Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Ben Monaco's avatar

Cool read! I’m a fan of really any genre x with horror, it usually seems to work. I’ve been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy lately, on Blood Meridian right now, and the way he blends western and horror is just incredible. Such a freaky, unsettling, yet perfect western journey… of hunting for scalps deep in Mexico of course.

Expand full comment
Virginia Neely's avatar

To me, horror is more effective when it's understated and leaves the reader to fill in the details from the darkest depths of his imagination. It's easier to do that with writing than in films, where you usually get to face the monster head on. Beowulf is probably one of the earliest horror stories and even now it makes me shudder. Back in the 50s and 60s, there were a lot of horror films on TV, such as The Fly, that we might laugh at today but they sure seemed creepy back then. Around 1960 I saw a film version of Jules Verne's The Time Machine, where the monsters were a devolved race of cannibalistic humans. Verne may have invented sci-fi/horror, as he wrote in the 1800s.

Expand full comment
26 more comments...

No posts