Welcome to My Nightmare! Or is it Welcome to Ghost Mansion with Alice Cooper Leading the Charge?

Finding tenants is easy when you welcome the dead. Getting them to pay rent is another matter, and Welcome to Ghost Mansion turns that predicament into a spooky, surprisingly sweet comedy.

Welcome to Ghost Mansion Manga Cover
Available to purchase on Amazon USA (Volumes One to Three)

Titan Manga

If Welcome to Ghost Mansion (訳アリ心霊マンション, Wakeari Shinrei Manshon) ever happens to get an animated adaptation, I can imagine it being something like Maison Ikkoku. Although the setups differ, there are some amusing parallels: the building is a worn-down apartment complex whose residents are hardly conventional. They are spirits! The resident manager, Kaoru Shinonome, is hardly fazed by that, and rather than try to convince the living to share the space with the undead, her advertising welcomes spirits who need a place to stay. No, this story isn’t Hotel Transylvania. There’s no young daughter coming of age here, but there is a family gradually coming together.

There’s no big threat yet, but across the three volumes released so far in English, I’m finding that this supernatural comedy has room to grow. In fact, the original Japanese edition is still ongoing as of October 2026, with six volumes, and the English publisher is moving quickly to get the first four volumes out this year. The other two may well be planned for later in 2027 to keep pace.

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Over The River And Through The Woods, The Monsters Off The Road We Go! Album Review and EU Tour Dates

Forty years hasn’t mellowed these Swiss troublemakers. The Monsters turn daily frustration into a noisy mix of garage punk, boogie and grunge on Off The Road We Go!

The Monsters Off the Road We Go! Album Cover
Available to pre-order on CD and digital download through Bandcamp.

Release Date: Oct. 16, 2026

Forty years ago, the youth revolution was in full swing in Bern, Switzerland. Young people were pushing back against conservative traditions, BEDS ARE BURNING, clubs were forming, and a new music culture was taking shape. Somewhere in that chaos, The Monsters were born, and they’re still going strong with the release of Off The Road We Go!

Back then, they probably never heard of The Munsters, the sitcom comedy from America, but one can’t help but wonder if they knew. One might think there’s some similarity, but honestly, there isn’t! The band consisted of Beat-Man, Yves and Oli, three young musicians who weren’t exactly virtuosos yet. That turned out to be part of the point. They simply wanted to play covers of their favourite rockabilly, garage and punk records, but they were so inexperienced that they turned to writing simpler original songs that made sense to them.

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Streaming Spider-Man: Brand New Day Deserves Better Than CosmoGO’s Playback Issues

When deciding on which service is best to be streaming Spider-Man requires knowing who is offering what, and sticking to Amazon. ’nuff said

Spider-Man: Brand New Day UHD
Available to pre-order on Amazon USA

Spider-Man: Brand New Day may well be the second-best film next to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, and streaming it at home calls for recreating as much of the theatrical experience as possible. For me, that means a proper surround sound setup, the meanest UHD screen I can use (I have a Samsung U79 55″ 4K UHD Smart TV), and preferably a physical disc. Until that release arrives, there’s the digital edition. And what buyers receive varies by service.

For viewers interested in how this adventure came together, the bonus material is part of the attraction. But choosing where to buy the digital edition requires a closer look at what each streaming service includes. While it won’t replicate what I experienced in IMAX and UltraAVX, I hoped the video quality would be just as detailed. And that’s where my expectations fell short.

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Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2026. Five Essential Top Picks and The ScareScore Experiment! Do We Really Need It?

For those folks able to attend Toronto After Dark Film Festival, it’s time to power up those smartwatches!

Toronto After Dark Film FestivalToronto After Dark Film Festival (TADFF) officially announced its lineup for its 19th year. And although Casey Walker’s films (Home Bodies and Ithaqua) are suspiciously missing from this year’s lineup, there’s no need to be concerned. His work will be playing somewhere as the cold chill strikes Canada. In this case, though, what will befall Cineplex Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond St W) and CineCycle (129 Spadina Ave)? The event takes place from October 14 to 18, 2026, and this year’s event is unique, which I will talk about later.

What has my attention this year are works that showcase what Austin Abrams can truly do rather than simply running around and doing nothing. The festival kicks off with the Canadian Premiere of Brian Duffield’s Whalefall. A tense and emotionally charged survival thriller starring Austin Abrams (Resident Evil) and Josh Brolin (Weapons), the film depicts the harrowing story of a scuba diver (Abrams) who finds himself swallowed whole by a sperm whale and trapped inside the animal’s stomach. With a dwindling supply of oxygen in his tank, the young man turns to the nautical and life lessons his father passed on to him in a desperate bid to survive. Jonah’s Whale this tale is not, and honestly, who doesn’t want to check this out?

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Ten Scary Halloween Themed Comic Books to Read This October!

This year’s lineup of Halloween themed comic books is sure to please readers young and old, and not skip a beat for what’s important for fans of long running franchises (or authors of the macabre) too!

Chibi Ed reading comics resizedThis year marks the return of Hellraiser, and for some of us, that is already enough reason to crack open a new comic book. BOOM! Studios is heading back into Clive Barker’s Cenobite-filled nightmare, and that will be looked at in a separate article. Meanwhile, this year’s Halloween themed comic books offer plenty of room for haunted kids’ clubs, cosmic horror and a few monsters who deserve more than one October night for a reader like me to absorb them all.

This list excludes established annuals like Hello Halloween and Scream! Halloween Special. Sadly, it seems Dark Horse Comics is not continuing with what they tried to establish from a few years ago. After Headless Horseman 2023, and 2024, and 2025 having come and gone, it’s a shame this spirit has lost his mojo. Instead, what we got is Mad Cave Studios’ Terrorbytes Halloween Annual. But with this being its first issue, it’s too early to assume it will become an annual tradition.

So what I got on my pile of books to read are the following. Some works are already out and others waiting to be picked up!

A Ghost Arm Made of Angry Ghosts

A GHOST ARM MADE OF ANGRY GHOSTS _1354x2048Release Date: September 2, 2026
Publisher: Oni Press

Sixteen-year-old Ari Ackerman has just witnessed a murder, or perhaps two. He is not entirely sure, and that uncertainty is only one more strange thing to process while his cancer-stricken father repeatedly hovers near death. Ari would rather lose himself in Washington, D.C.’s punk scene with his best friend Maya Meng, especially if it means seeing Jawbox at the Black Cat, but unexplained deaths have a way of wrecking even the best plans.

That mix of grief, adolescent confusion and peculiar supernatural trouble makes this sound like more than a standard ghost story. The comparison list, which ranges from Love and Rockets and David Lynch to Agatha Christie and Fugazi, suggests a book with its own scruffy rhythm. Readers who like their horror a little offbeat, personal and steeped in music-scene energy should give this one a look.

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To the West Coast and Not Beyond! Shot in Vancouver: Adventures in Hollywood North Dives Deep Into Pop Culture History in BC!

Shot in Vancouver traces the productions that helped shape British Columbia’s screen industry. Sam Wiebe’s book rewards curiosity with familiar favourites and local discoveries, although its preview copy leaves some gaps.

Shot in Vancouver
Available to order on Amazon USA

The one thing I immediately noticed in Sam Wiebe’s book, Shot in Vancouver: Adventures in Hollywood North, is the lack of an index in the preview copy I received to read. When I’m trying to find out whether a certain movie or television production was filmed in town, at Terminal City, or somewhere else, having an index would come in handy. If that’s intentionally part of this book’s design, I hope the retail copy will be different. That’s because of the way he’s built the chapters, which move back and forth in chronology and purpose.

And along the way, the details he offers can make or break a section. That includes historical anecdotes about when Yvonne De Carlo made this city her home and why some Asian movies were filmed here. When downtown Vancouver was part of the Rumble in the Bronx set and the biggest running joke amongst fans during release was why are there mountains in the background? Even I looked at this chapter rather than to start on page one to see if that concern was ever addressed by the producers. Even today, there’s no official statement. Had this film historian sought an answer, I’d be pleased. But instead, all he wrote about is how this film helped certain talents begin their legacy.

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