New Halloween Fiction: Worst Afterlife Ever
By Tamara Wilhite
I thought I had a good survival plan.
It seemed like such a good idea. Head out of the deathtrap dense urban Philadelphia at the first word of zombies in New York. Head into the mountains around the Shenandoah Valley, but head to the depopulated Centralia area instead of someone’s over-priced AirBnB property.
There were shrines in the area that had basic tourist amenities like bathrooms, so I could fill up with water. There were abandoned buildings for shelter. Yet it had almost no one living there because of the evacuation. Because of the fire hazard, no one else would go there.
An Interview with Author and Horror Podcaster Boo Rhodes
By Tamara Wilhite
Boo Rhodes is a horror author. (And yes, that’s her real name.) Boo Rhodes is also host of a horror podcast called “Scary Story Time”. I had the opportunity to interview her just as she was making major changes to her horror podcast.
Where Are the Child Vampires?
By Tamara Wilhite
Barring the “Twilight” movies and “Interview with a Vampire”, there are almost no child vampires in popular books and movies. I’m talking about living children turned into undead vampires, not babies born to a new vampire race that will grow up like the pure-blood vampires in “Blade”. It turns out that there are several logical reasons for them to be rare to non-existent.
Frankenstein’s Monster, Mr. Hyde, and the Horrors of Science
By Shant Eghian
For the past month, I have been diving into some of the Golden Age Horror films from the 1930s. Like most people, these are movies that have always been in the background of my cultural knowledge, but ones that I have never actually seen. I decided to change that this October, so I watched Dracula, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Like a lot of older films, they can be slow and somewhat hokey at times. Since these were some of the first sound films ever produced, most of the actors came right from the stage to the screen, and it shows. As anyone who has been in acting knows, you have to overact on a stage production in a way that comes off as silly in a film, but since many of these actors were not used to the transition, a lot of the performances come off as overdone.
But none of that can suppress the genuinely great scenes in these films; indeed, they deserve the bone-chilling reputation that they have garnered over the decades. No one can ever forget Lugosi’s haunting performance as the title character of Dracula, Fredric March’s leering grin as Mr. Hyde, or Colin Clive’s electrifying screams of “It’s alive! It’s alive!” as the horrifying creature comes to life.
Caribbean Halloween Killing: A True Story
By David Walls-Kaufman
We never knew some things about my gentle Grandmother Loyd. She kept those things secret. Darkly secret. Black secret.
Halloween stories are ridiculous. And I say that as a man who has had probably four run-ins with ghosts, not including this one. But this all happened.
My earliest memory of her was of her sweet, loving face beaming at me when I was three and leaving with my friends to Trick or Treat down my suburban street in Austin. She wore a 1950s pleated sleeveless, collared dress and waved goodbye to me and said, with music light as a wind-chime in her voice, “I’ll see you again after you go around.” Only years later, after the unlikely deaths in Puerto Rico around our vacation home, her old home, did the prescience in those words strike me.
Transformative Titles: From St. Augustine to Koontz’s Frankenstein, The Exorcist, & Dinesh D’Souza
Which books and authors most shaped your life? Part 3
By Fred Tribuzzo
Books have been transforming me, getting under my skin, ever since I read Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis as a boy. Many books, and many years later, here are some that I currently enjoy.
