Oct 18: VAMPIRE The night before I took my first writers’ retreat, I had a dream about a vampire. God! You know what I’d been scared of encountering on that trip? Not vampires. Ghosts. I knew other writers who had gone on the retreat, and about half of them had either seen a […]
Oct 17: OWL The old barn doesn’t smell like much when it’s cold, but in the summertime when the sun slices through the cracks in the boards it smells sweet, like straw and old manure. The wood creaks in the wind, it creaks underfoot. Up in the lofts it smells sour, because there
Oct 16: SKULL Stop me if you’ve heard this one. … So a guy walks into the Hangar Bar last Sunday night, well after the game had wrapped up, with a big fake skull under his arm. I mean, this is no normal-sized skull, it’s as big as a beach ball. There are
Oct 15: BLACK CAT I first encountered the woman in black on a moonless October night in dreams. I, Ferntail the Cat, was gathering information on a certain nightmare that had recently begun encroaching upon my ward Jaela’s dreams. Once she was solidly asleep, I had entered the realm of dreams and traveled
Oct 14: VAMPY LINGERIE It had all been a series of mistakes. Moving to the new town, making friends, taking up Judy’s dare to bike past the old Alterwerth farm, and then, even worse, taking up her dare to go inside the creepy old place, especially considering the number of women that have
Oct 13: BAT You’re watching a surreal Italian horror movie and a bat is ravaging a woman’s hair, trying to bite at her face. It’s a stuffed monster. Real bats don’t do that. … You wake. It’s a hot night, the window is open. Something dark flutters in the room. “It’s nothing.” You go
This list comes from Kirsten Easthope! Oct 12: DEMON/DEVIL Every woman I’ve ever met is possessed by demons. Devils. Vicious, brutal spirits. Sometimes I have to remind myself of this—when I see a babe in the arms of its mother or a young girl smiling at a summer day, hair tugged by the
Oct 11: WITCH The rains had been falling hard for a month when that old coot Reba, who herself was known as a drifter, came forward with the story that the farmer Andrace Chenowith had not been murdered by a homeless man living under the Bird Road Bridge. It was a good bridge
Oct 10: FRANKENSTEIN Frankenstein’s Monster calls Dr. Frankenstein his father, which makes him Dr. Frankenstein’s son. So I don’t wanna hear it. … He stands over the city, watching, waiting. Dressed in black and wearing a mask. It’s a city that never sleeps…and ever since he came back from the dead, neither does he.
Oct 9: SÉANCE There’s only one way to elicit a good jump scare. You have to interrupt the mental flow somehow with fear. You can do it in movies pretty easily, of course. Build up sympathy for the character, increase the suspense…then release it by having someone pop out of nowhere and strike or
