Halloween Monsters and Strangeness 2011

I thought I would review everything I did in the past two weeks and use this blog as the hub to link to everything. I realized last year that it would be foolish to try to outdo myself this year due to everything else I have going on. So, I had a few ideas and then revived some oldies. Speaking of which...

Some years back I covered the outdoor locations of Boris Karloff's The Mummy which was filmed at Red Rock Canyon. One thing I did not get quite right was the funeral procession that takes place on a cliff edge.

Unfortunately, when I went there this last time I forgot to bring the above picture with me. So, what I have is close, but not as fine-tuned as I would like. The deal is the above picture (and maybe mine too) is an optical illusion. It looks like the background is combined with the ramp area they are walking to make it look like they are on a cliff edge. The reality is there are two separate areas that have blended in together when you take a picture like this.Time to do a re-cap of my Halloween series for this year and provide the links:

1)Alien Murder at Corriganville!?!?!: this was a follow-up to something I discovered a few years ago while I was editing my Fort Apache video. It had to do with the tv show Bones having a few scenes at Corriganville that I thought was strange enough for this Halloween season. This just goes to show you that, although it is rare, sometimes modern tv shows and movies end up at the old classic locations.

a)Alien Murder at Corriganville!?!?! Blogs

b)Alien Murder at Corriganville?! (Youtube Version)

2)The Bridge to Nowhere: here I did a video for an area I had been to years ago. In fact, it was one of the original locations I used for my first Halloween series. The hike is rather easy (for me at least), but the trick is you have to cross the East Fork River at least six to maybe a dozen times to get to the final destination.

a)The Bridge to Nowhere Blogs (from 2006!)

b)The Bridge to Nowhere (Youtube Version)

One thing I wanted to mention here is that I experienced a lot more trash this time around on the ground doing this hike. This bothers me. If for some reason you are in the area or doing this hike please consider bringing a trash bag with you to pack some of it out. It is a popular hike, this sort of thing is to be expected there, but it still troubled me to see so much trash out there.

3)Ancient Monsters: this was a bunch of blogs that took up most of the series this year. Dinosaurs are fascinating to most people, and with the new dino exhibit at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum I thought it would be a good idea to include this one this year.

a)Ancient Monsters Blogs

b)I did five videos for this that are on youtube. They are linked in each blog, or go down to the very bottom of this blog and click my Halloween video collection to find them.

4)The Mummy at Red Rock Canyon: of course, I have covered this before on a previous Halloween series. It was just time to create a new video for this one to replace the old lower quality one that was on the old youtube channel.

a)The Mummy at Red Rock Canyon Blogs (note: this blog is included with that so don't get confused)

b)The Mummy at Red Rock Canyon (Youtube Version)


Finally, I thought I would link to my various October blogs where I had at least something a little strange for Halloween up from previous years:

October 2006

October 2008

October 2009

October 2010 (after clicking this one check out the blog archive on right side for the rest of the links. Not all the blogs fit on one page the way I have it set up...there were too many of them)

All my Halloween themed videos can be found on one of these:

The Silence of Halloween Locations (Youtube Version)

The Mummy: The Flashback Tomb Location (The Red Rock Canyon Series)

Halloweener #5

The flashback sequence in the movie is really in the same area as the dig excavation of my last entry. For this reason I did not feel the need to do a video of it. If you want to see the area then refer to that video; when I go up that incline I would have to come back down it to show where the funeral procession was heading. There is a trick to the following picture. Take a look and I will try to explain:

Most of the locations in Red Rock Canyon are easy to find. This one confused me a bit, and since there is no need for me to reinvent the wheel, I refered to Richard Schmidt's A Field Guide To Motion Picture Locations at Red Rock Canyon. The book was helpful regarding the issue, but I still did not quite get what was going on until I got home. What you see in the movie picture is an optical illusion. It looks like one solid ledge on a mountain side, but it ends up being two different places separated by a few hundred feet.
The picture above, Hagen Cliffs, is the background in the upper right side of both pictures. This is the picture that really threw a monkey wrench into what I normally do. I could line up a bunch of rocks, but would get lost in the middle. Where is that ledge they were walking at? After examing my pictures over and over and then reading Schmidt's book I realized the error I was making. Keep in mind I am going to have to go back to this area to get the correct picture, but the following picture should help in figuring out the key to this puzzle. The above picture is our incline. This is where they funeral procession was coming down from. If you look closely in the upper right background you should see the top parts of Hagen Cliffs. My picture has the same type of illusion in that everything looks connected when it isn't. So, what I have to do when I go back is, turn around, go up higher, and then shoot the picture in this direction again; there is another area I can climb up for this. I will take a picture of this incline, but also get Hagen Cliffs in the background. It should look like the movie picture. Interesting enough, I had another problem like this with another movie location I was trying to find where two areas looked like they were connected, but were not. I will show that location at another time. Now what about the actual tomb location?
In the excavation they show them discover the tomb as a hole in the ground. The flashback sequence is still roughly in the same area. I pointed it out in the video, but here is the picture that best shows where they did it:

I went ahead and circled the rock you can compare with the movie picture. It is the same as the big bloated rock formation on the right side of the picture. For the movie, they added a wall there that represented the tomb entrance.

The Mummy at Red Rock Canyon (Youtube Version)

The Mummy: The Excavation Site (The Red Rock Canyon Series)

Halloweener #4

(GPS: N35° 21.665 W°117 59.285)

As I mentioned in my last entry, all the scenes they did at Red Rock Canyon took place within a few hundred feet at most from each other. This area is really just around the corner and above from the last entry. This is the scene that Boris Karloff reveals the location for where the tomb was.

Boris Karloff sure sounds like Darth Vader, or better yet, Darth Vader sure sounds like Boris Karloff. The more old movies I watch the more I see where George Lucas got his ideas. I can not tell you how many times I have watched old movies where the mysterious masked person ends up being a long lost relative. Okay, back to this. In the above movie picture Boris is standing over the ledge showing where the dig should take place. If you watched the video I had to make a short climb to get to this point. Compared to everything else I have done it was nothing, but I still did not want to make any mistakes. In my picture they were standing in the middle right side. I went over there and looked down.That area below is where the incline is the men were team digging with the baskets. The dropoff here is not really that dramatic. It is maybe 50 feet. What is interesting to me is a lot of movies filmed at Red Rock Canyon seem to make areas like this bigger than they really are. Then when I was there this area out along with some others seemed a lot smaller than they way the seemed in the movie.

The Mummy at Red Rock Canyon (Youtube Version)

The Mummy: Enter Boris Karloff (The Red Rock Canyon Series)

Halloweener #3

(GPS: N35° 21.675 W117° 59.245)

Time to start a news series. Many old movies have been shot using areas in Rock Rock near Mojave, Ca. If the Alabama Hills is a gold mine for movie locations, then Red Rock is just as good of a gold mine. I thought I would start one to keep the Halloween theme going so this is the first I intend to do with the 1932 Boris Karloff movie: The Mummy. The first thing to note is the big rock formation in the background is known as The Acropolis. Since the movie was supposed to have taken place in Egypt this location was an obvious area to go to for the production to keep things cheap.Boris Karloff's character comes down this little incline. In the movie it seems quite a distance a way.
It really isn't though. The distance is very close, and I was a bit surprised about that.Some of the night scenes in the movie took place on the other side of this. The interesting thing is they filmed a bunch of scenes in the movie, but they are only within a hundred feet or so of each other.
I will try to get a few more of these Mummy locations in another blog or two.

The Mummy at Red Rock Canyon (Youtube Version)