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.
James Han Mattson’s Reprieve is set in a full-contact haunted house
What could possibly go wrong?
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.”
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.”
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.”