Tag: Chris Sanchez

New Horror 2023 – Day 1

“The beautiful face kept her secret and told me nothing.”

“Snatched from the Brink” by Mary E. Penn (1878)

I select a lot of stories without fully understanding the plot since I don’t want to spoil, so sometimes it’s a dice roll as to how much spookiness is contained in a given story. But this one delivers after it winds its way through a tale of marital impropriety and the ~horror~ of an unmarried woman’s dishonor.

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“No one knew what the sorcerer wanted with so many beautiful young girls…”

“Birds of a Feather” by Stephanie Phillips, Maan House, Giorgio Spalleta, Justin Birch, Chris Sanchez (2021)

A Bluebeard story somehow always finds itself into my horror list each year, but they’re usually taking the original and flipping it on its head. This one’s short and sweet and probably could have told the tale without the direct references, but with so few pages it’s perhaps best to make things explicit.

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“It needs to tenderize the soul by attacking your sanity.”

It Lives Inside dir. Bishal Dutta (2023)

I liked this a lot, despite a lot of reviews about how mediocre it is. While it does a lot by the numbers, the point here is to give it a cultural spin based on Hindu tales of terror, and that’s what makes it special. And I’m always a sucker for high schoolers not being believed by adults and having to take things into their own hands. (In fiction, not in real life where adults should be less shitty about supporting teens.)

New Horror 2022 – Day 28

(Image source)

“The Signal-Man” by Charles Dickens (1866)
“What is the danger? Where is the danger?”

This idea of the adventuring British gent who wanders out into the world and feels free to go anywhere by rights is prime horror material, in particular because it’s good to swat down that idea by putting that gent in over his head. Now this story isn’t that necessarily (”A Distant Episode” goes there), but it does highlight that if you think you can just wander into someone else’s business on a lark then you’re fucking around and you will find out.

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“Hello, My Name Is…” by Nadia Shammas, Rowan MacColl, Licha Myers, Chris Sanchez (2021)
“Workers have names. Management has power.”

What is a name but a tracking system? The means by which to search and destroy.

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Medusa: Queen of the Serpents dir. Matthew B.C. (2020)
“People like that… they’re nothing.”

I was a good half hour into this movie before I realized this was not the Medusa I was looking for, but I couldn’t just stop watching after getting that far. This one does do something interesting with transformation and a reckoning for the abusers, then it muddles things a bit by trying to justify it all with an explanation. I do like a good explanation, but this one doesn’t pan out.

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Medusa dir. Anita Rocha da Silveira (2021)
“Don’t let yourself be deceived by the worldly people.”

Now this is the Medusa I intended to watch, and it’s a different kind of movie altogether. It’s light on the horror but it does present a horrifying reality. That sense of a danger that might feel new but we’ve been facing for millennia. People get scared and they get together to come up with rules and systems that ultimately can’t serve everyone, and then they’re scared of the outliers, and then there’s death, and then one group or another is the majority and the rules and systems remain but in different forms. Anyway, that’s where my brain went from watching this. Systems and death.