Today is Dario Argento's 82nd birthday, which is a perfect time time to mention one of my favorite movies for my Origins of My Love of Horror series: Deep Red (Profondo Rosso). A classic giallo, Argento's fifth picture is a highly stylized murder mystery that sees the master filmmaker pulling out all the stops, including psychics reading the mind of a murderer, a jazz musician involved in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse on the streets of Rome, a daring reporter following a story into dangerous territory, and a revelation that is as insane as it is flabbergasting. It's notable for its incredible visuals, its great sense of tension, and a magnificent soundtrack by Goblin. It's an influential film as well, informing not only John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) but indeed much of the slasher genre of the 1970s and 1980s. While a case can be made for Suspiria (1977) being Argento's best movie, I personally prefer Profondo Rosso for its daring and invention while still maintaining the narrative structure of a thriller. If Suspiria is like What is your favorite Dario Argento movie? What is your favorite giallo? Let me know in the comments.
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For this entry in the Origins of My Love of Horror series, I'm posting this interview I conducted with Peter Straub, who passed away yesterday. Straub was one of the key writers who made me want to be a writer. Indeed, I was probably conscious of him at least since my early teens, when I initially read his seminal Ghost Story. Since then, I've tried to read every release, be it his subtle short fiction or his breathtaking novels. He was a writer I could actually say never wrote a bad work. I had the pleasure of interviewing Straub for Revolution SF in 2008 or 2009, with the publication of his novel A Dark Matter. The interview appears to have disappeared down the Internet's memory hole, so I am reposting it here. A Dark Interview: a Q&A with Peter Straub Your latest novel, A Dark Matter, is your first overtly horrific novel since Mr. X, or perhaps even Floating Dragon. Was it inspired in any way by your editing work on Poe’s Children and the two-volume American Fantastic Tales? It’s a sensible question, but I think the answer is no. I worked on A Dark Matter for about five years, and it was planned out – sort of – before I began to assemble the anthologies. The novel was supposed to be a novella, but it overflowed its banks. As with Julia and Ghost Story, A Dark Matter deals with the unfinished business of the past returning to haunt the present. What draws you to this theme? As far as I can see, the past always haunts the present, everybody’s present. We walk around inside invisible cocoons made up of opinions, responses, viewpoints, stances, and assumptions given us by our childhoods and our parents, and generally speaking, we are conscious of none of this material. A meeting between any two people involves the inevitable misreadings and bad judgments produced by the collision of two different scripts. Besides that, decisive actions follow us throughout our lives and affect us, drive our behavior, in ways we seldom understand or even grasp. The past is an indelible part of the present. A Dark Matter also saw publication as The Skylark by Subterranean Press. You’ve also had your short story collection 5 Stories and Sides, your book of criticism, published by Borderlands Press and Cemetery Dance Publications. What for you are the benefits of publishing through the small press houses? I like small presses a lot. They are willing to accept projects my trade publishers would not wish to bring out, books that would strike them as too small, too limited in appeal, or too eccentric. Also, small publishers often produce strikingly beautiful books, and it’s always nice to have a really handsome new book to put on the shelf. Have you seen the graphic adaptation of The Talisman? If so, what are your thoughts on it? I’ve been reading it in all stages as it moves along. It seems to be to be doing an excellent of condensing and presenting the story without leaving out anything important, and I’ve been enjoying it. Do you read graphic novels at all? If so, what titles do you read? I began reading graphic novels with The Sandman in the eighties. Since then, I’ve read all the John Constantine and Preacher books. Seth is one of my favorites, and so is Chester Brown. Dave Sim is in a class by himself. What writers do read these days? Are there any particular genre authors you see as rising stars?
Joe Hill is certainly on the rise, isn’t he? Daryl Gregory and Chris Barzack are doing very good work, too. Otherwise, I read Kelly Link, Donald Harington, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Elizabeth Hand, John Crowley, Tim Powers, people like that, who turn the idea of genre into a rifle-range target. Today in the Origins of My Love of Horror, I talk about the book and movie encapsulating everything I think of when I think of horror. First, some context, I saw the trailer for Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Shining in 1980. Some friends and I sat in a theater waiting for the beginning of a comedy. Suddenly, this terrifying trailer began. I knew nothing of Kubrick, or King, and had never heard of the novel. I can't remember a single thing about the comedy we saw, but I remember exactly my thought processes as the trailer ran. Needless to say, while my other friends seemed ready to see it almost immediately, my own feeling was that it was a movie I could almost guarantee I wouldn't see, and made the decision to read the book instead, making the argument that there was no way the book was going to be as scary as the movie, much less as the trailer we just watched. Yeah, I got that one wrong. I fell in love with the book over the summer and fall. And, a few years later, I rented the movie from Blockbuster, and fell in love again. Adaptations of movies often are different from their source material, of course--what works on the page won't necessarily work on screen--and this is especially true of The Shining. (King has gone on record as disliking Kubrick's movie.) Even this early in his career, King's focus never strayed from the characters, while Kubrick appeared far more fascinated by the story's concepts and ideas. In King's novel, fate is not set, and is a consequence of our actions; in the world of Kubrick's movie, past, present, and future are determined, and none of the characters can escape. You can see this in the messages Tony sends Danny throughout the movie; everything Danny sees from the very beginning comes to pass. In 1997, ABC-TV aired a miniseries based on the novel. Directed by Mick Garris from a teleplay written by King, its fidelity to the source material is much higher, taking fewer artistic, narrative, and philosophical liberties. The miniseries is quite good in its own right, and is worth seeking out, though has never quite engaged me as much as either King's masterful novel or Kubrick's incredible adaptation. What is your favorite book-to-screen adaptation? Let me know in the comments.
For today’s Origins of My Love of Horror, we come to one of the most insane efforts I had seen at that time, and in some ways is still incredibly odd. Director Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm came out in 1979. I caught on one of Houston’s UHF stations a year later when I was twelve years old. Even edited for television, it was a batshit insane movie. It was crazy: a tall man overseeing a creepy mausoleum; Jawa-like creatures stealing bodies; a nearly nude woman with a large knife killing people in a graveyard. All of which is just the beginning of even stranger ideas. It was a dizzying mix of science fiction and horror, with a science fiction rationale that mixed with a surreal atmosphere suffusing every frame, rewiring my brain without my understanding of what surrealism was. Coscarelli went on to make The Beastmaster, Bubba Ho-Tep, and the Masters of Horror episode “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road”. All are worth seeking out. What is your favorite mix of science fiction and horror? Do you love something even stranger than Phantasm? Let me know in the comments.
Today’s Origins of My Love of Horror entry is one of the best television series to show up in the medium’s history. Created by Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone (called simply Twilight Zone in its last two seasons) brought fantastic concepts into public consciousness. Its tales of terror remain part of modern mythology, from the creature on the wing of a commercial passenger plane in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” to aliens with nefarious motives in “To Serve Man”. Allegorical tales like “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and “It’s a Good Life” tap into our collective fears of the monsters within us. And elements of cosmic horror can be found in the sublime “And When the Sky Was Opened”. While Serling wrote many classic episodes, a good number were penned by such masters of the macabre as Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson, and Richard Matheson. What is your favorite horror anthology series? Let me know in the comments.
For the second in my Origins of My Love of Horror series, we turn to the greatest of all vampire novels, the one to which all roads lead: Dracula by Bram Stoker. If you have only seen one of the multitudinous movies or shows based on this seminal novel—from Murnau’s Nosferatu to the 2020 Netflix series starring Cleas Bang—then you have missed one of the truly great modern novels. And I do mean modern. Published in 1897, Dracula is an epistolary novel, making up diary entries, news clippings, even telegraph messages as it tells the story of the Transylvanian count who plans to take up residence in London. It’s swiftly paced and full of compelling characters, and includes elements of romance. While one can read it as a horror novel, it easily can be seen as a thriller along the lines of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, and its different forms of media make it a prototype for Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. In addition, I’m including Tod Browning’s 1931 feature, starring Bela Lugosi. Yes, for many its elements will appear dated. But seeing it when I was eleven on one of Houston’s UHF stations was a transformational experience, providing me with a view of a world adjacent to ours, one can be seen if you twist your eyes in just the right way. What was your first vampire novel or story? Do you have a favorite vampire movie? Let me know in the comments.
It’s September, and what better way to kick off the month than discussing the origins of my love of horror, either in print or film? Like my friend Michael Louis Dixon (whose Facebook postings are OG for this particular series), I’m a horror obsessive; unlike Michael, my relationship with horror was an evolution. Regardless, for the curious, here are my firsts. I read Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles when I was eight years old. No, technically it isn’t a horror novel, but it contains elements of Gothic horror alongside its detective story; there’s decrepit family mansion, a desolate moor, and a spectral black dog believed to be a portent of death. Like I said, it’s not exactly horror. The mystery surround the tale is solvable without resorting to supernatural explanations. But to my young brain, it served closely enough.
What was your first exposure to horror? More specifically, what was your first horror/detective story hybrid? Let me know in the comments. Armadillocon 2022 takes place this year from August 5 to August 7 at the Austin Southpark Hotel. I’m scheduled for five events, two of which I’m moderating. (Cthulhu help us.) I’m including my schedule below (and if you don't see me at these, check the bar), and you can find the full schedule here. Hope to see you there. Friday, August 5Modern Horror Fiction: From the Bigs to the Indies Southpark A, 10pm - 10:45pm A discussion of contemporary horror fiction--what's hot, what trends we see, and what to look for--from major and independent publishers. Panelists: Derek Austin Johnson (moderator); John Hornor Jacobs; Tonia Ransom; Josh Rountree Saturday, August 6Texas Weird: What Is It, and Why You Should Seek It Out Ballroom E, 1pm - 1:45pm Texas is its own place, and its SFF literature has its own unique flavor. We bring together a few experts and novices to talk about what it is and what you should be reading. Panelists: Jayme Lynn Blaschke (moderator); Derek Austin Johnson; Mark Finn; Rick Klaw; Tex Thompson; Joe R. Lansdale Movies: What You Should Have Watched 2022 Southpark A, 3pm - 3:45pm Panelists discuss the movies, television shows, and other visual media released since the last Armadillocon. Panelists: Cassandra Rose Clarke (moderator); Derek Austin Johnson; Rosemary Clement-Moore; A. T. Campbell Reading - Derek Austin Johnson Conference Center, 8:30pm - 9pm Story to be announced. Sunday, August 7The World of Analog Horror
Southpark A, 1pm - 1:45pm Local 58, The Mandela Catalog, Gemini Home Entertainment. Explore the world of this unique subgenere of horror, and why it can be so effective. Panelists: Derek Austin Johnson (moderator); Holly Lyn Walrath; E. A. Williams; John Hornor Jacobs; Eva L. Elasigue Last night on social media I provided a list of introductory horror movies. It included the following:
I usually find these lists a challenge—not because of how difficult they are to put together, but how easy. Seriously, if you want to provide an introductory viewing list, you find yourself recommending a lot of pretty standard titles. As a CineFix host opined on their Top Five Horror Movies of All Time video, horror has a strong center; there’s something about this particular genre that makes the classics more classic than most. Take a look at the above list. You can ask why, say, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre didn’t make the cut, or why David Cronenberg is absent, but by and large the selections I included are pretty much unarguable. Because of this, I began wondering what my list would look like if I didn’t include any of my previous selections. I love the ten previously listed, but I keep wondering what gems are hidden from somebody who sees Hereditary or Us and wonders what else might be available. So here’s a list of ten additional introductory horror movies. I’d like to say this is more idiosyncratic, but many still probably meet the criteria of “classic.” The only limitations I included were (1) they could not have appeared on the previous list, (2) only one movie per director (which is why you don’t see Curse of the Demon here), and (3) no director in the previous list can appear here.
The post-quarantine world moves fast. For those interested, I’m scheduled to be at Multiversecon this October. If you attend come say hi.
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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.
He lives in Central Texas. Archives
August 2023
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