Happy Halfoween! Get out your now empty plastic eggs and fill them with fingers and eyeballs. Behead the Daffodils. Leave bloody footprints as you tiptoe through the red tulips. Keep watch for killer bunnies. As we're halfway to Halloween, I began to ponder how, in scary books and movies, we are given only half of the story. The demon has been defeated by rituals and symbols. The ghost vanquished. The insane killer with the chainsaw has been left to die in a rock quarry or lake. The vampire staked. The werewolf left breathless by the silver bullet. All the ev[...]
Tag
slasher films
6 Hello Kittens, Welcome back to our corner of the graveyard.I had originally planned to blog about thirteen little tidbits about the actual day, Friday the 13th, but I couldn't get a certain man out of my head. Damn you, Jason Voorhees. So instead I'm just going to give you thirteen facts about Jason Voorhees and the Friday the 13th franchise. Here we go! 1. Victor Miller, the creator of Jason Voorhees, named the killer after his two sons, Josh and Ian. How freaking cool of a story is that to tell your friends on the playground. 2. Camp Cryst[...]
There are few things I love more than slasher movies---they're horror stripped down to it's barest, dumbest essentials, and it's wonderful in all of it's confused, faux-morality tale wackiness. I also love board gaming, and in the past fifteen years tabletop gaming has exploded as hobby. In fact, the most interesting work in horror today is coming from game designers. If you want atmosphere, great art, and fun, horror games is the place right now. If you've never played any recent board games, I can't recommend it enough. The thing that makes it great is th[...]
While I hope that common sense will prevail should you find yourself in a particularly harrowing situation this summer, I think we might want to take two seconds to revisit The Rules. I offer this happy little reminder in the event that you should find yourself in a derelict cabin somewhere for a "fun" weekend, getting irregular phone calls from inside your house while babysitting, or your car dies on some remote part of the interstate and your only recourse is to make a phone call from that creepy gas station around the bend. The "Final Girl" is a horror movie t[...]
It’s my birthday today! So, because I love you all very much, I sat down and watched the seriously terrible 1981 slasher film Happy Birthday To Me. It’s bad. Really bad. And not even in that “so bad it’s good way”. Nope, just bad. But the film did leave me thinking about what we can learn from bad writing. By studying the places the script for Happy Birthday to Me went so horribly off the rails, what lessons can we apply to our own stories, particularly within gory tales of suspense and murder? (This review/analysis is going to be full of spoilers, but[...]
