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Growing up listening to folktales about reanimated corpses made this aspect of horror a pretty normal one for me, and in this story, their presence made sense with the location being the former cursed burial ground.
Guest reviewer J.B. Kish shines a spotlight on a French horror film you might have missed: MadS. Find out why it’s a must-see on for both film nerds and horror fans!
This is an Ecuadorian tradition, to burn a poppet doll on New Year’s Eve and leave the bad year behind as you jump across the burning effigy. We burn a body that represents el año viejo—the old year—so we can leave behind all that negative energy and welcome a new year full of hope and possibilities. I wanted to examine this celebration by emphasizing its violence and the borrowing of faces to do so.
In late 2023, I noticed a new subgenre on the horizon, emerging from the intersection of celebrity culture and horror. I call it “Stage Fright”—save the groans, it’s a working title. With the release of Trap, Smile 2, and MaXXXine, this new wave reflects a zeitgeist increasingly disillusioned with the glittering facades of billionaires and icons, and eagerly tuning in when these stars find themselves ensnared in tragic circumstances.
David Lynch did not come up with the line “The owls are not what they seem.” It was co-creator Mark Frost who wrote the teleplay for that episode of Twin Peaks. But seemings and doublings are a primary occupation of Lynch’s work. That’s why when I sat down to write about this month’s issue, I immediately thought of him—and the owls. These stories and this poem are also not what they seem.
I didn’t want it to feel fixed to a specific culture or fable, but rather to have the general atmosphere and logic of a myth. The inspiration was more in the “vibe,” so to speak, and archetypal elements like a connection between cats and the supernatural. The creature’s name and gist of the story came to me in a dream. And I connected it, in my own mind, to a few other weird fiction stories I’ve written about invented entities.
Because all horror stories are about survival, aren’t they? It’s the shadow cast at the heart of the genre. The thing in the dark, in the closet, under our beds; the thing with the knife, the teeth . . . or the roaring chainsaw—they are all just different costumes draped upon the same bony shoulders. Death, that’s what’s wearing the shroud, and no one survives its slow pursuit forever.
I can think of two types of experiences where I’ve felt like an observer in my own life. One is when I’ve suffered bouts of sleep paralysis. Feeling aware of what’s happening (with heightened paranoia to make it more fun!) while simultaneously being completely unable to move your body is an experience I wish on no one.
Anyone who’s read Edgar Allan Poe knows that he was fascinated—alongside many others of his era—by the prospect of premature burial. It’s not hard to imagine why: prior to modern imaging equipment, and particularly in Western traditions where corpses were buried intact, a person could, at the hand of their own well-meaning family, end up interred and helpless.
There’s a special kind of darkness in each of this issue’s pieces that is made out of both our struggle to understand each other and our failures to be what other people want us to be. It’s art that feels like sunshine on what the meteorologist predicted would be the worst day of the year—or vice versa.
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