A four part survival guide to authors responding to reviews, from the negative one you must never answer to the glowing one that earns the reviewer a lawn mowing. Written for any horror author currently refreshing Goodreads and reaching for the Reply button. The correct response is almost always silence, and occasionally chocolate.
Fright Club ranks the best Texas horror movies, skipping the obvious chainsaw classic to make room for everything else. From Bubba Ho-Tep and Frailty to Mia Goth’s turns in X and Pearl, these five Texas horror films show how much the state has given the genre.
A comic ranking of horror’s greatest final girls by how long each would survive a Wetherspoons car park at 2am. From Sally Hardesty to Laurie Strode, Sidney Prescott, Ellen Ripley, and champion Erin Harson, we test the slasher survivors against British closing time.
E.F. Schraeder looks back at a 1980s Midwestern girlhood where the ordinary was the frightening part and the undead were a relief. The essay traces childhood fears through slasher films, the satanic panic and goth subculture, and explains exactly what job folk horror had to do. From the author of The Case for Cryptids.
Yuvashri Harish takes the Ginger Nuts of Horror questionnaire ahead of her YA horror novel Kill Your Darlings. She talks Goosebumps, Carrie, and the one viewing of The Exorcist she has never managed to repeat. She also names the classic horror monsters behind her Halloween novel, and explains why her next book is cannibalism soulmate horror.
The rotten city and the unreliable body are the same complaint, and very few novels admit it. Ahead of Lee Glenwright’s SOMA, a feature mapping British estate horror from Ramsey Campbell and Joel Lane to Gary McMahon and Alison Rumfitt, the body horror line from Clive Barker to Agustina Bazterrica, and the overlap almost nobody works.
Philip A. Suggars charts the four phase decline of horror franchise monsters, from the pure terror of Alien: Earth and Michael Myers to the merch shelf and the leash. Drawing on Freud, Robin Wood, and Mark Fisher, he asks why The Thing and It Follows stay frightening while everything else gets a Funko Pop. The domestication of horror monsters, it turns out, is exactly what the culture industry does best.
A.J. Vane argues that ambiguous horror is not a cop-out but the hardest thing the genre can do. Drawing on Robert Aickman, Shirley Jackson and Picnic at Hanging Rock, this guest essay defends the unexplained ending and the fear that keeps working long after the book is shut. From the author of The Night Fair.
A ranking of seven fictional vampires I could kill without breaking a sweat, from Nosferatu to Count Duckula. Yes, David from The Lost Boys makes the list, and yes, I have strong opinions about his hair. Proof that most vampire movies are style over substance.
Adrian Tchaikovsky has been writing cosmic horror and folk horror under a science fiction badge for years, and most horror readers missed it. His gothic horror novella Preaching to the Choir, out in August from Solaris, is the moment that excuse runs out. Here is why the Terrible Worlds: Transformations author belongs on your shelf.
