Go in as uninformed as possible. Then buckle up and prepare to be surprised.

This was exactly how I experienced the film — having heard lots of praise and hype but not actually knowing anything about it — and it was a thrill to watch the film unfold, being entirely unprepared for whatever happened next.

Barbarian begins with Tess (Georgina Campbell), arriving at an Airbnb late at night, only to find someone else already there: a young man named Keith (Peter Skarsgård). It turns out the property has been double booked and, with no other options, they agree to share the rental for the night.

It’s a super simple setup, but you’d be shocked at where the film goes from there. It’s certainly not what you might expect, and I shan’t tell or give you any hints.

You must watch the film yourself and experience it fresh and unspoiled.

It is a tense thriller of a film. You’re always trying to assess where the threat will come from, only to have the rug constantly pulled out from under you.

It’s a guessing game of sorts — we know that something bad is going to happen, but what exactly is the danger?

No seriously, what the hell?!?!

At almost every step, just when we think we might have figured out what the deal is, there’s another stunning revelation and the story pivots in a new and unexpected direction.

It’s fun, it’s edgy, it’s thoroughly entertaining.

What I especially love about Barbarian is how it plays with the storytelling structure. Just as things reach a crescendo, a whole new perspective is introduced. And later again, a detour through time provides yet another important layer of context to the story.

This isn’t to say that Barbarian is one of those puzzle-films where serious brain power is required to follow the plot or make sense of what’s happening, rather is a refreshingly different approach to feeding you the information to make sense of it all.

Things happen and then details are provided so you can better understand what and why and how.

It is really skillful storytelling — kudos to Cregger who both wrote the script and directed.

And as scary a horror film as this absolutely is, it’s also incredibly funny at times.

I implore you — stop whatever it is you’re doing, and go watch Barbarian right now. You’ll laugh and you’ll yell at the screen, but most of all you will be shocked at the twists and turns this movie takes.

It is a fantastic modern horror movie, and the less you know before you watch, the more fun you’ll have with it.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Barbarian on Amazon here. Thank you :)

It’s only natural, then, that when he comes upon an eBay listing for a real-life ghost, he makes an impulse purchase for shits and giggles. He didn’t really expect to receive anything. And he certainly never imagined that the auction was an elaborate ruse to ruin his life and exact a very specific revenge on him and all those he held dear. Big mistake.

Those goth girlfriends I mentioned? Judas didn’t even bother calling them by their real names. Rather, he gave them each a nickname based on their states of origin. One recent ex was from and called Florida. She was a weird kid who constantly asked weird questions and who shared precious little of her life before meeting Judas.

Near the end of their relationship, Florida became increasingly preoccupied and depressed. Eventually, Judas put her on a bus and sent her home, worried about her well-being. But not worried enough to answer her countless letters or check in on her at all. His life moved on.

Not Florida’s. Her life ended. Mere months after being abandoned by Judas, Floria committed suicide. The ghost that Judas was tricked into buying is her family’s vengeance.

Turns out Florida’s stepfather, Craddock, was something of a psychic medium and conjuror. As his own life fizzled out, he concocted a plotted with Florida’s sister to get revenge on Judas for (as they saw it) killing Florida.

It is Craddock’s ghost that Judas unwittingly purchased — and now that he’s in Judas’ home, he will stop at nothing to drive the poor man insane, kill everyone near to him, and ultimately drive Judas to death himself.

And he’d’ve succeeded too if it wasn’t for that pesky kid…

I’m talking about Georgia. AKA Judas’ latest live-in girlfriend.

Mature beyond her years, Georgia is the level-headed adult that Judas desperately needs in his life — and it’s her who might just save it (his life, that is).

Neither of them may be perfect individuals, but Georgia’s love for Judas is an excellent realization of a sane adult relationship. It is only thanks to Georgia that Judas is able to escape his ranch with his life. But their escape is only temporary — and just the beginning of their trials and troubles… Now, the two of them must travel across the country to pay a visit to Florida’s sister and try to put an end to this whole horrible mess.

Heart-Shaped Box is a thoroughly entertaining and engrossing read. This was my first Joe Hill novel (I know, I know) but I will certainly be back for more.

Action unfolds naturally and often. This is a page-turner that never lets up. And yet, for all the narrative momentum and pleasurable horrors that abound throughout this book, the one scene that stuck with me was during a hiatus in Judas and Georgia’s hair-raising road trip where they spend a few hours at Georgia’s grandmother’s house. Safe for a moment, they take advantage of a comfy bed and a nap together while the afternoon sunshine wafts in through the curtains. It is such a delicate yet evocatively luminous scene, it stopped me cold.

Folks, this guy knows how to write!

If I had one criticism, it’s that the third act deviates into an almost metaphysical, dreamlike plain (something which rarely resonates with me) but the novel still packs a punch and is a virtuoso accomplishment of exciting horror storytelling with depth and levels and nuance. I really, truly enjoyed it.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Heart-Shaped Box on Amazon here. Thank you :)

I say all this because I had watched the X-Files episode many, many times before I saw The Thing, and while I could certainly see the similarities, I found the two to be remarkably different beasts. True, both are set at isolated scientific stations, both deal with an undetectable infection, both deal with increasing paranoia and mistrust among those stranded together in close quarters. But whereas “Ice” executes perfectly on a TV budget, The Thing has a lot more cash — and blood — to splash on the screen. And splash it, it does!

The movie opens with an astonishing helicopter chase across the expansive white Antarctic landscape. A dog is pursued by two Norweigians, but manages to evade their shooting long enough to seek refuge at a US base, where the Norwegian’s arrival of violence and mayhem is taken as a sign of madness (one of them is killed as a result of a fumbled explosive, the other is shot given the reasonable belief that he is a threat).

But why were they shooting at the dog? Intrigued enough to fly in less-than-ideal weather, helicopter pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell) takes a doctor out to the Norwegians’ fire-ravaged base where they discover evidence that the Norwegians had excavated something from the ice. They also find the body of a horribly mutated person who was seemingly one of the targets of the fire.

Before anyone is able to properly put the pieces together, however, the dog that started this whole chain of events explodes into a nightmarish tangle of blood, guts, and tentacles, causing all the other dogs in the kennel to, understandably, go absolutely batshit nuts. MacReady and his colleagues witness it too — although the very sight of it is utterly unbelievable.

Finally it all makes sense: whatever the Norweigians dug up was an otherworldly shapeshifting parasite that can pass undetected while containing to infect and replace others. Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Polymorph from Red Dwarf, then split the difference.

The point is: There’s a monster among them and there’s no way to know who it is, nor how many of them there are.

Each of the crew lean into their own area of expertise as they scramble to come up with a strategy to detect the impostor(s) and survive the long winter ahead. But tensions soon reach breaking point, individuals go crazy, and the alien creature continues to attack in a variety of disgusting and disturbing iterations.

In order to survive, each of these distinct characters must rely on each other. The only problem is that, given the nature of their predicament, none of them are able to trust each other.

Rightly regarded as one of the greatest sci-fi horror films of all time, The Thing is loaded with taut atmosphere, creepy dread, and intense paranoia. The practical special effects are astonishing — and wonderfully gory and goopey. The direction, the actors, the cinematography, the score, the production design — every element of this film is absolutely on point.

It is a masterpiece.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying The Thing on Amazon here. Thank you :)

Midnight on Beacon Street plays with these myriad possibilities at varying points throughout the book, regularly appearing to set up one narrative avenue only to pivot in another direction again and again.

It’s a Friday night in October 1993, and Amy is babysitting two kids, pre-teen Mira and her younger brother Ben. The children’s mother has ordered a pizza to be delivered, and Amy has an evening of fun games planned out. Maybe when the kids go to bed, her boyfriend will come over and the two of them will watch a VHS horror movie together.

What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, as it happens.

The book opens near the end of the story, with Ben stepping over the bloody body of a slain girl in his kitchen — but with precious little context as to who the victim is or what actually happened — before flashing back to earlier in the evening to tell the tale that culminates in this grisly scene.

All we know is someone dies.

As the clock ticks down to midnight, the book’s chapters shift between Amy and Ben in the (non-synchronous) present and the younger Amy of several years ago, when she herself was being babysat on a night just like this.

Various clues as to the potential terror ahead are sparingly offered: There’s a cat burglar who has been plaguing the town for weeks… The children and their mother fled their abusive father/husband years earlier… The children believe there is a ghost that haunts their home…

Between the presumptions of the reader and the plentiful breadcrumbs of clues teased (not to mention the frequent references to one Laurie Strode of Halloween fame), there are many possibilities for which direction this book might ultimately go in, and who or what its particular boogeyman may be.

This is a horror novel centered around a babysitter, but what type of horror story is it exactly?

Midnight on Beacon Street will keep you guessing as it routinely upends your predictions before setting up an altogether different possibility, only to rip the rug out from under you all over again. It’s a fun experience for the reader: a playful puzzle of a whodunit in reverse.

This murderous mind-boggler is, of course, underpinned by a very down-to-earth tone that feels highly appropriate for the setting and the period in which its set.

This is early-90s suburban America where, potential homicidal maniacs aside, the biggest problems in our protagonists’ lives are feeling comfortable in their own skin and of fitting in with those people most important to them.

The author handles these elements with a light but effective touch — we get the sense of how absolutely important these concerns are, yet they’re never sources of melodrama nor presented as narrative obstacles to overcome; simply things that make these characters fully human and real.

Which makes Midnight on Beacon Street all the scarier, as it is a portrait of an average, mundane, and unextraordinary American suburb where very bad things can happen.

Even to society’s sweetest specimen; the benevolent babysitter.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Midnight on Beacon Street on Amazon here. Thank you :)

The pitch was that this particular found footage horror movie was actually constructed from honest-to-goodness found footage filmed by a group of bona fide student filmmakers who had really, pinky-swear, gone into the woods to film a documentary about the mythical witch who haunted them… and were never seen again.

The timing was on the eve of the new millennium when the zeitgeist was saturated with doomsday prophecies, from Christianity’s incessant Revelations predictions to Y2K panic, and The Blair Witch Project fit right in.

It was also, critically, the rise of the internet when film nerds across the globe shared trailers and reviews without borders.

The hype machine was primed and ready, and The Blair Witch Project was teed up to take full advantage.

I was still living in the UK at the time, and although the film didn’t release there until three whole months after it took the US by storm, everyone and their mother was already fully aware of the movie and its rucksack full of controversies — the false narrative that the whole things was actually genuinely real, the stories of moviegoers throwing up in screenings (albeit from motion sickness caused by shaky camera work rather than outright terror, but still, the marketing folks dialed it up so that everyone knew this wasn’t a film for the faint of heart or stomach).

Some friends and I even parodied the movie as part of a school assignment weeks before we or anyone else in the country had even seen it, and still everyone got it — our teacher included.

That’s how prolific this film was.

The film itself is genuinely great (it still had to be to achieve the success it did) even though it’s essentially just three (spoiler: soon just two) characters — Heather, Mike, and Josh — filming themselves stumbling through the woods growing increasingly lost and evermore scared.

The self-shot dynamic allows for some great moments — the chaos that ensues after hearing disembodied children’s voices in the dead of night, Heather’s iconic dripping-snot direct-to-camera monologue — and discoveries such as the wooden figures hanging from the trees are genuinely scary.

It’s all unrelenting mood that increases the terror, because we know it’s leading somewhere bad.

But we have to keep watching to find out what happens even though, as the honest-this-is-so-real marketing of the movie implies, no-one really knows.

By the time the film abruptly ends, the filmmakers have got you eating out of the palm of their hands.

The film is a ride and, given the form of the picture, you’ve ridden right along with those poor dumb saps who wound up witch fodder.

You’ve also seen something disturbing — just a split second there at the very end, but enough — that you shouldn’t have. And depending on how much you bought into the marketing spin, the more unnerved you’re going to be.

The genius viral marketing created to support the release (before there was even a name for it) included fake missing person reports, local news articles, and even IMDB listings for the three "actors" noting them as missing or dead.

All of this helped sell the film (both figuratively and literally), fueled uninformed speculation from an army of proto-internet detectives, and made the whole thing more horrific than it might otherwise have been.

It’s a strategy that has been often imitated but never duplicated in the 25-years since, which really does make you nostalgic for the good old days of the internet 1.0, before Facebook came along and ruined everything.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying The Blair Witch Project on Amazon here. Thank you :)

Needless to say, I came to Amityville with high expectations, but after first watching the film, I was unimpressed.

I’m just going to say it: The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, 1979) sucks. It is a dull, boring, not-at-all scary film.

Fortunately, the book on which its based is none of those things.

I really enjoyed The Amityville Horror. Although it follows a fairly standard blueprint for a haunted house story, it does a great job of slowly-but-surely cranking up the tension and escalating the horrors.

(Yes, it’s a well-worn trope that just as soon as the protagonists realize they need to flee, they are unable to do so, but it still gave me some perverse pleasure when the book hit that recognizable note.

Is The Amityville Horror derivative of countless other horror house narratives, or does it deserve to be considered an originator of the modern form? Feel free to discuss in the comments.)

Here’s the plot in a nutshell: a young family are looking for their dream home on a budget. They find the perfect property, only to learn that an infamous murder occurred there in the recent past. Ever since a young man killed his parents and siblings in those very rooms, the house has stood empty — which is why it’s listed for such a good price.

George and Kathy Lutz don’t care. They move right on in.

Very soon, they wish they hadn’t.

Almost immediately, strange occurrences begin to trouble the family. It is inexplicably cold throughout the house, a swarm of flies materialize in one particular room, objects move or go missing, and their little girl discovers a new imaginary friend who has the face of a pig.

Creepy shit!

Part of what makes the book so effective, even half a century later, is the relatable mundanity of the situation: George and Kathy are deeply disturbed by living in the house, it alters their psyches, spooks them, and yet they still have to continue with the tasks of running a household and earning a living. Yes, the family is being terrorized on a nightly basis, but life goes on and bills still need to be paid.

Anson tells the story in a mostly clinical and detached fashion, keeping us at arm’s length from the inner minds of the characters, but it is a cooly effective writing style for this particular spooky story, almost like reading a police report detailing the events of some unfathomable horror.

Despite this largely unemotional approach, it does provoke fear in the reader. There’s no attempt to explain or legitimize the things that are happening. All we know, all the characters know, is that something scary is going on — and not understanding of exactly what is not only feels authentic but adds to the frightfulness of it all.

Of course, this almost journalistic approach is only partially by design, as The Amityville Horror isn’t entirely fictional.

According to Wikipedia, the murders that occurred in the house were real. George and Kathy Lutz are real people, really did buy the house and then fled it less than a month later, leaving all their possessions behind. Naturally, there are various disputes over accuracy, but the consensus supports the book’s marketing that The Amityville Horror is indeed based on a true story.

I’m sure there are greater conversations that could be had (and surely have been in other corners of the internet) about the truthiness of the book, but my interest is only in whether or not it’s a good horror novel.

It is.

The Amityville Horror is a decent ghost story that is well told. It’s a stark, spare, and scary horror novel — worthy of the pedestal upon which it is placed, and far, far superior to the lackluster film it inspired.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying The Amityville Horror on Amazon here. Thank you :)

Bring Her Back is a polished and professional horror movie that takes some big swings, is unconventional in what information is laid bare early (or not), and does a great job of mining terror and suspense from its set up.

Half-siblings Andy and Piper find themselves shipped off to a foster home following the sudden death of their father. Andy is almost 18 and plans to seek guardianship of the legally blind Piper once he is legally of age.

Despite their conventional brother-sister ribbing of each other, it’s clear that the two of them share a very special bond and would do anything for the other. They even share a special code word, “grapefruit,” that compels the other to be completely honest. It is both a sweet and authentic-feeling portrait of an unusual yet highly specific familial relationship.

Enter the wedge that will seek to drive them apart: their kooky new foster mother, Laura.

Almost immediately, Laura sets about doting on Piper while keeping Andy at arm’s length. It’s not just the fact that Andy’s very nearly an adult man while Piper’s a young girl. It’s also because Laura’s own recently deceased daughter, Cathy, like Piper, was visually impaired.

It is a role that allows Sally Hawkins to both play with the limits of the whimsical archetype she previously perfected in such films as Happy-Go-Lucky and Paddington and go vehemently against type as something altogether sinister in a thoroughly unsettling performance of the caliber you’d hope would garner some sort of awards recognition.

Hers is a very strange household indeed — case in point: she has preserved her former pet dog via taxidermy; this is a woman who struggles to let go after death — and that’s even before we even get to the household’s fourth inhabitant: the mute young orphan boy named Oliver whose presence oozes maleficent mystery in every scene.

As for the plot, well, the title itself should have given you a fairly good idea of what’s going on… Laura has been unable to get over the death of Cathy and now, somehow, has evil plans for Piper. But what, exactly, isn’t entirely clear.

Horror movie aficionados will of course note the numerous clues that are present as the table is laid: the opening scene depicting some shady occult ritual, a line of white (salt? paint?) that encircles Laura’s house, the barely contained feral personality of little Oliver… (There’s more than a touch of prime M. Night Shyamalan about this one.)

Something bad is destined to happen here — and it’s only a matter of time until the shit hits the fan.

So we know, vaguely, Laura’s goal. What we don’t know is what, precisely, her plan is — or what she’s capable of. Is she simply deranged, or is there a more tangible threat hanging over these kids’ heads? And just what the hell exactly is up with Oliver?

As with Talk To Me, the Philippous employ troubled teen characters who understand the dangers that lurk in their world, but precisely because they are categorized as both “troubled” and “children,” they struggle to convince anyone to believe them — setting up an enormously tense situation where they themselves are powerless to stop the inevitable.

Bring Her Back is a fantastic, fearless, and wonderfully realized horror film that leaves a lasting impression and lingers in your mind for days afterwards. Affecting, suspenseful, and outright horrific, I guarantee that Bring Her Back will compel you to look away from the screen on at least two occasions.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Bring Her Back on Amazon here. Thank you :)

In 1845, two British ships — HMS Erebus and HMS Terror — set off on an Arctic exploration to uncover the Northwest Passage.

It is documented fact that the ships became trapped in the ice of the Victoria Strait for more than a year, but what has never been determined is what became of the 129 souls aboard the two ships.

Simmons takes this scenario and spins a wildly imaginative but utterly plausible work of literary fiction that is impressively researched.

The thrust of the narrative is based around the many long months where the two ships are icebound. Already one summer has come and gone without a thawing of the sea ice.

Men aboard both ships are growing restless, and as supplies dwindle, tensions grow as the possibility of escaping the Artic tundra become evermore remote.

To make matters infinitely worse, the ship is being stalked by a large bipedal creature that kills men and polar bears alike.

And of course, there is the ever-present threat of all the evil that mankind often chooses to inflict on each other…

Horror books and films are rich with tales where survival seems impossible, but the twist of The Terror is not just that it is set in a milieu uncommon to the horror genre, but rather that it is not just a small group of individuals battling for survival — but more than a hundred men organized by a very strict hierarchy who are dependent of each other in order to accomplish anything: those in charge must make the correct decision, and those who follow orders must do so successfully.

It is an austere and grim read.

Fortunately, Simmons livens up proceedings by distributing the many chapters among a handful of key characters — most if not all of whom are based on real figures aboard the two doomed ships — including Terror’s caption, Francis Crozier, Erebaus’ surgeon, Harry D. S. Goodsir, and Third Lieutenant John Irving.

This allows for some variety in style and voice, as well as plenty of opportunities to leap back and forth in time, allowing both for the inclusion of details that took place years before this ill-fated voyage, as well as overlapping accounts of contemporaneous events, allowing us to experience an event from a different character’s perspective, knowing already how things are going to turn out.

At times, The Terror can be a dense and intimidating read, but it is well worth it. For while much of the thick book is concerned with the monotonous terror of being stranded in the Arctic (regardless of any deadly monster poised to attack) there are also a number of energetic, vivid, and highly memorable set pieces, including one character being pursued across the ice and aboard the ship by the giant Arctic beast, and another extended sequence in which the crew of the two ships hold an extravagant and otherworldly Venetian carnival on the ice — that turns into a nightmarish massacre.

The Terror is different from a lot of the other horror books that I’ve read and I found it to be a most welcome and refreshing change. Although it is certainly an ambitious book, I never thought it to be demanding. It is intelligent, amazing, and damned scary.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying The Terror on Amazon here. Thank you :)

Jaws is a masterpiece of a movie.

It has a lean yet meticulous script, narrowly focused on the core conflict between police chief Martin Brody and a killer shark terrorizing the citizens of his small beach town — with iconic lines (“You're gonna need a bigger boat”) and whole scenes (the USS Indianapolis story) that have passed from legend to meme, that transcended the cultural zeitgeist and became a part of the greater public consciousness.

It has solid performances — not just in its trio of leads (Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss) — but in all its supporting players; Murray Hamilton is perhaps most obvious (his Mayor Vaughn is not merely a pro-business blowhard, there’s tortured pathos to his political scheming), but it is Lee Fierro’s portrayal of Mrs. Kintner (and specifically the scene where she runs into the water to discover it was her child who died) that is devastating in its raw simplicity.

It has a spare and epochal score courtesy of the ever-great John Williams, who took two solitary notes and turned them into an instantly recognizable theme.

And, of course, it is masterfully directed by the then only 26-year-old Steven Spielberg. It was just his second ever feature film, and yet he merged a creature feature concept with an Altmanesque naturalism that oozes atmosphere and heart and suspense.

It is a film that far exceeds the sum of its parts — none of which were too shabby to begin with. There is a reason why, 50 years hence, we still regard Jaws as one of the greatest Hollywood movies of all time. Because it is.

Is Jaws a horror movie?

Of course! It is the film that made a generation afraid to swim in the ocean.

It has gory blood-drenched deaths, at least two standout jump scares, an existential threat that grows evermore terrorsome… and an unnerving and suspenseful undertow that runs beneath the entire film.

Aside from the political horrors that abound (keeping the deadly beach open to swimmers for the sake of profits — and the mayor here is still the mayor in Jaws 2, that’s why it’s important to vote in local elections, kids), it has at its core a very primal horror threat. Jaws is man versus beast. And not just any beast. A prehistoric monster with “lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes…”

Let’s talk about the shark. It is well-documented that “Bruce” (the name given to the animatronic shark) malfunctioned to the point where original plans had to be scrapped, the crew had to pivot, and Spielberg concocted a solution that resulted in making the film far scarier than it would have been otherwise. So, for much of the film, you don’t see the shark.

It’s a lesson lost in the age of CGI-soaked big screen spectacles. The unassailable truth is the less you see, the creepier it is. Let the audience use their imagination; it’s free and it’s almost guaranteed to produce something far more intimidating than the special effects team can build.

It also makes the eventual reveal — inches away from Brody as he tosses chum into the sea — all the more jolting. The monster finally comes into the light. And whoa, he’s a big mother.

In Jaws’ case, finally seeing the shark it all its enormous glory has all the impact that you’d want. And it compounds the threat that already existed, ratcheting up the stakes as the film builds to a tension-fueled climax.

Fifty years later, Jaws continues to more than deserve its stellar reputation.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Jaws on Amazon here. Thank you :)

Despite having only known each other a few months, Billy, Melody, and Troy have quickly formed true friendships, partially because of the shared burden of having each suffered tragedies in their recent pasts. Billy, for example, lost both his parents in a car accident — which is what inspired his interest in the phenomenon of roadside memorials.

Their idea is to discover memorials and share the stories behind them — of those who were lost and those that they left behind — in the hope of not only shedding some light on why the bereaved feel compelled to erect a roadside monument but also, by extension, serve as an additional artifact of remembrance.

Yet despite the three musketeers’ respectful intentions, it seems someone (or, more likely, plural someones) is apparently vexed at their snooping around these shrines.

Someone is watching them. Stalking them. Trying to scare them. Willing to hurt them.

At first, there are merely the expected cultural conflicts between the bigoted hillbillies and the two-thirds POC traveling outsiders. But then, things get creepier… Our heroes begin to feel (quite reasonably) unsafe camping out every night. The very real threat of violence against them grows increasingly palpable. And that’s before things get downright freaky.

They discover a strange symbol covertly graffitied on several of the memorials. Naturally intrigued by this eldritch emblem, they seek out its meaning — only to learn that it has ties to an ancient folk religion; that they might have unwittingly angered a local cult, and thus put a target on their backs…

Memorials is an engrossing and compelling read; an affable adventure that, while it takes its sweet time, allows us plenty of opportunity to get to know its characters and to enjoy their company.

The characters are what makes this book. Chizmar does a great job of crafting three individuals who are at once both recognizable archetypes and fully-rounded and unique individuals.

Despite the fact that the story wasn’t plotted in advance (according to the author’s endnotes), its pace and twists flow naturally and sufficiently to keep you constantly engaged and wanting to find out what happens next.

There’s also a significant mystery element to the book, which keeps you turning the page to learn more. The longer the journey goes on, the more clues and red herrings are uncovered. People from Billy’s past come back into his life, new characters are introduced… But who can actually be trusted?

Eventually, of course, the book veers into severe horror territory, but by the time it gets there, the stakes are compounded because we’ve spent so much time with these characters and come to like all of them very much. We don’t want anything bad to happen to them. Which, well, too bad.

In that way, Memorials unfolds both naturally and realistically; beginning in a world analogous to the reality we all inhabit, and slowly slipping into one altogether stranger and more terrifying — a jolt of true horror in a world that is already harsh enough.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Memorials on Amazon here. Thank you :)

Christine tries to justify her actions to both herself and the elderly Mrs. Ganush by saying that she was just doing her job. (No doubt that rationalization has only become more poignant in the years since Drag Me to Hell was released — given the current state of American capitalism run amok, ever-increasingly disparate wealth inequality, and the general hellscape perpetuated by people just doing their job, that hollow justification is much harder to swallow.)

Unfortunately for Christine, Ganush doesn’t merely rage against the machine — she targets Christine specifically: she is the personification of the bank that has booted her to the curb. And not unfairly, as Christine herself later admits that she could easily have given her another extension. Except she wanted to be personally rewarded. God, capitalism sucks.

Ganush initially attacks Christine in a deserted parking garage in a virtuoso sequence of raw violence that is devilishly wicked. And then she places a curse on Christine — a curse, we later learn, which involves her being increasingly tormented by a Lamia goat demon for three days, at the end of which she will be literally dragged to Hell. No backsies.

Over the next few days, Christine endures multiple visits from the Lamia. She is terrified. She is attacked. She feels like she is losing her mind — certain that she is in grave danger from something horrific that shouldn’t exist in the too real world of car payments, rent, and 401ks.

Desperate to make sense of what is happening to her, Christine seeks help from a spiritual advisor. She scarifies her pet kitten in an effort to appease the Lamia. She participates in a séance. She tries to transfer the curse to someone else (top of her list: her competition for the promotion). But in selling her soul to the man, Christine has in effect done exactly that. She’s sold her soul. She has exactly zero of redemption.

Drag Me to Hell is a blatant critique of modern capitalistic exploitation: Christine’s problem is the direct consequence of her causing someone economic harm in order to benefit financially herself. Later, her dwindling hope for salvation is reduced to a medium who has prior experience dealing with this Lamia — but only if Christine can come up with $10,000 within a matter of hours. (She tries to, by selling crates of her prized possessions. But the pawn store owner senses her desperation and severely undercuts her asking price.)

But as thinly veiled as the film’s scathing social commentary is, it’s perfectly easy to focus purely on the horror story at hand and have a rollicking good time. Drag Me to Hell is one of the genuinely scarier PG-13 horror movies out there. I’ve no doubt that had I seen this film at a more tender age, there are certain scenes that would have certainly creeped me out. As the grumpy old man in training I now am, and with considerably more horror experience under my belt, it was less so — but still thoroughly impressive.

This is a slick, CGI-heavy, mainstream horror movie complete with a bombastic score that could have been ripped straight out of a comic book hero film. Darker, meaner, and more nihilistic than you’d expect, I found Drag Me to Hell to be both intelligent and an awful lot of horror-oriented fun.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Drag Me to Hell on Amazon here. (Yes I get the irony.) Thank you :)

With real life duller than dishwasher at best, Jade seeks solace in horror movies. She’s such an ardent fan, in fact, that her obsession is common knowledge locally. She’s considered the weird horror girl, and thus is further regarded as other amongst the otherwise tightknit little community she doesn’t quite feel at home in.

So when actual horror comes knocking in the shape of an apparently bloodthirsty serial killer terrorizing the town, it only makes sense that Jade is the one that recognizes all the hallmarks of a literal slasher on the loose… Now if only someone would believe her.

My Heart Is A Chainsaw is a literary twist on the classic eighties slasher movie formula, but whereas films like Halloween or The Slumber Party Massacre only had to fill 90 minutes of screentime, this novel fills close to 400 pages.

It’s an unusual twist on the old adage that the original book was better than the film it inspired: turns out a slasher novel is a wholly different beast to a slasher movie. It’s a different medium, and so of course the storytelling must be treated differently. And it’s interesting to see how Jones accomplishes the marriage of the medium with this genre most strongly associated with another.

But, of course, this is a horror book about a horror fan, written for horror fans — and so naturally the references to classic slasher flicks of yore are splattered as liberally as blood throughout its pages.

That may sound like forced fan service (and in truth it does sometimes feel like it) but it always makes sense within the context of the narrative. Jade doesn’t really know what she’s doing, she just thinks she does. Her interpretation of everything she encounters is through her encyclopedic knowledge of celluloid demons and final girls.

Speaking of final girls, Jade quickly hones in on who she thinks best fits that mold with regards to the apparent murderous rampage unfolding all around her. It’s Letha, a classic (though wealthy) girl-next-door who’s new in town. New in town because some uber-rich city folk are building a gated community on the outskirts of this podunk little town, on the other side of the lake, at the edge of the national forest — a location that also has its own violent history: a long-closed summer camp that saw a Friday the 13^th-style spree of deaths, not to mention the rumored home of supernatural local folklore monster, the Lake Witch.

Against this backdrop, Jade tries to unravel the mystery of what she’s certain is a filmic boogeyman made real. But though it may seem like her lifelong fondness of spooky cinema has finally paid off, the other side of that particular coin is that she so desperately wants to believe that she’s in a horror movie she struggles to appreciate that real-life killers don’t always abide by the establish formula of the slasher genre.

Look, it’s a given that pretty much any horror fan would find something to appreciate in My Heart Is A Chainsaw, but where this might just be a pulpy slasher story in fiction form, in actuality there’s a lot more substance, depth, and nuance at work. But don’t worry, it’s not too much.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying My Heart Is A Chainsaw on Amazon here. Thank you :)

And what a stressful experience it is.

From the early scenes of the two families meeting cute on holiday in Italy onward — which include pangs of horror score to telegraph from the beginning that something bad cometh — this film produces such anxiety, such tension, that you’ll need a minute to shake it off after the credits roll.

And even then, it will continue to skritch and scratch inside your mind.

Speak No Evil is a horror movie that lingers. Perhaps because it’s just all-too terrifyingly plausible.

A Danish couple, Bjørn and Louise, on vacation with their 11-year-old daughter, Agnes, become summer friends with a Dutch family; Patrick, Karin, and their 11-year-old son, Abel.

Listless Bjørn in particular is enamored with the uninhibited Patrick, so when Patrick and Karin extend an invitation to Bjørn, Louise, and Agnes to come visit them at their home in the rural Netherlands, it is Bjørn that pushes the resistant Louise to accept the idea.

Patrick and Karin’s home is way out in the countryside, with no neighbors of note. And while they welcome their Danish friends into their household, from the off it’s obvious this is not quite the same family they met previously.

Of course, they were on vacation then; now they’re living their everyday norm — and playing hosts to boot…

But that’s just the first of many rationalizations our protagonists employ to try and explain away the many strange incidents and odd behaviors that occur.

Speak No Evil walks the knife edge of a dark comedy of sorts that feels very Ruben Östlund, dealing as it does with notions of social norms and politeness (just how much incivility should one endure before risking rudeness yourself by trying to put a stop to it?) and, yes, outright nightmarish horror.

Because this is very much a horror film.

This Dutch family are very bad people. And the Danish family squander every opportunity to escape; through a combination of justifications for their hosts’ insolent behavior, plain old bad luck, and all manner of classic horror protagonist mistakes.

Stressful, unsettling, and incredibly dark, Speak No Evil is an awesomely effective phycological thriller of a horror movie that will continue to live in your head rent free for long after it ends.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Speak No Evil on Amazon here. Thank you :)

For Harry Picard, the homicide detective charged with solving their murders, the case is a real head-scratcher. To start with, leads are few and far between. Other than driving a distinctive black automobile, the only clue to the perpetrator is that he is apparently a wealthy foreigner. Not exactly a needle in the haystack of the nation’s capital — a city brimming with international dignitaries and civil service workers.

But as the killings continue — and the killer apparently escalates his prey beyond the irrelevant ladies of the night — Picard is forced to confront a most unfathomable truth: the killer might be a genuine vampire. Or at least someone who believes himself to be.

In Will Errickson’s introduction in Valancourt Books’ Paperbacks From Hell edition of Progeny of the Adder, he credits the novel as being the first example of fiction to take a classical horror villain and transpose them from their traditional setting into one more contemporary.

Exactly how accurate that is, I don’t know, but Errickson goes on to point out that Progeny of the Adder was originally published in 1965, a full five years before Jeff Rice’s more renowned novel, The Kolchak Papers, was completed. (That novel infamously inspired a series of movies and TV shows — and directly influenced The X-Files.)

Indeed, Progeny of the Adder feels much more in the mode of a procedural-focused crime novel than a typical horror genre piece. But that’s precisely what makes it so compelling.

Yes, we horror readers know going in that the killer of this story is a vampire (the cover illustration kind of gives it away) but for the bulk of the novel, the characters themselves are in the dark.

And so, we get to be a fly on the wall as this archetypal hardboiled cop slowly pieces together the clues available to him to try and catch the killer.

For the entire first half of the book, that’s what Progeny of the Adder is. It’s a police detective story. And it’s great. Dark, gritty, utterly compelling. We come to sympathize with Picard the same way we do, say, McNulty in The Wire, as gives his all to crack the case assigned to him, all the while hitting roadblocks, getting caught up in political red-tape, and all the rest of it.

We are with Picard all the way. He’s not a faultless hero, but neither is he just a cop. He has hopes and dreams of his own, damnit. He has a crush on a policewoman from the Women’s Bureau called Susy. Soon enough the two of them embark on a burgeoning romance and she is inevitably harangued into going undercover as a blonde streetwalker in an effort to help capture the killer.

And then everything changes. After identifying their prime suspect and cornering him on the property where he’s holed up, realization hits that there might actually be more to this murderer than anyone expected. Although Picard is still reticent to admit the killer is actually a vampire, it’s clear at least that the killer certainly wishes or believes himself to be a vampire — which, as far as the policeman cares, is all that really matters.

All of a sudden, this modern sleuth is up to his neck in research into vampiric folklore and movie tropes — and advocating for his colleagues to carry crucifixes and garlic to help bring this night stalker with superhuman strength to justice.

The fact that no-one ever truly believes the killer to be a vampire is in itself interesting. The novel plows on as it began, as a police procedural first and foremost. In that way, Whitten doesn’t just bring an ancient evil into the modern day, he supposes how the modern world would react to it. Of course no one would believe in the magic of it all! People would recognize that the vampire was a danger, sure — but not that he was really a vampire.

Progeny of the Adder is a lean, mean, violent and very different horror novel. It is a page-turner of an enjoyable cheap paperback, but one that provides a unique lens to engage with impossible monsters through a gritty, reality-focused perspective.

I grew up watching The X-Files. To me, it makes perfect sense that FBI agents should routinely hunt down liver-eating mutants who can squeeze through air vents. It never occurred to me that mainstream storytelling had to evolve to a point where the adventures of Mulder and Scully were possible. Even though their predecessor was inarguably Kolchak, Progeny of the Adder provides an engaging window into how entertainment got there — and we are all the better for it!

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Progeny of the Adder on Amazon here. Thank you :)

How did a film from the director of such lauded classics as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I’m Going!, and Black Narcissus cause such outrage?

The same way most things upset the self-appointed morality police: it was different and it made people uncomfortable. Suffice to say that respectable film fans of the early 60s were not at all ready for it.

Peeping Tom was a slasher film before there were slasher films. A horror film that did not fit neatly into the contemporaneous horror boxes of the time — which is to say it was neither gothic creepfest nor monster movie, but something wholly different.

Sure, Peeping Tom could be seen as affiliated with the psychological thrillers or crime dramas of the era which often involved suspense, danger, and killings, but such films were never oriented with the murderer at their core.

In Peeping Tom, the serial killer is the protagonist. Mark is a camera assistant who works in the film industry and has a side gig photographing soft porn pin-ups. Over the course of the film, the audience is invited to feel sympathy for him, see the world through his eyes, and even root for him to varying degrees.

Close to two decades before Halloween and Maniac, Peeping Tom’s opening shot literally put the audience into the killer’s perspective via his camera’s viewfinder as he picks up a sex worker, follows her to her boudoir, then attacks her.

Mark’s camera is both his recording device and weapon (well, technically, it’s a spike on the camera’s tripod, but it’s close enough). In its choice of murder weapon, Peeping Tom strongly insinuates that cinema is intrinsically linked with violence.

The film forced the audience to see the world through the eyes of the killer and provided them the opportunity to not only be repulsed with the images they saw on screen, but with themselves for enjoying it.

But Peeping Tom goes beyond POV shots in channeling Mark’s perspective throughout the film. He isn’t simply the film’s main character, he is its emotional center. We feel for him because he was traumatized as a child; never mind that these traumas caused him to grow up to be a murderer. We pity him. And yes, we root for him despite not wanting him to succeed (perhaps most notably: the scene where he’s hiding above the police investigation of a studio soundstage, we desperately hope he isn’t discovered).

This simultaneous empathy and revulsion was radical in 1960. Today? Not so much.

Widely regarded as a proto-slasher, Peeping Tom employs many of the subgenre’s traits long before they were codified (the extensive use of POV shots, the psychological trauma that made Mark a killer, the symbolic selection of his victims, the ritualistic nature of his murders) while being much more psychologically complex than is typical. There’s no mask in Peeping Tom, for example — instead it internalizes evil as opposed to turning it into mechanizable iconography such as a hockey mask, striped jumper, or clown makeup.

Condemned on its original release, Peeping Tom has been subsequent reappraised in the intervening years and is now widely regarded as an important if atypical horror film worthy of study and praise.

It’s true horror lies not in the (gore-free) violence it depicts, but in the forced identification it imposes on the viewer.

Buy Peeping Tom on Amazon.

Okay, so there’s this newly married couple. The wife is shy and innocent to a fault. But her prudish nature causes her husband to be dissatisfied with the lovemaking he receives, and so he submits her to the local psychiatrist. Eventually, she becomes a sex-mad feral woman and everyone lives happy ever after.

No really. That is, in essence, the basis of Gwen, In Green. Only with a whole lot more eco-horror and gore thrown in.

Look, the book was originally published in 1974. It has some very outdated sensibilities in multiple aspects. But make peace with that and you’re actually in for an engrossingly enjoyable read.

To expand on the glib summary already shared; Gwen and her husband, George, buy an isolated dream house to start their new lives together. It is there, while swimming in their private pond, that Gwen encounters apparently sentient plant life that bestows her not only with a raging horniness, but also a telepathic awareness of the local flora and a deadly determination to protect it from harm.

George is perfectly happy with his young wife’s much-improved libido, and indifferent/accepting of her newfound fondness for greenery (especially the strange Venus fly traps she has a particular obsession with).

The problem is there’s a crew of construction workers tearing a course through the local wilderness. The plants, naturally, are none too fond of this. Fortunately, they have Gwen to avenge the massacre on their behalf. And what is an early-70s construction crew if not a bunch of dumb horndogs who are only too happy to be seduced to their deaths? Meanwhile, their foreman is oblivious to the immediate danger they’re all up against.

Silly, silly men.

Gwen, In Green is a fun and diverting throwback horror that feels very much of its time both in terms of substance and style.

On numerous occasions while reading it, I felt it would make a good companion piece to the also-early-70s movie, Let’s Scare Jessica To Death. That film shares a similar setup to this book, although the horror there is something altogether different.

(Another film the book inspired me to recall was Carnival of Souls, but mostly due to the shared hokeyness of their doctor subplots. Gwen’s shrink repeatedly half-remembers a previous case involving a suddenly sex-hungry murderess that previously lived in Gwen’s house, but it takes him almost the entire book — and much longer than your average bear — to connect the dots.)

So yes, there is plenty of old-fashioned detritus on offer in Gwen, In Green, but dare I say that is part of its charm? And in a way, to give credit where credit is due, it might even be argued that the book was at least somewhat ahead of its time with its environmentally conscious subject matter.

I recognize that Gwen, In Green might not be in everyone’s taste, but I’ll freely admit to thoroughly enjoying it. Despite being a relic of post-summer of love patriarchal horror, it absolutely scratched my trashy genre paperback itch and absolutely recommend it.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Gwen, In Green on Amazon here. Thank you :)

Adapted from and expanding the short story by Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now stars 70’s Hollywood giants Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as John and Laura Baxter, a married couple trying to pick up the pieces of their lives following the recent drowning of their young daughter, Christine.

John’s work as an art restorer has taken them to Venice which, as one of the most romantic cities in the world, should provide them with an opportunity to refocus and reconnect as a couple, but (one of the most notorious sex scenes ever committed to celluloid aside) their post-tragedy relationship mostly remains as cool as the grey winter landscape they find themselves surrounded by.

This is a morose portrayal of Venice where the heights of the tourist season are well and truly over, and the once bustling and jolly city is now a harsh and disorientating maze of alleyways, steps, and bridges, all sandwiched between and cut off by canals.

The frigid air is palpable on screen, and an ominous threat of impending doom glowers over the film, most notably in an apparent string of murders that provide additional texture and depth to the background of the film.

In short, rarely has the expression “the city is a character” been more apt.

John is indifferent to the murders. His focus is on his work and his wife. But Laura has nothing to distract her from the loss of Christine. A chance encounter with a slightly spooky couple of sisters (one of whom claims to be physic and is just convincing enough in her assertion that she saw Christine’s ghost standing next to Laura) is enough to make her lose the plot, at least as far as John sees it.

Christine is readily taken in by the sisters. John, to his credit and despite his misgivings, goes along with this newly struck friendship, hoping that it will help his wife heal.

But as he himself reckons with the potential gift of premonition, coupled with his repeated glimpse of a small child in a red raincoat — exactly what Christine was wearing at the time of her death — his own hold on reality begins to come unstuck and he becomes increasingly convinced that something sinister is afoot…

I hadn’t always been enamored with Roeg’s distinctive arthouse style in films such as Walkabout and The Man Who Fell to Earth (coincidentally the films he made immediately prior to and following Don’t Look Now), but here it absolutely works as the attention-seeking editing serves to articulate and emphasize John’s unraveling mind as he searches desperately to find his wife, all the while wrestling with a barrage of confusing and contradictory visions.

Everything about this film is on point: the cinematography that paints such a mournful vision of the floating city, the phenomenal performances by Sutherland and Christie, the editing, the sound, the score, everything…

And that shock ending with a twist reveal that’ll make you want to immediately rewatch the entire film all over again?

Oh yes, this is one of the great ones.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Don’t Look Now on Amazon here. Thank you :)

Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery is immediately absorbing and unrushed to get into outright horror territory, perhaps because its setup is horrific enough.

Abitha was cast off by her father and essentially sold off into a marriage with an as-yet-unnamed pioneering settler of America. Now thousands of miles away from her native home in England, Abitha lives with her halfwit husband Edward on their homestead on the outskirts of a Puritan New England village.

Expect, it’s not exactly their property. Not yet at least. The parcel of land still technically belongs to Edward’s bullying brother, Wallace. The young couple have very nearly paid off their debt, but they’re about to have the ground literally ripped out from beneath them with the revelation that Wallace used their almost-land as collateral for a business deal that flopped.

Determined not to allow Wallace to destroy the fragile life they’ve built together just as they were about to finally be free of him, Abitha oversteps what is permitted of a woman in this primitive society in standing up to Wallace’s cruel ways. Fortunately, Edward is there to protect her. Until he’s not.

Something wicked this way comes. Or, rather, it was there all along. An ancient evil in the forest that borders Abitha’s farmstead awakens. Sprites with the bodies of animals and the faces of young children call the figure Samson. He’s a goatlike humanoid that is exactly what a puerile Puritan would imagine the devil be.

Edward falls into a cave. Samson arises. Wallace uses Edward’s death as leverage to try and take control of the disputed estate, but Abitha is having none of it. All alone in the world, the girl clearly sees the two possible futures ahead: either she fulfills the agreement between Edward and Wallace and subsequently takes ownership of the farmstead herself, otherwise she falls into servitude to Wallace and probably winds up getting sold off again into another unwanted marriage.

Abitha is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Fortunately, she’s intelligent enough to find a slither of opportunity given that even the uber conservative Puritan laws of the land grant a widow the right to act in her deceased husband’s stead.

And so, Abitha is granted the opportunity to produce one last bountiful harvest on the hardscrabble land she and Edward have already poured so much sweat equity into. But she’s just a small thing, there’s no way she can manage it. Is there?

Wallace certainly doesn’t think so, and so he begrudgingly allows her the time to fail, confident that he will be able to claim ownership eventually. What he doesn’t anticipate is that Abitha will strike up a friendship with the creature that calls himself Samson.

At the beginning of Slewfoot, Samson isn’t sure who he is. He thinks of himself as both a shepherd and a slayer, as a conduit for Mother Earth, and in learning about Jesus Christ from Abitha, he notes similarities between himself and the Christian God.

Samson is Abitha’s benefactor. He helps her farm succeed. But a reckoning is coming. Horror will ultimately occur.

For much of the story, it is not clear exactly who or what Samson is. He clearly has great power, but he just as obviously sits outside of the conventional God-Devil dynamic. Surely he’s a sort of old god, a pagan throwback to when the world was young. He himself doesn’t know. Slewfoot is as much about his journey of self-discovery as it is about Abitha’s last-gasp fight for independence.

While not really a scary book, Slewfoot certainly occupies the horror sandbox both in subject matter and occasional bloodiness. Who or whatever Sampson is, he is never positioned as the villain; that’d be the Puritan townsfolk who see the devil in every wild creature’s footprint, and whose own insecurities result in them lashing out at anyone slightly other — and it’s the threat of their ability to control Abitha’s destiny which is most terrifying.

Slewfoot surely owes a debt to the movie The Witch, and also more longstanding examples of pilgrims-versus-witches fiction such as The Crucible. Indeed, the plot points of what happens to Abitha serve to make Slewfoot a definitive archetypal example of this genre.

Slewfoot is historically inspired, but ingeniously modern. This isn’t a simply another retread of an old-fashioned story you’ve heard versions of before; there is a lot more complexity and nuance at work here. It’s an engrossing, bewitching, and spirited horror novel.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery on Amazon here. Thank you :)

There is something about the film’s tone (horror-focused, interested in science, serious but never taking itself too seriously) and aesthetic (dark, shadowy, all the scarier for the less you see of the low-budget monster).

Indeed, Alligator is a B-movie which does not restrict itself to the limited expectations of the genre. Despite the film’s budget, it feels like everyone is going for broke to make the movie the best it possibly can be. Everything — from Teague’s energetic direction, to Joseph Mangine’s moody cinematography, to the late great Robert Forster’s solid performance — works together to wring the absolute biggest bang from the movie’s buck and elevate it to far more than the sum of its parts.

All of which is to say that though Alligator might easily have been dismissed merely as a cheap Jaws knockoff, it is distinct and special enough to earn its own place among the pantheon of GOAT creature features.

Not bad for a film which is essentially about a massive killer alligator living in the sewers of Chicago.

Yes, Alligator is both inspired by and fuel for the urban legend concerning alligators in the sewers (as is mocked in Spielberg’s E.T. — a discreet nod to this film’s homage to his Jaws, perhaps?).

The origin of the murderous monster in this movie is a baby gator pet that was flushed down the toilet 12 years earlier. As it swelled to enormous size thanks to chemicals dumped by reckless capitalist scientists, so its young owner grew up to become a herpetologist who assists Forster’s detective in his crusade against the reptilian beast (in a neat touch, the characters never make this connection — it is for we the audience alone to enjoy).

As the alligator grew, it fed mostly on rats and other sewer-dwelling vermin, until it was unknowingly fed dead dogs dumped in the sewer by a crooked pet store owner — played by Sydney Lassick, who coincidentally has a memorable role in a season four episode of The X-Files. (Robert Forster was never in The X-Files, but he did feature in both Twin Peaks and Breaking Bad, which is close enough.)

But I digress…

After an accidental slip into the sewers himself, the pet store guy is eaten, and the alligator develops a taste for human flesh. And so ensues a fun horror movie which also borrows aspects of the crime procedural and disaster movie genres.

I meant it when I said that Alligator punches above its weight. Despite its small budget, it gives us a fantastic sequence in which the alligator romps along a city street and gives the illusion of a grander scale as individuals react to the beast (a kid grabbing a knife from his mother’s kitchen to go hunt the animal is a random highlight). Another great moment is when a pompous big game hunter gets his bloody comeuppance at the jaws of his prey (“Clever girl”).

As with the shark in Jaws, of course, the alligator itself is mostly obscured by shadows out of necessity — but it is all the more horrific because of it.

Alligator may not have struck the cultural zeitgeist in the same way as many Spielbergian blockbuster did, but it remains a solidly entertaining horror flick that impresses on every level.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Alligator on Amazon here. Thank you :)

Sisters Chloe and Sarah inherit Perron Manor from their somewhat aloof uncle. Right out of the gate we know their uncle was odd, but how strange, exactly, was he? That’s just one of the tantalizing mysteries this book dangles to draw you in amid all the usual tropes of the traditional genre. But hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Haunted: Perron Manor plays a neat balancing act of playing with our expectations while also fulfilling them and it’s clear effort was made to make such fulfillments as satisfying for the reader as possible. Because — spoiler: it’s true — Perron Manor is haunted, and much more explicitly than, say, The Amityville Horror.

But if so scary, why do Chloe and Sarah stay?

Well, if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be much of a book, would there? In truth, it’s because they have nowhere else to go, both have pegged their futures on making something out of Perron Manor, of turning into their new home long-term and so they’re not about to be runoff by escalating creepiness. When oh when will characters in horror stories ever learn?

The fact is, Mountfield does a damn near masterful job of walking that tightrope, and successfully sells the motivation of both sisters (and Sarah’s husband, Andrew) as they come to the house with their own distinct pasts, perspectives, and hopes.

These are well-drawn characters indeed, and so it is easy to buy why one or the other of them might be willing to overlook certain scares or simply feel obligated to stay because they owe it to the others. It’s a delicate ballet of fear, skepticism, and very human self-doubt that is perfectly pitched.

There’s also the small matter that Chloe’s past is connected to this house. You see, some unspeakable horror happened here years ago, when Chloe was just a child. And while the nightmarish event in question is repeatedly referenced with regards to the unsettling haunting that’s going on here, you’ll have to sign up to Mountfield’s mailing list and read his prequel novella Inside: Perron Manor, to find out exactly what occurred that fateful evening.

As a standalone book, however, Haunted: Perron Manor delivers. It is a satisfying contemporary spin on the haunted house novel, decorated with all the ominous hallmarks of the genre one could want: secret rooms filled with occult paraphernalia, creepy strangers lurking outside at night, disturbing sleepwalking that might actually be possession in disguise…

Haunted: Perron Manor isn’t breaking any new ground, but there's no suggestion that was the book’s intention in the first place. Instead, it tells an original yarn within a familiar framework, with interesting characters, and enough going on to keep you invested in finding out what happens next.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Haunted: Perron Manor on Amazon here. Thank you :)