“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.”
“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.”
“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.
Newly published poem by Vladimir Nabokov delves into the personal life of the Man of Steel
“The Man of To-morrow’s Lament” imagines Superman’s angst at not being able to live a normal life after marrying Lois Lane.
John le Carré mined moral ambiguity and Cold War paranoia to reinvent the modern espionage novel
The novelist, who famously eschewed literary awards and other national recognitions, leaves behind a corpus of work that transcends its genre and tells deeply immersive psychological stories.
Why it’s so difficult to adapt Stephen King’s books for film
Being able to see King’s horrors is a significant drawback in terms of their emotional and affective impact – with one exception.
Tananarive Due and the rise of Black horror
Black creators have made their mark in horror film and literature, though they have had to work to get noticed. There are signs that this is changing.
Josh and Benny Safdie on what scares them
“You can imagine that character – Max Renn – you can imagine him having a Twitter account after going through and seeing the true colours of society.”
Sue Carter on sleepovers, un-ironic humour, and why she’ll never watch The Human Centipede
“I have always been drawn to adrenaline-cranking moments that straddle that delicate space between hysterical fright and laughter.”
Christopher Sharrett on neoconservatism in the 1980s and ’90s horror film
Upending the radical vision of much 1960s and ’70s American horror cinema, the following decades saw a reactionary retrenchment, argues the academic and critic.