I must confess, I was prejudiced against Jason Zinoman’s book Shock Value before I read it. Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror came out last summer, but my first encounter was a story on NPR: Modern Horror Defined By Edgy Realism Of The 1970s. I [...]
Dead of Night (1945)
One sub-category of scary movie is the horror anthology. Representative films include Black Sabbath (1963), Creepshow (1982) and Tales from the Hood (1995). Instead of telling one long story, as a novel does, you get several tales, like a collection of short stories. The more ambitious of these movies have an overarching story that ties [...]
Carnival of Souls (1962)
My biggest regret about Carnival of Souls (1962) is that I didn’t see it earlier in life. In some ways, it is a schlocky low-budget horror movie. In other ways, it’s like an art film. Its plot is simple: The automobile that a young woman is riding in plunges into a river and she is [...]
The Innocents (1961)
Back in the Eighties, there was a great film festival in Los Angeles called Filmex. As part of the festival, they would hold a 50-hour movie marathon, starting on Friday evening and ending on Sunday. It was organized by genre, such as Westerns or Science Fiction. You could sit in a theater, day and night, [...]
At the Heart of Darkness
I think I first became interested in the horror genre early on. I can recall becoming fascinated with Edgar Allan Poe by 5th grade, especially “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I was a fan of the books of children’s author Scott Corbett and he had some scary books for young people, such as Here Lies the Body [...]
When Did the Shift in Horror Come?
This month, I was hoping to blog a little about horror movies. My favorite holiday of the year comes at the end of this month, and it just seems timely. Then I saw this NPR interview with Jason Zinoman, the author of the new book Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, [...]