Gemma Files

You may have noticed that I don't have to talk about anything I don't already like in these columns, and today's subject—my heartfelt appreciation for and passionate envy of rising U.K. horror star Adam Nevill—will be no exception. Whenever I start to talk about Nevill, even to my friends, I tend to get a bit star-struck.

When I was a kid, I collected almost anything to do with vampires—not memorabilia, not objects, and this was long before the very idea of owning copies of actual movies, unless you wanted to buy a 16mm/Super-8 camera system (thus risking the attention of the child-stealing demon Bungool, according to recent horror film Sinister)—but short story collections, comics, nonfiction books, magazines . . . and, of course, novels.

It's interesting that Crossley (Alan Bates), the central figure of The Shout (dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 1978), claims to have spent 18 years perfecting his grasp of Aboriginal shamanistic sympathetic magic in the Australian Outback, because the film The Shout reminds me most strongly of Peter Weir's The Last Wave (1977).

As a vampire-obsessed young adult, I found myself in the odd position of having the gatekeepers for my interest in the genre often be slightly older women whose first/imprinting experience of Yes, THIS Is The Thing For Me came through the medium of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The Winds of War creator Dan Curtis's now-legendary supernatural soap opera, Dark Shadows (recently reinterpreted in movie form by Tim Burton with a not-exactly-winning combination of smirky 1970s fetishism and sub-par Johnny Depp freaktitude, in such a way as to neatly alienat

Over the holidays, I picked up a bunch of books (surprise, surprise). One of them was the revivified Hammer Horror's recently repackaged apparent tie-in novelization of their 1966 film The Witches, directed by Cyril Frankel from a screenplay by Quatermass series creator Nigel Kneale, and later characterized by actor/writer Mark Gatiss as being part of a wave of British “folk horror” which would also include things like Hammer's own Witchfinder General (dir. Michael Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (dir.

Every year I try to keep a list of the books I read, though I think I gave up around 150 this year. But when I was asked to compile a list of notable genre books for 2012, I was forced to revisit that list, and then scan my shelves for any entries I might have forgotten. I'm sure there are a lot, because frankly I inhale books at a much faster rate than I probably should. I read in the toilet. I read in transit.

If I had to use one word to characterize Hammer Horror's highly successful recipe for re-visioning the Universal monster movies for a post-World War II Britain, that word would be “muscular.” Brightly Technicolor, intentionally chock-full of boobs, blood and the veriest awefulnesse that people like Freddie Francis and Terence Fisher could come up with, Hammer was determined to begin things as far in situ as the budget would allow for, maintaining a propulsive forward pace while constantly subverting narrative expectations and almost never cutting away from the things their target a

The story goes like this, potentially apocryphal as all anecdata, but it's still a fun one: When Beyond the Black Rainbow writer-director Panos Cosmatos was a kid in the early 1980s, he spent a lot of time inside a store called the Video Attic, looking at VHS boxes of R-rated horror and science fiction films and daydreaming about their covers and plot descriptions on their backs.

Born in 1950, Michael McEachern McDowell was a remarkably prolific author and screenwriter—probably best-known, these days, for getting primary script credit on Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988)—who Stephen King once called “the finest writer of paperback originals in America today.” From 1979 to 1985, he produced a series of startlingly good Southern Gothic novels which, while certainly benefitting from that decade's post-Carrie horror boom, constantly provided a standard for other horror writers to look up to … and did so while simultaneously writing light mysterie

Considering that the overall giallo (Italian horror-mystery) template was set—at least in terms of international recognition—by intense stylists like Dario Argento and Mario Bava, it only makes sense that the work of Pupi Avati looks fairly staid by comparison. Although his filmography is a long and varied one, his direct contributions to the genre could be programmed and viewed as a two-evening mini-“festival.” Yet that festival would include not only a movie Guillermo del Toro chose to spotlight during his Guest Filmmaker appearance at the 2011 L.A.

Traditionally, science fiction and horror/dark fantasy have been assumed to make for uneasy bedfellows, which is odd, since both share a key intersectional taproot text in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—the ultimate "Things [People] Were Not Meant To Know/Hyperintellectualism Makes for Bad Parenting Methodology" fable underlying almost all Cronenbergian body horror on one side, all musings on Artificial Intelligence and Singularity mechanics on the other. When Frankenstein takes the wheel, H.P. Lovecraft starts trying on H.R.

You can't understand. Because you're reading the last chapter of something, without having read the first chapters  . . . Kids always think they're coming into a story at the beginning, when usually they're coming in at the end.
—Dodge, aka “Echo,” in IDW's Locke & Key 1: Welcome to Lovecraft, written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez.

Making a sharpish turn from one stream of horror culture (film) to another (graphic novels), I've decided to use my time this week to talk about my favourite current comic series, Locke & Key, which—with the release of its latest collected volume, number five (Clockworks)—claims to be finally moving into the home-stretch. Since the series began back in 2008, this means the culmination of a surprisingly streamlined five-year plan, when one takes the guiding narrative's dark, oblique, often spectacularly surreal complexities into consideration.

I sit here and I can't believe that it happened. And yet I have to believe it. Dreams or nightmares? Madness or sanity? I don't know which is which.

We're first introduced to Jessica (Zohra Lampert), right as she jumps from her husband Duncan (Barton Heyman)'s hearse and runs off into a roadside cemetery to take an impromptu tombstone-rubbing. “I'll just be one minute!” she yells back, happily. As Duncan and his friend Woody (Kevin O'Connor) lean against the hearse, waiting for her to return, Woody assures Duncan that Jessica seems fine, recovered, especially now that they've removed her from New York … “I mean, that apartment was starting to scare me.” But even as Duncan agrees, Jessica has already looked up from her rubbing to find an odd-looking girl in an archaic sack-dress, her throat circled with what looks like a bandage, gesturing to her from a nearby rock. Whispers mount on the soundtrack, along with a phantom wind, and Jessica shuts her eyes and warns herself: “Act normal. Don't tell them. They won't believe you … ”

Over this last weekend, I picked up a second-hand copy of Mario Bava's 1963 film The Whip and the Body (also known as La Frustra e il Corpo), a legendarily much-censored movie, which was the showpiece of an Italian obscenity trial. For some reason, I'd been sure it was one of Bava's “modern” films, like Hatchet for the Honeymoon or Blood and Black Lace, so I was a bit surprised to realize it actually plays far more like a Roger Corman AIP Poe picture crossbred with a Milo Manara porno comic.

In the years since its initial release, Harry Kümel's Daughters of Darkness has become a bit of a legend—a cheerfully perverse riff on cinematic vampire mythology (its four-word promotional slogan was: “Vampirism, lesbianism, homosexuality, sadism!”, which is...accurate, as far as that goes) that made almost nothing at the box office, yet still managed to amass enough of a following to get it into the second volume of critic and film historian Danny Peary's Cult Movies book series just a mere twelve years later.

So . . . since last weekend and a little bit before, former commercial director Rupert Sanders' slightly revisionist dark fairy tale epic Snow White and the Huntsman has managed to make over $100 million, demonstrating once again (as with The Hunger Games' similarly “surprising” success) that the world may, after all, be ready for big-budget franchises spearheaded by female characters.

Like Shane Carruth's 2004 movie Primer, Zal Batmanglij's debut film Sound of My Voice is a strange little low-budget stunner, effects poor and idea-rich—but where Primer left audiences mainly intrigued yet alienated, Sound of My Voice packs enough emotional punch to potentially cross the geek-indie divide. Indeed, in a lot of ways, its character logic is far more effective than its plot; in retrospect, trying to parse exactly what might or might not be “true” about its events is probably the least interesting facet of the whole affair.

I recently picked up The Asphyx in its most recent re-release form—on Redemption DVD and Blu-Ray—for a combination of reasons, not the least being that I had (mostly) unwittingly referenced its central concept in my novelette “each thing I show you is a piece of my death” (co-written with Stephen J. Barringer), by dubbing the image supposedly found burnt into a murder victim's eye after death an “asphyx”.

Sometimes, even in this meta-saturated genre of ours, things just go right. Absentia, funded by Kickstarter and shot in fourteen days on a hand-held hi-res digital camera which also takes video footage, was conceived less as “a horror film” than as an excuse for writer/director Mike Flanagan to work with and showcase his favourite group of friends/actors, one of whom also happened to be his massively pregnant wife. According to the DVD's documentary feature, no one involved seems to be a horror buff, so the scenario's trope-o-meter is not exactly cranked up high.