THANKSGIVING Horrors, HELLBOY 2019 Reactions, and More!
In this Issue:
- Horror History: Harvest Horror
- Image of the Week: Fear Feast
- Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
- The States of Horror: Iowa + Kansas
- Things We Love: Slasher Season
- Hey, That’s Us! – Shudder in the News
HORROR HISTORY: HARVEST HORROR
Holidays are, if anything, rites and rituals. By and large, we now celebrate in more modern ways, with families and feasting and casual sweaters, but those are rituals nonetheless. Most especially, Thanksgiving, a uniquely North American holiday with roots generally believed to be in a 1621 harvest feast shared by colonist Pilgrims and the Wampanoag.
Speaking of harvest, it’s a word that pushes the mind beyond simple agriculture. For fans of genre, it’s the type of free association that can lead to terribly rad visions of black mass, sacrifice, and the occult. Arguably our most ritualistic and harvest-focused subgenre is, of course, Folk Horror, that enrapturing and increasingly popular pocket of terror which is often characterized by its subjects encountering rural horror of the frequently pagan and pre-Christian kind. It’s a horror in the land. Folk Horror, as a term, was popularized by the great Mark Gatiss in his special, A History of Horror, and is subsequently mainly defined by British films and media like The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General, The Stone Tape and the stories of MR James.
But what of American Folk Horror? As our Harvest approaches, may we suggest a playlist of terror focused on fears and sins of the US soil.
The Witch: Plenty of folk horror trades in stories of witchcraft, revealing pagan tradition and beliefs carry on. Considering the U.S.’s great stain of the Salem Witch Trials and puritanical beginnings, it’s no surprise that plenty of our Folk Horror follows. The best often work to subversive effect, like Robert Eggers’ recent and rightfully celebrated The Witch, a folk tale which finds the witch of the wood all too real and her Satan-granted powers freeing.
Eyes of Fire: Another tale of American settlers made to fear the land they’ve intruded upon is the 1983 cult curio, Eyes of Fire. In the film, colonial Americans are destroyed by Native American spirit and mythology in increasingly psychotronic fashion. It’s a shame the warped mind melter isn’t more widely available.
The Blair Witch Project: One of our great American folk horror witch films is, of course, The Blair Witch Project, the intimate and visceral doc style of which firmly plants you in the shoes of then-current ideals and technology, and chips away modern sensibility and confidence in the rational.
Candyman: Excluding witchcraft and eschewing the rural altogether is Candyman, which finds folklore/urban legend born of the American sin of slavery and stalking the city, where its institutional effects remain.
Young Goodman Brown: Back to those Puritans.The Scarlet Letter author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, reckoned with his family history. His great-great-grandfather, the judge John Hathorne, presided over the Salem Witch Trials and inspired the writer to change his last name’s spelling out of guilt. His lineage also inspired the penning of short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” a nightmarish tale of a nighttime walk in the forest, where the title character encounters his wife and neighbors engaged in a dark ceremony.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Maybe you’d also like to curl up and revisit Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Regularly celebrated around Halloween, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is just perfect for a cold November morning as a piece of purely American folklore in which a schoolteacher from Connecticut encounters a supernatural legend in a rural town said to be bewitched.
Harvest Home: A perhaps undersung treasure of horror literature, the incredible Thomas Tryon’sHarvest Home is almost the picture-perfect presentation of what one might imagine to be “folk horror.” A city family, in search of the quaint freedom of country life, relocates to a small, hidden village in Connecticut only to find their bohemian dreams and salt of the earth fantasies decimated by the annual harvest.
Pet Sematary: Stephen King is our defining American horror author, a storyteller with great observation of horrors of the land in work like It and of course, the grief-stricken nightmare of resurrection, Pet Sematary. You’ve likely seen and read Pet Sematary, so I’d like to suggest engaging in the campfire tradition by closing your eyes and perking your ears to the recent audiobook performed by Michael C. Hall.
Anansi Goat Man:Creepypasta and NoSleep have done wonders for the building and creation of new American folk horror, perhaps best seen in the popularity and viral sensation of Slender Man. One of the more enduring tales, and admittedly more folk-y, is the 2017 chronicle of an Alabama camping trip and their encounter with the Anansi Goat Man. This intensely eerie Wendigo-like creature of legend infiltrates a group and launches them into a paranoid all-night ordeal in the woods.
The Wendigo: Speaking of the Wendigo. Mining Algonquian folkore, weird fiction titan Algernon Blackwood penned the great short story of madness and myth, The Wendigo, in 1910. In the tale, a hunting party in the wilderness of Canada encounters the legendary man-eating spirit which possesses and drives men insane. In 1968, it was adapted into an atmospheric episode of the CBC’s radio show,Mystery Theater. Turn the lights down low.
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Fear Feast
Hannibal Lecter, Leatherface, and friends gather for a festive but fear-filled Thankgiving feast. Happy Thankgiving!
TINY BITES
M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN’S SURPRISE, STAN LEE’S MONSTERS & MORE
Shocked by the end of M. Night Shyamalan’s Split? Turns out the studio knew nothing about theUnbreakable connection either.
There’s a reason that when you think of haunted houses, you think of Victorian mansions.
Toni Collette’s only Academy Award nomination was for The Sixth Sense. Here’s why Hereditary should earn “the matriarch of modern horror” another.
How a former sex worker helped dream up the “incredibly subversive” new Blumhouse horror-thrillerCam.
There’s a four-hour-long documentary on theSleepaway Camp franchise in the works that we can’t wait to see.
General Mills wants you to come up with the ideas for their Boo Berry, Franken Berry, and Count Choculamovies.
In other food-related horror news, Jell-O released a line of monster slime you can eat.
Jeff Lemire’s DC Vertigo comic Sweet Tooth — about a boy/deer hybrid wandering the world after a cataclysmic event — is getting a Hulu pilot.
Watch the gruesome and silly trailer for Leprechaun Returns.
Test audiences have seen Hellboy 2019 and they were not happy.
Check out the best horror movie trailers of the ’80s.
Esquire says the reason witches are so popular now is because “we’re feeling politically powerless, and nothing offers us the illusion of power like watching fictional characters wield theirs.”
The Library of Congress released a newly restored version of the first film adaptation of Frankensteinfrom 1910.
The late Stan Lee created the Marvel Universe, but he should also be remembered for “keeping the monsters alive.”
THE STATES OF HORROR: IOWA + KANSAS
Today’s States of Horror see agents of evil, albeit very different agents of evil, invade small midwestern communities.
Iowa: The Crazies
Where George Romero’s anti-military bio-horror took place in Pennsylvania, the underrated 2010 reimagining of The Crazies planted its feet in Ogden Marsh, a fictional town which takes at least part of its name from the city of Ogden, Iowa. Shot in and around the Hawkeye State, The Crazies focuses in on a family who must survive a deadly outbreak after their town’s water is contaminated with a virus nicknamed “Trixie.” Lean and tense, the 2010 iteration of The Crazies is less concerned with the political, but certainly follows in a long tradition of stories that see seemingly idyllic communities — this one called “the friendliest place on earth” — upended by lethal circumstances and distrust.
Kansas: Critters
That’s right, Critters. Like, imagine being on a small Kansas farm, living your family life, shooting fireworks. Then, a batch of small, furry stress balls just start rolling around and ankle biting. And then some bounty-hunting extraterrestrial decides he should be a rock star named Johnny Steele in order to catch said minuscule monsters. That’s a pretty weird time in Kansas, which is where Critters takes place. The band, Kansas, does not appear on the soundtrack.
THINGS WE LOVE: SLASHER SEASON
Sure, you could celebrate the start of the holiday season by hanging a traditional wreath on your front door. But that would be boring. Instead, why not kill it this year with a Friday the 13th Light Up Jason Horror Wreath from Angry Duck Studios?
HEY, THAT’S US! – SHUDDER IN THE NEWS
Iconic Host Joe Bob Briggs Details the Importance of Communal Horror Movie Viewings