1,551 words
“On the surface, Bram Stoker was a pillar of late Victorian respectability. . . . But just below the surface, he had something on his mind.”
The preceding sentences are from Christopher Frayling’s BBC documentary on Stoker’s Dracula, which was broadcast on A&E in 1996.
In a more recent television documentary on M. R. James, (more…)
2,512 words
Katherine Beem and Andy Paciorek, eds.
Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies
Wyrd Harvest Press, 2015
The term “folk horror” is a relatively recent invention that can be applied to a wide range of artistic creations, not all of them belonging to the horror genre. It was popularized by the 2010 BBC TV documentary A History of Horror where the term was used to describe three horror films: Witchfinder General
William Blake, “Hamlet and his Father’s Ghost”
5,903 words
We never manage to bury the dead completely. Their words still echo down to us from beyond life’s event horizon in direct contravention of physical law. Our stance towards death is a determining factor in how the dead return to us; in what form and with what significance they haunt the living. Although they are always there, the ways in which they interact with us vary and shift through time. And, at the present time, there is a strange blend of residual religious funerary rites and atheistic materialism. It feels very much as though we go through the motions of dispatching the dead to the next world without believing a word of it. (more…)