Conan Tobias on a quarter-century quest to watch every episode of the vampire soap opera Dark Shadows
The pop culture phenomenon resulted in board games and a central character’s appearance alongside Bozo the Clown.
Carvell Wallace on America’s history of exploiting Black pain for cheap scares
Nia DaCosta’s re-imagining of the 1992 film Candyman proves more effective because it does not traffic in white voyeurism in its examination of Black trauma.
On resilience, the pandemic, and the surprising benefits of consuming horror fiction
“By scaring you in your seat without actually posing a threat, you have the opportunity to practice your emotion regulation skills, particularly with regard to fear.”
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.”
“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.