Since it’s Halloween, I figured it would be fun to take a look at some of the moments that have scared, frightened and unnerved me, either in a book or a movie. We’ll be looking at two short stories, two novels, and some movies. Let’s get started.

“BEST NEW HORROR”

I’ll start with this one since I’ve mentioned this short story by Joe Hill once or twice already, and I’ll try not to repeat myself too much here. ”Best New Horror” is the story of a jaded horror editor who receives a terrifying short story submission that renews his faith in horror stories. The editor’s interest in the story leads him to seek out the author, a meeting that fans of horror will see coming a mile away, followed by a twist they won’t. (more…)

It’s almost Halloween. While this is wonderful news to someone like me, it’s terrible news for my wife who is once again subjected to a plethora of horror movies in my attempt to show her all of the movies she had been missing out on before she met me. It doesn’t help matters much that I can clearly remembering watching movies like Halloween and The Fog before she was born. Anyway, in order to be a little different, this year’s movie queue has been littered with a lot of new unseen movies, such as The Objective (I’m convinced there was an amazing idea somewhere in that mess), The Strangers (who knew being attacked by three creepy people in masks could be so…dull?) and many others not worth mentioning. It’s been pretty bleak. Just when I was giving up hope, along came a movie that made up for all of the disappointments.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is an excellent example of horror deconstruction in the 21^st century, up there with other recent cinematic examples like All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, and literary examples like Joe Hill’s “Best New Horror”. When I find myself talking about the film with others, inevitably the Scream trilogy is mentioned by others for comparison. And while it’s easy to lump Wes Craven’s franchise with Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, I’d argue that the former spent more of its energy desperately trying to convince a new generation that horror is, like, cool, whereas the latter simply reminds the rest of us why we loved horror in the first place. (more…)

I always had a soft spot for John Carpenter. As a kid, he was the first director whose name meant something to me. Seeing his name flash across the screen for the commercials for The Fog when I was a child left an impression that I’m still trying to shake off today. More than any other director, Carpenter appeared to be making movies just for me. Halloween and The Fog were there when I was first discovering horror movies. Escape from New York, The Thing and Starman arrived when I was exploring other genres. When I discovered Stephen King, Christine arrived at the video store. When I stumbled on martial arts movies, he gave me Big Trouble in Little China. When I became interested in science, Carpenter churned out the underrated Prince of Darkness (a pessimistic and claustrophobic End of Days story offset by the optimism of quantum physics). And when I started to question authority, along came They Live (a movie remembered more for its excess than its restraint). Looking at Carpenter’s work from The Fog (1980) to They Live (1988), not only is it an impressive resume, but it is a body of work that perfectly reflects the paranoia, glut and cynicism that was the Eighties.

Sadly, the Nineties would not be a good time for Carpenter, and this, like many of us, is when I started to lose interest in his work. Memoirs of an Invisible Man, while inventive at times, is painful and never quite understands what kind of movie it wants to be; all of this is made worse by the fact that many scenes practically scream studio intervention.

So when I saw the trailer for 1995’s In the Mouth of Madness, I tried not to get my hopes too high. The good news was the movie ended up being pretty good, and the bad news was that it would be Carpenter’s last good movie. (more…)