Orrin Grey's Blog: Shovel Murders & Monologues, page 4

The Most Merciful Thing in the World

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Last night, I hosted a screening of Dan O’Bannon’s underseen 1991 classic The Resurrected at the Stray Cat Film Center, which put me in the position of having to justify why I regarded it as the best H. P. Lovecraft adaptation to date.

For starters, I said that it wasn’t my favorite adaptation. This is true. My favorite is Die, Monster, Die! from 1965, which certainly isn’t the best. But then I had to further backtrack and say that I don’t necessarily believe that this is the best movie, full stop, ever adapted from a Lovecraft story, either.

Instead, The Resurrected sits at a relatively (and unfortunately) unique intersection of being both a good movie and a good adaptation – keeping, for the most part, to the spirit of the work it’s adapting, even when it deviates from the letter, while also bringing enough of its own vitality and personality to the proceedings to make it worthwhile on its own.

That, by itself, might be enough to justify my placing it as the best Lovecraft adaptation to date. While the Old Gent’s work has been brought to the screen dozens upon dozens of times, most interpretations fail to satisfy one or the other of those relatively modest criteria.

And I’m not the only one who thinks so. In their landmark guide to Lovecraftian cinema Lurker in the Lobby, Andrew Migliore and John Strysik quote artist Allen Koszowski as he hopes for the day when “some gifted filmmaker will adapt Lovecraft’s stories in a manner that does both credit,” before suggesting that O’Bannon’s Resurrected “did just that.”

However, while casting around on the podcast following the show, I hit upon something that I think might be an integral part of the real explanation of why I hold The Resurrected in such high regard.

Lovecraft’s stories are often told in indirect ways. The quote that I used at the top of this post is the famous opening paragraph of his 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” and it could in some ways be seen as a statement of intent for how several of the Old Gent’s stories are constructed.

Rather than a straightforward narrative from point A to point B and C and so on, Lovecraft’s tales are often about the “piecing together of dissociated knowledge,” which gradually reveals a sinister and often epic dimension to otherwise seemingly unrelated events – a dimension of which only the story’s protagonist (and now the reader) is usually fully aware.

It is this gradual accrual of details that many cinematic adaptations often elect to jettison, but which The Resurrected leaves intact. For those of us who are familiar with Lovecraft’s posthumously published novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, where everything is heading is already a foregone conclusion, but watching all the pieces tumble into place, revealing, bit by bit, an ever more gruesome and grotesque whole is still deeply satisfying.

Of course, this approach isn’t for everyone, which might help to explain why The Resurrected isn’t better known among Lovecraft adaptations, even while those who do know of it tend to hold it in high esteem.

Nor is it limited to Lovecraft (who is not even its best practitioner). Indeed, while the approach is particularly well-suited to cosmic horror, the idea of the story that grows from the gradual accumulation of relatively innocuous, seemingly unrelated incidents is one that has been used in all sorts of genres, and is especially popular in stories of crime and detection.

To see what is, without a doubt, my favorite cinematic example of it, one need look no further than Koji Shiraishi’s 2005 found footage film Noroi: The Curse, in which a documentarian gradually pieces together an almost apocalyptic plot involving a rural sect. But it’s also used in any number of other horror films, to greater and lesser degrees.

When it’s done well, this slow-building patchwork of seemingly dissociated knowledge is one of my favorite approaches to telling a scary story, and I think the extent to which The Resurrected engages in it helps to cement my agreement with Migliore and Strysik that it is “the best serious Lovecraftian screen adaptation to date.”

What We Can Do

When a tree fell in my neighbor’s yard, I went over to help her clean it up. I hadn’t lived in this house very long at the time, and had never met that neighbor before. There was no motive in what I was doing, except that she needed help, and I knew that I could help a little. That’s just the kind of world I’d like to live in.

It can be easy at any time – and especially at times like these – to look around at the things I do and wonder what the point of them is. Why should anybody bother to read what I write, let alone spend their hard-earned money on it when they could be buying gas or eggs or video games or little plastic army men?

And yet, I don’t have the skills or the temperament or the resources to do many of the other things that seem more significant.

These are the times when you’ll see lots of well-meaning posts on social media about how important art is. How art will save us. How the world needs your novel, your painting, your film. I’m not necessarily sure that’s true.

I don’t know that the world needs any of the things that I’m ever likely to write. I write stories about monsters and ghosts and nonfiction about horror movies. It’s never going to materially affect anyone’s conditions. It’s not going to shape policy. It’s not going to save anybody’s life.

What it might do, though, is help a little.

It might make someone’s day better. It might turn them on to a movie that becomes a favorite. It might make them stop and look at something in a new way. It might be something that they return to, again and again, because it makes them smile, even if only a bit.

And that’s the best any of us can usually hope for. We aren’t likely to be the heroes of the story, or the villains. In fifty years’ time, they won’t make Academy Award-winning movies about what we did – or what we didn’t do.

Most of us will never save one life, let alone many. If we shape policy at all, it will be as one drop in a sea of collective action.

But what we can do is help a little.

31 of My Favorite Horror Movies

Happy Halloween!

Since I kicked off October and the press for the release of Glowing in the Dark with a list of my 13 Favorite Horror Films, I thought it would be fun to end the month and commemorate the holiday with a list of 31 of my favorite horror films, 31 being both the reverse of 13 and the number of days in the month.

This list is, if anything, even more haphazard and recklessly constructed than the last one, with somehow even more glaring exclusions and baffling omissions, despite having nearly three times as many movies on it.

While I was able to incorporate several titles that it was literally painful not to include in the last list, it turns out that 31 still isn’t anywhere near enough, and several titles on this list are performing double duty, acting as stand-ins for a whole raft of other films. Night Creatures most notably is nowhere near the best of Hammer’s gothic chillers, but it was my first and is a sentimental favorite, so it represents my love for that whole category of pictures.

Similarly, this list could easily have half-a-dozen or more William Castle movies, and it currently contains exactly zero films from the production ouevre of Val Lewton, though Curse of the Demon nicely acts as a stand-in for such flicks as I Walked with a Zombie or Cat People.

I think John Carpenter is the only director with two movies on this list, and it could easily have been twice that number or more. Meanwhile, Guillermo del Toro doesn’t have a single flick in the running, in no small part because my favorites from his body of work are sufficiently fringe cases that I was able to justify excluding them.

(Is Pacific Rim a horror movie? It’s a monster movie, to be sure, but like King Kong, it sits enough in other categories that I felt okay not including it, even though both of those titles belong here every bit as much as anything else on this list. Maybe in November I’ll post “My X Favorite Movies That I Felt Okay Excluding from the Horror Lists on Some Grounds or Other.”)

All of which is to say that this list is incomplete, slapdash, and subject to change and, even to the extent that it is representative of my own true favorites, I mean just that and nothing more. I’m not suggesting that these are the best horror movies around (some of them are), or that they’re the most important (again, some are), but merely that they mean something special to me – joining the ranks of dozens and dozens of other movies that could have easily been here instead.

Hopefully, you’ll find this list fun, and maybe find a new favorite or two, especially if you’re looking for something to fill in your Halloween viewing.

As was the case in my list of 13, these are presented in order of release date, not preference. Because trying to stack them by preference is an even more doomed enterprise than listing them out in the first place.

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

2. The Cat and the Canary (1927)

3. The Old Dark House (1932)

4. Doctor X (1932)

5. The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

6. Curse of the Demon (1957)

7. House on Haunted Hill (1959)

8. Mill of the Stone Women (1960)

9. The Ship of Monsters (1960)

10. Night Creatures (1962)

11. Matango (1963)

12. Blood and Black Lace (1964)

13. The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964)

14. Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

15. Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

16. Viy (1967)

17. The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

18. The Legend of Hell House (1973)

19. Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

20. House (1977)

21. Suspiria (1977)

22. The Fog (1980)

23. The Thing (1982)

24. The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

25. Dolls (1986)

26. Gremlins 2 (1990)

27. Nightbreed (1990)

28. Tremors (1990)

29. Ghostwatch (1992)

30. Noroi: The Curse (2005)

31. Trick ‘r Treat (2007)

“… and next week is Halloween.”

Halloween is just one week away. I’ve spent much of this spooky season promoting the release of Glowing in the Dark, my newest book, which collects 10+ years of my best nonfiction writing on horror films. But I am also still a fiction writer, my latest story appearing in the Fall/Winter issue of Spooky magazine.

As a horror writer and, particularly, a horror writer with my specific proclivities, I like to think that just about any one of my stories would make good reading for the week leading up to Halloween. But I’ve also written a few stories that were set specifically on and around the autumnal holiday, and I figure I should highlight some of those for your seasonal reading needs.

“How to See Ghosts (or Surely Bring Them To You” is the title story of my latest collection, How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. It’s also one of two stories that are original to that collection. It takes its title from an old Vincent Price audio recording, and its story concerns a group of friends who go to a haunt and then conduct a seance on Halloween night. It’s about the desire to see a ghost – even if maybe you shouldn’t.

“Old Haunts” is the other story that’s original to How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, and it also takes place at a Halloween haunt. In this case, it’s a home haunt that may be more than it appears, luring an inveterate haunt-goer into more than he bargained for…

“Screen Haunt” was originally published in It Came from the Multiplex and hasn’t been collected, but is one of the stories on this list that is currently available to read (or listen to) online thanks to Pseudopod. Like a lot of my stories, it’s a love letter to movies and, especially, to movie theaters, and the experience of seeing a scary movie up on the big screen.

“The All-Night Horror Show” is a story that I was still in the process of writing when I read it aloud at the Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird. It was published at The Dark, making it another story available to read online, and it also hasn’t ever been collected (yet). It’s about an aging horror film star who is spending his Halloween night in reverie in front of his TV set – and some home invaders who might have chosen the wrong house.

“Goblins” is a story dedicated to my good friend Reyna, who helped me to come up with the idea. It was originally included in the deluxe edition of my first collection, and has since been reprinted at Pseudopod, meaning that it is also available to read (or listen) online. It’s about some kids and their (possibly very justified) fear of the undertaker who works at the nearby cemetery.

As I said, I like to think that just about any of my stories would make for good Halloween reading, and if you’re reading any of my tales or collections this spooky season, I would love to hear about it. These five in particular, however, are set on that most auspicious of nights (or very close to it) and hopefully capture the spirit of the holiday even better than most.

Why not try one out this Halloween, and let me know if it’s more trick or treat?

“My kind of horror is not horror anymore.”

“My kind of horror is not horror anymore. No one’s afraid of a painted monster.”
– Boris Karloff in Targets (1968)

I have spent my life trying to avoid becoming the kind of person who laments that horror (or much of anything else) was better back in the “good old days.” I try to find the good qualities in every era of horror output, and avoid broad generalizations about, especially, what is being produced today. That being said, like anyone else, I obviously have my preferences.

Perhaps surprisingly, my favorite horror films are not those that I grew up with. When I was a kid, I watched the stuff that was being produced at the time and seldom delved very far into the past. I generally believed myself immune to the charms of older horror movies, and assumed that I would not like them.

There were glimpses, even then, into the kinds of films that would become my favorites, though I was unable to recognize them at the time. I have written before and at great length about my love affair with the Crestwood House monster books, how I would pore over their evocative black-and-white photographs of films I had never seen – and might have avoided, even had the opportunity presented itself.

Then there were old horror comic books or issues of things such as the Cracked Monster Party that I would pick up at flea markets and read to pieces, even making my own homemade versions. There was my obsession with Mezco’s line of Silent Screamers toys, even though I had never seen most of the movies they were adapting.

But it wasn’t until college that I actually began digging into the majority of the horror movies from before the 1980s – the eras which would become my greatest raison d’etre.

“Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing.”
– Dario Argento

If pressed to pick a favorite decade of horror cinema, the answer is almost certainly the 1960s. But really, anything from the ’60s or before is my preferred brand of poison. As I have belabored up above, however, this isn’t due to nostalgia on my part, as this era of films was long over by the time I was born, and I didn’t come to them in any meaningful sense until my formative years were already behind me.

So, what draws me to the creaky, old movies in preference to the new? I’m sure there are lots of answers, and I’ve addressed some of them in essays before. But the lion’s share of it is probably aesthetic as much as anything.

In the essay that I just linked, I quote from Jason Zinoman’s book Shock Value and Roy Olson’s Booklist review of same, where the argument is advanced that “between 1968 and 1976, all the films that redefined the horror movie were made.” This is Zinoman’s “New Horror,” a genre-centric equivalent to the auteur-focused “New Hollywood” that was being developed by filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese in the 1970s.

There are a lot of elements that separate this “New Horror” from the “painted monsters” that came before – I address just one of them in that essay above – but aesthetics certainly play a part.

While it is, again, unproductive to make broad declarations as if they are rules without exception, it is more true than not that the films of this “New Horror” – and those that followed – largely eschewed the expressionism of the earlier horror films for at least a certain brand of aesthetic realism.

Naturally, you can find exceptions aplenty, from the candy-colored lighting of Argento’s Suspiria to the canted camera angles of Raimi’s Evil Dead, but for the most part, the “New Horror” brought horror home in more ways than one. The stories were more likely to take place in locations where regular people might be, they were more likely to be filmed with naturalistic lighting, and even sometimes adopted cinema verite shooting styles.

This is often described (probably accurately) as modern horror films looking more “real.” But there are other elements at play, as well, from changes between horror of interiority and externality to a relaxation of the rules about what could and could not be shown on screen, leading to greater and greater depictions of violence to the body.

Discussing these changes at any length would require much more time and space than I have available here. Indeed, it occupies a considerable portion of Zinoman’s aforementioned book. And it’s largely irrelevant, anyway.

I am well aware of the relative strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, and I absolutely understand why the “New Horror” of the ’70s led to a renaissance of the genre that is largely still going today.

Variety recently made a controversial list of the “100 Best Horror Movies of All Time” where they placed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) in the number one spot – and I don’t necessarily disagree. It’s not that I dislike modern horror, or that I think either aesthetic approach is inherently better or worse. Like almost anything else, each one has its uses, and each one can be applied to great effect in the right hands.

It’s simply that, if I have to choose, my heart is with those “painted monsters” every time. The interior of my mind is a manufactured set filled with artificial fog, painted on shadows, and handmade trees. It’s a place where a painted moon hangs above a cemetery filled with foam headstones.

I try to make almost every kind of horror “my kind of horror,” but, like anyone, I’m only ever going to be so successful at that. I’m always going to have my preferences, and those preferences are always going to be the old, expressionist shadows and painted backdrops of movies made decades before I was born.

“Say it’s only a paper moon / sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn’t be make-believe / if you believed in me”
– E. Y. Harburg & Billy Rose, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”

The Cat That Launched a Thousand Books

One week from tonight, my newest book will officially be out in the world, and we’ll be celebrating at one of my favorite local haunts, the Stray Cat Film Center. There’ll be copies of Glowing in the Dark (and maybe some of my other books, too) available for sale, other tricks and treats, and I’ll be hanging out, talking spooky movies and my favorite season of the year.

That’s all free and open to the public but the Stray Cat is, at the end of the day, a movie theater, and this is a book about movies, so we’ll be wrapping up the festivities with a special secret screening of one of my favorite horror films. The book launch is free, but the screening costs $10 – or is free with the purchase of a copy of Glowing in the Dark.

Of course, while Tuesday, October 15 is the official launch event, it won’t be the first or only time that habitues of the KC film and literature scenes will have a chance to pick up a copy of Glowing in the Dark. On Saturday, October 12 I’ll be vending at Lit on Grand outside Afterword Tavern and Shelves from 1 to 5pm. Think of it as a little like an outdoor Scholastic book fair for grown-ups.

I’ll also have copies at the usual VHS tape trading that takes place before Analog Sunday on October 13. And, of course, it being October, Analog Sunday is hosting its very special Halloween Double-Creature that happens every year, this time bringing out two very different Evil Dead knock-offs, neither of which I have ever even heard of.

So, if you can’t make it out to my official book launch on October 15, you can drop by one of those places and get your copy early! Busy all those times? You’re still not out of luck. Assuming I don’t sell out of all my stock (you never know!) I’ll also be vending at the historic Aztec Shawnee theater for their double-feature of Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man on October 16 and 23.

If you’re not local to the Kansas City area, you don’t have to miss out entirely. Pre-orders of Glowing in the Dark are currently making their way out into the world and you can get a copy of your very own direct from the publisher right here.

“Quick, become a mushroom… join me in the soil!”

When Silvia Moreno-Garcia and I co-edited Fungi all the way back in 2012, we put together a list of fungal fiction in various media, from William Hope Hodgson’s germinal 1907 story “The Voice in the Night” through one of my favorite films, 1963’s Matango, and far beyond.

One thing that we didn’t include, despite our best efforts at casting our fungal nets far and wide, was Shirakawa Marina’s 1976 manga UFO Mushroom Invasion. The reason for this rather shocking omission is simple: we had never heard of it. In fact, I had still never heard of it until this year, when translator Ryan Holmberg made it the sophomore installment of his line of Smudge manga translations from Living the Line Books.

The knee-jerk response, when one encounters something like this that is so inextricably within one’s wheelhouse, is to wonder how it is even possible to have been unaware of it for so long, despite the fact that it has existed since before I was born. A better reaction, however, is to be happy for both its conspicuous absence and its late discovery, which serve as a reminder that, no matter how much perfect shit you find in the world, there will always be more waiting.

Did I just suggest that UFO Mushroom Invsasion is perfect? I certainly did. And while it may not be perfect in some other senses, it is absolutely perfect for me. The influence of Matango is as inescapable here, especially in some of the manga’s climactic panels, as the influence of horror manga legend Kazuo Umezu – two great tastes that taste great together.

Despite those two obvious points of inflection, however, this is still very much its own thing. The lengthy asides in which Shirakawa stops to explain how mushrooms work or to retell various mushroom-related legends from China and Japan are what really make UFO Mushroom Invasion stand out from the crowd of other horror manga I have read – a crowd that is, to be fair, far from exhaustive.

While I was an old hand at fungal fears, it was horror author Jonathan Raab who introduced me to the concept of “high strange,” a term (so far as I can tell) originally coined by astronomer and ufologist J. Allen Hynek in 1970 to describe ufological phenomena.

Like any other subgenre of horror, high strange fiction doesn’t have a universally agreed-upon definition, but it certainly isn’t necessarily limited to stories about UFOs. For those who are unfamiliar with the idea of the high strange, I’d point you toward some recent movies, including 2019’s The Vast of Night or just about anything by directing duo Benson & Moorhead. That’ll give you an idea.

While UFO Mushroom Invasion combines fungal, ecological, and apocalyptic horror, it also samples heavily from the high strange. “Some people are simply possessed by UFOs,” writes Udagawa Takeo (author of Manga Zombie) in an appreciation of Shirakawa Marina included in the back of the book.

Shirakawa certainly seems to be one of those people. As the back matter points out, this was only one of three manga the creator did around UFOs. More to the point, however, Shirakawa’s affection for the subject – and, specifically, for the more high strange manifestations of it – is apparent throughout the work, from the early introduction to UFO history to the way speculation about UFOs is treated by characters throughout the manga. Indeed, some of the best pages in UFO Mushroom Invasion involve characters wondering about aliens, and the artist noodling with what they might look like.

The overall result is a book that is a must-read for fans of fungal horror or high strange weirdness, a manga that has been a completely unknown blind spot in my life that is now wonderfully filled in. Besides the appreciation from Udagawa Takeo, the back of the book also includes a brief overview of some of Shirakawa’s other works and I hope that the Smudge line of manga translations is a huge success because I want to read all of them.

My 13 Favorite Horror Films

One of the two entirely new pieces in Glowing in the Dark is a list of “100 Movies to See After You Die,” a joke that got its start on social media and blossomed into the closest thing the book has to a “recommended viewing” list. The goal there was less to curate the best movies, or even my favorite movies, and more to suggest some that were worth watching and yet that people might be less likely to have seen.

Making a list of favorite anything is pretty much always a mug’s game. You’re bound to trip yourself up in arbitrary and self-enforced rules, and by setting up a numerical limit, you’ll be plagued by glaring omissions. For example, in the 13 films selected here, you will find no Hammer horrors and no movies by Nigel Kneale, in spite of the outsized role that both have played on my taste and my formation as a writer, or the fact that either The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) or Quatermass and the Pit (1967) could easily have featured in pride of place.

There are no films by Mario Bava, though Blood and Black Lace (1964) certainly belongs here. In fact, there are no Italian horror or giallo films at all. The Ship of Monsters (1960) is conspicuous in its absence, as is The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968), to name just a couple.

A list of my 13 favorite horror films is doomed to incompleteness and exclusion before it even begins. I could easily add another decimal place to that number and never come near running out of favorite horror films. But, at the same time, no list of my favorite films, of any kind, would be complete without these 13 flicks, which are listed here in order of release date, because trying to assemble them further into a hierarchy is an even more futile endeavor.

As ever, these are not intended to be the best horror movies, or the most important. Just the ones that mean the most to me. And even that, as I’ve belabored quite a lot by now, is a stretch…

1. The Cat and the Canary (1927)

Not as frequently talked about as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Nosferatu, but it should be. This is probably my favorite-ever silent film, one that is as lively, dynamic, and modern as any movie made yesterday.

2. The Old Dark House (1932)

My favorite movie from the classic Universal canon features none of their iconic monsters but is rather James Whale’s eerie old dark house comedy. The book is also fantastic, and I helped to get it back into print.

3. Doctor X (1932)

One of only a handful of surviving films shot in what is colloquially known as “two-strip Technicolor,” Doctor X feels more like a pulp paperback cover or a Richard Sala comic come to life than any other movie I can think of.

4. Curse of the Demon (1957)

The perfect combination of the quiet horror of Val Lewton movies and the rubber monsters of ’50s drive-in movies, even if director Jacques Tourneur didn’t agree.

5. House on Haunted Hill (1959)

When I am asked what my favorite movie of all time is (a question I am asked fairly often, in my line of work) this is what I always answer with. It’s as true an answer as any.

6. Matango (1963)

I still maintain that weird fiction has never translated to the screen as well as it does when it’s filtered through 1960s tokusatsu film, and Matango is maybe the most shining exemplar of that philosophy.

7. The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964)

There are almost certainly other movies that should be on this list in place of this one, but this pilot for a TV series that never happened holds a special spot in my heart as one of the greatest discoveries I’ve ever made without having heard much about it in advance, and it’s still one that a lot of people haven’t seen.

8. Viy (1967)

The monster-filled last few minutes of Viy would be enough to guarantee it a spot on any list like this, but everything that leads up to them is delightful, too.

9. The Thing (1982)

In some ways the most obvious inclusion on this list, in some ways the biggest outlier. John Carpenter’s magnum opus and one of the best monster movies ever made.

10. Gremlins 2 (1990)

Speaking of monsters, Gremlins 2 literally crams the screen with them, while also being a parody of not only itself but the very concept of film sequels in general. Whenever I’m asked about whether a sequel can ever be better than the original, I simply point to this movie and drop the mic.

11. Nightbreed (1990)

Maybe the most imperfect movie on this list, Nightbreed is not even the best Clive Barker adaptation that Barker himself directed. But it is the movie that speaks most to my weird, queer, monster-loving heart.

12. Ghostwatch (1992)

A movie like no other and maybe my ultimate Halloween watch. Possibly the most genuinely frightening film I have ever seen.

13. Noroi: The Curse (2005)

Many people dislike found footage movies. I am not one of them. When I watch a found footage horror, though, Noroi is pretty much the high I am always chasing.

The Busy Season

For those of us who ply our trades predominantly within the spooky industries, October is always going to be our busiest time of year. And this year is no exception, as I gear up for the release of Glowing in the Dark, my latest nonfiction collection featuring some of my best writings on the horror film, due out from Word Horde next month.

In fact, this October might just be my busiest one to date. I’ll be hosting movie screenings, hanging out at an outdoor literary festival, having a book launch party at the Stray Cat Film Center, attending some screenings that I’m not hosting, and much more. To help keep everyone (including myself) up to date, here’s a list of all the events where you’ll be able to find me in October:

Oct 3, 7pm – I’ll be hosting a 25th anniversary screening of House on Haunted Hill (1999) at the Screenland.

Oct 6, 7pm – I’ll be in attendance for Andrew’s Video Void: Paranormal Paradise at Stray Cat.

Oct 10, 6:45pm – I’ll be hosting Eyes Without a Face (1960) at the Screenland.

Oct 12, 1-5pm – Find me hawking books at Lit on Grand outside Afterword Tavern & Shelves. This will actually be your first chance to pick up a physical copy of Glowing in the Dark!

Oct 13, 6:30pm – The annual Analog Sunday Double-Creature featuring not one but two Evil Dead knock-offs! At the Screenland.

Oct 15, 6pm – The big one! Book launch party for Glowing in the Dark at Stray Cat! Come see me, buy books, and stick around for a wild and weird Secret Screening! Admission to the party is free, but the screening either costs $10 or is FREE with the purchase of Glowing in the Dark.

Oct 16, 6:30pm – I’ll be hawking books in the lobby of the Aztec Shawnee Theater during a special double-feature of Werewolf of London (1935) and The Wolf Man (1941).

Oct 19, 4:30pm – One of my few holiday traditions. For the tenth year in a row, I will be in the crowd at Nerdoween, hosted by Greg and Jenius at the Screenland!

Oct 23, 6:30pm – Back for a repeat of the werewolf double-feature at the Aztec Shawnee Theater, assuming I haven’t yet sold all my books by then. If you miss this screening, there’s one more on October 30, but I won’t be around for that one.

Oct 24, 7pm – The Horror Pod Class presents the Sleepy Hollow Mixtape live at the Stray Cat!

There’s a lot more going on in October, but those are all the places and times where you will definitely find me. As previously mentioned, I also worked on a special pub crawl experience called The Harvest Society that’s running at watering holes all over Kansas City throughout the month. You can find more info at that link, and the whole thing wraps up at the Great Harvest Bonfyre on October 26 at Callsign Brewing.

There’ll be more coming here and on social media throughout the month of October. I’ll be posting more about some of these events as they transpire and I will, of course, be encouraging you, in so many different ways, to buy my book! Nor is my book the only one I’ll ballyhooing. My friend and fellow KC film nerd Abby Olcese also has a new book of film writing out this month, so pick up Films for All Seasons from IV Press!

If you’re local to the Kansas City area, I hope to see you at one or more of those events as the nights grow long and the veil wears thin! And if you’re too far away to attend in person, we’ll see you there in spirit!

Harvest Home

Besides that whole “new book coming out” thing, I’ve been working on some other stuff that’s happening this October. Before I get too far into that, though, it seems worth mentioning that Drinkaway Camp is up for “Best Pop-Up Bar” in The Pitch‘s annual Best of KC survey. So, if you enjoyed Drinkaway Camp or just enjoy putting your thumb on the scales of democracy, why not go over there and cast a vote?

For those who don’t know, Drinkaway Camp was a pop-up experience conceived and executed by my friend and Horror Pod Class co-host Tyler Unsell, with help from the rest of the folks at Signal Horizon Entertainment. I helped to come up with the name and wrote the backstory and booklet for the first Drinkaway Camp, which took place last year.

My involvement in the latest thing from Signal Horizon is considerably greater. This year, rather than just one pop-up bar, Signal is bringing together a haunted pub crawl spanning more than nine locations throughout Kansas City. Are you ready to become a member of the Harvest Society?

Since time immemorial, the members of the Harvest Society have gathered near the autumnal equinox, as the nights grow long and the veil wears thin, to perform the Great Harvest and decide the future of this world. The Reapers work to cut down the growth of the Erl King and his children, while the Sowers plant the seeds of transformation. Will the Reapers emerge victorious and usher in another year of life, or will the Sowers open the way to a new world of gods and monsters? The choice is yours…

Last time, I just cooked up some ideas and wrote the booklet. This time, I created much more of what the Harvest Society would ultimately become. Any project like this is the work of divers hands, however, and the Society as it exists is very much the product of the hard work of Tyler Unsell, Tracy Palmer, and others, not to mention some dynamite graphic design work from Elijah LaFollette.

What exactly can you expect from the Harvest Society? There’s only one way to find out, but I can give you some hints. Signing up for tickets will get you access to a guidebook (written by me and designed by Eli) that will walk you through a little of the history of this secret society and the Great Harvest which, each year, decides the fate of the world.

It’ll also guide you to nine different drinking establishments, each with their own spooky ties to Kansas City history, where you can enjoy local libations while also solving puzzles that will help your side to win, whether you choose to stand with the Reapers and defend this world, or throw your lot in with the Sowers and watch it all burn.

The Great Harvest begins this Friday the 13th, so get your tickets now, pick your side, and see if you have what it takes to survive the Harvest…