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.

💀💀💀

“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.

💀💀💀

“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.)