1/2: Whenever I feel down about what frequently seems to the state of #horror #literature and #movies, at least from my personal perspective and preferences, I turn to reading the stories of the late, great Michael Shea, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Algernon Blackwood, Robert E. Howard, and Harlan Ellison and watch the films of Osgood Perkins, John Carpenter, Sam Raimi, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Brian De Palma.
My kind of horror is more weird than shock and...
2/2: ...disgust horror. Slashers are fine, sometimes. Possession movies are okay, I guess, sometimes. Gore is perfectly acceptable, but it's better in moderation and in support of imagination. Slow burns are alright, if they pay off and don't wind up sucking because someone thought it made the film arthouse, and yes, I'm looking at you, A24.
This message brought to you buy next to no one wanting to get behind the kinds of stories I pitch but preferring safe, boring "horror".
@thedisasterautist Tell me about it. We're putting ourselves through a rewatch of the Poltergeist reboot and picking apart the flaws in it right now. They invested so much into it financially and creatively and missed the mark in so many ways. Trying to play on the difficulty of chilling an audience with the more mundane scares early on by laughing past them had the overall effect of raising the bar so high on what they'd have to deliver as a finale that there was no way for them to get over it.