In the late 1950s, American horror comics were effectively dead, or so it seemed. The moral panic that followed the publication of Seduction of the Innocent and the subsequent creation of the Comics Code Authority had wiped out the most creative and subversive publishers of the previous decade, most notably EC Comics. The lurid, poetic, and morally cruel horror stories of Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear vanished almost overnight, taking with them an entire generation of writers and artists who had perfected the form. One man saw opportunity where others saw only
Tag: horror
When 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) appeared, it did not simply revive the zombie film. It replaced it with something leaner, faster, and more psychologically pointed. The infected were not undead bodies driven by hunger but living humans stripped down to a single overwhelming impulse. That conceptual precision gave the film its force. The famous opening, Jim (Cillian Murphy) waking alone in a hospital and wandering through an emptied London, has often been compared to the later beginning of the tv series The Walking Dead, but the resemblance is mostly structural. In Boyle and Garland’s film the hospital is
- House of Leaves (2000), by Mark Z. Danielewski
- Let the Right One In (2004), by John Ajvide Lindqvist
- Haunted (2005), by Chuck Palahniuk
- Cold Skin (2005), by Albert Sanchez Pinol
- The Ruins (2006), by Scott Smith
- The Terror (2007), by Dan Simmons
- Bird Box (2014), by Josh Malerman
- Tender Is the Flesh (2017), by Agustina Bazterrica
- The Haunting of Hill House (1959), by Shirley Jackson
- Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), by Ray Bradbury
- Rosemary’s Baby (1967), by Ira Levin
- Hell House (1971), by Richard Matheson
- The Mist (1980), by Stephen King
- The Cellar (1980), by Richard Laymon
- History of the Caliph Vathek (1786), by William Beckford
- The Monk (1796), by Matthew Gregory Lewis
- Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Shelley
- Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), by Charles Maturin
- Varney, the Vampire (1847), by Thomas Prest
- Carmilla (1872), by Sheridan Le Fanu
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), by Oscar Wilde
- Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker
- The Turn of the Screw (1898), by Henry James
Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw is famous for being slippery. Are the ghosts real, or is the governess losing her mind? The 1961 film The Innocents keeps that same spirit of uncertainty, but instead of James’s careful prose, it uses images, sound, and atmosphere to create doubt. The story is essentially the same, but the movie sharpens the tension, leaning into the creepy sexuality and suppressed desire that James only hinted at. Where the book makes you question every line, the film makes you question every shot. The script started with a stage adaptation, but Truman Capote