When it comes to reputation, horror… well, horror isn’t exactly the class president. When I was a sophomore in high school, my English class was assigned an argumentative essay. I had yet to become the massive horror aficionado that I am today, but, for whatever reason, I chose to argue that horror films had just as much artistic merit and social conscience as “real movies.”
Read MoreHannah Neurotica (2017) #WiHM
Without Hannah Neurotica, there’d be no Women in Horror Month. That’s not hyperbole, though it may sound like it. The fact of the matter is, though, that the movement can be traced to the efforts of one enterprising young woman in the early days of the 2010s who looked out at a horror landscape dotted with so many female bodies, yet far too many women responsible for putting those bodies there; so it was that Ax Wound Magazine was born, and with it, the entire ethos that would become the Women in Horror Month movement.
Read MoreNickyXX (2017) #WiHM
In the Creepypasta kingdom, NickyXX reigns supreme. It was a cold January afternoon when I first made her acquaintance, riding shotgun on the road to Dallas, during one of those peculiar Texas winters when the weather shifts from balmy to arctic in the blink of an eye and tropical sunrises give way to gray, frozen dusks. Pennie and I were en route to a business function, and to kill the time during the four-hour slog—made even less interesting than usual by the endless vistas of frozen, grey grass and naked trees—I googled “best Creepypastas of the year.”
Read MoreCK Walker (2017) #WiHM
Hey, True Detective fans—did the resolution of Season 1 leave you cold? Disappointed in the reveal of the King in Yellow and the non-reveal of the evil cult’s machinations? Upset that you invested that much time into something for so little a payoff?
Read MoreTamae Garateguy (2017) #WiHM
It’s 9:30 on a Tuesday morning, and I think I’m about to watch Tamae Garateguy die. Her geographic location—Argentina, or, “the end of the world,” as she calls it—precludes my usual phone interview method, so she’s been kind enough to chat with me on Skype about her career and her latest film, Mujer Lobo. It’s midway through our conversation when her doorbell rings.
Read MoreAminah Iman (2017) #WiHM
Few things have the power of the written word. I don’t know about you, but I can endure the most terrible visions when they’re projected on a screen, but when I read them, they get buried so deep in my imagination, my brain starts growing fear-tentacled-Chtululike-dendrites and I become a proverbial nervous wreck. I’ve watched all kinds of “extreme” horror, but I had to put down both Lauren Beukes’ Broken Monsters and Henry James’ Turn of the Screw because they were so unsettling.
Read MoreHeidi Moore (2017) #WiHM
To paraphrase the noted sociologist Jeff Foxworthy, “There are rednecks everywhere.” By this, he meant that while stereotype would tell us that rednecks usually live in the south, the phenomenon of the defiantly trashy knows no geographical bounds. Growing up in a southern small town famed for its prison, its prison riots, and its prison rodeo, Foxworthy’s observation was cold comfort to me.
Read MoreAshlee Blackwell (2017) #WiHM
Ashlee Blackwell is on a quest. Like many horror fans, she has been disturbed by the lack of positive images of women in horror films, especially women of color. It’s an old sin we know horror to be guilty of: the Black Guy always dies first, women of color are often far more sexualized than their caucasian counterparts, and if by some miracle a Black character makes it to the last quarter of running time, he or she is usually either comic relief or a sacrifice conveniently placed to save the all important, lily-white Final Girl.
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