Tag: horror

  • Monster Pet! by McAllister and Middleton Analysis

    Monster Pet! by McAllister and Middleton Analysis

    Monster Pet! is a 2005 picture book written by Angela McAllister and illustrated by Charlotte Middleton. The story is designed to get young readers thinking about the responsibility of caring for a sentient creature. A body swap plot is used to that end, though I suspect more empathy derives from the facial expressions on the poor little locked up mouse…

    Continue reading

  • Disorientation And Spatial Horror In Fiction

    Disorientation And Spatial Horror In Fiction

    I’ve been thinking about ways in which a storyteller creates a sense of unease for the audience, but spatially. We might call this spatial horror. I’m talking about disorientation, dizziness, light-headedness, fear of falling, and various senses outlined in the graphic below.

    Continue reading

  • The Creepiest Body Parts

    The Creepiest Body Parts

    The human body is a grotesque, meaty thing. Storytellers can make use of our squeamishness by breaking the body into parts for horror or for comic effect. In his autobiography Going Solo, Roald Dahl takes a voyage to Africa. Onboard the ship he meets all sorts of weird and wonderful characters, as Dahl was inclined […]

    Continue reading

  • Graduation Afternoon by Stephen King Short Story Analysis

    Graduation Afternoon by Stephen King Short Story Analysis

    “Just After Sunset” is a 2007 short story by Stephen King. This 9/11 story was first published in Postscripts Magazine.

    Continue reading

  • Singing My Sister Down by Margo Lanagan Analysis

    Singing My Sister Down by Margo Lanagan Analysis

    “Singing My Sister Down” is a horror short story by Australian author Margo Lanagan. Find it in Lanagan’s collection Black Juice, published by Allen and Unwin. Black Juice was published in 2004, but “Singing My Sister Down” has proven especially resonant with readers, anthologised numerous times since. “Singing My Sister Down” is now a modern Australian […]

    Continue reading

  • The Symbolic Basement In Fiction

    The Symbolic Basement In Fiction

    In Gaston Bachelard’s Symbolic Dream House, you probably shouldn’t go down to the basement, ever. I mean it. Nothing good ever happens down there. The basement is the house version of a fairytale forest — a descent into the subconscious. We can’t control our subconscious. That’s what makes it scary. EXAMPLE ONE: BASEMENTS AND BEREAVEMENT […]

    Continue reading

  • The Scary Kitchen in Children’s Stories

    The Scary Kitchen in Children’s Stories

    Most often, kitchens in children’s literature serve as metonyms of familial happiness, but every so often you do find a scary kitchen in which not all is well. The kitchen is the perfect place for a scary scene because it is at once close to home (in fact the hub of the home) and contains […]

    Continue reading

  • The Haunted Tea-Cosy by Edward Gorey Analysis

    The Haunted Tea-Cosy by Edward Gorey Analysis

    Edward Gorey was an American writer and illustrator who died in the year 2000. The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas is a picture book for adults, based on the cartoons first published in the December issue of the New York Times Magazine, 1997. Bloomsbury picked it up in an early-Internet era […]

    Continue reading

  • The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce Analysis

    The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce Analysis

    Hard to remember now, but ‘damned’ used to be a full on swear word. A teacher at high school once pounced on me for using it (though by the 1990s I think she was being ridiculous). ‘Damned’ was certainly shocking 100 years earlier than that, in 1893, when Ambrose Bierce published his horror short story […]

    Continue reading

  • Notes On A Quiet Place Film

    Notes On A Quiet Place Film

    A Quiet Place is a suspenseful 2018 film directed by John Krasinski, also starring John Krasinski. John Kransinski shares a writing credit with two other guys. A Quiet Place is one of those films where if you see the trailer, you’ve seen the whole film. So don’t watch the trailer if you intend to see […]

    Continue reading

  • A Dictionary of Witch Words

    A Dictionary of Witch Words

    The definition of witch changes over time. The word witch dates from around 800 AD. It originally referred to men who practise witchcraft but 200 years later referred to female magicians and sorceresses. Later it meant women who were meant to cooperate with the devil or other evil spirits.

    Continue reading

  • The Ritual (2017) Film Study

    The Ritual (2017) Film Study

    “The Ritual” is a horror film directed by David Bruckner, adapted by Joe Barton from Adam Nevill’s novel. Although this film is pretty standard in its tropes and structure, the CGI monster makes the viewing experience truly scary. This article says more about the monster and its basis in Swedish folklore.

    Continue reading

  • Stephen King’s IT Storytelling Techniques

    Stephen King’s IT Storytelling Techniques

    IT is a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King, first adapted for screen in 1990, and most recently in 2017. This blog post is about the storytelling of the 2017 film. After filming ‘IT’ (2007) Bill Skarsgård had daily nightmares of Pennywise. In these nightmares, he would battle Pennywise just as the characters in the […]

    Continue reading

  • The End Of The Fxxxing World Storytelling

    The End Of The Fxxxing World Storytelling

    Listed on IMDb as a comedy drama, The End Of The Fxxxing World is a darkly comic coming-of-age tale with a major crime at the centre of the plot. It is also a twisted and cynical romance. The script is written by Charlie Covell, based on the graphic novel by Charles Forsman. Forsman is an American […]

    Continue reading

  • Black Mirror Season Four Storytelling Takeaways

    Black Mirror is a science fiction anthology series exploring a twisted, high-tech world where humanity’s greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide. Each story says something about our relationship to technology and how technology affects our relationships with others. SEASON FOUR: USS CALLISTER LOG LINE: A virtual woman wakes up on a Star Trek-esque ship where the […]

    Continue reading

error: Content is protected