Heather Lindsley's "Werewolf Loves Mermaid," Sunil Patel's "The Merger," and Emil Ostrovski's "Tragic Business" develop humorous situations from SF/F motifs: cryptid romance, intergalactic business negotiations, and the cycle of death and rebirth, respectively. Lincoln Michel's "Dark Air" combines common weird fiction / horror situations with a very dry, very dark sense of humor. Naomi Kritzer's "So Much Cooking" is a serious SF story about a grave possibility, but it brings the matter home via a witty parody of a cooking blog.
"The underground bad place is always in the present, whether literally or in memory, and it is always about the past." Bernadette Lynn Bosky on underground and secret spaces in Peter Straub’s fiction.
Released in 1971, 666 is the third and final Aphrodite's Child album, a two record concept concerning the biblical Apocalypse. The singer (now deceased) went on to become this guy. The keyboard maestro went on to become this guy. But the album itself remains one of the creepiest, strangest, best examples of so-called progressive rock ever released. And that [infinity] track featuring Irene Papas on vocals -- that's genuinely terrifying in the right/wrong situation.
The Stone Tape is a television play, first broadcast on the BBC as a Christmas ghost story back in 1972. It was written by Nigel Kneale, best known as the writer of Quatermass. BBC radio is broadcasting a new adaptation tonight (along with an adaptation of The Ring)
Jezebel ran a Scary Story contest this year, here's the wonderful (though sometimes badly edited) results. Need more? Then check out last year's winners, especially the one titled "Look at Me".
Facebook, funeral homes and the feeding of our lives as we fade away. A horror story by Andrew F. Sullivan for Hazlitt.
The girl in the closet. The doomed nurse. The cave creature. Just a few of the best jump cuts in horror movie history.
"These are books that should get the essence of Halloween going and give people a sure scare!" Goodreads' list of 536 books to get your fright on.
Between 1973 and 1983, Vincent Price starred in twenty-two episodes of radio horror for the BBC. Price claimed the stories were drawn from his own reminiscences, though certain plots bear strong resemblances to classic pieces by Roald Dahl and Bram Stoker. Click on and listen, if you can afford...THE PRICE OF FEAR. [more inside]
The streaming service Shout Factory has a treat in time for Halloween: The VHS Vault!. These are VHS rips of classic 80s horror movies: Sleepaway Camp, Night of the Demons, Day of the Dead, Class of 1984, and Exterminators of the year 3,000. There's also the documentary Adjust Your Tracking about VHS collectors.
Zack Parsons, Something Awful's resident writer of much weirdness (oldest articles in that listing may be misattributed) has resumed his beloved series with Steve Sumner (the Max to his Sam), WTF D&D. While Zack still writes for Something Awful, he and Steve's reviews of weird pen-and-paper RPG sourcebooks and art, and their rollicking RPG campaigns, have resumed on Zack's new site, The Bad Guys Win, which also features other new articles from Zack (all of the new WTF D&D, currently a two-part adventure in the Ravenloft setting starring Steve as an idiot monk, is collected under Games). [more inside]
Half-heard whispers. A creaking door. A missed step. From Vertigo to Videodrome, the scariest movies exploit our greatest – and most basic – fears. Fear Itself - BBC Documentary (SLYT NSFW)
The Google DeepDream makeup tutorial that nobody asked for. If you want to look like something hallucinated by a computer, here's how. (Halloween? I suppose you could do it for that too.) Neural network nightmares previously and previouslier.
For the first time in forever, Halloween will be filled with scary movies.* And while you're here... [more inside]
YouTube user Muted Vocal changes 5 iconic creepy themes into major key: The X Files, Halloween, Saw, The Exorcist and Nightmare on Elm Street. He does five more with Jaws, The Fog, Psycho, Phantasm and The Omen. He expands the chipper X-Files theme out into a full track as well.
"Hollywood brings glitz, glamour and big budgets to movie-making; France has avant-garde artistry. But what about Britain? Looking at our selection of the 75 greatest British movies of the past century, you'll find that Britain excels at genres you'd expect (kitchen sink and period drama, class-obsessed satire) and plenty you wouldn't (strange sci-fi, blood-freezing contemporary horror). Here are the essential home-grown films to watch, listed in the order they were made..." [SLTelegraph]
"I’ve been infected by a parasite. I won’t tell you what because I don’t want you to search for it. By the time this reaches you it won’t matter much, anyway. In fact, I’m forbidding you right now from looking for anything or asking anyone. Apparently I have about twelve hours as myself. They won’t say what happens next, because it’s kind of unpredictable. There are lots of animals who’ve had it, but only two people. They won’t tell me." -- The Glad Hosts, a SF short story by Rebecca Campbell
(Or I CAN Get Arrested in This Town!) Aspiring actor Jason Stange nailed the audition for the role of an evil doctor in the forthcoming horror film Marla Mae. The low budget production was shot in Olympia Washington, where the local paper took an interest. [more inside]
Galaxy of Terror, Mutant (NSFW), Contamination and the joy of cheap alien knockoffs. Prefer the sequel? Here's Aliens remade under the name "Terminator 2". Sadly one take on the franchise that will not be seeing the light of day is Alien Identity, a fan film recently shut down by a cease and desist from Fox. Meanwhile the Neil Blomkamp Alien film continues to incubate.
If you heard that Robert Bartleh Cummings was attached to direct a biopic of Groucho Marx's last years from a screenplay by the writer of I'm Not There and Love & Mercy, you might shrug. But what if you knew that Cummings changed his last name back in the '90s to match his stage name: Rob Zombie? [more inside]
The Vulture came up with a trailer for Marvel's upcoming Ant-Man film as a '50s-style horror picture -- complete with narration by the great Vincent Price! (Ant-Man previously, previously) [more inside]
From Software left fantasy for horror, and the results are mind-blowing. More detailed analysis and spoilers below the jump. WARNING! THIS POST CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE GAME BLOODBORNE. IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED THIS YET AND WOULD LIKE TO, IT SPOILS SOME COOL REVEALS LATER IN THE GAME! LIKE EVEN MOUSING OVER URLS COULD SPOIL STUFF - BE WARNED. [more inside]
Someone apparently found a strange horror "game" that was uploaded to a remote corner of the deep web, accessible only via anonymizing tools like Tor. No one seems to know what it is or who made it, and apparently the link hosting the file is now down. All we have to go by at the moment is part of a playthrough (note: potentially unsettling material): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
This was a world that never quite fit me. I was unnaturally hungry and never found something that could satisfy that hunger. No job kept me. From desks to barns to the muffling din of factories, the concept of a profession was foreign. No drug quieted me for more than a few hours. No friend or lover ever lasted for more than a few days. My family had long since receded into the gray haze of memories.Thomas Ligotti reviews the new Hot Dog Bites Pizza from Pizza Hut. [more inside]
Call of Tutu is a Lovecraftian short film by Aaron Vanek. An old man describes his cat... but is it really a cat? (SLYT)
Can any mortal control this foul, pulsating orifice? Stewart Lee on Top Gear by way of HP Lovecraft. Stewart Lee previously on Top Gear
“Derelict is an editing project for academic purposes,” explains Willins. “Prometheus wasn’t exactly an Alien prequel, but this treats it as such by intercutting the events of Alien with Prometheus in a dual narrative structure. The goal was to assemble the material to emphasize the strengths of Prometheus as well as its ties to Alien.”
RIP Sir Christopher Lee, actor most famous for playing Dracula in numerous horror films but also notable roles as Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit film trilogies [more inside]
The BBC's Matthew Sweet explores the gruesome and wildly productive rivalry between two greats of UK horror: A half hour of satisfying radio for anyone who ever stayed up late (or searched, mostly in vain, through a local video store) for "Curse of Frankenstein" or "Vault of Horror": [more inside]
Predator: Dark Ages Templar Knights are put to the ultimate challenge, to hunt The Predator. Testing not only their skills as fighters but also their faith. Kickstarter funded fan film. IMDB. Facebook page.
You couldn’t control the camera, I mean. The Silent Hill video games were blunt and herky-jerky—you, backed into a corner, swinging a plywood board clumsily at two sets of mannequin hips bolted horrifically together, flailing at you. Clay-colored, faceless children grabbed at you in the dark as you tap-tap-jogged awkwardly in circles, desperate to regain some kind of control. The world fell silent for cutscenes, PlayStation glory-era wax-lipped women with empty eyes mouthing hollow dialogue at you from the mist and shadows.Why Silent Hill mattered.
It was all really bad and scary, and kind of broken, and everyone loved it, especially me.
Robert Macfarlane, in The Guardian: In music, literature, art, film and photography, as well as in new and hybrid forms and media, the English eerie is on the rise. A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of “dwelling” and “belonging”, and of the packagings of the past as “heritage”, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle. Such concerns are not new, but there is a distinctive intensity and variety to their contemporary address. This eerie counter-culture – this occulture – is drawing in experimental film-makers, folk singers, folklorists, academics, avant-garde antiquaries, landscape historians, utopians, collectives, mainstreamers and Arch-Droods alike, in a magnificent mash-up of hauntology, geological sentience and political activism. The hedgerows, fields, ruins, hills and saltings of England have been set seething. [more inside]
What are the most disturbing novels? [The Guardian] [Books] Guardian Books discusses disturbing reads:
"Bret Easton Ellis has haunted some of our readers for days, and on the books desk we’re still getting over certain depictions of dangerous obsessions and hellish orgies. Which fiction has most unnerved you?"
Peter Watts (previously) tours the FX house responsible for Hannibal's bodies. Meanwhile Neil Marshall and Vincenzo Natali are to direct episodes of the show.
Following the capture of the notorious Horror Owl of Purmerand, another notable Dutch owl is capturing the public imagination. [more inside]
When British daytime TV and geek heroes collide... a collection of youtube interviews with various sf, horror, fantasy people such as Terry Pratchett, several Dr Whos and William Shatner on various lightweight UK tv chatshows from years past
"Death #1: Devoured by bats. Death #2: Sailed too close to the Elder Continent; my ship, bones gained sentience." People have been discussing Sunless Sea, the nouveau-Roguelike game just released by FailBetter Games. What else are they saying? Rock, Paper, Shotgun: "...the most delicious collection of words in all of gaming." Eurogamer: "This is the video game at its most mystical and revealing." There is, of course, a trailer. [more inside]
The Wall Street Journal celebrates the 20th anniversary of John Carpenter's In The Mouth of Madness. Meanwhile, at VICE, John Carpenter wouldn't explain his new album, so they got a bunch of artists to each provide their own interpretation.
Locus Magazine has published its 2014 Recommended Reading List. BestSF.net has given its Best SF Short Story Award for 2014. Tables of contents have been announced for The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Two edited by Kathe Koja and Michael Kelly, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Nine edited by Jonathan Strahan. And several writers have called out their favorite stories of the year too, e.g. Ken Liu, Carmen Maria Machado and Sofia Samatar, Usman Malik, and Fran Wilde, Michael R. Underwood, Tina Connolly, and Beth Cato. Quite a few of these short fiction selections from 2014 have been published online in full. [more inside]
Welcome to my database of science fiction and fantasy books that demonstrate diversity in sexuality/gender, race, disability, and other aspects. My hope is that this will both promote existing but less well-known books, and inspire authors to write more and publishers to make them available.All Our Worlds is a "Database of Diverse Fantastic Fiction" which can be searched by tag, or you can check notable releases.