Imaginarium 2012

The Best Canadian Speculative Writing Anthology

Chiaroscuro Reading Series

Chiaroscuro Reading Series

Rannu Fund

The CZP/Rannu Fund

Ads

Newsletter

Join our email newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest on ChiZine and ChiZine Publications.


"The Lurid Files"—Gemma Files' Lurid Musings

Absentia

reviewed by
Gemma Files

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.

The Asphyx vs. Photographing Fairies

reviewed by
Gemma Files

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”.

Beyond the Black Rainbow

reviewed by
Gemma Files

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.

Black Curiosities: the Work of Adam Nevill

reviewed by
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.

Dark Shadows

reviewed by
Gemma Files

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

Daughters of Darkness: Director's Cut

reviewed by
Gemma Files

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.

Les Daniels' The Black Castle

reviewed by
Gemma Files

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.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death

reviewed by
Gemma Files

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.
—Opening voice-over narration of Let's Scare Jessica to Death.

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 … ”

Locke & Key

reviewed by
Gemma Files

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.

Marvel Comics' Essential Tomb of Dracula

reviewed by
Gemma Files

Tomb of Dracula 7

Pages

 

CONTACT US § PRIVACY POLICY
randomness