This evening I went over to the campus for the first "extracurricular activity" I've attended since I went back to school. It was a Halloween-themed event, "An Evening With Death". Death, in this case, as described by Doug Bradley, much better known as Pinhead from Hellraiser.
It was a great "lecture", and I use "lecture" loosely. It was much more "Dramatic Readings" than "lecture", with Bradley touching on all sorts of "death-related topics", starting with a lengthy rendition of "the story that leads into the first Hellraiser movie", and touching on "various peoples' last words", Shakespearean readings on death, interesting things people have put on tombstones, and several short stories that all in some way touched on the topic of death, or the fear of death, concluding with a reading of The Monkey's Paw, a short story I don't think I'd heard since 8th grade english class, but which was much more dramatic now than it was when it was being shoved down my throat back then.
Bradley is definitely a gifted actor, and it's a shame that he'll probably be in "type-cast hell" and never get to really flex his acting muscle in better forums.
I felt like such a geek afterwards, meeting him, shaking hands, etc. After all, the first movie poster I ever owned was a Hellraiser poster I'd managed to convince the local video store to let me have. That poster went to college with me, and got abused far more than it should have and eventually got so torn up that it had to go (had I been more attuned to collecting then, I'd've probably still had it and brought it tonight to get it autographed or something). I also would have felt slightly weird doing the "I was enjoying your movies while the rest of these folks were still wetting the bed" routine, so I settled for a simple thanks for an enjoyable evening, and left for home.
If you see him coming around to your area, I highly recommend taking the time to hear him speak.