The Masks the Monsters Left Behind by Romeo Kennedy (Guest Post)
So a few months ago, I was chatting with Mr. Annandale on twitter about iconic horror characters in movies — something that myself and my wife have discussed many a time. Characters such as Frankenstein’s monster, Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Justin Bieber … OK, maybe not Bieber, but many others.* These iconic characters have been prevalent in the horror genre for many years, and with remakes/reboots over the years, these icons will always have their place within the genre, and quite frankly, deservedly so. But where are the iconic characters of horror today? There have been some fantastic horror films released over the last few years (and some not so good). Mostly, the films involve the classic Haunted House story, be it from a source of the supernatural or from a deranged serial killer, etc. Of course there is nothing wrong with that, as far as I’m
The Disquieting Guest — RIP Mike Vraney
On January 2, Mike Vraney, the founder of Something Weird Video, passed away. You can read his obituary here. I would like to offer my condolences to his family and his friends and to comment briefly on the importance of his archival work. Because though Something Weird is, of course, a business, it is one with a mission, and Vraney has been responsible for both the preservation and the dissemination of films and voices that would otherwise be no more than entries in film histories, or forgotten entirely. Something Weird is essentially the Criterion of Grindhouse, relentlessly seeking out and preserving the B and exploitation film. Its mandate goes far beyond horror — the nudie cutie, the roughie, and the rest of the carnival sideshow of cinematic sleaze are at play here. And, sticking to the focus of this column, this is as it should be. Horror is the disquieting guest of the fantastic not just because of the darkness of the tales or the unpleasant emotions it seeks to create, but also because it is disreputable, and always has been. From the Gothic onward, horror has been regarded with suspicion,
The Disquieting Guest — Hannibal, Horror and Television
I’m dreadfully late to this party, but over the course of the last few weeks, I finally had the chance to catch up on the first season of Hannibal. By and large, I enjoyed it very much, especially Mads Mikkelsen’s incarnation of the title character. I was very struck, too, both by how stylized the series is and how committed it is to bringing full-on horror to the small screen. In this respect, it is a pretty rare animal.* In his chapter about horror on television in Danse Macabre, Stephen King writes that horror has not been well-served by the medium. One of the big problems is that “television has really asked the impossible of its handful of horror programs — to terrify without really terrifying, to horrify without really horrifying, to sell audiences a lot of sizzle and no steak.” This is back in 1981, and the television landscape has, of course, changed radically since then. There were exceptions to this rule that King could point to then, and there have been even more since, but I think there is still a fair bit of
The Disquieting Guest — A Panel on Horror Writing
Friday afternoon, I took part in a panel on horror writing organized by the Manitoba Writers’ Guild and hosted by the Arts and Cultural Industries Association of Manitoba. Chaired by Maurice Mierau, the panel consisted of Chadwick Ginther (author of the Norse urban fantasies Thunder Road and the recently-launched Tombstone Blues), Michael Rowe (in Winnipeg as part of the book tour for his ghost story Wild Fell) and myself. It was a very cozy setting to talk horror while a -30 C windchill howled outside, and while the event is fresh in my mind, I thought I’d touch on a couple points that came up in the discussion (and I thank Chris Borster for the idea of doing so). So here we go; any misrepresentations in the paraphrasing that
The Disquieting Guest — Horror in/and Fantasy
A few weeks back, Shaun quipped to me that horror is “fantasy with scary bits.” Even further back, a discussion went around on Twitter as to whether horror and epic or high fantasy could coexist. A few remarks this week (which I will get to in due course) had me thinking about this issue again. As I’ve argued previously, horror is too polymorphous to be considered a genre — any attempt to define it as such winds up with exclusions and inclusions so remarkable as to invalidate the definition. For example: an insistence that there must be an element of the supernatural excludes the likes of Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and so on. On the other hand, horror’s symbiotic/parasitic nature allows it
The Disquieting Guest — A Belated Explanation
It occurs to me, a few columns in, that I should perhaps say a couple of words about the title I have chosen for this series of barely coherent ramblings. While I did, certainly, want to suggest something ghostly, what I also had in mind was horror’s uncomfortable relationship with the rest of the field of speculative fiction.* Horror takes on many forms, but some of those share a clear family resemblance to SF and F. One obvious example is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Though often hailed as the first SF novel, it is also a crucial work in the horror canon (though it is not the first horror novel — that honor goes to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto). As well, what with many writers crossing over from one genre to the other**, or fusing elements, the lines are very, very blurry.
