The Mausoleum of Madness, Part II!
Welcome to Dinosaur Dracula’s MAUSOLEUM OF MADNESS, PART II! This is a multipage feature. Page links are are at the bottom, or you can visit the starting page over here. Enjoy your stay at the Mausoleum, and pay no attention to the ten-inch gnats.
#30: Halloween III on WPIX! (1987)
This ancient TV Guide ad captures the historic broadcast television premiere (in the New York area, at least) of everyone’s favorite movie, Halloween III.
It all went down on WPIX – aka Channel 11, where I watched my weekday cartoons and sitcom reruns – on October 29th, 1987. 9PM sharp. If you’ve followed me long enough, you know that WPIX was my gateway to horror, simply because they ran scary movies so damn often that no child with a bedroom television could completely avoid them.
I wish I could tell you that I remember watching Halloween III on WPIX that night, but I don’t. Given that I would’ve been eight years old, that’s for the best. Masks that turn kids’ heads into snakes and crickets sounds like the kind of plot point that would’ve stuck with me in a bad way.
But man, now? I’d give anything to watch that broadcast! Robots, witchcraft and Tom Atkins, broken up by commercials for Dristan and McDonald’s? That’s heaven!
#29: Los Temblors! (1991)
Of the three creeps shown above, two are stuffed monsters from the little-known Los Temblors collection — a Spanish riff on My Pet Monster.
Google tells me that “Temblors” is Spanish for “tremors,” which was a fitting name for battery-operated dolls that rattled erratically while blasting that same “sonic sound” so many cheap Halloween toys made famous.
The line had its own dedicated TV commercial, frantically illustrating how weird and awesome these guys were. While some elements were clearly borrowed from My Pet Monster – the neon fuzz and the plastic chains – they still felt distinct enough to graduate from “knockoffs” into something bigger.
I got lucky on a price for this working pair a while ago, but Los Temblors are generally very expensive. As far as I know, they were never available in the States, except maybe in border towns where informal trades of crops and vibrating monster dolls were common.
Today, discussion of these toys is mostly confined to the My Pet Monster collecting community. Turns out that a lot of different toymakers made a lot of different dolls that took inspo from him. Having seen many of them, I say with confidence that Los Temblors are on the higher-end of the spectrum. If you’re looking to splurge, you could do a lot worse than these screaming, shaking, furry acid trips.
#28: Halloween Devil Shaker! (1980s)
Can we go back to the era when Halloween decorations looked like this? Simple yet totally demented?
This wild-haired devil was part of a series of what collectors call “Shakers” – battery-operated hanging figures that light up, make noise, and violently vibrate until you turn them off. There were a million of them from many companies, but the best ones looked like cursed artifacts that might come alive and kill you.
Despite being kinda edgy by today’s standards, decorations like this were sold just about everywhere. You could be in the world’s friendliest mom-and-pop pharmacy, and you’d still find a pile of these guys situated right next to the spinning rack of sympathy cards. (Pick me up some Pine Bros throat drops while you’re there.)
While there are plenty of Halloween Shakers on the market, and most are cheap, you’ll need a lot of luck to find this version. He doesn’t turn up often. Besides, whenever the next one does, you’ll have to fight me for it. And I’m not above biting you.
#27: Halloween Ding Dongs! (2003)
I love that Hostess still does Halloween stuff, but I miss how hard they used to go on the packaging. 2003 was a particularly strong year for them, evidenced by this breathtaking box of Ding Dongs. (Now there’s a sentence that hasn’t been written before.)
While the Ding Dongs were unchanged from the norm – except for rebranding the creme filling as “s’cream filling” – this was a case where a simple box revamp carried the load just fine. I’ve seen most of Hostess’s spooky packaging from the early 2000s, and what strikes me is how the designs all looked like they were from the early ‘90s. Like, the ghosts on this box were way too pure to have lived through WWE’s Attitude Era.
So why are today’s Halloween Hostess boxes comparatively tame? I don’t know. Streamlined branding, market research, take your pick. Maybe ghosts that look like they were plucked from a 1995 Geocities clipart page just don’t have as much clout in 2025. A pity!
#26: Haunted Halloween Party! (1986)
This was one of the first Choose Your Own Adventure books I ever bought, from an elementary school book fair. I picked it because in my mind, that three-eyed pig costume on the cover had to be a reference to Ree-Yees from Return of the Jedi. (It wasn’t.)
Regardless, I loved the book, which told the story of two siblings who end up at a Halloween party full of real actual monsters. While I can’t recall many other plot details, I’m confident that there were some genuinely creepy endings. Hell, even Choose Your Own Adventure books that didn’t have the word “haunted” in the title had those.
There was a certain feeling I remember experiencing as a kid, right after I’d read or watched something that was outside my comfort zone. It was a moment of strange silence – like that split second between when you stub your toe and the pain sets in. The Choose Your Own Adventure series gave me that feeling pretty often. When one of these books dealt you a “bad ending,” it didn’t play around.
The “bad endings” were never terribly graphic, but they could hint at things that were. Upon reading one, the lights in my childhood bedroom suddenly seemed to dim. The window creaks grew louder, the air gained a chill, and when I could finally muster the courage to look up from that blondish page…
The End.
