Fright-Rags was created for one simple reason: the owner, Ben, wanted cool looking horror shirts! He started in September of 2003 and up until that point there weren’t too many shirts out there that impressed him. Of the ones he did like, everyone seemed to be wearing them. What’s a horror hound to do? “As a way to let off some creative steam, I started working on my own ideas and posted them on various forums I was a part of to see what people thought of them. Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one that wanted something different as many others liked what I was showing. Based on that alone I ordered my first three designs with money I didn’t have (i.e. credit card) and spent Labor Day weekend designing and building the first ever Fright-Rags site and hoped for the best…”

It was a good gamble because 5 years later Fright Rags designs have been sold through out the world and there are are several new creative team members helping design, print, and program. But some things never change. Ben still fills all the orders and answers all of your emails, and he’s remaining true to his original focus: “To create the best horror shirts I can… no matter what.”

Here’s your chance to win one of these amazingly designed shirts. Flex those scary movie buff muscles and identify which movies are being shown in the 3 screencaps below.

The contest runs from October 9th – October 13th, 2008 at midnight PST. 2 winners will each get their choice of shirt.

BONUS: Get 10% off your order at Fright Rags from now until Halloween using coupon code 365HALLOW!

Name These 3 Scary Movies:

Send your answers to by October 13, 2008 before midnight PST. If you’re really stuck, here’s a hint: you can find each of these movies reviewed on our Top Scary Movies page.

Open to US residents 18 and older. Shirt choice can be any style listed in the “Horror T-Shirts” section of Fright Rags (this excludes the Vintage Horror Shirts). One entry per person. 2 winners will be chosen at random from all entries who correctly identify the 3 scary movie screencaps.

There’s always something new going on at Zombie Pumpkins. Proprietor, stencil illustrator, webmaster, and zombie-wrangler, Ryan, is a man of many talents and ideas. Not content to let his site rot like an old pumpkin, it receives a steady creative transfusion every Halloween season. So what’s new at the best pumpkin carving pattern site on the Internet?

• Each year a new zombie-related theme for the website is chosen and for 2008 it’s “Night of the Zombie Pumpkins“. As always, there’s an amazing new site design to go with it. It’s seriously worth it to visit the entire site just to see how detailed and cohesive the design is.
• Each year Zombie Pumpkins chooses a new charity to raise funds for. This Halloween your purchase of a “Monster All Access” membership will help Free Arts for Abused Children. (You will also get some exclusive bonus pumpkin patterns!)
• Finally, the real guts of the site are the amazing new pumpkin stencils that come from Ryan’s original illustrations. The collection is already huge, but he adds new designs all the time. Freshest from the pumpkin patch are shown below. For those about to carve, we salute you!

Photo (c) James Jordan

For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, today marks the first day of Fall. (There are now just 38 days until Halloween!) What’s so special about this day? Today the tilt of the earth’s axis makes the nighttime equal to the daytime. Everywhere on earth experiences close to 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of nighttime. Wow.

To learn more about the amazing significance and history of the Fall Equinox, check out our newest article.

Reusable bags are probably the most popular way that people are “going green” right now. Everybody has them! It’s no wonder because it’s a simple switch and it saves tons of resources, energy, and pollution. Trick or Treat Bags are generally reusable, but disposable plastic bags are also a popular choice.

This year you have another option for a reusable trick or treat sack from ChicoBag. 12 year old Estefania won an ChicoBag art contest and her design is on their limited edition Halloween bag. Even if you’re not going out to collect candy this year, the bag would make a good lunch tote for work or school or as a regular old reusable shopping bag.

Perhaps the sweetest part is that ChicoBag donates 10% if the proceeds. The money goes to Treeswing, which are the fine folks behind the amazing eco-friendly, family oriented GreenHalloween.org. It’s an awesome organization and besides “greening” Halloween, they’re doing a lot to bring imagination back to our beloved holiday. Check out Green Halloween for some great tips and fun ideas.

Gory decorations and pet costumes: how’s that for an unusual combination of themes?

The folks at Halloween Forum and Pet Butler recently let us know about the contests they’re running. They’re perfect for Halloween fans and Howl-o-weenies alike, so it’s time to get creative!

The first contest is hosted by Halloween Forum and the objective is simple. Create the scariest scene. All experience levels are encouraged to enter. So far there are simple entries like this yoga skeleton all the way up to a “blood” splattered bathroom like this chilling “Hot Dose” entry. 3 winners will be chosen and will receive prizes from BodyBag.

ENTRIES DUE: August 12, 2008
Full details here

The other contest is hosted by Pet Butler and they’re looking for pictures of your dog in his or her Halloween costume. The categories are;

• Overall Best Costume
• Cutest Costume
• Most Photogenic
• Scariest Dog
• Cutest Group photo

For inspiration you can check out last year’s winners.

ENTRIES DUE: October 15, 2008
Full details in PDF file

If you enter either of these contests, we would love to see your photos. Please leave a link to your entries and photos in the comments!

I love horror movies. Always have. From the time I was old enough to watch them (which was a lot younger then I would admit to my parents). As I got older I came to appreciate the classics as well as some of the new ones that came out. However, as a young man I came to the impression that women in these films weren’t good for much more than running, screaming, falling down, and dying. Well, they could take their shirts off in just about every 80’s horror movie out there, but aside from that there were, and still are, a lack of strong female characters.

As a social justice educator I tend to look at horror movies and the women in them in a bit of a different way then I did as a kid. I found something out as an adult, women like horror movies too. And as women, I can only imagine that they have a unique view of the horror genre.

The issue that many people in the social justice fields have, as well as women and men who are devoted to feminism, is the sexualization of violence in horror movies. If you have sex in a horror film, you’re dead. We all know that. It’s the way that the violence immediately proceeds the sexual act or during that has people troubled. It can have psychological consequences for impressionable young people. As I have said, I love horror movies, the gorier the better on some occasions, but I still question the need for the sexualization of it all. The horror movie industry finally caught on to the fact that their R ratings were getting their movies exposed to too small an audience, and so with no TNA and a PG-13 rating the industry opened the door for a whole new fan base. The newer movies have made a positive move away from the sexualization of the violence, which is good.

Anyway, my favorite movies had very little sexualization of violence in them. Dawn of the Dead is an anti consumerism piece. Night of the Living Dead is a statement on human relations and how we treat each other. They still have all the splatter, and the women seem to have more powerful places in the films. The 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead has the heroine cast as a toughened survivor. In the Dawn of the Dead remake the main character is a strong woman. Resident Evil has a woman at the helm.

Which leads me to another subject, that is happily making progress due to not only “girl power”, but feminism too, and that is the role of the woman in the horror film. As I said, growing up I watched countless screaming, running, half naked women get slaughtered by the bad guy. Then one day I sat down with my dad and watched a movie that changed my view of women in horror movies forever. The movie was Alien. (If you haven’t seen Alien, then why are you on a Halloween site to begin with?) If you have, then you know what I am talking about. Sigourney Weaver changed my whole concept of women as leads in horror films. Sigourney Weaver plays Eleanor Ripley. Ripley didn’t scream, Ripley didn’t cower in a corner crying, Ripley didn’t fall down running, Ripley just kicked ass. Ripley didn’t need a male hero to come save her. Even in Aliens, which has a slight romantic interest for Ripley she still put his broken down butt on a ship while she went to save the day. If I want my daughter to watch a horror movie that conveys strength in women I will pop in a copy of any of the Alien titles.

So what to do? Obviously I can’t condone the stopping of watching horror movies. That would be absurd, not to mention boring. What we need to do is educate ourselves on the subject. We can be the responsible watchers of horror movies who understand the consequences of violence against women in our society and demand better female role models in horror films. We need more Ripleys, we need more women in horror films that can kick just as much butt as their male counter parts. If a woman is gonna get snuffed out for being stupid, then the same needs to happen to the men in the story. Why does the man get to go down swinging, while the women has to go down screaming?

With all of the women fans of this genre we need to offer them more. Scream Queens are great, but unless they are giving a war cry while doing battle with the bad guy, is that the message we want to convey? If the guys reading this want their girlfriends/partners to sit down with them and watch more horror flicks with us then maybe we need to demand a horror movie that caters to both of the genders.

In conclusion, I know that there are many people out there who are going to point out examples of horror movies aside from the ones that I mentioned as an example that I am off base. This is what is referred to as “The example illustrates the point.” The fact that you can point out a handful (or if you do enough research perhaps more) of movies that go against the grain just proves that they stand out, or else they wouldn’t be examples. I am certainly not an expert on horror films, or at least not to the standards of many. I do however, have better than a passing knowledge of social justice issues, which is why I wrote this. I still watch Alien Resurrection every time it comes on TV. And my favorite baddie of all time is Freddy. That one can be a bit hypocritical I admit. I actually stood up in the movie theater at the end of Freddy vs Jason and yelled “Oh, bulls***!” With all of that in mind though, I still like to see a woman on the screen who kicks butt. A heroine who breaks through the gender classifications and helps the hero up right before he gets hacked to bits. The Ripleys (Alien movies…duh!), Alices (Resident Evil), and Anas (Dawn of the Dead) are the start of something brilliant. Hopefully we will see more of them in the future. And hopefully one of them will be wielding a sharp instrument with which to decapitate the un-dead. Later.