by Ashley Lister It’s no surprise that we’re frightened of mummies. Firstly, mummies are associated with foreign cultures (Egyptian predominantly) and it’s long been a trope of the horror industry to demonise anything associated with foreign culture. When you consider that Dracula came from Eastern Europe to terrorise British citizens, that zombies have their heritage … Read more
lycanthropy: the mythical transformation of a person into a wolf. It’s hard to say where the first examples of werewolf stories can be found. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known Western prose, Gilgamesh discarded a potential lover because she had turned her previous mate into a wolf.Werewolves (of a fashion) are also apparent … Read more
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 Do you want to win a free book? On March 1st, 2021, I’ll be releasing Cursed, the third novella in my series of dark tales from Innsmouth. This is a fun little story that looks at the relationship between storytellers and the stories they tell. The characters in this particular novella are … Read more