Recent trip to see elephant seals

I meant to post about this here a few weeks ago, but I knew I was forgetting part of the story. (edit: what reminded me of what I had forgotten is the death of Dick Miller, because he was in The Howling. That'll make sense if you keep reading). Over Christmas vacation, my family took me to see elephant seals in their natural habitat, on the coast of California a ittle ways north of Santa Carla, whoops, Santa Cruz.

When I say "natural habitat," of course I mean a small part of their natural habitat. Their life cycle takes them all the way ou to Alaska, and then diagonally across the Pacific. I don't even want ot think about all the plastic they have to swim through. I can't imagine that there will be very many more generations of creatures like that left to see, so I'm lucky I got to see them when I did. Anyway, they are impressive as hell, although they are sort of funny too. I recommend watching Youtube videos, and reading about them online.

I just wanted to mention that apart from The Lost Boys, my mind was affected by at least three other horror movies in the way I perceived the elephant seals and the stretch of shoreline where they were hanging out. The general shape of the shoreline in some places kept making me think of the location of the camp in The Howling, for one thing. That was filmed in Mendocino, a loooong way north of where we were, in Ano Nuevo State Park, but maybe there was something slightly similar about the geology of the area. I just kept being reminded of The Howling, it was weird. I also thought of the Nicole Kidman movie The Others (2001) a lot, because there was a big, isolated, rambling old house on a rocky island visible offshore, where (I think) an old lighthouse keeper used to live. Finally, I thought of the video in The Ring a lot, just because the seals lying all over the beach made me think of the dead horses on the beach in the evil killer video.

I just thought that was striking that I couldn't even go to a nice wholesome outdoorsy park, with family, helpful park rangers, etc, without thinking constantly of demented horror movies with people getting killed in a wide variety of extremely disgusting ways. Had to share.