“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.”
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.
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.”
Labyrinthine nightmares: “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.
Stalking the self: “Consequences” by Willa Cather
Cather’s use of a close third-person narration lends her story an uncanny element of unease and creepiness.
“They are our collective nightmares”: Robin Wood on the 20th century American horror film
We can thank Wood for taking the horror film seriously, and for giving us a framework to understand many of our current cultural impasses.
The most wild, homely narrative: “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe’s 1843 tale is not only one of the greatest horror stories ever written; it is also a pristine example of internal integrity in the short form.
All horror is body horror: An introduction to a month of fear
The genre “specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation” traffics in transgression and finds pleasure in the disreputable.
“I didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be”: Lisa de Nikolits on a turn to science fiction in her latest novel, The Rage Room
“I think I see life in very, very noir terms,” says the author, who considered quitting after finishing work on her latest novel.