1. Submersible Edgar Allan Poe was a trickster, a hoaxster; were he peering over our shoulders as we stare at pages of his words and, with the omniscience of a ghost, reading our thoughts, I have no doubt he would repeatedly whisper, like a dusty and demented raven, or […]
Reactor has published my essay “Poetry from the Plague Pit: The Early Stories of Clive Barker and Joel Lane”, which explores the work of two of my favorite writers of horror/weird short fiction within the context of Thatcherism and the AIDS crisis. This essay is the product of a year […]
We must theorize horror. (We must horrify theory.) * …instead of arriving at a clear grip on what kind of entity is horrifying, we are confronted with the feeling that there is this something that must harm us according to its very essence. Horror retains this character of indefinite something […]
If you read a lot of horror literature because you like to be scared, then you’re probably a normal, healthy person. If you read horror literature to fulfill some deeply personal predisposition, be assured there is probably something odd and unwholesome about you. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s […]
Trying to remember when I last saw a new horror movie I liked, I had to go back to my notes on Letterboxd to see what had captured my attention over the last year or so. It feels like I haven’t much enjoyed horror movies lately, at least recent ones. […]
1. In both F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and Werner Herzog’s 1979 reimagining of it, the lasting beauty for me lies in the films’ presentation of love as something momentary and evanescent, and the way that real love ends up being strengthened by sacrifice — even when, as in Herzog’s film, […]
The Substance ends with voices calling out: So beautiful! We love you! You’re irreplaceable! These words are what everyone who seeks fame and attention wants to hear and can never hear enough of. Narcissism is a bottomless pit — no attention, no love, no praise is ever enough. Nor could […]
When Val Lewton took the job of heading up horror films for RKO in the early 1940s, one of the conditions he had to accept was that the executives at the studio would give him titles and he would then have relative freedom in how he turned those titles into […]
Fifty years ago, the world ended and a new world was born. * The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a movie made for less than $100,000, had its general release in the U.S. on October 11, 1974. October 1974 saw some other notable low-budget releases, including one of Larry Cohen’s best […]
Friends came over this weekend and wanted to see a horror movie. Something contemporary, something without many jump scares, something with a bit of intellectual content. That should be easy for me to provide — after all, I own literally hundreds of horror DVDs and Blu-rays, and I subscribe to […]
June 27 was Robert Aickman’s birthday, but I missed it. I was busy somehow. I’m often late to people’s birthdays. I don’t think Aickman minds very much, since he’s been dead for most of my life. To be honest, I was thinking it was this month. I’ve been reading Tartarus […]
Late in Joel Lane’s 2003 novel The Blue Mask, a character discusses his favorite books by Jean Genet: “I often think his scenarios are built up, not just from solitary fantasies, but from real sex. The books are a fundamental part of his love life. What he does on the […]