THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE First Look, 50 Greatest Horror Novels, and More!
In this Issue:
- Horror History: Scary Schools
- Image of the Week: It Grows on You
- Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
- The A to Z of Subgenres: W is for Western
- What We’re Reading: Best of the Best
HORROR HISTORY: SCARY SCHOOLS
“I want to go home. I don’t want to stay. Give up education as a bad mistake.” So Morrissey sings in the Smiths’ anti-school album opener, “The Headmaster Ritual.” It’s one of the many pieces of film, literature or music with no immediate connection to “horror,” but relates the emotional highs and nightmarish lows ingrained in the educational experience. Is anywhere more operatic?
With adolescent emotion on full display, exploding out of your skin, school is already a nightmare for so many. Horror can only amplify and hone in on the feelings so beautifully, and frighteningly. As the genre has taught us, we have a lot more to be scared of now that the new school year has begun than merely overdue homework or showing up late to class. Every terrifying possibility, inward and outward, has taken place in school, public, private or otherwise. And so some of our best school movies are, in turn, horror movies.
There’s the monstrous transformations of puberty, probed in I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Ginger Snaps. There are the echoes and hauntings of past misdeeds in Whispering Corridors and The Awakening. Every teenager’s wicca phase is on display in The Craft. Fears of conformity and brainwash pop up with extraterrestrial educators inThe Faculty and The Substitute, while teachers’ fears are imagined in F and Cooties. Questions of identity are asked in Alena and The Blackcoat’s Daughter. Meanwhile, Slashers and stalker films particularly reflect the angst of school, thanks to bullying, loneliness, revenge and popularity narratives that span time periods from the 19th century setting of The House That Screamed to Urban Legend.
And then there’s prom, that climactic, iconic spectacle loaded with a school year’s worth of desire, despair, jubilance, and wrath. It’s no wonder it serves as an explosive, cathartic touch point in films like Carrie,Tragedy Girls, Prom Night and the superior sequel,Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2.
So, student, teacher, guidance counselor, hall monitor. If you think you can’t make it till June, the above watchlist might help you through.
[And speaking of school: It seems The Bite wasn’t paying close enough attention during math. When celebrating Dawn of the Dead‘s 40th anniversary last newsletter, we mistakenly headlined it “Dawn at 20.”]
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
It Grows on You
Max Booth III, host of the Stephen King podcast Castle Rock Radio, might be the author’s #1 fan, because he keeps the author on his desk. Or at least an infected figure of Jordy Verrill (who King played in the 1998 movie Creepshow) created by artist Christine Morgan.
TINY BITES
CARVING CTHULHU, CHANGING CHUCKY & MORE
Here are the first images from the TV reimagining of Shirley Jackson’s iconic 1959 horror novel, The Haunting of Hill House.
You could settle for turning pumpkins into Jack-o’-lanterns when Halloween rolls around next month. Or you could be like this guy and carve Cthulhu into a watermelon instead.
There have been hundreds of haunted houses in the movies over the past 100 years, but according toEsquire, these are the 10 scariest. And if you’re up for a roadtrip, you might want to visit these real-life haunted houses.
No supernatural elements? A smart toy instead of a serial killer? Here’s how that Child’s Play reboot plans to change Chucky.
It turns out that horror is good for you (and it’s even better for your kids). We knew it!
We all live in fear of our phone batteries dying, which is probably why that’s the scariest part of many modern horror movies.
Suspiria screenwriter David Kajganich definitely has opinions about the elevated horror debate. (He saysSuspiria is “basically smuggling what we call a Sundance movie into a horror movie.”)
Meanwhile, Time calls the new Suspira “bland, boring, and silly,” but audiences gave it an eight-minute standing ovation at its world premiere.
Paste has a super solid list of the 50 best horror novels of all time which includes books from 1818 to 2016. Five of them were written by one author, and we suspect you can guess his name.
Steve Vertlieb said his 1997 article “Dracula In the Seventies: Prints of Darkness” had been re-written to ridicule and attack Christopher Lee instead of treating him with reverence and affection. Twenty-one years later, he’s publishing the original story to set the record straight.
David Cronenberg said he’s developing a TV series, but because he’s David Cronenberg, he won’t tell anyone what it’s about.
THE A TO Z OF SUBGENRES: W IS FOR WESTERN
Like horror, the Western boasts a legacy of its own movements, standout filmmakers, and subgenres. There are classical Westerns. There are anti-Westerns. There are Acid Westerns and Spaghetti Westerns and Neo-Westerns and Westerns set internationally. And considering many take place in a time where much is left to the great terrifying unknown, Horror Westerns. That’s where we land today, looking at films in which elements and icons of horror and terror invade the aesthetic and tropes of the Western; occasionally quite literally as in William Beaudine’s B-movie double feature of Billy the Kid Versus Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, or in one of the oldest Horror Westerns, The Haunted Range (1926). These films would hope to convey just how scary the frontier could be. Sometimes it’s simply an aura, like in Clint Eastwood’’s High Plains Drifter, which features a distinctly gothic air. Then there are films in which the characters are given over to folklore of the land they invade, like the amazing Eyes of Fire and Ravenous. Often, it’s pure human survival and malice, like Bone Tomahawk or Red Hill. But you can’t count out all manner of the supernatural in ghosts, vampires and real deal creature features. The meeting of horror and the west is seemingly so natural, I have to ask why we don’t have more great examples?
Essentials: Tremors, Near Dark, High Plains Drifter, Curse of the Undead (1959), Westworld (1973)
Favorites: Eyes of Fire, Brimstone, The Burrowers, Dead Birds, Ravenous
WHAT WE’RE READING: BEST OF THE BEST
When you want not just the best but the best of the best, your go-to editor is the award-winning Ellen Datlow. Her latest anthology The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction gathers together some of our favorite short stories from Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, Margo Lanagan and other horror greats. Mira Grant’s “You Can Stay All Day” — originally published in the celebratory George Romero anthology Nights of the Living Dead — is a great place to start, and a wonderful tribute to the zombie master.