Ashley Lister

By Ashley Lister I appreciate that ‘K is for Knives’ is never going to get into anyone’s phonetic alphabet, but it must be admitted that knives are an essential part of the horror genre. They are certainly the feature that puts the slash into slasher movies and, if we broaden the term, we can see … Read more

by Ashley Lister Technically, I guess, it should be Jason Voorhees. However, those who are familiar with this serial killer from the Friday the Thirteenth franchise usually refer to him as Jason rather than Mr Voorhees, or Mrs Voorhees special little boy. I’m going to put the words SPOILER ALERT here, just in case there’s … Read more

By Ashley Lister I’m not using this blog post to promote my own series of novellas, released under the heading of dark tales from Innsmouth. Today I just want to talk about the inspiration I’ve taken from Lovecraft’s description of Innsmouth.Innsmouth is a fictional town in Massachusetts created by American author H. P. Lovecraft as … Read more

When I was growing up there were two authors who dominated the horror genre: Stephen King and James Herbert. Of course there were plenty of other successful horror authors at that time, including Guy N Smith and Dennis Wheatley and, later, Clive Barker and Dean R Koontz. But, when I was growing up, the giants … Read more

By Ashley Lister According to the Oxford dictionary, a ghoul is: an evil spirit or phantom, especially one supposed to rob graves and feed on dead bodies. Of course, there’s also the definition that describes a ghoul as ‘a person morbidly interested in death or disaster’ but, since you’re reading this, I suspect you (like … Read more

By Ashley Lister Carol J Clover, author of Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, studied slasher films from the 1970s and 1980s. Clover was the first to observe and discuss the trope/character we now recognise as the Final Girl and it’s a concept worth serious consideration. According to Clover, the … Read more

by Ashley Lister exorcism/ˈɛksɔːsɪz(ə)m/nounthe expulsion or attempted expulsion of a supposed evil spirit from a person or place.“the rite of exorcism” Exorcism is an unsettling topic that lives in the uncanny valley between reality and unreality. Worse, whether it’s genuine or not, it still indicates that the good and safe world I want to inhabit … Read more

By Ashley Lister It will come as a surprise to no one that Count Dracula, Bram Stoker’s fictional creation, has been portrayed in more than 200 films. This number, second only to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation, Sherlock Holmes, illustrates the power that Dracula still has over contemporary audiences. Writing theorists (and I’m one of … Read more

By Ashley Lister Some call it coulrophobia, others call it common sense. The fear of clowns seems like a relatively modern phenomenon, no older than the twentieth century, but the truth is a little bit more complicated.Some suggest that our current association of clowns with villainy comes from Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, in the DC … Read more