Author | Critic
“Missing Child Videotape’s most significant virtues are in the intricacies of its folklore-steeped plot, which patiently unfolds with carefully administered moments of eerie revelation, especially surrounding the site of its central mystery.”
“Gothic cinema inherits an ongoing obsession with writers and writing from its literary ancestors, but how does it translate such text-based fixations into its own audiovisual grammar? How does it stage ‘objective’ diegeses in concert with the innately subjective representations of writers and the act of writing? This article approaches these questions, not by offering a comprehensive history of Gothic films depicting writers (that would require a long, book-length project), but by analyzing a trio of writer-focused Gothic films notable for their dealings with literary ancestry through negotiations between subjective interiority and diegetic objectivity.”
“Chime traffics in the ‘eerie’ titular concept of Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie: a kind of placid, almost subliminal detachment that Fisher argues ‘can give us access to the forces which govern reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether.’ The chime, then, is an auditory metonym for the eerie, an experience that exceeds the visceral shock of horror to inhabit the more transcendent power of terror — 18th-century gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe defines these terms as two distinct phenomena: ‘Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.’ In Chime, the high degree of life is the very thing that contracts, freezes, and annihilates.”
“Sayuri makes overtures to the cultural anxieties underlying many haunted house narratives, with several lines pointedly alluding to what constitutes a ‘happy life.’ An early scene depicts a teacher asking her disinterested class to analyze a poem by posing questions such as ‘Where do we find happiness?’ and ‘What exactly is happiness?’ The film ultimately disavows the notion that domestic ownership equals anything like existential fulfillment or familial harmony. It locates horror in the conformist embrace of cultural repetitions, depicting its haunting as something like a tape stuck in a loop: the same ghostly giggle echoes through the house again and again, haunted TVs replay snippets of glitchy footage, and one character repeatedly watches the simulated reenactment of her beloved’s grisly death.”
What first attracted you to horror writing?
Reflecting on my earliest childhood encounters with horror, I remember being initially attracted to the genre’s visual iconography, above all else. It seems impossible to separate my desire to write horror from my interest in reading horror. These two things are inextricably bound.
As a young kid, I was really excited by J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and R. L. Stine. Discovering Stephen King as a preteen was a big deal, and the same goes for encountering Hubert Selby Jr. in my teens.
These days, I try to read as widely as possible. I’m currently making my way through Drawn Up from Deep Places, by Gemma Files, which is terrific. I was recently floored by two Henry James novels—The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians.
Today on Ink Heist, we are excited to welcome author Mike Thorn to the site with a list of his 50 favorite Horror films from the last decade. If there is one thing we love as much as dark fiction here at Ink Heist, it’s dark films. We watch a TON of movies throughout the year, and it seems like every time we hit our streaming services, we struggle to find things we haven’t seen. That’s where Mike’s list comes in handy and another reason why it’s so interesting. There is a good balance of more well-known mainstream films mixed with titles that are a little more obscure. A huge thanks to Mike for sharing this list with us. Not only did we find a lot of films we want to check out, we think it will generate a good discussion. What are some of your favorite Horror films?
The folks at Seventh Row invited me to submit a ballot for their Best Films of 2019 Critics Survey.
Mike Thorn 