“The Green Bowl” by Sarah Orne Jewett (1901)
“The English tart is nothing but a pie without a soul.”
A lot of stories from this period are people recounting some tale of the supernatural to their friends, sometimes with a little twist thrown in. This one’s fairly light on the twist part and isn’t scary except in a heaviness of the foreknowledge of death sort of way.
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“Crush” by Janet Hetherington, Ronn Sutton, Becka Kinzie, Zakk Saam (2018)
“His eyes are as wild as the sea.”
Aye, that’s a Gothic story alright. The foreword by Jacques Nodell that introduces the anthology was actually a really good breakdown of the Gothic literature genre and its trappings. The ending is pretty gruesome but then I think that’s also a tendency in the scary Gothic romances.
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It Follows dir. David Robert Mitchell (2014)
“It is not done with me either.”
This movie carried some good word of mouth but had fallen into the bottomless backlog of stuff I needed to watch. A showing at the Roxie prompted me to finally check it out. There was actually a short lecture by author Johanna Isaacson that introduced the movie and let me tell you, I’m always in for a pre-movie presentation to prime the brain for what’s to come. The movie itself is great of course, lives up to the hype and left me creeped out. I’ll be walking uneasily and constantly checking my surroundings for days.
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Zombies Ate My Neighbors dev. LucasArts (1993)
“Terror has a new name!”
This is one of those games that’s been in the back of my brain since the 90s as something to complete someday, and the season felt right for it. (It helps that I have a portable device with emulation support so I could cheese through the game with save states and a rewind function.) Now that I’ve completed it, whoof, what a pain in the ass. It can be fun with its horror and sci-fi tropes, but it’s also incredibly difficult. It’s meant to be completed over the course of weeks or months but I don’t have that kinda time. The levels also start to get repetitive, with latter levels essentially serving more challenging remixes of earlier stuff. I’m glad I finally got through it but it’s a tough proposition these days.