10 Weeks of Spooktober: Clive Barker's Legacy Lives On in Books of Blood...Sort Of

October 10, 2020 Mary

Welcome to a special guest edition of Spooktober: 2 Spook, 2 Tober. Mary is filling in for Emily this week to talk about one of her favorite horror franchises, and its latest installment. Don’t worry, Emily will be back next week with another installment all her own!

Hellraiser is a special film, dancing the line between the Gothic grotesque and the strangely sentimental. A lot of Clive Barker’s work feels like that for me, torn between genres and worlds, but always horrific, always devilishly pleasurable and campy.

10 Weeks of Spooktober: American Murder (Week 6 of 10)

October 8, 2020 Emily

As has been tradition for 10 Weeks of Spooktober: 2 Spook 2 Tober, we’re just kind of posting these whenever I feel like it throughout the month of October, despite my honest efforts to stick to Saturdays. My bad friends.

And this is also new territory for Spooktober, because this time I’m covering a new Netflix true crime documentary: American Murder: The Family Next Door. Does this fit with a horror movie series? That’s complicated to answer. Some people find true crime really scary. Which makes sense. Unlike horror fiction, true crime… really happened.

I know what you’re saying. “Duh, Emily. We know that. Thanks for the insight.” But I do have a point. In my head, I know that true crime should probably be scarier because they’re events that really happened. And it’s often really messed up stuff. Meanwhile horror story stuff like ghosts may or may not be real (they are real).

And yet I have never been scared by true crime stuff. American Murder: The Family Next Door is no exception. This isn’t scary. To me. I really don’t know why. Maybe somebody in the comments can explain that to me. But I still wanted to watch this documentary and wanted to talk about it. Why? Well.

Horror Book Blog: The Only Good Indians

October 4, 2020 Emily

I’ve been teasing the Horror Book Blog for weeks, and now that we’re into October, it’s finally here! I hope you’re ready. We’re starting this series off with one of the most gore-iffic books I’ve read in quite some time: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones.

SGJ, as I will now call him for the rest of this blog (SORRY) is a fairly prolific horror author. The Only Good Indians came out in July, and the author already has another NEWER book, Night of the Mannequins, which hit shelves at the beginning of September. I’ve read some of this other books, and while he’s usually square in the horror genre, he’s not afraid to take risks and try new things. And when you’re writing so much, why not? Goals, truly.

Before reading The Only Good Indians, I read SGJ’s The Last Final Girl back in June of this year. While The Last Final Girl (purposefully) read like a horror movie script, in the vein of the Scream films, The Only Good Indians has a much different feel. It takes its time. It’s dark and moody. It’s literary. But is it any good?

PEN15 and Me: Reflections on Shame, Empathy, and Being a 13-Year-Old Girl

October 3, 2020 Kelli

PEN15 is a comedy series on Hulu co-created by Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle, and Sam Zvibleman. The series follows fictionalized versions of the creators as 7th graders in the year 2000, and it is cringe comedy at its finest (and most unbearable). The show’s cringiest weapons are its stars: Erskine and Konkle, two women in their 30s acting as 13-year-old versions of themselves alongside an ensemble of literal 13-year-olds. It covers a wide range of classic coming-of-age tropes, and uses a combination of humor, surreality, and surprising poignancy to dig deep into some of the less-explored subjects of teen girlhood: cultural identity, masturbation, and doing whippets in some girl’s garage, just to name a few.

This show is not for the faint of heart when it comes to second-hand embarrassment. Few entries in the cringe comedy canon are quite as piercing as this show, and unless you are ready to open yourself up to intense feelings of empathy-fueled shame, steer clear. The reaction this show provokes in me is strongly tied to my own experiences, so I thought it might be fun to sort through some of them and figure out what it is about PEN15 that has lodged it so sharply into my heart.

10 Weeks of Spooktober: Antebellum (Week 5 of 10)

September 29, 2020 Emily

Well, well, well. I’m a liar. I said I was going to be on time with my next Spooktober: 2 Spook 2 Tober post, but you know what? It’s 2020, and there are no rules, so these are just going up when they go up. Deal with it.

Today, in week 5 of Spooktober (3 days late), we’re going to take a look at Antebellum, the movie that everyone wanted to see because it stars Janelle Monae and was advertised as being from the producers of Us and Get Out. Producers. Not director. Not writer. That should be the first red flag here.

The posters also featured the tagline “If it chooses you, nothing can save you,” which is creepy, sure. But what does that mean? I’ll get to it at the end of this post. Spoilers to follow. But honestly, if you’ve seen the trailer, you know what happens. It’s already been spoiled. More on that too. Here we go.

Making the Old New: A Spoiler-Free Review of Raised by Wolves

September 24, 2020 Mary

Father and Mother in their barren wasteland of a home.

Ridley Scott has had a lasting impact on science fiction in film, so much so that when we see androids or aliens on screen, our minds immediately wander to Alien, or even the less appreciated Prometheus. As the director for the first episode of HBOMax’s new show Raised By Wolves, Scott reintroduces us to some of his most classic themes: the meaning of humanity, the probability of life on other planets, and the horror of existence in an undeveloped, expansive new world. That being said, Scott didn’t create Raised By Wolves (though he does serve as an executive producer for the series). Instead, that credit goes to Aaron Guzikowski. Guzikowski has created a world in which the main ideas of Scott’s career can flourish and be explored with unbelievable depth—in a way that could never happen in a single film.

10 Weeks of Spooktober: The Owners (Week 4 of 10)

September 23, 2020 Emily

I’m finally back with more Spooktober. Yes, I know this is really late. The last one was early. This one is late. It’s 2020. There are no rules anymore.

Anyway, this time I’m reviewing the film The Owners, which is a new horror/thriller film starring Maisie Williams, and since that’s this movie’s only claim to fame, she’s front and center in all of the posters. To be fair, she is a main character in this story, so it’s not totally off base. But when a movie advertises its star this much rather than its plot… you do have to wonder.

And wonder I did. And then I watched it.

Coincidence Island: The Guest List by Lucy Foley

September 22, 2020 Susan

I love murder mystery novels, so when I kept seeing The Guest List by Lucy Foley pop up all over Bookstagram, I was excited to check out a new author. Foley's books have been compared to Ruth Ware's, and because I liked a few of Ware's novels, I had high hopes for The Guest List. Unfortunately, I walked away quite disappointed.

Queer Girl Book Club: The Color Purple

September 16, 2020 Kelli & Emily

Kelli: It is September, and time for our second ever Queer Book Club meeting!

Emily: How fun. It's officially a thing now because we've done it two times.

Kelli: Yay us!

Kelli: So, the point of doing this club is to expose ourselves to more queer lit. I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do in terms of queer literature, and while I am obviously into reading more recent stuff (like we did for our last post), I also wanted to take this opportunity to fill in a very important blind spot for myself: The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

Not only had I never read The Color Purple, but I also had no idea that it was even queer. I knew it was a huge touchstone of Black literature as well as southern literature, but that was the extent of my knowledge of the book. Then Emily told me I should read it, with the caveat that it is epistolary, a word I just had to look up how to spell.

Emily: Haha. Yes, Kelli famously hates epistolary novels.

Spoilers to follow for this book from 1982.

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