When Gnomes Attack?

I found this today... it's actually three years old.

The video is produced by the Australian film company Screen Invaders and was supposed to be a teaser trailer for an as yet unmade film.

Pretty sure this film wont be made, as it is three years later, and multiple google searches have revealed no progress.

Their website is here in case anyone is interested.  It seems to be an internet dead end.  Too bad, though, this little video shows so much potential for a classic B-movie monster flick.

Tactical Gnomes

MTV hasn't been a good network since probably the 1980s. Once they jumped on original programming that wasn't music related, and then essentially jump-started the modern reality television craze with The Real World, the television network went irredeemably downhill. 

In 2003, MTV produced a prank show that combined staged pranks with horror/suspense themes. Even with celebrity hosts Shannon Doherty, Stephen Baldwin, and Tracy Morgan, the show was canceled after 5 seasons. It had it's best moment during the last season, in episode 11, Gnome Sweet Gnome. 

The Gnome Sweet Gnome prank is set up to scare the new babysitter. Not only are little people with axes scary, but so are kids with crazy imaginations. This prank combines both. Although this part of the episode is brief, and the payoff is pretty lame, the themes are pretty creepy. It would not be far fetched to see it stretched into a full length feature, much like Brian Pulido's comic. 

Busty, The Jesus Gnome

There is this crazy inborn ability humans have to recognize patterns, and faces, and patterns of faces. There are tons of examples, like the Man in the Mountain or the face on Mars. Sometimes this recognition ability gets coupled with religious fervor, and you get stories like people who find Jesus in their food.

Anyway, the other day, this woman in Tennessee found Jesus again, hiding out in a ceramic garden gnome. Quick, call the Vatican! but, it's not just Jesus inside a garden gnome... it's the head of Jesus, on a woman's body inside a garden gnome. This little transgendered wrinkle will probably nix it from being considered a miracle by the Holy See.

This story appeared on ABC News, in local papers, and on the Huffington Post, among others, I'm sure.

It is a pretty cool coincidence. I find pareidolia to be a cool human instinct and survival mechanism. But, in order to find this thing, the poor garden gnome had to lose his face! What a tragedy. Some pictures are below...

Gnomes are Fables

I enjoy action roleplaying games, especially the open world adventure questing kind. Some embrace the "choose your own adventure" theme, where actions and decisions made in-game have consequences within the game and outcomes may vary. The Fable franchise by Lionhead Studios was one of the pioneers in morality game play.

There have been other action roleplay based games since that have done what Fable did and were better at it, like The Elder Scrolls and The Witcher, but I enjoyed Fable, especially Fable III. One of the best parts in Fable III was a quest chain involving Brian from Brightwall who has a vast collection of gnomes.

Brian with Jonathan, Lionel, et al

The quest starts as a simple delivery. Your character has to find a lost package and return it to Brian. It's a gargoyle statue. But the gargoyle makes all the gnomes come alive and they run away.

The second part of the quest is a scavenger hunt. Throughout the Fable universe are 50 gnomes hidden. They can be found by listening to their mean spirited insults. Collect them all!

Gnomes Love Beer

Brasserie d'Achouffe is a brewery based in Belgium, owned by Duval Moortgat. They've been brewing beer in Achouffe since 1982. Why do I care? I care because their identity is tied to their gnome logo, of course.

The logo was created shortly after the brewery was founded, drawn by a daughter of a colleague, influenced by an unnamed episode of an unnamed television show involving a gnome themed painting sold at an auction.

Monsters and Mysteries

There is a television show all about cryptozoological monster legends on the Destination America channel called Monsters and Mysteries. A recent episode devoted a part of the show to a woman from Porterville, California, near the Sierra Mountains who claimed to have been tormented by "evil" gnomes. I tried to find the clip from the episode about the gnomes, but I could only find the entire 43 minute episode. I did find the poster advertising the episode, though. You can buy the episode for 2 bucks and watch it on YouTube... which is ridiculous. I didn't realize YouTube was a prescription site.


The same story is reported in the website Weird Fresno, another blogspot blog about strange, cryptozoological, haunting, and supernatural stories from the Fresno, CA area. The article is linked to that picture to the left.









Mysterious Universe also wrote about the same woman and the same farmhouse. Check out their story about it, linked to the picture to the left also. Both of the these stories are free. Unlike Destination America, these two sites aren't money grubbing capitalists.