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One of the biggest surprise hits of 2014 was the cinematic adaptation of John Green’s young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars. With a budget of just twelve million dollars, the film went on to earn over three-hundred million worldwide, and gave its director Josh Boone carte blanche in Hollywood. But what Hollywood didn’t know was that Boone was a lifelong horror fan who was more interested in adapting Stephen King than additional teen romances.
David Mitchell is the best-selling author of the 2004 novel Cloud Atlas, which was adapted by the Wachowskis into a feature film starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. All of Mitchell’s novels are set in the same universe with characters from one book appearing in or being referenced in the others. Those books include Ghost Written, Number Nine Dream, Black Swan Green, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Mitchell’s most recent books are The Bone Clocks, about a secret war between two factions of immortal occultists, and Slade House, a decade-spanning haunted house novel.
Garry Whitta wrote the screenplay for the post-apocalyptic thriller THE BOOK OF ELI, starring Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman, and also worked on the script for AFTER EARTH, an SF adventure starring Will Smith and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Gary has also written for video games and comics and he also worked on the upcoming feature film STAR WAR: ROGUE ONE, which (unfortunately) he is strictly forbidden from discussing. He recently used the Ink Shares crowdfunding platform to publish his first novel, ABOMINATION.
[The book required] years and years of research, much of which I never had the opportunity to use, but it was vital to the process. I delved into alchemy, sacred geography, the Quivira and their language—I even got a chance to read a transcript of Coronado’s journal from the expedition. The truth is more fantastic than anything I could ever come up with.
My mother loved Edgar Allan Poe; she exposed me to him at, possibly, too young of an age. Our favorite holiday was Halloween; I say “our” because she and I used to start my Halloween costume in August, so since I was a kid, I liked scary stuff. Hitchcock is my favorite genre movie director; in college, I took a class on just Hitchcock movies, so every week we saw two movies and talked about them. The movie that scared me the most was Friday the 13th, which I saw alone at home when HBO first started out; I was at my cousin’s house in Los Angeles, and it frightened me too much. Like playing with fire; you want to put your hand in the fire even though it hurts.
What is it like to be a queer horror writer in 2015? We caught up with four up-and-coming writers of the dark, surreal, and horrific — Meghan McCarron, Brit Mandelo, Rahul Kanakia, and Carrie Cuinn — to ask about their experiences in the genre. Here, they offer their insights into genre, identity, and the strange attractions of fear.
Tucked away behind an unassuming warehouse façade at the far eastern end of the San Fernando Valley is one of the most gleefully horrific places in Southern California: Dapper Cadaver. Founded in 2006 by husband and wife team BJ and Eileen Winslow, Dapper Cadaver is a horror prop shop that services the film and television industries, haunted attractions, amusement parks, carnival sideshows, private parties, and even disaster preparedness training courses.
Most people never expected me to go back to Pinhead in literary form; the expectation was that I would go back to him in a movie. That never felt right to me. Pinhead is a rather literary figure. He speaks with a Shakespearean cadence, so I wanted to make sure that was in the performance, if you will, of his farewell, and I couldn’t do that on a movie screen.
Kc Wayland is the writer and director of the zombie horror podcast We’re Alive, a full-cast audio drama that has racked up over 32,000,000 downloads. David Cummings is the host and producer of The NoSleep Podcast, an award-winning anthology series of original horror stories. He has also appeared on the Pseudopod horror podcast and The […]
Lucy Snyder is one of those rare genre-hopping writers who are equally at home in horror, science fiction, poetry, or nonfiction. Throughout her career, she has (almost gleefully) defied clichés and reveled in contradiction: She was born and raised in what she calls the “cactus-and-cowboys” area of Texas, but her work is often urban in setting and tone; she has published collections of both erotica (ORCHID CAROUSELS) and humorous essays about computers (INSTALLING LINUX ON A DEAD BADGER).
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