Things That Go Bump In the Night

What scares you? As a kid I'd have this fear of strangers looking through my window while I slept. There's the sudden revulsion of spiders. The loss of control.

I could go the political route and say the Koch Brothers, the horrific injustices of the Central Park Five, the West Memphis Three, Trayvon Martin, and countless other pathways into discussions that lead to arguments that lead to angry trolls. There's the ecological route and how, according to Elizabeth Kolbert, we will be the arbiters of our own extinction. There's evil on a national scale: the Pol Pots, the Idi Amins, the gulags of the Soviet Union, and concentration camps. Human nature has no bottom and is capable of horrors vastly beyond anything produced in an artistic medium.


But that's getting too serious. And as a man with scars once said: why so serious?

For the month of October, I'm shining a flashlight on the topic of horror. I've decided to cast the net wide and let it encompass film, television, music, painting, literature, and true crime.

In doing this, it's important to note that the subjects discussed are not just things that get under my skin, but the kind of horror I respond to the most. I'm rarely scared by anything film related nowadays. Hereditary has its moments. Yet It Comes At Night's whole mood was unsettling. Even the marketing of it made it out to be a standard horror film when it was something else. What I'm after here, at the end of the day, is ideas. If I were to make a horror flick, many of these ideas and visual aesthetics would inform it either conciously or subconciously.

So pull up a chair and put a log on the fire. While the fire is kindling, we can keep the beasts at bay.

For now, at least...