Horror Homeroom

a boy leans against a wall covering his eyes in a hallway with a large portrait hanging overhead

Posted on November 23, 2022

The Return of Halaloween

Guest Post

In October of 2019 I had the good fortune to attend and write about the first iteration of Halaloween, a production of the University of Michigan’s Global Islamic Studies Center. With so many good horror films coming from outside of the US in the last 20 plus years, a film festival providing exposure to horror films produced in the Muslim world had no problem finding an audience.

After the understandable setbacks prompted by Covid, I am happy to have the opportunity to report on the 2022 edition of Halaloween. Here is an overview of this year’s lineup:

book cover showing a doll with a missing nose

Posted on November 18, 2022

The Bloodcurdling Book Club: Talking Elizabeth Engstrom’s WHEN DARKNESS LOVES US

Podcast

Elizabeth Engstrom’s WHEN DARKNESS LOVES US has been called everything from dark and soul crushing to a “paperback from hell” but we call it one of the finest literary explorations of trauma in recent memory. In this episode, we discuss what makes a monster, how trauma gets replicated, and what it means when monstrosity cloaks itself as maternal indifference. On this podcast we talk blood, guts, and spoilers so listener discretion is advised.

You can order Engstrom’s novel from Valancourt’s Paperbacks from Hell site.

Listen now!

decorative image of a collection of book covers

Posted on November 17, 2022

Call for Papers – Special Issue #8: Horror Literature

Call for Papers

Our featured image, which includes Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson’s popular Paperbacks from Hell series, evidences horror literature’s resurgence in recent years. There has been not only a reclaiming and reissuing of critically dismissed titles of the past but also a proliferation of new and diverse horror fictions. Whether disdained as pulpy trash or ignored for appealing to youth demographics, a large swathe of pre-2000s horror literature has frequently been deemed unworthy of critical analysis. But with developments that include Paperbacks from Hell, Valancourt Books’ new translations of horror novels, increasing numbers of film adaptations of horror youth literature, and decreasing rigidity between what constitutes high and low culture, titles that have long skirted the horror literature canon are increasingly being taken seriously as cultural documents speaking to societal norms and taboos as well as significant artistic works in their own right.

For this special issue on horror fiction, we invite submissions that critically reassess historically disregarded horror literature titles or that take up the works of new horror writers. We want to distinguish horror fiction from its more highbrow cousin, the gothic – and we are interested in horror. We do welcome, though, essays that self-consciously take up the critical difference between horror and the gothic.

Posted on November 10, 2022

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke (2022) by Eric LaRocca

Guest Post

First published last year in the US by Weirdpunk Books, Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke (2022) has made its way to the UK and found a home with Titan Books. Somewhere along its journey across the pond, it picked up a new cover and two more short stories – ‘The Enchantment’ and ‘You’ll Find it’s Like That All Over’ – transforming the book from a novella into a short story collection.

The collection still retains an echo of its original form as most of its pages are taken up by the titular story ‘Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke’- a post-internet take on the epistolary form which comprises emails and instant messenger transcripts between Agnes Petrella and Zoe Cross. Read more

Posted on November 6, 2022

Jordan Peele’s Nope, Spectacle, and Surveillance

Guest Post

Film is a medium for conveying a director’s message. In the last five years, Jordan Peele has directed three horror films – Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022) – that are each infused with a message (indeed, many messages). Get Out was a commentary on casual racism in the contemporary US; the film Us focused on social class and the “underground’ existence of the oppressed, but what does Jordan Peele say in Nope? Nope is many things – and one of them is a comment on modern surveillance culture in America.

Nope takes place between 1998 and the early 2000s on a horse ranch just north of Los Angeles, California. There are four main characters in the film, Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer), OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), and a giant UFO. The plot centers on the characters’ efforts to get footage of the UFO to prove its existence to an inevitably skeptical public. It is this intended exploitation of the UFO, central to the film, that symbolizes surveillance culture in the United States.