Month: November 2020

The nights are drawing in, the air is growing chill, and time is running out for me to finish my to-do list for this year. I’ve been crackling on with some writing projects – most of which will not see publication until a while down the road – and likely I’ll be doing the same for much of December.

I’ll be giving myself less time for blogging next month, but to keep my schedule up I’ll be launching a new series of posts, Christmas Past, where I dig up clippings about festive celebrations of days gone by.
Until then…

Articles of mine published elsewhere this month:

• The Twisted Ones: T. Kingfisher, Arthur Machen and Weird Perspectives
• The Low, Low Woods review
• The Dollhouse Family review
• Vampires on the Margins: Forbidden Desires
• Amazing Histories: Fall 1928
• Remembering Charlee Jacob: The Myth of Falling
• The Aztec Mummy
• Werewolf Wednesdays: The Blue Demon, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, Mark of the Wolf Man
• Infinite Crisis: Fifteen Years On (WWAC Patreon exclusive)

Article topics for December and beyond:

When it comes to horror, November is a little like Boxing Day: the decorations are still up, but let’s face it, much of the spirit has faded. Yet there were still some genre happenings of late.

First of all, the ever-reliable Shudder unveiled a new crop of films. Blood Vessel follows a group of survivors adrift at sea in the final year of World War II as they find terror aboard a seemingly abandoned ship.; Lingering is a South Korean film about a haunted hotel; and Leap of Faith is a documentary in which director William Friedkin discusses his most famous film, The Exorcist.

In other news, the long-running Supernatural (which premiered back in 2005) concluded this month. I’ll admit that I’ve never watched the series, although even a bystander like myself could hardly fail to notice the loud reactions to a certain romantic coupling.

Supernatural should most definitely not be confused with the similarly-titled Paranormal, an Egyptian television drama based on a series of books by Ahmed Khaled Tawfik. Den of Geek calls it “weird but addictive” while Egyptian Streets praises the series for its authenticity.

Sadly, there were again some familiar faces from the horror genre who did not make it to the end of the month.

Daria Nicolodi was an actress and screenwriter whose career involved multiple collaborations with her sometime partner, director Dario Argento. She co-wrote Suspiria, one of Argento’s best-loved films, and also performed in the likes of Deep Red, Inferno, Tenebrae and Phenomena. She passed away on 25 November, at the age of 70.

Dave Prowse was best known as the man who portrayed Darth Vader onscreen (and, to British people of a certain generation, as the Green Cross Man) but he also had a few roles for Hammer: he portrayed two distinct Frankenstein monsters in Horror of Frankenstein and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, and appeared as a strongman in Vampire Circus. On top of this, he played a Minotaur in the 1972 Doctor Who story “The Time Monster”. He passed away on 28 November, aged 85.

My latest article for WWAC Patreon subscribers is an in-depth examination of how Infinite Crisis, the DC Comics event from 2005, reflects the ways in which superhero comics had changed since the days of Crisis on Infinite Earths in the eighties, from graphic violence to audience fragmentation. Read a preview here.

Yes, I’m still making my way through the list of demons that was compiled by Leonard Ashley and then screwed up by fundamentalist Christian Jon Watkins. See also the first and second parts of this series…

Karau – A demon who is known for causing death in the world, he effects people by tragedies & illness.

Apparently, this is a being from the folklore of the South American Yupa people, and is mentioned in Johannes Wilbert’s 1974 book Yupa Folktales.

Continue reading “Jon Watkins Fails Demonology: Never Mind the Molochs”

My Killer Horror Critic column on werewolf films is on hiatus due to DVD-sourcing issues, so in the meantime, I’ll be looking at the vintage Mexican monster movie trilogy starring the Aztec Mummy! (The first film got mashed into Face of the Screaming Werewolf, so there’s a tenuous lycanthropic connection). Read part one here…

In the latest instalment of my retrospective on the work of Charlee Jacob, I’m looking at her final and most personal short story collection: The Myth of Falling.

Continuing my trip through the Hill House comics line, here’s a review of The Dollhouse Family…

It occurred to me that, between this year’s Vampires on the Margins series and The Vampyre’s Legacy from last year, not to mention a couple of one-off articles I’ve done on the side, I’ve covered a fairly large chunk of nineteenth century vampie literature over at WWAC. So, in case anyone wants to read it all together in chronological order, here’s a quick list:

• John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819)
• Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s “The Black Vampyre” (1819)
• Cyprien Bérard’s Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires (1820)
• Théophile Gautier’s “La morte amoureuse” (1836)
• James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1845-7)
• Elizabeth F. Ellet’s “The Vampyre” (1849)
• Charles Wilkins Webber’s Spiritual Vampirism (1853)
• Paul Féval’s Le Chevalier Ténèbre (1860)
• J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871-2)
• Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Fate of Madame Cabanel” (1880)
• Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ “Manor” (1885)
• Anne Crawford’s “A Mystery of the Campagna” (1886)
• Mary Cholmondeley’s “Let Loose” (1890)
• Eric Stenbock’s “The True Story of a Vampire” (1894)
• Violet Hunt’s “The Prayer” (1895)
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
• Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897)

After a long break looking at rival Astounding Stories, I’m returning to my issue-by-issue retrospective of Amazing Stories. Join me as I hang out with giant ants, mad inventors and four-dimensional travellers…

This week at my Killer Horror Critic column on werewolf cinema I’m reviewing the film that debuted a true legend of Spanish schlock. It can only be Mark of the Wolf Man!

Past instalments:

• Wolfblood (1925)
• Werewolf of London (1935)
• The Wolf Man (1941)
• The Mad Monster (1942)
• The Undying Monster (1942)
• Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
• Return of the Vampire (1943)
• Cry of the Werewolf (1944)
• House of Frankenstein (1944)
• House of Dracula (1945)
• She-Wolf of London (1946)
• Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
• The Werewolf (1956)
• I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)
• Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957)
• How to Make a Monster (1958)
• The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
• Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (1961)
• House on Bare Mountain (1962)
• Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964)
• Hercules, Prisoner of Evil (1964)
• The Blue Demon (1965)
• Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965)