Nicholas Diak

  A Best Of Halloween Haunts from 2018.... Introduction Year after year, various online periodicals compile lists of the best video games to play during the month of October. Typically, these articles mostly adhere to listing universally renown survival horror titles from popular franchises such as Resident Evil, Fatal Frame, Silent Hill, Dead Space, Alone in the Dark, and Dead Rising. While these games are scary in their own right and are perfect to celebrate a month of frights, they all have one thing in common: none of them take place on Halloween. In reality, while there is an abundance…

It’s February 2009, and I’m sitting behind a table in a small conference room at the Albuquerque Hyatt.  I’m knee deep into the masters program at the University of Washington, and I am presenting at my first academic conference, the South West Popular/American Culture Association. In the room are roughly fifteen other scholars, students, teachers, independent scholars and my thesis advisor, anxious to hear my topic: an analysis of Antonio Margheriti’s James Bond/Raiders of the Lost Ark knock off, Sopravvissuti della città morta aka Ark of the Sun God. My PowerPoint beams with pictures of David Warbeck winking, with bullet…