Fear on the page, and why human monsters are harder to write convincingly than supernatural ones.
Character DevelopmentThe flat head and neck bolts appear nowhere in Mary Shelley's novel. Her creature had yellow skin, flowing black hair and the voice of a philosopher. Here's how he changed from page to stage to screen, with the pictures to…
Character DevelopmentGuillermo del Toro has spent thirty years making monsters into heroes. His advice to writers comes down to nine ideas, from trusting your own voice to giving the villain a real reason. Here they are, with my own take on…
Fiction WritingCan a vampire show up on thermal imaging, use a smartphone or trigger an automatic sink? How to build vampire rules from an origin, with lessons from Dracula 2000 and Blade.
Fiction WritingThe second tier of the horror ranking. Romero, Polanski, Friedkin, Carpenter and Kubrick, plus the films that invented the conventions everything since has used.
Gothic HorrorRice wrote 37 books that sold over 150 million copies, and the reason she matters to anyone studying craft comes down to one decision made in a short story around 1968. She moved the camera and gave the vampire the…
AdaptationStoker managed a London theater for twenty-seven years and wrote Dracula in the evenings. It became the most adapted novel in the language, and almost nobody who invokes it has read it, which means almost nobody knows its central technique…
AugustLovecraft sold to pulp magazines for a fraction of a cent per word and died at forty-six in poverty, having invented the only genuinely new horror idea of the twentieth century. He was also a racist by the standards of…
Gothic HorrorStevenson wrote a pirate adventure that fixed the shape of every pirate story since, produced a psychological horror novella in days whose title became a figure of speech, and was dismissed as a children's writer for most of a century.…
Fiction WritingEvery October people who never read horror pick the book with the most alarming cover, discover it does nothing for them, and conclude they dislike the genre. What they have discovered is that they dislike one register out of six.…
Fiction WritingHorror is a flight simulator for fear. Readers seek controlled, survivable fright because it makes them feel more alive and more able to face real threats
FictionEdvard has loved Marisol for four months, and tells himself the love is the larger part of him. In the gray hour before dawn he does the arithmetic one last time and finds the truth he buried under the romance:…
AmbiguityA foundation contractor drills through a coffin lid and finds forty dead souls underneath, one of whom is past reasoning and wants him dead in the hole. Dale talks for his life, makes the wrong offer, and learns that the…
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