essays
Seduction on The Blacktop: The Eroticism of 'The Hitcher'
For all its action-horror swagger, this film is, at its core, a seduction.
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podcasts
Catching Up with The Scares That Shaped Us
Turns out when you commit to a massive essay project that consumes your entire brain for the month of October you have a little trouble keeping up with other things. You might have noticed November was a slow month around here, because I was tuckered out and the holidays were
books
GUEST POST - Shiny Happy Horror: Why YA? Why Me? by Clay McLeod Chapman
In this exclusive guest post, bestselling author Clay McLeod Chapman explains his YA debut, Shiny Happy People.
Essays
Essential Short Stories: "Brushdogs" by Stephen Graham Jones
After The People Lights Have Gone Off is one of the best single-author short fiction collections I've ever read, in any genre. It's a marvelous distillation of the imaginative leaps and creative risks Stephen Graham Jones is willing to take in his fiction, and each story
podcasts
The Scares That Shaped Us Episodes 53 and 54
I'm a little behind in posting the podcast to the newsletter because, well, my brain just basically gave out after 31 straight Halloween essays. Let's play a little catch-up, shall we? First, on Halloween week, we had writer and monster-maker Trevor Henderson on the show to
Tracing The Shape
Tracing The Shape 31: You Can't Kill The Boogeyman
Halloween, like Black Christmas and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, doesn't really end, not in the neat way we tend to think about. There's no real solution to anything, just two people who managed to survive and a whole town terrorized all over again. If you
Tracing The Shape
Tracing The Shape 30: Sam Loomis is Damned
Sam Loomis has wanted this for a long time. It's the end of a long search, and he's cornered Michael Myers on the top floor of a house in Haddonfield. His gun is loaded, he's ready to make his move. If he does it
Tracing The Shape
Tracing The Shape 29: Michael Unmasked
Michael Myers is a composite character played by more than one actor. Nick Castle famously portrayed Michael as "The Shape," the masked and coverall-clad Boogeyman who picks his way through Haddonfield with quiet grace and fluid steps. But for one unforgettable moment, another actor went under that mask,
Tracing The Shape
Tracing The Shape 28: Laurie Drops The Knife, Again
Laurie Strode has placed herself in an impossible position with the biggest gamble of her life. She'd hoped to lure Michael outside by opening the balcony doors in the bedroom, make him think he needed to go chase her through the streets, away from the kids, toward some
Tracing The Shape
Tracing The Shape 27: The Quiet Brilliance of Laurie Strode
If I've gotten across anything in my writing about Laurie Strode over the past month, I hope I've gotten across just how much I think is going on in this character's head. Everything about her, from the way Carpenter and Hill scripted her to
Tracing The Shape
Tracing The Shape 26: Michael and The Kids
One of the more fascinating things about Halloween is how little, for all the backstory and insight it tries to pepper in throughout its runtime, it seems to care about who Michael Myers was before that night in 1963 when he murdered his sister. Those six years, the ones that
Tracing The Shape
Tracing The Shape 25: Loomis is Broken
Once Laurie has seemingly dealt with Michael, Carpenter briefly pivots the action back to Loomis. I say "action," but really he's not doing much of anything, and yet the way Donald Pleasence plays this brief scene says everything about where the character is right now. We