A Monstress Comes of Age, Angela Carter's Vampirella, Lovecraft with Clay Puppets

 Three videos for your delectation.

A Monstress Comes of Age: Horror and Girlhood

by Yhara Zayd

Angela Carter's Vampirella

H. P. Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror and Other Stories

Something is Not Right in the House of Mald (Part 1)

Photo by Tim Mossholder
 on unsplash.com

It's not often that I get a chance to play an rpg one-on-one, but the other day I had the chance to run Necro-Cavaliers of the Astral Galaxy (my science-fantasy hack of Lasers & Feelings) for Anne of DIY & Dragons. Anne's character was Anomi Anomalisa Monalisa, a noblewoman trained as a necromancer and cavalier of House Satomi, a family attached to the God Empress's court as historians and scholars. 

Anomi was called upon to visit Ogra V, a backwater agricultural planetoid. A woman named Joella Mald and her son Micah were expected for a visit with Joella's sister Selenia, but they never arrived at Selenia's home. Anomi's first task was to locate the homestead of Sperlington Mald, Joella's husband and Micah's father. Anomi's initial face-to-face with Captain Varrigan, the constabulary administrator of Ogra V, did not go particularly well; it was clear that Varrigan was trying to dissuade Anomi from investigating further. He posited that perhaps Joella or Micah had fallen ill and forgotten to notify Selenia.

Anomi returned to orbit to delve into the records on her data slate to get a little additional information. Her first suspicion was that Sperlington Mald had run afoul of some enemies and his family had been abducted, but she uncovered no obvious enmity. However, she did discover that Sperlington and Joella had been taking their son to a variety of blood specialists. Delving deeper into the medical records, she found out that Micah seemed to be suffering from an unknown blood ailment that had so far resisted all treatment. In fact, there was something in his blood that seemed...inhuman.

The time had come to investigate the Mald homestead directly. The homestead consisted of a two-story house and a large barn surrounded by soybean fields. Mald's hauler was docked at a nearby landing port. As Anomi made her way up to the porch of the house, she heard a beeping sound that became more and more rapid; she realized, too late, that she was about to fired upon by a laser beam trap! Fortunately, she was tackled out of the way just in the nick of time by a handsome, clean-cut man raised on Wonder Bread. After extricating themselves from each other, he introduced himself as Deputy Durango. Captain Varrigan had assigned him to watch the house for "intruders," but he had found someone by the back door who had similarly fallen prey to the house's traps.

Anomi and her new lackey Deputy Durango resumed exploring the house. The house was in good order, with nothing notable missing, save for the occupants of the house. However, Anomi did discover Micah's data slate, which he mostly used as drawing pad; the first few images were normal, but then it began to seem like Micah was obsessed with drawing a strange alien creature with elongated limbs, dead black eyes, and a mouth full of fangs. Anomi's attempts to search the databases of known alien beings turned up nothing, but she did find strikingly similar creatures depicted in the woodcuts of one culture's historical treatises on witchcraft--these creatures were regarded as "demons" in the historical record.

However, one item in the house caught Anomi's attention: the door to the basement was not just locked with a conventional keypad; it was also being held shut with a necromantic ward made of black magic and bits of ribcage. What secret was it hiding in the depths of the house of Mald? Tune in next time to find out.

Unghosting the Secret Rooms, The Woman in Black, Dracula's Posters

Unghosting the Secret Rooms: Reclaiming Haunted Spaces for the BIPOC Imagination
- Angela Maria Spring, Tor

The Woman in Black: Why did Britain's scariest horror film disappear?

- Andrew Male, The Guardian

Dead! Undead!: The Many Posters of Bela Lugosi’s ‘Dracula’ 1931

- Flashbak

Japanese Horror

Three interesting Youtube videos about Japanese horror.

What Happened to Japanese Horror?

- Screened

The Grudge & Ringu: What Makes Japanese Horror Creepy?

- Bluelavasix

A short history of Japanese Horror

- One Hundred Years of Cinema

Facts About Scary Stories, Women Who Built Horror, Gothic Scooby Doo

14 Terrifying Facts About Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
- Maureen Monahan, Mental Floss

Four Forgotten Women Who Built the Horror Genre
- Bust

How Scooby Doo Revived Gothic Storytelling for Generations of Kids
- Elene Theodoropoulos, CrimeReads

Strahd versus Dracula

Did you know that it is a canonical possibility that Strahd could face off against Dracula?

Let me explain.

It is generally well known that the Ravenloft setting pulls people from other realms into the Land of the Mists. The setting has characters from other settings such as Krynn, Faerun, Athas, and Oerth. The mists of Ravenloft can also abscond with characters from Gothic Earth--a setting that where all the elements of the Victorian Gothic are real rather than fictional. In fact, Ravenloft has a domain--Odiare--that was stolen from Gothic Earth's Italy.

And that's where Dracula comes in.

Dracula is one of the great evils of the Gothic Earth setting. If the mists can incorporate Odiare into its patchwork of horrors, there's no reason why it could not also pull Dracula from Gothic Earth's Transylvania and insert him in Ravenloft as the dark lord of a new domain. Of course, if that were to happen, it's only a matter of time until Dracula and Strahd square off to determine who is the true lord of the undead. What a horrible war for player characters to find themselves in the middle of...

A History of Horror

A History of Horror

This is a three-part documentary on the horror film genre made by the BBC and Mark Gatiss.

Frankenstein Goes to Hollywood

Home Counties Horror

The American Scream

The Quiet Boy, The Eight People Who Murdered Me, The Old Pageant

Three pieces of short horror fiction for your enjoyment:

Nick Antosca, "The Quiet Boy"

Gwendolyn Kiste, "The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)"

Richard Gavin, "The Old Pageant"

September's Horror

So it begins! The yearly horror movie binge is upon us. Here's what I've watched so far:

Truth or Dare

We're starting off on rocky shores this year, as Truth or Dare was a steaming pile of garbage. It's funny, last year we accidentally watched a different horror movie called Truth or Dare mistakenly thinking it was this one. It turns out that the off-brand Truth or Dare was the superior movie. A game of truth or dare played in an accursed convent in Mexico makes dead, grinning fools of the participants in what is essentially a poorly conceived iteration of The Ring. 

Death Warmed Up

Death Warmed Up is a horror movie dating from before New Zealand's makeover as idyllic Hobbitland. It's definitely the other scuzzy Australia in this. Death Warmed Up plays like a weird combination of Mad Max and Return of the Living Dead, but with added oedipal anxieties. That feels like a premise aimed at a very specific audience, which I am not a part of.

Gothic Harvest

Just...avoid this one. Trust me.

Okay, if you need a better reason to stay away, try this on for size: this is an "erotic thriller" in which Bill Mosley's character reads pick-up lines from his phone to a young coed to try to get her into bed.

Erotic...as a hangnail. 

The Town That Dreaded Sundown

Now this movie is fascinating. Based on the real-life Texarkana Phantom murders, The Town That Dreaded Sundown veers wildly between gritty, grindhouse-style scenes of murder and comedic Keystone Cops-style inept antics. Did you know that they screen this movie every year in the town where the murders happened? Wild, right?

Knock Knock

An architect left home alone when his wife and kids head to the beach without him is seduced by two "lost" women who show up on his doorstep during a rainstorm. They then tell him the morning after that they are underage, he's a pedophile, and they're going to ruin his life over it. Look, if you believe Ana de Armis's character's claim that she's only fifteen years old, you deserve what you get, buddy. That's clearly a full-grown woman and you should be able to tell the god-damn difference. Anyway, not sure why I gave Eli Roth another try; this one ends like so many of his films do: a meandering search for an absent moral center that collapses into a lame joke.

Piranha

Piranha comes from the era where b-movies were fun. I've seen it called a parody of Jaws, but I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment. Part of my uncertainty lies in that some of the funnier bits aren't easily recognizable as comedy. When a guy says "I swear on my honor as a Texan" in a Bronx accent, is that intentionally humorous? Who can say? Either way, what you get is a batch of piranha who have been altered by the government getting into the water supply and wrecking havoc.

Shirley

My feelings about Shirley are a little complicated. On one hand, it's a really well done movie, with excellent performances and a strong aesthetic sense. But on the other, it felt a bit like a character assassination of Shirley Jackson and her husband. Though they may have had their fair share of problems, they didn't work to disrupt the lives of a young couple living with them for their own entertainment or as grist for the mill of Jackson's next novel.

Demon Seed

Demon Seed is strangely prescient; even though it's from 1977, it imagines a world in which an Alexa achieves sentience and begins to terrorize a woman. It then goes full "what if?" when that terrorizing turns into the artificial intelligence proposing to impregnate her to create the first of a new race of beings.

Trick or Treats

Trick or Treats is a fairly run-of-the-mill iteration of Halloween's premise, but it is enlivened somewhat by how bizarre some of the plot choices are. For example, the sequence where the future killer is chased by orderlies who want to take him to the asylum goes on for a surprisingly long time; it ends up involving wrestling, tree-climbing, and cops being thrown into a swimming pool by the "maniac," who may just be a guy trying to enjoy his breakfast.

The Hitcher

The Hitcher was a much weirder movie than I remembered. It's an unsettling mix of action movie and stalker nightmare. A young man delivering a car to a client in California picks up a hitch-hiker who just happens to be a serial murderer. But instead of killing the kid, the killer marks him out for torment, framing him for the killings and generally putting his resolve to the test. Odd that the most disturbing scene essentially happens off-camera. Also, is it just me or is there something inexpressibly threatening about Rutger Hauer sweating profusely?

Brain Dead

An expert in experimental brain surgery is hired to extract corporate secrets from the mind of a brilliant man who has, apparently, gone insane. But, in the end, nothing is what it seems and everything resides in a state of insanity. It's rare to find small budget films like this packed with talent, but this was produced by Julie Corman (wife of Roger Corman), based on a script by Charles Beaumont (writer of several classic Twilight Zone episodes), starring the two Bills (Pullman and Paxton). Oh, also, Bud Cort of Harold & Maude fame is in the mix. 

In the Mouth of Madness

An insurance fraud investigator is hired to track down horror author Sutter Cane, who has disappeared with the manuscript of his long-awaited next novel. The investigator believes that all of this is an elaborate hoax to promote the book, until reality starts warping around him. In the Mouth of Madness is still possibly the best Lovecraftian movie ever made, precisely because it avoids the most cliche, surface-level appeal elements of Lovecraft's fiction.

The Silence of the Lambs

You already know the premise: a young FBI trainee leverages her connection with a cannibal serial killer to catch a trophy-collecting serial killer. The Silence of the Lambs is still a stunning film, even after years of repeated viewings. Nothing else to say about it. Either you see it or you don't.

Paganini Horror

A rock band struggling to write their next hit song buy a score of unpublished music by Paganini and decide to film the music video for their song that will be based on it in a supposedly haunted house. Bad move, all around. All of this unleashes an undead Paganini, and all many of accompanying supernatural tomfoolery, which means the band, their manager, and the video director get picked off one by one. Not much in this movie adds up and, frankly, the poster is way better than the actual film.