On the Book of Faces, I was nominated to take part in the ABCs of Horror. Each day, I’ll post a favorite horror movie in alphabetical order.
Day 5: E Is for The Exorcist III. My understanding is that William Peter Blatty hated Friedkin’s adaptation of his classic novel to the point that neither would speak to each other for decades. When Hollywood decided to adapt his novel Legion, Blatty signed on as director. Friedkin’s The Exorcist remains a classic, a terrifying picture that has lost none of its power. General consensus states Blatty’s picture suffers only by comparison, but I don’t think it’s a fair one. The Exorcist III is a thoughtful, uncanny horror effort, with terror deriving from its intellectual approach to the material as well as visuals that just feel…off. Some of it is extremely funny—I cannot hear George C. Scott’s Kinderman complaining about the fish in his bathtub without cackling—which only amplifies the terror—the screams from a confessional as the camera slowly zooms in on onlookers never fails to fill my veins with Freon.
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Reading: Pleasant Dreams by Robert Bloch
Watching: Severance, Season 2 Listening: The Beatles, Abbey Road A. J. Nash of The Supernova Short Ficiton Review has a review of Parsec Issue 12, and includes notes on my story “Boys.” You can read their review here. They say of “Boys”: With ‘Boys’ by Derek Austin Johnson, we enter a creepy and bloody world which definitely has potential to leave the reader disturbed. There’s no happy ending here in a generational saga of monsters hiding inside the members of a cursed family, and the ever-present ‘boys’ who help carry out the dirty (and gory) work. Horror fans will love this one. 2024 positives: I had a novel published, and had the rights revert back to me. I managed to have three stories released, and one appeared in one Crystal Lake's story contests. Oh, yeah, and I had surgery before a heart attack laid me down for the big sleep.
Otherwise, 2024 was a dumpster fire. Local 58's "Contingency" feels far more like a documentary these days. Out this week. My story "Itch" is Story 3 of 16 in Crystal Lake Publishing's Flash Fiction Contest. This theme focuses on psychological horror and appeared on November 6, 2024. You'll need to be a Patreon member, but if you enjoyed it, consider giving it your vote. My story "Boys" is out today. You can find it in ParSec [Digital Magazine] - Issue 12, along with great work from Peter Daley, Joanna Corrance, and H. P. Howell, among others, and features an interview with Ken MacLeod and cover art by Jim Burns. I'll see you on the page.
My story "Cuckoo Cocoon" appears in Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers 9 curated by Bret McCormick . curated by Bret McCormick and published by Hellbound Books. It includes stories by Mario E. Martinez, L. H. Phillips, Lucas Strough, Aimee Trask, Armando Sangre, W. R. Theiss, C. W. Stevenson, and Jae Mazer, among others. You can pick up a copy here, or come to Haunt Happy Books on November 15, where Julie Aaron, William Jennings, Juan Pérez, and I will be signing copies. Hope to see you there. If not, I'll see you on the page.
For your post-Halloween reading, the Criterion Channel has a few interesting horror articles. Up first is an interesting view of the Val Lewton-produced classic I Walked With a Zombie, with a a focus on how outsiders find some worlds inaccessible. Desire and its erasure, past and present, the living and the dead (the two camps into which the final voice-over narration, spoken by an unidentified Black Christian priest, separates the characters), embraced as a flow of fragmentary and dematerialized appearances: this is all that remains of the narrative of I Walked with a Zombie after the scene of Mrs. Rand’s rejected confession. This disintegration hints (and The Leopard Man, especially, will confirm) that, for Tourneur, the main theme of a film is nothing but its style—another reason, no doubt, why he found it fruitful not to specialize in any particular genre. The world of Tourneur is a collection of scattered fragments, seen from the point of view of a compassionate outsider who finds the pattern that preserves their secretiveness and their discontinuity. Horror's popularity with general audience waxes and wanes, with different obsessions and approaches bases on time and societal anxiety. Michael Atkinson's The Psychosocial Dread at the Heart of Japanese Horror discusses how this reflection affected Japan's approach to horror. In the ’80s, modernity began to seem unnerving enough on its own. The anxious focus and expressive politics of Japanese horror changed with the toggle to what became world-famous as “J-horror” (after a good deal of horror-adjacent punkish experimentation, as with Nobuhiko Obayashi’s hilariously goofy House, from 1977, and Shinya Tsukamoto’s suppurating Tetsuo: The Iron Man, from 1989). The historical moment was ripe, and uncertainty took hold: 1989 was both the end of Emperor Hirohito’s seemingly infinite reign, and the popping of the country’s huge economic bubble, sending the Japan of the ’90s into a deflationary spiral. Abandoning the fabled past, filmmakers leaned into the anxieties of late-twentieth-century life–including, prominently and presciently, the ghostliness of digital technology. I have not seen The Entity. Given Gavin Smith's Misogyny Incarnate: The Unspeakable Truth of The Entity, it may be rough-going. That doesn't mean I have no interest, however. Believe it or not, The Entity can be understood as a feminist parable. A showcase for Hershey’s fearless and committed performance (Jane Fonda, Sally Field, and Jill Clayburgh reportedly gave hard passes before it came to Hershey), it gives us something that used to be rare in the horror genre—a living, breathing, intelligent, three-dimensional woman. The film foregrounds the skepticism that rape victims often face. Carla’s credibility is even undermined by her son, who begins to equivocate about what he’s witnessed and experienced, and it’s only when Cindy confirms what she’s seen that Carla begins to find hope. If the entity is misogyny incarnate, the film finds in Carla a formidable and sympathetic heroine, one who ultimately emerges intact from the trauma of her harrowing ordeal, the damage to her self-esteem that Sneiderman’s well-meaning treatment has inflicted on her, and her reduction to a hapless test subject in the parapsychologist’s foolhardy experiment. Finally standing up for herself, she defies her unseen tormentor, declaring, “You can’t have me.” (But in the film’s chilling final scene, the entity speaks for the first time, gutturally uttering three words and effectively getting the obscene final say.) Mark your calendars. I'll be at Armadillocon this September. Details here. I'll post my convention schedule as soon as it's finalized. Hope to see you there.
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Derek Austin Johnson has lived most of his life in the Lone Star State. His work has appeared in The Horror Zine, Rayguns Over Texas!, Horror U.S.A.: Texas, Campfire Macabre, The Dread Machine, and Generation X-ed. His novel The Faith was published by Raven Tale Publishing in 2024.
He lives in Central Texas. Archives
November 2024
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