Horror Studies

In December 1975, the Lutz family moved into their new home on suburban Long Island. George and Kathleen Lutz knew that, one year earlier, Ronald DeFeo had murdered his parents, brothers, and sisters in the house, but the property - complete with boathouse and swimming pool - and the price were too good to pass up. This is the shocking true story of an American dream that turned into a nightmare beyond imagining for the Lutz family, who were forced to flee their new home in terror.

The Horror Writer covers how to connect with your market and carve out a sustainable niche in the independent horror genre, how to tackle the writer's ever-lurking nemesis of productivity, writing good horror stories with powerful, effective scenes, realistic, flowing dialogue and relatable characters without resorting to clichéd jump scares and well-worn gimmicks. Also covered is the delicate subject of handling rejection with good grace, and how to use those inevitable "not quite the right fit for us at this time" letters as an opportunity to hone your craft.

The New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller about a group of college students encountering supernatural terror while on a road trip through Appalachia—an unforgettable, chilling novel that is “scary and hard to put down. You might be advised not to read it at night” (Stephen King). 1983...

Stephen King presents “a fresh adrenaline rush of terror” (People) in this electrifying #1 New York Times bestseller! The new minister came to Harlow, Maine, when Jamie Morton was a boy doing battle with his toy army men on the front lawn. The young Reverend Charles Jacobs and his beautiful...

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, was an Irish writer known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. His book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, comprises two parts, the first being the "Kwaidan Proper" and the second, "Insect-Studies", which consists of an essay each on ants, butterflies and mosquitos. According to the author, most of the folk tales and ghost stories in the first part were translated from old Japanese texts. The themes encompass resurrection, sacrifice, magic, and the realm of dreams.

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented.

Your body is supposed to be yours. Until it isn't. Twenty tales of flesh that betrays, bones that remember, and skin that holds secrets too terrible to speak. In these pages, the human form becomes the ultimate battleground between self and something far more sinister. A woman's reflection grows more real while she fades away. A fitness tracker begins optimizing its wearer without permission. A heart transplant recipient discovers the donor isn't quite dead. A mother's body produces nourishment that isn't meant for feeding. From medical procedures gone wrong to parasites that rewrite your ...

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart—the eccentric'—the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.

Carlos Castaneda takes the listener into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very foundations of our belief in what is “natural” and “logical”. His landscape is full of terrors and mysterious forces, as sharply etched as a flash of lightning on the deserts and mountains where don Juan takes him to pursue the sorcerer’s knowledge - the knowledge that it is the Eagle that gives us, at our births, a spark of awareness, that it expects to reclaim at the end of our lives and which the sorcerer, through his discipline, fights to retain.

🎃👻 Why did the undead chicken cross the road? To get to the fool's house. Knock, knock! Who’s there? …The undead chicken😆😅😂🤣 – 🧟♂️🧠 written by unknown undead. Get ready to howl with laughter (or moan, groan & face-plant 😱🤣) this Halloween! Prepare for spine-tingling, side-splitting chills with the ultimate 🎃 categorized collection of Halloween & Horror Humor that’ll tickle your funny bone🦴🩻 & leave you cackling like a witch 🧙♀️💀! Get buried alive in an utter avalanche⛷️🏂 of face-planting😒🌵 BAD (😈 EVIL?) DAD jokes -...

In the early 20th century, World War I was the most devastating event humanity had yet experienced. New machines of war left tens of millions killed or wounded in the most grotesque of ways. The Great War remade the world's map, created new global powers, and brought forth some of the biggest problems still facing us today. But it also birthed a new art form: the horror film, made from the fears of a generation ruined by war. From Nosferatu to Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man, the touchstones of horror can all trace their roots to the bloodshed of the First World War.

A novella set in the hard-scrabble world of James S. A. Corey's NYT-bestselling Expanse series, The Vital Abyss is the secret history of the cataclysmic events that occurred on Eros station, and the revelation of what came after. . . Now a Prime Original series. HUGO AWARD WINNER FOR BEST SERIES...

Whether for entertainment, under the guise of medicine, or to propel consumerism, heinous acts are perpetrated daily on women’s bodies. In Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, award-winning journalist Anne Elizabeth Moore catalogs the global toll of capitalism on our physical autonomy. Weaving together unflinching research and surprising humor, these essays range from investigative—probing the Cambodian garment industry, the history of menstrual products, or the gender biases of patent law—to uncomfortably intimate.

In the sweltering heat of Texas, ex-con Bodhi Hall is trying to piece his life back together after serving five years for involuntary manslaughter. Taken in by the Diamondback Motorcycle Club, he's working construction jobs, volunteering at a pit bull rescue, and trying to outrun the ghosts of his past. But Bodhi's past refuses to stay buried. The Mexican death cult that nearly killed him in prison has followed him to the outside, and strange visions plague his days and nights. When he discovers his former cellmate and spiritual mentor, Caedmon, wasting away in a neglectful nursing home, ...

Abraham “Bram” Stoker was born in 1847 in Dublin as the third of seven children. Stoker was bedridden with an unknown illness until the age of seven, when he made a complete recovery. He even grew up to become a successful athlete. Stoker is best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. The novel Dracula begins when an English lawyer, Jonathan Harker, travels to Eastern Europe to meet Count Dracula, who is a client of his. When he arrives in Transylvania, he immediately notices that locals are shocked to learn where he is heading.

Few events have sparked more legends and stories of the supernatural than America's Civil War. The accounts of gallantry and heroism have spread far and wide. Nancy Roberts grew up listening to her father's stories of the War Between the States, and she trekked over many battle sites with him during her childhood. After reading about General Joshua Chamberlain's supernatural experience at the Battle of Gettysburg, Roberts began to collect tales of the blue and gray and write them down.

Conventional wisdom has it that the origins of the horror genre are found in the nineteenth century, in works like Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this paradigm-shaking new book, Bible scholar and cultural historian Brandon Grafius argues that the Bible is, among other things, the world's first work of horror literature. The tropes and themes that we find in slasher movies, body horror, folk horror, and zombie apocalypses were kickstarted by the Bible. Before Godzilla, there were the monsters arising from the sea in the book of Daniel.

To her group of classic stories, Mrs. Roberts has added three new tales about the Carolina coastal areas. The mountains, Piedmont, Eastern Carolina, and the Outer Banks all provide settings for the unique and haunting accounts found in this book. Six of the stories take place in the Outer Banks - a particularly inspiring location and the perfect place to meet the ghost on Blackbeard's last voyage.

“Gilbert writes so well that you half-suspect he could give up the day job." The Independent. This dramatic version of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde", brings out the full horror of the original story as well as being a compelling play in its own right. Stevenson's narrative has been adapted so that six actors can perform it. This is the only stage version which is genuinely faithful to the text, using Stevenson's words where appropriate, as well as his chapter headings. It would be ideal for students to perform in small groups, particularly if ...

On December 26, 1973, The Exorcist was released. Within days it had become legend. Moviegoers braved hours-long lines in winter weather to see it. Some audience members famously fainted or vomited. Half a century later, the movie that both inspired and transcends the modern horror genre has lost none of its power to terrify and unsettle. The Exorcist Legacy reveals the complete story of this cultural phenomenon, from the real-life exorcism in 1949 Maryland that inspired William Peter Blatty's bestselling novel on which the movie is based, to its many sequels, prequels, TV series, and homages.