syfy Channel, with American writers and actors.

You can also bet that any and all edge will get stripped away, in hopes of garnering more viewers, so kiss the amazing sex scenes goodbye, along with violence, blood and realistic humor.

Plus you will never, never, never be able to recreate the chemistry and timing the trio over at Being Human have. It is by far one of the better ensemble casts working today.

In short, this is a disaster. The worst case is, we'll end up with just another CW-esque dramedy show about pretty white kids and their magical issues. To me, this is on a par with an Americanized Doctor Who, — it's not needed, and all but impossible to adapt properly.

How can this be saved? If Syfy decided to spend lots of money on hard working writers and producers that can actually Imagine Greater. Even then, they'd have to attempt at translating the dark humor without throwing in a green screen, adding reality-show components or trying to make it any darker than it already is. Then they have to cast three people who can sell this crazy premise. But they could always take that money and create new material, and just air the original Being Human along with said new series, instead of butchering a great UK show. Because if it ain't broke...

If this makes more people watch the original, then that's one thing this new reboot has going for it. Still I honestly just don't think it can be done. And now with the internet making foreign shows more accessible to the masses, I think there will be a surprising amount of push-back from U.S. fans.

Firstly, yes, I know that witches aren't monsters, but if you're working your way through Halloween icons, there's no avoiding the fact that the old Elphaba has created quite a following for herself. And, let's face it; if there's anyone you could see having a fair chance against a supernatural spirit nemesis, someone who literally has a few (magic) tricks up her sleeve is as good as anyone. So! Witches Versus Poltergeists! Go!

Our take: It depends on how experienced the witch would be, but we're of the opinion that witches can easily communicate with those in the spirit realm - Even mean, chair-throwing ghosts like poltergeists. If she couldn't ease them into submission with some well-chosen words, we wouldn't be surprised if a couple of hexes couldn't take care of things faster than you can say "Bippity-Boppity-Boo." But what do you think?

As usual, voting is open until midnight tonight, and the winner of this match will find themselves advancing to tomorrow, and so on until the final showdown on Hallowe'en itself. Vote early, vote often, fight fans.

Apparently, you people have no respect for the classics. How else to explain the poor performance of the Mummy in yesterday's first round of io9's Hallowe'en Smackdown - but with Zombies being the clear winner of that clash of the undead, we thought we'd put them up against the peculiar ghostly phenomenon known as poltergeists. You know, like this:

What happens with an unthinkable physical force meets an invisible, untouchable ghost? You tell us.

For the uninitiated, poltergeists are described by Wikipedia as "an ostensibly paranormal phenomenon attributed to an an invisible spirit or ghost that manifests itself by moving and influencing objects, generally in a particular location such as a house or room or place within a house," and aren't necessarily out to destroy humanity and eat their brains like our zombie brethren, but which one would be more annoying, terrifying or outright deadly to your average horror movie victim? After all, everyone can knock the head off a zombie, but not everyone is an exorcist...

Poll stays open until the witching hour tonight. Vote early and often, and feel free to share your reasoning in the comments below - The winner goes on to face the next opponent tomorrow, all the way up until Saturday's final showdown.

Frankenstein Conquers The World

Because, sometimes, a monster has to save the world from a Godzilla-esque other monster, who's threatening (where else?) Japan.

Dracula The Superhero
We'd love to say that we can't blame Dell Comics for trying to cash in on the Batmania of the 1960s by turning Dracula into a superhero, but... Well, it's Dracula as a superhero. Even worse, it's a modern-day Count Dracula as a scientist who accidentally swallows some formula that allows him to transform into a bat and then decides to fight crime in a purple jumpsuit. Seriously, in what world is that a good idea?

Supporting Team Spirit Is Some Kind Of Good-Doing, Right?
Maybe werewolves were meant to be working for a common good. Exhibit A:

Frankenstein's Monster... Hunter
Ignore the shortlived attempt to turn the character into a superhero from the same people behind the Dracula superhero (Although we're slightly charmed by the secret identity "Frank N. Stone"); the best comic version of Mary Shelley's creation is undoubtedly Grant Morrison's sullen hero from the Seven Soldiers series, packing heat and a grim demeanor as he dispatches demons, alien invasions and deals with his former Bride, who just so happens to be a reanimated agent of a secret government agency investigating weirdness. Freaks have never had such a strong defender as this son of Victor Frankenstein.

Zombies Can Do More Than Shuffle
It's hard to make a case for zombies being good guys; they're mostly unthinking forces of brain-eating chaos, as opposed to particularly malicious. And yet, who could argue that this didn't improve their life just a little bit?

Werewolf By Night
His name is Jack Russell, people. Whoever said that the 1970s wasn't the age of Mighty Marvel Bad Ideas?

Buffy The Vampire Slayer In General
Vampires with souls, sarcastic werewolves in bands and demons with perfectly justifiable fears of bunnies. Joss Whedon's calling card may have specialized in making heroes out of monsters - even Dracula helped out the Slayers in the Season Eight comic series - but he made sure to keep them interesting even after they'd seen the light (Metaphorically so, in Angel's and Spike's cases, of course).

Dracula Saves Hallowe'en

Any movie that has a plot where Dracula has to save Hallowe'en because the classic horror monsters are seen as funny rather than scary already has our love, but where The Hallowe'en That Almost Wasn't goes horribly wrong isn't even the Munsters-esque treatment of the characters, but the casting of Judd Hirsch as Dracula. There's just no way to find that man scary, sadly.

We Ain't Afraid Of No Ghosts (1)

'Nuff said? No, wait...

We Ain't Afraid Of No Ghosts (2)

Definitely 'nuff said. Paranormal Activity would've been so much better if it'd been Casper visiting instead...

Says researcher Marc Micozzi:

Our data show that anomalous perceptions parallel other forms of environmental sensitivity, such as having pronounced or longstanding allergies, migraine headache, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, irritable bowel, even synesthesia (overlapping senses) and heightened sensitivity to light, sound, touch, and smell. Women make up three-quarters of this sensitive population but there are other markers as well: being ambidextrous, for instance, or recalling a traumatic childhood. The more we look at the people who say they're psychic, or who have recurring anomalous experience, the more it seems there's a mix of nature and nurture that predisposes them.

Hmmm, I feel as if I'm being haunted . . . by pseudo-science!

via Science Blog

Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters 1 and 2) is officially on to direct Ghostbusters 3. Bloody Disgusting confirmed his involvement along with this little juicy script detail.

Apparently, the sequel takes place when the paranormal researchers "reopen" their ghost removal service after it has been closed for quite a few years.

Please, let their first client be the Mayor's idiot son or the angry doctor's child, because nothing would give me more pleasure than to hear Bill Murray, who is confirmed to have some sort of involvement, deliver this gem again....

Ghost Cat is just one of those movies that's too bizarrely cute not to love. Ellen Page is adjusting to life in a small town and dealing with the death of her mom. And then every 15 or 20 minutes, the ghost of the dead cat Margaret has to intervene in the plot somehow — by alerting people to danger, by scratching the faces of bad guys, or by knocking over catfood to reveal a long-forgotten secret. The climax, in which the ghost cat takes out both bad guys by crashing their car, is really amazing stuff. The epic comes out on DVD later this month.

Noting that the Ghostbusters films owe a great to old horror comedies, from Abbott and Costello flicks to the 1970s children's series The Ghost Busters, YouTube user whoiseyevan created this faux trailer from over a dozen films and TV shows, recasting Dean Martin as Ray Stantz, Bob Hope as Peter Venkman, and Fred MacMurray as Egon Spengler. And personally, I think the 1975 Ghost Busters theme is a great improvement.

[via Coilhouse]

The series, which literally is about a young werewolf, vampire and ghost all sharing a flat in Bristol together, is like Friends, if the cast mates sometimes murdered people and turned them into bloodsucking immortals and wolf people.

The bumbly little fellow who plays the mild-mannered werewolf, George, is awfully endearing, you should tune in just for him. The ghost is a obnoxious dead lady, but pehaps I would be too if I was stuck wearing the same clothes forever. All in all, its a cute little series (from what I've seen) and if it stays on the "troubles with dating a werewolf" path it will continue that way. Sadly it looks like it's veering off into some strange vampire war that I can't particularly understand, and I'm not sure I care for.

George "Turning" In The Apartment:

Being Human premieres Saturday, July 25, at 9 PM on BBC America.

Behold the boy who coughs up a brown flower, or an arm-vomit cloud, caused by an evil ghost in a story that's supposedly based on real events. The official synopsis for the flick is:

The Haunting In Connecticut charts one family's terrifying, real-life encounter with the dark forces of the supernatural. When the Campbell family moves to upstate Connecticut, they soon learn that their charming Victorian home has a disturbing history: not only was the house a transformed funeral parlor where inconceivable acts occurred, but the owner's clairvoyant son Jonah served as a demonic messenger, providing a gateway for spiritual entities to crossover. Now unspeakable terror awaits, when Jonah, the boy who communicated with the powerful dark forces of the supernatural, returns to unleash a new kind of horror on the innocent and unsuspecting family.

Sounds like your standard-issue haunting film. But I do like the lovely Virginia Madsen, so I'm more inclined to see it, even though they're harping on the "ZOMG THIS TOTALLY HAPPENED" vibe a bit too much. The film is in theaters March 27.

I'm from Chicago, and you do not screw around with the Chi-town cops. So these ghosts are in for a world of trouble if they get up to the same shenanigans that regular nutcases on Cops try to pull. Flashlight ends at the ready, slimer, they're not here to fuck around — now tell me how many beers did you have tonight sir?

This would be the next ghostly show on A&E following Paranormal State. While I'm not so keen on Paranormal State, I think Paranormal Cops could be pretty spectacular, but only if you work with the hardened city cops that are ready to bring these spirits downtown.

[Variety]

According to the Daily Grail, the scientists from Goldsmith College’s Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit got mixed results with their EMF-laced house:

Recent research has suggested that a number of environmental factors may be associated with a tendency for susceptible individuals to report mildly anomalous sensations typically associated with ‘‘haunted’’ locations, including a sense of presence, feeling dizzy, inexplicable smells, and so on. Factors that may be associated with such sensations include fluctuations in the electromagnetic field (EMF) and the presence of infrasound. A review of such work is presented, followed by the results of the "Haunt" project in which an attempt was made to construct an artificial "haunted" room by systematically varying such environmental factors.

Unfortunately, when the team tested this theory, they came up ghostless. They asked 79 participants to walk through their haunted house and record if and where they experienced any unusual sensations. While some participants did feel such sensations, the locations in the house where they felt the sensations did not correlate with the locations the team had “haunted,” suggesting the sensations were caused more by the power of suggestion than electromagnetic fields.

But other researchers have had more luck summoning ghosts with EMF. Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University, published a study on a brain damaged girl who reported frequent nocturnal visits from an apparition. Reports Scientific American:

When Persinger and his colleagues investigated (at the behest of the girl's mother), they found an electric clock next to the bed that was about 10 inches (25.4 centimeters) from where she placed her head when she slept. Tests showed that the clock generated electromagnetic pulses with waveforms similar to those found to trigger epileptic seizures in rats and humans. When the clock was removed, the visions stopped. Persinger determined that the clock, in combination with the girl's brain injury, were highly likely to have been contributing factors to the perceived nocturnal visits.

Regardless of the cause, the notions of ghosts and haunting do have a measured effect on our psyches. In 2005, a study published in Human Nature had participants take a test on which they were given the opportunity to cheat. Some of the test takers were told the room was haunted, while the others were not. The students in the haunted group were overwhelmingly less likely to cheat than the non-haunted group, suggesting that, even if they didn’t fear ghostly retribution, they still had the uneasy feeling that someone might be watching them.

The 'Haunt' Project [Daily Grail]
Ghost Lusters: If You Want to See a Specter Badly Enough, Will You? [Scientific American]
Spooky Science: Does a Fear of Ghosts Help Keep Us Honest? [Scientific American]

Kidney writes:

My current home is near the top of Mt Washington, and several times a week I jog down this same street to catch the Metro Rail at the bottom of the hill. As I hike back up, panting, I sometimes imagine I'm being passed by one of the iron cars of the Los Angeles and Mount Washington Railway. Inside, the passengers in their colorless hats and collars sit on wooden benches gazing out at the passing front yards. And as they go by, I realize not one of them can see me.

So cool. Reminds me of the post we did a while back on the alternate history of public transportation projects that almost happened.

Ghosts of Mnt. Washington [via Dinosaurs and Robots]