Cursed Britain opens by posing the question: if your misfortunes gradually escalated and piled on top of one another, would you – could you – believe yourself cursed? If you came to that conclusion, one a younger you would have found preposterous, what would you do about it?
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TV has had no shortage of witches these past few years, from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina to the Charmed reboot. While I love the witch archetype as a metaphor for powerful, radical women, one thing these witch TV shows are lacking is a legitimately frightening witch. Lucky for me, when Netflix announced the French series Marianne I was not disappointed. Written and directed by Samuel Bodin and Quoc Dang Tran, this series is decisively one of Netflix’s most frightening series yet, next to Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House.
Coming to this new Netflix horror over a week after its launch and, being a user of Twitter, I was subjected to a range of diverse opinions. And some strong emotions too. At first I thought, “what’s all the fuss about?” In the Tall Grass got off to a promising start – the production was slick and stylish, the idea was novel and, at first glance, quite neat and concise. But as the running time dragged on, In the Tall Grass progressively lost its way.
Ask a horror reader which book of 2019 they’re most excited about and one might reasonably answer with King’s The Institue or Tremblay’s Growing Things, to give two notable examples. In other words, new books from mainstays of the horror genre. I would answer with Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre. I would say this not only for the simple reason that Hurley is one of my favourite contemporary novelists writing horror fiction but for what Hurley represents.
I’ve been a fan of Stephen Chobsky ever since The Perks of Being a Wallflower came out when I was in college. Needless to say, I was excited to hear that he was dipping his feet into the horror genre with Imaginary Friend. The book centres around a young boy named Christopher Reese who goes missing in the woods after following a disembodied voice. Upon returning, Christopher realises he has something akin to superpowers: he’s no longer dyslexic, he wins the lottery, and he can somehow hear people’s thoughts. But there’s a catch. He keeps having reoccurring nightmares about a “hissing lady” who wants to tear down the wall between the “imaginary world” and the real one, which has something to do with another little boy who went missing fifty years ago.
In Search of Darkness, a crowdfunded documentary that showcases 80s horror, is the ultimate nostalgia trip. For anyone who grew up in the 80s or otherwise quenched their passion for horror on the films of this decade, this 4-hour-plus love letter will have you pining for the days when more was really more – more blood, gorier special effects, but not necessarily more budget. Nor, when we look at the 80s oeuvre as a whole, more quality.
What unites ghost stories and folksong? A Venn diagram of the two would surely put love and death in the centre. Robert Aickman wrote in the introduction to The 3rd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories that the eerie tale fulfils our “need to escape, at least occasionally, from a mechanistic world, ever more definable, ever more predictable, and, therefore, ever more unsatisfying and frustrating.”
Because I’m a woman who loves horror, people always ask me who my favourite women horror writers are, and I’m a little ashamed to admit I don’t always have the best response. Beyond the obvious choices like Mary Shelley or Shirley Jackson, sometimes it’s hard to come up with a comprehensive list when your bookshelf is made up of 90% white men.
I liken short story anthologies to a supermarket trip – you go in for what you want, see things you don’t like and often come away with something extra you didn’t know you liked in the first place. An odd analogy perhaps, but you get my drift I’m sure. In other words, in Full Throttle by Joe Hill, there were some stories I liked, some I didn’t like at all and a couple of nice surprises.
I was already a fan of Kirsty Logan’s work, which explores the dark and fantastical, through her previous novels, as well as hearing her perform at events, such as when she read her wonderfully titled short story “Girls are Always Hungry When all the Men are Bite-Size” which also features in Things We Say in the Dark. Since then, I have been excited to hear more of Logan’s horror – her new collection does not disappoint.
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