Horror as a genre is an unusual beast. It is on the surface just a way to illicit scares, to give you a momentary burst of adrenalin. Other times it is a way to repulse you – to disgust you with macabre and grotesque imagery. But when horror is utilized to its best effect,
Nothing says Halloween like a mask. (Well, maybe a pumpkin. Or a ghost. Or a skeleton, or a black cat, or a witch. Or candy. Look a lot of things say Halloween but masks are definitely one of them.) And in the world of horror if you want to create an enduring villain or
We shared our first kiss under the cherry blossom tree. It was perfect, like a scene from the movies. I stared into her eyes and brushed her soft hair from her delicate face. I saw the blood rush to her cheeks and imagined what it would be like to feel her soft skin. Her scent
October has arrived - the most wonderful time of the year. There is a nip in the air, the leaves are changing and the smell of pumpkin pie surrounds us. It’s time to wear flannel as you walk a corn maze then curl up by a fire as the sun goes down early. A time
"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all." "The Masque of the Red Death" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe originally published in 1842. It tells the story of a group of wealthy nobles attempting to avoid a plague by hiding in an abbey hosted by Prince
Tod Browning’s 1931 adaptation of Dracula is the granddaddy of them all, the film the launched the Classic Monster films of Universal. The Universal cinematic universe if you will. I try not to judge these old films by modern standards or how a film has come to be perceived over the decades. I attempt,
The blood elevator scene, sometimes called the ‘river of blood," from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a horrifying and disturbing image in a film full of horrifying and disturbing images. Upon watching it the scene produces in many - myself included - a feeling of dread; an uneasiness that is hard to explain. I’ve often
I didn't do much reading this week comparatively speaking. I am still doing my deep dive into Buddhist thought and philosophy, something I have been interested in since my teenage years when I read Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums for the first time. You'd think I'd be an expert at this point, but sadly no,
There are three things I like quite a bit: comics, horror, and podcasts. So imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered someone combined all three! The Longbox of Darkness is a podcast covering horror comics hosted by Herman Louw. Every episode does a deep dive into a particular horror comic or collection of comics
by Noel Carroll This book takes a serious look into the aesthetics of horror. Carroll is a philosopher so comes at the material with a philosophical view (obviously) but he is also a film scholar and so adds to that the language of film. By looking at the classics of the genre as
