It’s day 18 of the countdown, and once again this month feels like it’s just whizzing by! For today’s vintage mask ephemera I’ve selected this 1989 Distortions advertistment titled Nightmares. It hails from issue #86 of Fangoria and is really where Distortions starts to get fun for me…
I’m not sure if it’s the realistic (un completely un-affordable) human torso, the icky white goo and unfortunate facial hair of the Death mask, or the uber-extreme gore of the Blasted offering, but this was the stuff that I obsessed over as a twelve year-old who was smack dab in the middle of one of the largest horror-movie-watching phases of my life. At some point between the end of 1988 and when this ad came out I had convinced my mom to let me start renting horror flicks from our local video store. I started at A, and rented my way through Z over the next two years doing my best to hit all of the stuff that seemed super gory and scary. This was also around the beginning of my heavy Fangoria purchasing days, and I can remember ogling this ad for hours when I first picked up this issue of the magazine. I used to daydream about ways to come up with the 700 bucks I’d need to secure my own Victim torso so that I could creep the living hell out of my parents and sister, but I never did manage to raise enough dough. I wonder what one of these would go for these days…
Anyway, come back tomorrow for more mask tomfoolery, and if you’re looking for a ton of Halloween content all through the month of October, make sure to stop on by the official Countdown to Halloween site and check out the list of participating blogs for 2011. You’ll be glad you did!
