Chills, Thrills and Spills: A Horror Thread

I have a The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon popup book, and its super fucked up and amazing

i also really enjoy the long walk, just because it's so purely fucked up.

 

Firestarter. It's not horror, in that its main goal isn't to scare the crap out of you, but it is intense as fuck and haunting. It's about the psychic abilities of the titular babby pyrokinetic and her dad, but people are the real monsters. And some of them are especially monstrous. There are kind strangers as well, a dad who'll do anything to protect his daughter (who's a badass in her own right both in terms of power and mentality but is also very much a little girl on the run), a shadowy group that does experiments on people (The Shop, shows up in some of his other books being shady. There's a chart somewhere), and I am biased as fuck because it was the first King book I read all the way through (my grandma's always been a fan and collected his books, and I was handed good passages to read that were deemed safe, I was interested in them but because I was pre-diagnosis they didn't know my nightmares were symptomatic instead of just being sensitive to horror influences. But this was also after I ended up watching Storm of the Century as a tiny and ended up having "I'm a little teapot" as an anxiety trigger for years after. I'd gotten over it but I was actively discouraged from reading King until I was in High School and found Firestarter in the school library and NOBODY COULD STOP ME >:O)

 

@strictly quadrilateral That's just why I go 'idk how much any of these things are horror rather than tragedy'. Cujo's a good example - it's super dark and horrific in places, but my brain marks it more as tragedy because it's more 'terrible things sometimes happen to good people because Ka'.

 

* barges in * SK WAS MENTIONED SO I APPEAR

My personal recs would be Lisey's Story, Duma Key, and Full Dark, No Stars. None of these are exactly traditional horror, but certainly will be unsettling, scary, and potentially upsetting. (I would put content warnings for various things on pretty much every one of his books.)

(I also love the Dark Tower series to pieces, but that would be quite a time commitment.)

 

yeah, i...honestly, i cant say ive read any king that i would consider horror. i've only read carrie and the dark tower series and rose madder, and rose madder is the closest to horror imo but still....doesnt ping me as horror. horrific, yes, horror, not so much.

eta: my theory is that certain kinds of horror are a subset of tragedy, but i seem to have lost the notes i took about it

 

This is it. This is the problem. Literally everyone I ask about SK reccs a different book for different reasons. Is he even one man??? Who is this social phenomenon??? How

I should just read Dark Tower shouldn't I

 

Welll, I mean, he has got something like 90+ published works under his belt. Guy started when he was in his late teens and just hasn't fuckin' stopped, lol.

I'd say yeah, read the Dark Tower series if you want, but personally I'd just google everything that's been recced so far and hook into whatever seems most like your jam, yo.

(I absolutely ascribe to the belief that Stephen King doesn't actually physically write all those things, he just thinks them and they happen. Only explanation.)

 

I mean, the coke habit probably helped re: his rate of production in the 70s / 80s.

Also dropping in a rec for Desperation, which is about an eldritch abomination coming up from a mine in a Southwestern town. It's one of my favorites of his. He wrote his own surreal AU of the story and published it under his Bachman pseud as The Regulators.

 

Any of his with the monsters from the dark tower series. Their mythos is a sort of special interest of mine.

 

Okay, so I just watched The Visit on netflix... HOLY SHIT THAT WAS SO GOOD.

I was expecting it to be cheesy, with M Night Shamalyan of all people as the director... it WASN'T CHEESY. I was waiting for the signature twist, I was looking for it the entire time, but I was still COMPLETELY BLINDSIDED. HOLY SHIT.

WATCH IT IT'S SO GOOD.

 

I recall watching the visit in the cinema and enjoying it reasonably well for what it is. I have a bit of a lovehate relationship with horror movies that prominently featured mental health stuff. (Gothika is an old favorite in that category)

 

The thing I liked about Gothika was that iirc it didn't really demonize mentally ill characters. It focused on the doctor patient power imbalance more.

 

And I am reminded in how disappointed I was in The Ward.

In general I want more movies to just play their monsters and ghosts and such straight. They can still be metaphors but like metaphors with actual teeth.

 

@PotteryWalrus I didn't forget about you I just lose track of time real easy.

Have you seen The Blackcoat's Daughter? I believe it has an alternate title of 'the 29th of February.' It's on Amazon, I don't know about Netflix?? I don't think I saw it on there but I'm in the US so maybe it's just not on my Netflix.

That movie made me feel a lot of feelings and now I love it but I want to cry thinking about it.

The summary isn't really accurate - it's not so much 'two girls doing battle with evil' as 'the profound effects of isolation.'

 

Surreal horror short with Muppets. No gore but damn, it makes me viscerally uncomfortable.

 

The cracking noises are what got me that and the constantly rolled back eyes.

 

Super best friends play has their first Shitstorm of Scariness VI videos out. I’m so excited!!!

 

Ooooh boy, the SoS is usually my favorite stuff from them. I forgot it was that time already!

 

Does anyone have the periscope app? One of the users (@peripalace) has a live showing of carnival of souls going, if you’re interested. He also talks about the movie during it, I think?

 

Just finished watching a couple of horror movies, The innkeepers and found footage 3D. The second one was great, the first one not so much. The first one had some blood/body horror and a suicide scene. The 2nd one had a lot of gore and blood. Also, does anyone know about a horror movie that has a ghost made of human teeth in it?