Nightmare Magazine

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Nonfiction

Interview: David J. Schow

David J. Schow hasn’t just consistently produced great horror fiction and nonfiction for decades, he’s also managed to stay exciting, fresh, and relevant. Although he’s known primarily as a screenwriter (The Crow, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) and award-winning short horror fiction author, he’s also written several acclaimed novels (The Shaft, The Kill Riff), edited the influential 1988 anthology Silver Scream, and is probably the world’s leading expert on The Outer Limits. His latest collection, DJSturbia, was released in March by Subterranean Press.

Artist Showcase

Artist Showcase: Yana Moskaluk

Yana Moskaluk was born in 1984 in Siberia, and moved to Moscow at nineteen to work at the Art.Lebedev Studio. Yana loves to travel, and draws inspiration from medieval art, ancient sculptures, old towns, legends, and fairytales. She takes the mood and atmosphere projected by such stories and items and recreates them in her own art within a modern context.

Nonfiction

The H Word: The Monstrous Intimacy of Poetry in Horror

indulgent and masturbatory, though usually for very different reasons. The horror author is labeled a decadent: she’s a sadomasochist, someone for whom physical suffering and mortal terror are both bread and caviar. The poet is stereotyped as a different kind of pervert, one who enjoys the depths of his own navel and the taste of his own toes, and furthermore, one who wants everyone to know this about him.He too is considered a sadomasochist, obsessing about his tortured existence and taking everyone else into his private Hell.

Nonfiction

Interview: Josh Boone

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.

Artist Showcase

Artist Showcase: Chris Seaman

Chris Seaman, born 1993, is a freelance illustrator and artist based in the UK. Heavily influenced by the horror films of the 1950s and ’60s, his work focuses on creating fear and intrigue through storytelling. Using Adobe Photoshop as his program of choice, Seaman creates pieces that are bizarre, macabre, and unsettling in equal measure. “When I work, I like to think about things that would scare me in particular.”

Nonfiction

The H Word: But Is It Scary?

That seems to be the litmus test to which horror is most often held. When you get back from the latest movie about ghosts or serial killers, put down your favorite horror novel, or mention a spooky story on social media, it’s the first question that you’re likely to be asked. In our eternal struggle to find the boundaries of this vast and often contradictory territory called horror, I’ve seen more than one writer resort to “it aims to scare you” as a working definition.

Nonfiction

Interview: David Mitchell

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.

Artist Showcase

Artist Showcase: Steven Stahlberg

Steven Stahlberg was born in 1959 in Australia but grew up in Sweden. He started working with commercial art in the ’80s, went digital in the late ’90s, and began working in games in 2000. He’s also lived in Hong Kong, the USA, and Malaysia. He now lives in Kuala Lumpur, working for Streamline Studios.

Nonfiction

The H Word: Fairy Tales: The Original Horror Stories?

In many ways, fairy tales could be seen as the first horror stories, full of terrors such as the death of a parent, being eaten alive or of being abandoned. In Hansel and Gretel, the children are left to their fate in the forest because there isn’t enough for the family to eat. The parents in Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin trade away their babies. Bluebeard tests his wives’ obedience and murders them when they fail. There is enough betrayal, jealousy, murder, cannibalism and cruelty in the stories to satisfy any horror fan.

Nonfiction

Interview: Gary Whitta

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.

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