protean depravity

Just a tiny bit disappointed that I didn't find the thrill I was looking for in yesterday's Sci-Fi Filmfest's Weirded Out showing (most films just didn't speak to me, except, of course, the very first short film, Joan Vives' Els Amants, which was about a woman's love affair with a tentacled sea monster, but I left early and readily missed one film) I headed to the Creepy Crypt, the weekly horror screenings at Rollberg Kino. And it was the right decision because I could finish the night nevertheless horror-satisfied. I hadn't watched many trailers for In a Violent Nature and had only seen a couple of stills which show the utterly scary looking slasher walking around in the woods, eventually looking for victims. If you haven't seen the movie, my review might be kind of spoilery for you, though plotwise there's nothing to spoil in this movie. It's rather the case that the function follows the form for this once and not vice versa, and the novelty is...

Slowly but surely, the "Indian Lake Trilogy" is on its way to become author Stephen Graham Jones' magnum opus - that's the prime takeaway from the recent, massive and very much justified success surrounding its second installment Don't Fear the Reaper (only Reaper in text for purposes of brevity). It isn't unusual for a second book in a series to achieve more success than its predecessor, the first one having already separated the wheat from the chaff among readers and having established a backstory and setting for the protagonist. Solely people who accept and enjoy the terms set in the first book will stick around for more. The first book My Heart Is A Chainsaw ( Chainsaw ) of the Indian Lake series and its follower Reaper are no exceptions. When Chainsaw came out in the summer of 2021, it truly dropped like a bomb into horror circles. Even though there had been indigenous representation in the genre, (not the least thanks to Jones himself and his riveting...

Slasher fans, rejoice! After a vampire and a ghost novel, the Swedish Stephen King is back with a slasher!  Nine co-workers on a company outing arrive at the idyllic lakeside guesthouse Kolarsjöns Stugby in rural Sweden. They have been working on a project to launch a shopping mall in this remote place for which the land has been taken from local farmers, agreements have been made with shop owners and to build an Ikea around the corner in order to turn the place into a capitalist heaven overlooking the natural beauty. Despite the blatant tensions and conflicting interests within the group, they are trying their best to literally survive this trip and get on with their lives. But there are other tensions brewing too and one of them will result in a proper killing spree – where should they run to, where should they hide? And will they be able to set aside their quarrels in order to pull through together or will they even contribute to the killings?

Demon-possessed, blood drenched teenage girls aimlessly running in the woods… Cursed heavy metal songs with the best lyrics since the invention of heavy metal and a music festival to end the world… A warehouse full of haunted ready-to-assemble and ready-to-kill furniture… Sexy vampires kindling the struggle of the sexes in US suburbia… The battle of tropes breaking loose when a group of final girls is confronted with a timelier horror trope… Over the past decade Grady Hendrix has been gradually working his way upwards from class clown of horror literature to seriously credible writer who, with each new work, manages to reinvent a new subgenre of horror. Now you may or may not like his style, you may say he’s not hard enough for a horror writer, but there is one thing in particular that you can never say about Hendrix; that he is not a feminist. Each and every one of his books displays the story of yet another woman otherwise overlooked and erased, brought into the spotlight by Hendrix....

I’d read Frankenstein in AP English, so I knew you don’t just walk away from your creations. Not without consequences. 2020 is the year of Stephen Graham Jones! With two seriously grand novellas and an impressive full-sized novel within only a couple of months, he is hard to keep up with right now and is finally achieving the breakthrough he deserves in and outside the horror zone. His latest release that completes the literary Tour de Jones'20 (apart, I think, from his annual contribution to Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year ), Night of the Mannequins , is a small slasher story that holds in store quite a few surprises for the unsuspecting reader.