A horror icon returned in style this month with the debut of the Chucky television series. Three episodes have aired so far, and already it’s picking up quite a bit of buzz. Steven Scaife’s review for Slant is typical of the more positive responses directed at the series:
The show’s most surprising angle is that, while we understand and sympathize with Jake’s situation, he’s not all that hard to sway toward violence. He’s full of anger and pain that he hasn’t learned how to deal with except through art nobody seems to like. Chucky retains a lot of the silly humor inherent to the premise of a surly killer doll, but it can also be quite unsettling as it depicts Jake slowly goaded into violence against his classmates.
Naturally, we had a number crop of horror films on release, although admittedly they’ve been somewhat overshadowed by Dune. Personally, I’m most eager to see Last Night in Soho and Antlers. Halloween Kills also came out, and accurately recreated the completely pointless slasher sequels of the eighties and nineties. Horror-adjacent releases include Venom 2 and The Addams Family 2. According the RottenTomatoes the latter film is even worse than Halloween Kills, although I personally found it to be an amusing kidflick.
Fans of Ramsey Camobell were pleased to see DMR Books republish Far Away & Never, a collection of heroic fantasy novels that’s been out of print for a quarter century. Creepypasta got anotehr boost in the mainstream courtesy of a Financial Times article. The people behind Stygian Sky Media have announced that they will be publishing Joe Lansdale’s memoir The Mechanic’s Son. Oh, yes — and Joyce Carol Oates went viral for a bizarrely po-faced tweet about plastic skeletons.
In Memoriam
AOn October 13, Andrea Haugen (alias Nebelhexë) was one of five people killed in a bow-and-arrow attack in Norway. Her musical career, which was influenced by paganism, is documented by the Encyclopaedia Metallum. Her written work includesbooks on mythology, such as The Ancient Fires of Midgard. Multiple online sources, possibly derived from an uncited claim on Wikipedia, assert that she wrote scripts for horror films. I have been unable to find any evidence of these scripts having been produced, although she did express interest in writing for the screen.
Doris V. Sutherland 