glitter_n_gore: (eric draven)
The Final Four! If you missed the earlier entries in this set, here's Part 1 and Part 2. I hope I've boosted some titles you may not have heard of before. That's one reason I make lists like this: to create a fandom around a thing that I wish more people had heard of. (Someone please love Twixt with me!)

That said, there aren't many surprises left in this batch if you've been following me for awhile. Here goes!

4 - Sleepy Hollow (1999)
One of a handful of movies I simply must watch every October if I have the time. (Yes, I rewatched it this year already.) I have grown a little weary of Tim Burton's signature German Expressionism Lite style, and my feelings towards Johnny Depp these days are . . . ambivalent at best, but none of that has dampened my love for this movie a bit. This has little to do with Washington Irving's story apart from the legend itself, in which the horseman was a prank without any supernatural trappings. In Burton's version, the ghosts and magic are all real, and Ichabod Crane is now a squeamish forensic detective instead of a gangly school teacher. The colors, apart from a few splashes of bright red, are so washed out it's almost in black and white, and a sickly fog permeates every inch of the Western Woods. This is the only Burton movie that both legitimately scares me, and makes me laugh, sometimes in the same scene.



3 thru 1 here )
glitter_n_gore: (stoker)
Happy Devil's Night! Here's Part 1 of this countdown if you missed it. The middle chunk of this list is all about symbolism and subtext. Sometimes what the characters don't say is more beguiling than the dialogue itself.

9 - Twixt (2011)
The darkly funny, surreal, modern Gothic vampire movie no one's seen or heard of but me, apparently. But you should. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, this movie is a phantasmagoria of high-contrast dream sequences, lakeside Goth parties, haunted woods, a mysterious clock tower, and a struggling writer trying to find his next bestseller. The wonderful sequence with Ben Chaplin as Edgar Allan Poe, who appears as an otherworldly muse to help Val Kilmer's troubled author out of a creative rut (see below), is worth the viewing all by itself. At its center, this movie is a strangely accurate depiction of how a mystery writer comes up with new ideas. It's a combination of external stimuli and personal exorcism, and that's what Kilmer's going through here. It's hard to describe but impossible to forget, also featuring Elle Fanning as a beautiful dead girl, and Alden Ehrenrich as a Goth teen who quotes Charles Baudelaire in perfect French. Keep an eye out for it, and good luck!



8 thru 5 here )
glitter_n_gore: (samara)
Since I had so much fun doing my Top 13 Scariest Episodes of Doctor Who countdown last year, I decided to do something similar with my favorite sub-genre of cinema: the Gothic movie. Big difference is this time I'm not opening it up to a poll. Nope, instead I'm going to talk about my personal favorites, and I'm counting down from 13 to 1.

Now, when I say "Gothic," I'm not always entirely sure how to verbalize what that means to me. I don't necessarily mean "horror," although the two often coincide. There's a certain interplay of darkness and romance, always underscored by style, that conveys "Gothic" without always adhering to the expected tropes. In other words, love and monsters. It's lavish atmosphere, a sense of opulence masking death and decay, and a creeping dread. What it means is atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere. And that's what all these films offer in the best, and most brutal, ways.

Ready? Let's do this!

13 - The Moth Diaries (2011)
This adaptation of Rachel Klein's epistolary novel of the same name is equal parts Dracula and Girl, Interrupted. Brought to life by the same writer/director team behind American Psycho, this is the story of the intense, sometimes suffocating, and often possessive nature of friendships between teenage girls. The atmosphere lies in the school itself, with secrets lurking beyond curved corridors or inside locked roomsl. Everyone in the school seems to have a story, and the stories are both terrible and fascinating at once. This movie is criminally overlooked, even with Lily Cole as the probably-a-vampire exchange student, Ernessa. There's also a lot of great meta-commentary in the literature class about why Gothic stories are important. Word to the wise: If your name is "Lucy," don't hang out with vampires. It will not end well for you.



12 thru 10 here )

(Cross-posted to [personal profile] rhoda_rants.)
glitter_n_gore: (underworld)
As a library lady, people occasionally ask me for reading recommendations. As a horror geek, my coworkers will sometimes ask for me specifically if one of our patrons wants to read something scary. It's a great question, one of my favorite duties at my job, because I love talking about scary books. Narrowing things down by age group, scare-meter, and sub-genre is part of it--"What's Your Monster?" is a good place to start. (And I highly recommend NoveList's excellent webinar on this topic if you're not already a horror geek like me.)

HOWEVER.

I thought I'd do something different for Gothmas this year, and just give you some of my personal favorites. Not in any particular order, just a list of solid, scary books. Some of these you've probably heard of. Others I hope will be fresh and new and exciting.

1) Boring Girls, by Sara Taylor
This fell onto my radar purely by fandom association; the author is also the lead singer and lyricist of The Birthday Massacre. I wrote a lengthy review for this book already, so I'll try to keep this brief: teenage heavy metal fan, and her best friend, get violently assaulted at a show and swear revenge. It's tense, gruesome, tragic, and impossible to put down.

2) The Women in the Walls, by Amy Lukavics
Occasionally, I will check out a book just because the cover looks intriguing, and sometimes it turns out great. This was one of those times. The women in this family have a history of vaguely defined mental illness that might also be demonic possession, and is tied to the disappearance of the main character's mother before the start of the novel. Falls into the same realm of "RICH PEOPLE ARE SO WEIRD" as Ready Or Not, but with less humor and more Gothic atmosphere.

3) This Monstrous Thing, by Mackenzi Lee
If Mackenzi Lee isn't already on your automatic "YES" list, do something about that, because she is fabulous. She's gotten some buzz recently for her Gentleman's Guide series, and for her Loki Investigates Murder In Victorian London book (it's even more rad than it sounds), but this one fell to the bottom of the pile somehow. And that's a shame, because it's a steampunk reimagining of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, with Shelley herself as a major character. Revolution, mad scientists, automatons--it's great!

4) The Children's Home, by Charles Lambert
Another one I picked up because the cover was interesting. This is such a bizarre piece of work. It's told from the point of view of a kindly caretaker whose home gradually, mysteriously fills with lost children. The children are uncommonly intelligent and erudite. There's a shady organization searching for them. The revelation at the end completely blew my mind. More conceptual than some, and more literary than my usual, but sticks in the brain like a nightmare you can't quite remember.

5) And the Trees Crept In, by Dawn Kurtagich
This comes across like a standard family curse story, until it doesn't. The most effective monsters are those that blend supernatural threats with real-life horror, and that's where this operates. The formatting and layout are disorienting on their own, and I had to read between the lines and seek out other reviews to piece together what had really happened. This book is upsetting in so many ways. Don't read after dark.

6) House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
Speaking of disorienting! All you need to do is flip through this a little bit to know you'll be in for a very unusual ride. It took me a year to read this. Yes, an entire year. With breaks for less confusing and dense books in between. I'm not kidding. This book made me feel like I was being watched, like there was something peeking out from between the pages. It was worth it, but I don't think I could read it twice.

7) Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire
Technically Book 2 in Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series, also technically a prequel focused on Jack and Jill, but easily my favorite of the bunch. All the Wayward Children books are wonderfully bittersweet. This one just happens to be set in the sort of Graveyard Gothic fantasy land I'd most like to visit myself, all vampires, crumbling castles, and haunted moors.

8) The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
I know it's not new, but it is a classic, and I will always include it on lists like this. A lesson that we as a society seem to keep relearning is that wealth, class, and beauty are NOT signifiers of moral character. This book was a scathing critique of so-called Victorian values in its time. The fact that it stays relevant is scary all by itself. It is my very favorite book, and I reread it every single year.

9) The Girl from the Well, by Rin Chupeco
You've probably heard of Koji Suzuki's Japanese horror series, Ringu, or at least the various movie adaptations, but you might not be familiar with the legend of Okiku's Well that inspired it. This book not only introduced me to that unsettling true story, but gave Okiku a voice, generating empathy for a vengeance ghost without sapping any of her terrible power. The sequel, The Suffering, is pretty great too, but I'm more attached to the mystery in this one.

10) Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer
The first in the Southern Reach trilogy, and the basis for the cosmic horror film starring Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson, this short but riveting novel is a strange wild beast. I give credit to the filmmakers for evoking a similar mood, but the original story has a lot of memorable imagery we never seen on screen. The tower, the writing on the wall, and the lighthouse keeper's diary are all iconic stops along the biologist's journey. If you've seen the film and want more--or even if you haven't--read this.
glitter_n_gore: (stoker)
In case you haven't heard, there is a new adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House out on Netflix, directed by rising horror filmmaker Mike Flanagan. There have previously been two movie adaptations of this story, one of which is more or less faithful to the original novel, and one of which is . . . not.

Flanagan's take on this classic haunted house story is an unusual and highly creative approach. It reminds me of NBC's Hannibal in a way, taking advantage of the fact that the target audience is probably familiar with the source material, and using that familiarity to subvert and exceed expectations at the same time. It's very different from anything I could've expected, but stays true to the Gothic spirit of the original story beautifully.



Now, one thing you may have also heard is Flanagan suggested viewers stop mid-season, and go back and rewatch the first five episodes before moving on. In that spirit, I'm going to review the first half of The Haunting of Hill House, then go back and review the series as a whole. At this point, I have not watched further than Episode 5, "The Bent-Neck Lady."

There will be vague SPOILERS in this post, but only for the first half of the series.

Come home, my love. )
glitter_n_gore: (Default)
Tis the night—the night
Of the grave's delight,
And the warlocks are at their play;
Ye think that without,
The wild winds shout,
But no, it is they—it is they!


Boys In the Trees is the most elegant and personal tribute to Halloween I’ve ever seen. Don’t bother telling me Halloween’s over because I don’t care. And honestly, coming back around to this movie a couple days after the day itself was strangely fitting.

I’m not going to tell you the plot. I went in cold and that’s how it should be experienced. The story is loosely constructed, more mood than action, heavily dialogue-driven, and paced like a dream. It also brought back a lot of memories of what it felt like to be a “kid” on the verge of growing up, but not quite wanting to. The fact that it’s set in the late 90s, with a grunge-industrial soundtrack to match, helps a lot.


Screenshot of a teenager in a red hoodie
facing a path in the foggy woods


What I am going to tell you is what I remember about one particular Halloween night in 1996, when I was thirteen years old. Technically too old for trick-or-treating, not old enough to be content staying home to hand out candy. That’s the theme running through Boys In the Trees: fear of growing up, coupled with fear of being left behind, compounded by fear of all the people who you’ve wronged by trying to fit in.

Read More )

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