"
It was John Polidori's misfortune to be comic without having a sense of humor, to wish to be a great writer but to be a terrible one, to be unusually bright but surrounded for one summer by people who were titanically brighter, and to have just enough of an awareness of all of this to make him perpetually uneasy. Also, he couldn't jump."
posted by Iridic
on Mar 18, 2013 -
107 comments
Robert Aickman wrote some of the best ghost stories of the last fifty years. He also edited one of the finest genre anthology series of his time:
The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. Between 1964 and 1972, he curated eight volumes of horror fiction without repeating an author, favoring always the subtle, the psychological, the poetic, the rare, the neglected. 59 of his selections can be found online.
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Oct 25, 2012 -
21 comments
"As the Nazis approached Paris, the American Colony broke camp & abandoned the city like rats from a sinking ship. Behind them they left a frail, elderly, impoverished, homeless Irish-American who, as a young man, had been an heir to wealth, a close friend to Beardsley & Wilde, & the only important American in the 1890s Aesthetic movement of England & France. He was
Vincent O'Sullivan, one of the world's great authors of horror fiction..."
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on May 7, 2012 -
9 comments
"While most other notable British Science Fiction shows were over-ambitious in their special effects, with results ranging from the troubling (
Doctor Who) to the disastrous (
The Tomorrow People),
Sapphire & Steel [ATV, 1979 - 1982] simply did not
try to do anything the budget wouldn't allow. The result called for milking surreal horror for all it's worth, creating a show that is, while definitely not for everyone, quite capable of reducing so-inclined viewers to quivering little heaps behind the sofa."
posted by Iridic
on Dec 12, 2011 -
28 comments
The remarkable occurrences of which I am about to write were related by certain French persons of sound sense and unimpeachable veracity, who happened to be in Berlin a few weeks before the outbreak of the European War. The Kaiser, the most superstitious monarch who ever sat upon the Prussian throne, sternly forbade the circulation of the report of these happenings in his own country, but our gallant Allies across the Channel are, fortunately, not obliged to obey the despotic commands of Wilhelm II, and these persons, therefore, upon their return to France, related, to those interested in such matters, the following story of the great War Lord's three visitations from the dreaded ghost of the Hohenzollerns.
From "Wilhelm II and the White Lady of the Hohenzollerns," by Katharine Cox, as reproduced in S. Mukerji's charmingly digressive
Indian Ghost Stories.
posted by Iridic
on Oct 31, 2011 -
2 comments
Horror movie blog
Arbogast on Film is counting down the days of October with studies of
31 cinematic screams. Considered thus far: shrieks from
The Tingler,
The Pit and the Pendulum,
Two on a Guillotine,
Macchie Solari,
The Black Cat,
Monster House,
The Silence of the Lambs,
She Demons,
The Thing,
L'Amante del Vampiro,
The Nesting, and
Witchcraft.
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Oct 12, 2011 -
17 comments
This may only occur to the obsessive student of The Parent Trap, but once the subtleties are noticed, hints start stacking up, and a creeping sense of the mythic pervades the film...
Join Chris Stangl,
King of the Beanplaters, as he obsessively studies
The Parent Trap,
Little Shop of Horrors,
Beetlejuice,
Teen Wolf, the original
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and
more.
posted by Iridic
on Oct 28, 2010 -
33 comments
