The Horror Show: James Han Mattson’s Reprieve is set in a full-contact haunted house
What could possibly go wrong?
The Horror Show: On resilience, the pandemic, and the surprising benefits of consuming horror fiction
During the first few months of lockdown in 2020, I did something many found counterintuitive. At the height of uncertainty as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the globe, I sat down for a double feature in
The Horror Show: Stephen Graham Jones returns to his slasher-film inspiration with the nostalgia saturated novel My Heart Is a Chainsaw
The author returns to the slasher film saturated ground he has trod before to provide a loving homage that leans a bit too heavily on insider knowledge of the genre.
Horror is as horror does: Susie Moloney on the genre’s ability to ease real-life pain
“Horror movies really, really distracted me from the most painful time of my life. Alone in the theatre for a couple of hours, being manipulated into screaming, swearing, and tossing my popcorn, I was transported.”
“I was always a morbid kid”: James Grainger on respectability, experimenting on pig hearts, and the movie that got him interested in horror
“If you just look at your own nightmares, you know that there are no rules.”
The Horror Show: Why so serious? Punch, Pennywise, and the evolution of the bad clown in popular culture
“It’s difficult to assign a specific cultural meaning to the bad clown, because it is such a malleable archetype,” Radford writes.
The Horror Show: David Demchuk on queerness, supernatural horror, and the intersection of fictional and real-life monsters
“A lot of it reminds me of just how much I have come through. And how much the people I know have come through. And what it was like to lose people.”
“It encourages madness of a certain kind”: David Cronenberg on the horror genre
“The very things that nurture you in the horror genre are also the things that can suppress an understanding of what you’re trying to do.”
The Horror Show: “Treading the Maze” by Lisa Tuttle
Tuttle’s brand of quiet horror is at once a rejoinder to a genre that leans heavily on masculine aggression and a means to achieve effects more unsettling than an explicit presentation could ever be.
The Horror Show: “Consequences” by Willa Cather
Cather’s use of a close third-person narration lends her story an uncanny element of unease and creepiness.