- Bloody Mary Lived in a House That Lived in My Dreams
Since reaching adulthood, I’ve only had my nigthmare about being lost in Bloody Mary’s house once. I had it several times when I was a kid. A classmate of mine named David told me in second grade that Bloody Mary lived in a big wreck of a house behind a […]
- Confessions of a Fearphile: Ringu / The Ring
I’d heard of Ringu shortly after it came out in Japan, well before it was made properly available in the United States, before the American remake had been publicly announced, and long before any kind of reliable internet film streaming option. I remember futilely hunting for it in stores ranging from […]
- Confessions of a Fearphile: The Alien
I never knew the creature as the “xenomorph”, despite having seen Aliens–the movie where the term xenomorph was first used–before seeing Alien. My friends and I were far more informed by the titles of the film franchise than by the scientific designation tossed out by everyone’s least favorite space marine, Lieutenant Gorman. […]
- Confessions of a Fearphile: Candyman
Have you ever seen something that you believed only you could see? Something that should have been seen by others, but somehow was not? In the fall of 1992 I was thirteen-years-old, feeling increasingly ostracized at school, and feeling homesick away from school. The cause of my homesickness helped keep […]
- Confessions of a Fearphile: ‘Shudders’
I think I’m still too young to be using phrases like, ‘They don’t make them like they used to.” Given that I don’t have kids of my own and don’t read current horror anthologies that are geared toward kids, I really have no clue if they do or don’t actually make any more anthologies […]
- Confessions of a Fearphile: Simon’s Soul by Stanley Shaprio
It took a while for me to realize that the things that scared me most were products of my imagination. That’s not to say I’ve never been scared by a movie or a book, obviously. But much of what’s really stuck with me through the years were products largely or […]
- Choose Your Own End, er, Adventure – R.I.P. R.A. Montgomery
My intent isn’t to be reductive or morbid here, but with the unfortunate recent death of R.A. Montgomery, now’s as good a time as any to reminisce about the impact that the Choose Your Own Adventure series had on me as a kid. R.A. Montgomery was co-creator of Choose Your […]
- Confessions of a Fearphile: Stephen King’s ‘Night Shift’
Stephen King’s first collection of short horror stories might still be his best. Then again, I might be a bit biased, since Night Shift is the first Stephen King book that I read. As a young horror fan I was, of course, already familiar with King’s work through film and television […]
- Confessions of a Fearphile: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
The scariest children’s horror anthology of the 80’s! Hands down…
- Confessions of a Fearphile: Silent Hill
At the risk of sounding a bit crude, allow me to propose that horror falls within (or roughly around) two general categories: “Oh Crap!” horror, and “What the hell?” horror. The former would be likened to more visceral or “primal” fears, the kind of horror that, when experienced in real […]