protean depravity

Hello everyone! I hope you're enjoying the autumn weather - the weather to withdraw and read books in candlelight... (And I can feel that in the high number of books we have been selling at the Hammett currently, crazy!) Enjoy my short reviews - in the buildup phase to Halloween I traditionally read horror only and did that in the past month. For the next month I want to shift towards reading more short stories and I'm looking for good anthologies for that, stay tuned! 

Reflections, whether on glass, mirror, or water, have always,  from Narcissus to Poltergeist,  had confrontational, psychological, existential and inherently uncanny undertones for what they might (or might not) show us and what that might stir up inside of us. A mirror, or a reflective surface in the broader sense (a television screen, a photographic lens, a camera's eye, a celluloid film, etc.), shows the bare truth - and yet it is impossible for us to touch, smell, hear or taste that truth. We can only see it. So on the one hand it has the claim of reliability, but on the other hand it lacks depth. There is a conflict there, which, of course, provides perfect fodder for the horror imagination. It is not our world, thus it must be a different one. It is illusion through and through and yet tells us so much about ourselves and our fears; vanity, introspection, evil twins, parallel universes, the future... What's not to like in that, from a horror fan's point of...

The Final Girls Berlin are calling!!! Another year, another Halloween with a traditional program consisting of a short film screening, a costume contest/party and a feature film, which, this year is Mary Lambert's Pet Sematary from 1989!!! The best Pet Sematary adaptation, by the way.

Although the uncanny-ness of buildings in general is tapped out through tropes like the haunted house, the evil place, Gothic mansions and all, the horror of interior spaces has been considerably less explored. Until this year. By using inner spaces as a metaphor for the dark corners of the human mind, Backrooms  literally opened the doors to fantastic ideas and will probably be and stay the prime example, the epitome of this sub-genre. But the recently released Hokum , although taking on a little more on its plate, plays with that idea too - and the result is glorious! I want to start explaining my personal connection to interior spaces with a secret of mine - I very often dream about spaces. When I have those dreams I usually have super powerful and intense feelings upon waking up. Let me elaborate with an example of a recurrent dream I have. In my dream, I am in one of the flats I lived in in the past, or in my current place. All of a sudden I discover a little door, maybe hidd...