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
Oct 8: DAY OF THE DEAD The end of the world came and went with such a voluminous roar that it seemed as though everything that had happened in the before should no longer occur in the after. However, this was not the case. Where anyone survived to continue the old enmities, old
Oct 7: MOVIE MONSTER It’s a dirty job, managing movie monsters, but someone’s got to do it. Not the actual, you know, cleanup on set. They hire someone else to do that. And if anything gets broken in the course of the filming, well, that’s their problem. They want stuff to get broken,
Oct 6: SCREAMING I hate going to the grocery store. It’s the little kids, you see. Their parents wheel them around in the front basket of the cart, their fat little legs sticking out of the holes cut in the plastic. Or they trail along behind them like ghosts. And the crying? Always
Oct 5: MUMMY The plague came from the melting snows. They warned us about anthrax, the Black Death, smallpox varieties. They didn’t warn us about the dead coming back to life. The death metal bands had a heyday. Churches burned. “The end times! The end times!” You couldn’t call them zombies. They didn’t lurch
Still no further word…I’ll update if I find out, but otherwise skip it. Oct 4: SPIDER So I need to write a short horror story on the subject of spiders this morning. The first temptation is always to go for the cheap scare. Boo! To play on people’s typical childhood fears. And then you
