Blog Archives
Should horror be its own genre?
Is horror a genre, or is it an aesthetic? This guest post by Elizabeth Twist, a writer and life-long horror fan, seeks to answer that question and suggest a new understanding of “horror” in film and fiction.
I am a horror fan and much of what I write is horror – or at least, I think of it that way. I am frequently subject to the following exchange:
Well-Meaning Interlocutor: “What do you like to read?”
Me: “I enjoy horror.”
W-MI: “Oh, I hate horror. It’s disgusting and awful. How can you like it?”
I enjoy challenging people on this point. When they say they hate horror, often they mean they hate gore porn or slasher movies. Though I personally appreciate even the gorier manifestations of horror, the reality is, you can find horror in all sorts of flavours. Do you like the original Twilight Zone? Did you thrill to Poltergeist when you were a tween? Ever dip into Stephen King’s massive oevre? Love the spooky chills of classic movies like The Innocents? How about your annual viewing of A Christmas Carol? Any fond memories of Scooby Doo? Casper the Friendly Ghost? Beetlejuice?
All of these works have horror elements. Some are firmly placed in the horror canon; others merely dip their toes in the horror pool.
The problem lies in definitions. For many people, horror is “that gross stuff I don’t like.” It is as if we each have our own sliding scale of what we can handle and what we can’t, and for those who haven’t thought it through, horror is anything that exceeds their tolerances.
It is time for a new understanding of horror. Read the rest of this entry
Vampires, ghosts, habits and edits
It’s time for some summer social visits as we drop in on the blogs of Rebecca Roland and Susan Abel Sullivan, take a gander at our growing Pinterest collection, and touch base on the last week of Specter Spectacular open submissions.
Rebecca Roland, author of the forthcoming Shards of History (details coming soon!), blogs at Spice of Life. This week, she’s doing the time warp, drafting new novels, and finishing revisions. Do you have pre-writing habits you must follow before the words can flow? Rebecca Roland did. Then she figured out how to bypass all the ritual and get down to the writing — a necessary skill for every mom writing with young children at home! Read how she did it in her post “Cluck Like a Chicken, Bark Like a Dog.”
Susan Abel Sullivan, whose collection of short work Cursed: Wickedly Fun Stories came out this March, has been working on more short fiction according to her Twitter feed. Also on her Twitter: Pi, her new ball python. There’s pictures and much love for the newest reptilian addition to her family. This week, Susan Abel Sullivan counts down her top five favorite Dracula films in “Love Song for a Vampire” and asks who was your favorite on-screen Dracula?
World Weaver Press on Pinterest: Love pretty pictures? Love geekery? Love fairy tales? Love steampunk? Love treehouses? Love spooks and specters? We do. And we’ve created these boards and more, chock full of great images and links over on Pinterest. We even have an entire board dedicated to inspiring and celebrating our forthcoming anthology Specter Spectacular.
Speaking of which … Read the rest of this entry
Books & Pieces: weekly round-up
Our weekly quick round-up of news and factoids, articles and more that struck our fancy, tickled our interest, and had us scratching our heads. For readers, writers, and genre fans of any form.
World Weaver Press opened to unsolicited queries on May 1. Our open submission window started on Tuesday and we already have an inbox full of interesting queries. The window will remain open through the summer then close again until 2013. Additionally, our Ralan.com listing went live this week.
This is my pick for top article of the week — highly recommended: Dear Speculative Fiction, Elizabeth Bear writes an open letter to the genre of science fiction on Clarkesworld this month wherein she soothes and cajoles but ultimately suggests that the fun has gone out of the relationship when spec fic started taking itself too seriously. Bear writes:
I’m as guilty as anyone of taking myself too seriously.
But for you, it’s become an addiction. You seem to think that nothing fun can have value; that only grimdark portentousness and dystopia mean anything. You wallow in human suffering and despair, and frankly—it makes me tired.
I remember when we were younger. You were so clever, so playful. So much fun. We had some good times. You could make me laugh and think at the same time. You made my pulse race.
And later:
You can have a sense of humor too. It’s okay. We’ll still like you. We’ll still take you seriously. We just think it’d be best for all of us if you could let yourself unbend just a little.
I know. It’s easier to get people to take you seriously when you’re all grit and pus and urban decay—or all gut wounds and bureaucratic incompetence, for that matter. It seems like a quick route to street cred. But the thing is, real people generally aren’t miserable all the time. Even in horrible situations, they find ways to take a little pleasure, to crack jokes. Dying people and homicide cops and soldiers are generally really funny.
I want us to have a little pleasure again too.
Meanwhile, “These are your kids on books” poster goes viral according to GalleyCat. It’s a great poster that you may have already seen on Facebook and Twitter, possibly on the World Weaver accounts as we’ve shared it on both places!
It’s not writer’s block, it’s a series of obstacles the writer has to overcome — or at least that’s the understanding io9′s “The 10 Types of Writers’ Block (and How to Overcome Them)” will leave you with. But even if you’re not keen on reading about writers’ issues, the article is chock full of fabulous old school covers from pulp fiction magazines. It’s worth checking out for that alone.
The Addams Family was originally a comic strip and this was their first published panel. See other debut comic strips of some of the most famous cartoons here.
The most spectacular supermoon in years will grace the skies on Saturday. According to this Smithsonian article, the moon will appear 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than when it is on the far side of its orbit.
People have joined in our “who was your first vampire?” discussion all week! See the post that started it: “You never forget your first vampire.” Lestat, Lost Boys, Nick Night, Angel, Spike, Dark Shadows, Bunnicula, Nosferatu, Dracula(s), and a cartoon that I’d almost forgotten, the vegetarian Count Duckula!
For more links to interesting articles and genre related cartoons, check out World Weaver Press’s Facebook page, updated daily.
You never forget your first vampire
Who was your first vampire? Recent news of the Dark Shadows remake staring Johnny Depp and the passing of the original Dark Shadows star Johnathan Frid have prompted those of us here at World Weaver to contemplate the first vampires we encountered in film, fiction, and television.
From Rebecca Roland, author of the forthcoming Shards of History: When the movie The Lost Boys came out, I was 12 years old. I developed an immediate crush, not on the Coreys, but on Keifer Sutherland who played David, the ultimate bad boy and leader of a band of vampires in Santa Carla, California. With a perfect vampire sneer and contempt for the living, Keifer managed to scare me and send a pleasant little chill down my spine.
Looking back on the movie now, I think David and his vampire gang represented the pitfalls we all must navigate as we’re growing up, and so that movie spoke to me on many different levels.
And did I mention the fabulous soundtrack? “People are Strange” still takes me back to that movie and that moment in my life. Junior high is one of the strangest times in a person’s life, isn’t it? Things change so quickly at that age — not just our bodies, but our personal tastes as well — as we start to try on and discard different personas.
From Eileen Wiedbrauk, World Weaver Press Editor-in-chief: Once you discount Bunnicula — the rabbit who sucked carrots of their fleshy, orange color — and The Count from Sesame Street who never actually bit anyone in spite of his uber-pointy felt fangs, the first vampire I ever encountered was Nick Knight of the TV show Forever Knight.
Nick, played by Geraint Wyn Davies, was a detective trying to repay humanity for his sins while constantly being tempted back to the dark side by his maker, Lacroix. But I think my favorite character was the sassy-smart doctor, Natalie, doing her best to try and help Nick’s medical “affliction” through such non-effective remedies as herbal tea.
The show aired in the middle of the night — possibly because it was a Canadian show our local station had picked up as filler — but whatever the reason, my mother would program the VCR to record and then we’d watch the episodes together the following afternoon.
The series ending was tragic and haunts me to this day — Lacroix telling Nick, “You took too much.” In spite of all his efforts, Nick can’t overcome his faults — it’s him not his vampire nature that is his undoing — and that one thing leads to the destruction of everything he loves.
From Susan Abel Sullivan, author of Cursed: Wickedly Fun Stories and the forthcoming Haunted Housewives of Allister, Alabama: My first vampire was Barnabas Collins on the original gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. I was only four or five years old when the show first aired, but Barnabas was the reason I kept watching. The wonderfully talented Jonathon Frid, a Shakespearean actor with a Master’s in Drama from Yale, brought a deeply textured performance to a character that very easily could have been campy in the hands of a lesser actor.
I had a major crush on Barnabas even though I was pretty young. Surprisingly, Frid was a middle-aged man with average looks, nothing at all like the leading men of that time such as Paul Newman, Robert Redford, or Rock Hudson. But he brought such heart and pathos to the character that I couldn’t help falling in love with him. And neither could the ladies of Dark Shadows such as Josette DuPre, Angelique Bouchard, Roxanne Drew, and Dr. Julia Hoffman.
I believe Barnabas is the first instance of the vampire as a tragic hero in film, TV, or movies. Dracula was portrayed as a villain by Bela Lugosi in the 1930s and Christopher Lee in the 1950s, and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire‘s tragic vampire hero Louis was not published until 1975, four years after Dark Shadows’ last episode. The character of Nick Knight from the TV show Forever Knight owes quite a bit to Barnabas Collins, not only in Nick’s quest to reclaim his humanity, but also in the character of Dr. Natalie Lambert, a coroner, who like Dr. Julia Hoffman on Dark Shadows, attempts to cure Nick of vampirism with medical science.
Our discussion has also dug up some interesting links and related articles.
- Evolution of the Vampire looks briefly at the cinematic history of the bloodsucking undead.
- Susan Abel Sullivan’s Jonathan Frid remembrance.
- Bloody Good Vampires blog also did a Jonathan Frid tribute.
We also came to realize, while searching for the photos you see above, that an important part of being an on-screen vampire is having a really great coat, preferably black with pointy lapels.
And so we turn this question over to you — who was your first vampire? Leave us a comment and let us know!
