Archive for the ‘Scary Stuff’ Category

#FirstLineFriday

Posted: October 2, 2015 in Living and Life, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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It’s Friday, so you know what that means! It’s #FirstLineFriday! And it’s October too, my favorite month of the year! Hopefully no serial killers will show up though, especially ones wearing masks based on Captain Kirk (yeah, fun fact, the original Michael Myers mask was a spray-painted  Captain Kirk mask with the hair made wacky. Hilarious, considering that Myers murdered teens for being sinful while Kirk was sinful with as many women as possible).

Anyway, back to the reason we’re here. On #FirstLineFriday, I post the rules of this event, namely state the rules and then post the first one or two lines of a potential story, a story-in-progress, or a completed or published work. Then I ask for feedback and critiques from you, the reader.

And since it’s October, I figure that for every #FirstLineFriday I do, it’ll be a story that takes place on or around Halloween, or is just Halloween-related, or just plain spookier than usual. After all, I’m a horror writer, so I have to live it up this month.

Let’s see…our first selection will be from a short story that I hope to write for Teenage Wasteland someday, and features some rather creepy, otherworldly characters:

Leo woke up, slipped out of bed, and strode to the window. Sure enough, someone had left another dead rose on her windowsill.

Thoughts? Grammar or spelling or punctuation problems? Let me know in the comments below.

All for now. I’ve got cleaning and editing and a few other things to do today, so I’m going to get on it. You have a great day, my Followers of Fear. Watch out for serial killers, especially the ones with masks! They always get you when you least expect it.

#FirstLineFriday

Posted: September 25, 2015 in Living and Life, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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It’s Friday again, so you know what that means! No, not Happy Hour (though that is something to celebrate too). Nope, it’s #FirstLineFriday! In case you’re unfamiliar with the rules, here’s the deal: on Fridays you write a post with the title like this post, and then you post the first one or two lines from a potential work, a work in progress, or a completed or published work. Then you ask your readers for their thoughts and critiques on what you’ve just posted.

This week’s entry comes from “Tigress Lizzy”, the short story I wrote that was published in the recently released anthology When The Lights Go Out. Check it out:

Lizzy Markham slouched her way into the Magic River High School art room, her spirits as damp as her school uniform was at the moment.

Not the most dramatic opening to a short story, but it gets much more interesting as you read on, believe me. But what are your thoughts? Anything you’d change? Let me know. And if you’d like to read “Tigress Lizzy” and the other terrifying stories in WTLGO, you can find it on Amazon and Smashwords. Trust me, you’re going to want to check it out.

Well, that’s all for now. This weekend, contrary to prior declarations, I think I’ll be taking it easy at home, maybe just hang around Wiesbaden and see what Oktoberfest craziness I can get up to. After all, this is my last weekend in Germany. Might as well go all out in the city I’ve come to think of as home, right?

Have a good weekend, my Followers of Fear!

“When the Lights Go Out” is Available Now For Download

Posted: September 24, 2015 in Living and Life, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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when the lights go out cover

Well, I didn’t know this was happening so soon, but I guess it’s an early treat, which is always better than an early trick. The latest anthology from the Ink Slingers’ League, When The Lights Go Out (also known as WTLGO for the sake of keeping things short), has just become available for download! This creepy Halloween anthology contains a variety of terrifying stories from a plethora of authors, including yours truly, and I even got to write the introduction and help out with picking a title. Other authors in the anthology include Joleene Naylor, DM Yates, Barbara Tarn, Tricia Drammeh, Roger Lawrence, Adan Ranie, and many more!

If you’re still unsure about whether or not this anthology is for you, here’s the description:

A collection of twenty-five short stories just in time for Halloween. Enjoy thrills, chills, and mysteries. Meet ghosts, demons, vampires, and monsters everywhere from dark city streets to the English countryside. Scares lurk in the most unexpected places and, when the lights go out, no where is safe and no one will be spared.

Doesn’t that sound creepy? And if you need any more incentive to check it out, the entire anthology is very affordable. It’s available for a little under a dollar from Amazon and for free from Smashwords. And as it becomes available on more formats, like Kobo and iTunes, I’ll be posting those links on my Stand Alones & Other Works page.

Once again, thanks to Joleene Naylor for making me part of,this anthology in so many ways. I’ve already started reading it and I’m impressed by what I’ve seen so far. I’m looking forward to reading the rest and I’m so glad you thought one of my works was worthy of this impressive and terrifying collection of tales.

Well, that’s all for now. I hope you decide to check out WTLGO and have a spooky good time with me. Until next time, my Followers of Fear!

Thoughts on Lovecraft: Part 1

Posted: September 21, 2015 in Living and Life, Review, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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For a while now I’ve been reading The Complete Collection of HP Lovecraft on my Kindle. I figured it was about time, seeing as I haven’t been very exposed to his work up until this point, and the man has been a huge influence on greats like Stephen King, Allan Moore, Guillermo del Toro, and quite a few more. And since I am always looking to learn from other authors, I figured I should spend ten dollars of Amazon gift cards and see what happens.

Well, you get what you asked for. I didn’t realize that when I bought the collection, that it was 1112 pages! The length in itself is not such a problem, I’ve read books that long before. The thing is, Lovecraft…well, he’s hard to get through sometimes, and for a number of reasons. For one thing, there’s his style, which goes a little something like this:

And as I treaded up the stairs, filled with an anguish that panged the organs within my bosom to no end, I found my wife waiting for me in her chambers, her frown prominently featured upon her face. And I knew that my life had been transferred into a situation seriously detrimental and quite hazardous to my health, for that face on my wife at this hour could only mean that she had discovered my liaisons with Ellen the hotel maid from down in the village. I had endeavored to keep our trysts unknown from all but the walls of Ellen’s room, however it seemed that I was not secretive enough, as evidenced by the porcelain my wife volleyed at my head.

Okay, that’s a bit of a parody, but you get my point. Who talks like this?

Also, some of his early fiction isn’t that good. “Memory” is just a weird little flash fiction piece about a ruined city and a conversation between two beings about the city; “The Street” is about the houses on the titular street killing Communists after the street goes from a nice neighborhood to a slum; “Polaris” and “The White Ship” are obviously both dreams taken too literally, and “The Tree” is just not scary.

Also I noticed that so far, very few women appear in the stories. Several characters are mentioned as having wives, but so far the only woman who has any actual significance is the titular character of “Sweet Ermengarde”, and that’s a story parodying popular romantic melodramas of the day! But given that Lovecraft had a strained relationship with his mother, a turbulent one with his wife, and was dominated by his aunts in the later parts of his life, maybe that has something to do with it.

Lovecraft makes you wonder if maybe this guy is coming for you.

However, while I have my problems with Lovecraft’s early work, I have to admit that some of his stories do hit the mark, and even are a little scary. “The Tomb” is definitely somewhat chilling, as is “Dagon” and “The Picture in the House” (the former bears resemblance to Cthullu stories, while the latter has implications of murder and cannibalism). And I actually very much enjoyed “The Temple”, which was very strange and creepy.

I can’t say about the rest of his work, but for the early stuff I think what makes the successes so great is that they leave impressions on you. They make you think to yourself, “Imagine if that actually happened. That would be kind of creepy…” And then you take a look around yourself to make sure that a slippery slimy creature or some guy with wicked magic or something isn’t near you. Lovecraft is very good at leaving those sort of feelings with you. He makes you wonder, makes you think that there’s something just beyond the corners of our eyes or in the darkest parts of our world that we don’t understand, can’t understand, and that any interaction with that something or somethings would be very dangerous for us.

So there is definitely a reason why HP Lovecraft has stuck around and become well-known as a writer of weird and terrifying fiction. And as I progress from his early work to the stuff that he’s more famous for, like “Call of Cthullu” or “The Colour out of Space” or “History of the Necronomicon”, I’m sure I’ll find more reasons to like this guy (hence the reason this post is titled Part 1).

In the meantime though, I think I’ll take a break from his stuff. Like I said, he’s great when he’s good and I’m already learning a lot from him and seeing some of his influence on my work already, but he’s dense and hard to get through, and after so much of prose like my parody paragraph, I need a break if I’m going to continue someday. Besides, I finished on “The Nameless City”, which has that famous quote in it. You know the one:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

I can’t think of a better stopping point than on a creepy story that has that weird couplet in it. Can you?

Review: The Cat (2011 film)

Posted: September 21, 2015 in Review, Scary Stuff
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Continuing the trend of Asian horror films I’ve been binging on lately, our latest entry is The Cat, which is cute and scary because it involves kitties!

The Cat follows So-yeon, a young woman working at a pet store whose claustrophobia is so severe her apartment doesn’t even have doors inside it. One day after finishing a grooming session with a rich client’s cat, she starts to see apparitions of a little girl with cat-like eyes (sounds like my girlfriend in 10-15 years). That same day the client ends up dying mysteriously in the elevator, her cat seemingly unharmed. Asked by a friend of hers on the police force to watch over the cat until the investigation is over and the client’s husband decides he wants the cat back, So-yeon is sent on a terrifying journey to find out the origin of the cat she has as well as the little girl before the latter does her in too.

Now, this film is pretty paint-by-the-numbers in terms of story and characters: you see a lot of the normal clichés (the love interest, the friend who’s a bit shallow, the tragic backstory of the ghost, the almost too-good ending, etc.). However, the filmmakers do have a pretty good sense of building tension and keeping the story going without us becoming bored by the structured plot. Plus a lot of scenes with the cats are kind of scary to watch, especially when it involves a cat being mishandled, abused, killed, or dead.* And there’s a very powerful theme running throughout the film about helping those who are helpless, which is represented by a number of characters as well as cats, and it’s hard not to empathize with that.

Overall, I give The Cat a 3.5 out of 5. In a way, it’s similar to Jurassic World: not the best movie of its kind, but it does well on its own and it’ll do the job if you’re looking for that kind of movie.

You know I think I might take a break from all these Asian horror films soon. Don’t get me wrong, for the most part I’m coming across pretty good ones. It’s just that I don’t want to watch them to the point where I’m absolutely sick of them. That nearly happened to me with Stephen King in high school: I read way too many of his books in a short period of time and had to take a break from him lest I stopped liking his work. Now King’s an occasional enjoyment, and perhaps these sort of films should be as well.

Though if anyone finds videos of the films A Tale of Two Sisters, Hanako, or even the French horror film Livide with English subtitles, let me know. I’m dying to see them.

*Don’t worry though, the filmmakers assures the audience at the end that no cats were harmed in the making of this film. As far as we know anyway.

#FirstLineFriday

Posted: September 18, 2015 in Novel, Scary Stuff, Writing
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It’s Friday again, and you know what that means! It’s #FirstLineFriday!

On Fridays, bloggers write a post titled like this one, hashtag and everything, and post the first one or two lines of a potential project, work-in-progress, or a completed or published work and ask your readers to give you their feedback. It’s a lot of fun, believe me.

Today’s entry is what could start out a novel I had the idea for last weekend. I don’t intend to write it anytime soon, but it’s fun to play around and think about what could end up starting it or what could end up getting into the novel when I finally do decide to write it.

Anyway, enjoy:

On the first Monday of the fourth month of our sophomore year, my friends and I made a suicide pact. Since then, there have been several times where I wish we had all followed through, rather than chickening out and letting what happened next happen.

Thoughts? Errors? Ways to improve? Let me know in the comments below.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m going on a trip to Wewelsburg castle this weekend. The castle’s got a very interesting history, and I’m looking forward to exploring it (as well as taking lots of photos and writing a blog post about it when I get home).

Have a great weekend, my Followers of Fear! Until next time!

When The Lights Go Out: Coming Soon

Posted: September 16, 2015 in Living and Life, Progress Report, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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when the lights go out cover

Some of you may remember a previous post where I announced that a short story of mine, “Tigress Lizzy” was going to be published in an upcoming anthology by the same folks who did Strange Portals. I’m very pleased to announce that the anthology now has a name and a cover, and I have more news besides that!

Alright, as the title of this post indicates, this anthology is called When The Lights Go Out, a title I suggested to anthology editor/vampire novelist extraordinaire/indie colleague Joleene Naylor, so I’m very honored that she chose it for the title of this anthology. She also did the cover for this anthology, by the way. And holy shit, is that creepy to behold! It’s like she crossed Ring with Grudge and The Exorcist! I’m getting goosebumps just looking at it!

Or is that the ghost I suspect is haunting my apartment? I’m never quite sure.

Oh, and I have some more news relating to WTLGO (yes, I am starting that abbreviation. You shall use it to save time when referring to this anthology because it is just that much easier). In addition to being the author of one of the twenty-five short stories featured in the anthology, I was also asked to write the introduction. Yes, that’s right. I got to write the introduction! I’m really happy about that, and Joleene tells me she really liked it, which I call very high praise indeed!

Finally, WTLGO will be coming out sometime early next month from e-book retailers everywhere. As soon as it comes out, I’ll be posting links so you can check it out! The anthology will be free of charge, so if you’re of little pocket money but still have a device to read this on, you won’t have to miss out.

Though if I were you, I wouldn’t read this one right before bed. You might never sleep again…

I’ll post more when I have more. I’m riding a huge high right now, so I’m going to ride that high right to bed (it’s nearly ten at night here in Germany and I have early mornings!). I’ll celebrate with you guys in the morning. You have a great one, my Followers of Fear!

Slasher Remakes

Posted: September 13, 2015 in Living and Life, Reflections, Scary Stuff
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Hollywood is stuck in this phase where the studios are obsessed with sequels and prequels and spin-offs and franchises and remakes and reboots and re imaginings and a million other things. I have mixed feelings on this culture. On the one hand, I love the Marvel movies and a clever re imagining of a classic story or stories (like what Once Upon a Time has done with some of my favorite fairy tales when I was young) is a great thing. Plus who doesn’t love a good adaptation of a beloved novel or comic book or even video game into a movie or TV series?

On the other hand, seeing all these stories continued or retold constantly encourages filmmakers ane viewers to seek out familiar stories that are sure bets to be successful rather than new material that they don’t know will work out for them, when there is new material. And plenty of these sequels/prequels/reboots/whatever, when they come out, they are just awful and you wonder how the filmmakers could do this to beloved properties (see my review of the Poltergeist remake or watch these two dudes review the Smurfs movie if you need further proof).

The horror genre has been a big part in this, for better or for worse. Since the success of 2003’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake (as opposed to 2013’s remake of the film), there have been a slew of horror remakes, mainly slashers but quite a few others, and they have been showing up with increasing frequency). I’m focusing on the slashers though, because of the horror remakes the slashers are often the ones I see the most advertising for (an exception being Poltergeist, but we know how that turned out), they have some of the most iconic characters in the horror genre (Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, etc.), they’re notorious for putting out too many sequels of varying quality, even for horror, and they’re difficult to get right, because they rely on blood, guts, and gore to scare people rather than suspense and atmosphere.

And for God’s sake, there’s just been so many of them:

  • Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its prequel (the former was good, the latter awful)
  • Halloween and Halloween II (same deal as TCM in terms of quality)
  • My Bloody Valentine (lacks all that made the original so awesome)
  • Black Christmas (awful murder-porn)
  • Prom Night (awful and nonsensical)
  • Friday the 13th (of all the Michael Bay shit movies, this one is the shittiest)
  • Nightmare on Elm Street (I liked it, but others disagree with me)
  • Leprechaun (more of a re-imagining of average quality)
  • Texas Chainsaw 3D (I liked this too, but not everybody else did)
  • Evil Dead (fun and extremely bloody)
  • Scream (got rebooted as a TV series. Only saw one episode before leaving for Germany, but wasn’t impressed by what I saw)

On TV and in the movies at the same time. Like Kevin Bacon or Viola Davis.

And that’s just the ones that I know of that are out. And believe it or not, there are more on the way: Friday the 13th is getting a new movie as well as being re-imagined as a TV series for CW (haven’t heard anything on the movie, but what I’ve heard on the TV series sounds promising), Halloween is getting a new movie (also looks promising), Evil Dead is getting a TV series set years after the original films (excuse me while I skip it, because I’m not much of a fan of the franchise), and Texas Chainsaw Massacre is getting a prequel exploring Leatherface’s origins (I’m skeptical). There was also talk of a Hellraiser reboot, but there’s been no word in two years on that, so I’m going to say it’s been shelved.

So why are slashers being remade by the dozen? Like I said, they’re difficult to pull off, and they’re formulaic. Plus blood and gore is how they primarily scare you, and a lot of horror fans, including myself, find that distasteful. What makes them so appealing?

I think a lot of it has to do with the characters. Slashers have produced some of the most iconic characters in horror and in cinema: Norman Bates, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers. Heck, Freddy Kreuger isso well-known that he’s made cameo appearances in movies parodying the 1980’s in one form or another. People love these characters as much as they’re scared of them, they love watching them in action and being terrified of them. They like to sit there and think, “What’s he going to do next? What’s he going to do next? What’s he going to do–AAAH!”

Studios are aware of that, as well as they are aware of how much people go back to see the old films (the better ones anyway) and see these beloved characters do what they do best. With huge fan followings like this, and how easy it is to make a horror movie under twenty million dollars with minimal special effects, they know people are going to come and see the films so they can see these beloved characters resurrected again and perhaps in a movie worthy of carrying the franchise’s name.

The problem with that is, these same studios may just be banking on the popularity of a franchise and its character or characters to draw in crowds. Take a look at Friday the 13th, or another horror movie that Michael Bay meddled in, Ouija (read my review here). Both of those sucked, but yet they still made money. I think the latter was because of very good marketing, but the former had the draw of the first Friday the 13th film in six years, and one not bogged down by sequels’ worth of mythologies. Problem was, they didn’t invest in a good story, like the first film did and most of the early films tried to do with varying success. Instead they gave it a passable story and then added in as much drugs, sex, nudity, swearing, and gratuitous death scenes as possible so that the audiences would stay interested.

The result was a waste of film that makes watching people defecate on public streets look more entertaining. And I’m very worried that these other films that are on the way will do the same thing. They’ll be made with just drawing in fans and their credit cards in mind and the results will be absolutely terrible. And no horror fan wants to see beloved characters treated that way.

Hoping for better films for all these guys, and more.

On the other hand, I like to imagine that some of these filmmakers are huge fans of the franchises and really are trying to give these characters the stories they should be in, stories that are worth investing seven dollars and two hours in. The Halloween movie supposedly has an interesting plot, and the one thing I’ve heard on the Friday the 13th sequel indicates it’ll take place in the 1980’s, when the series started and where most of the better films are set. Perhaps there is hope here.

Well, we’ll just have to wait and see…and pray that along with better sequels/franchises/whatever, we get some new material too (*cough* Hollywood, call me *cough*).

All for now, my Followers of Fear. I have to get ready for the High Holidays tonight, so I’ll be busy for a while, but I’ll write again when I can.

See you next year, and Shanah Tovah (that means “Have a good year” if you don’t speak Hebrew).

On the Possible End of “Hannibal”

Posted: September 3, 2015 in Living and Life, Review, Scary Stuff
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It’s been one week since what could very well be the series finale as well as the third season finale of Hannibal, based on Hannibal Lecter and other characters created by Thomas Harris, premiered. NBC has declined to keep the show going, and while the show’s producers Bryan Fuller and Martha De Laurentiis, as well as series star Mads Mikkelsen and the many, many fans of the show (“Fannibals” or “Lecterites”, if you will), would love to see the show go on in some form, there is a chance that the show will have to hang up the carving knife and that everyone associated with it will have to move onto new projects.

Personally, I hope that the show is still able to go on, maybe as a feature film as Fuller has hinted at, or maybe moves to Starz or Amazon (though if it’s the former and not the latter I may have to wait till the show is on DVD or Netflix, depending on my financial situation). Also, I think it’s a good investment to keep the show going. Yeah, Hannibal has always been ratings-challenged, which is why NBC cancelled it in the first place. However, they knew a show focusing on a serial killer was a risk to begin with, and they still went with it for three years, as did huge legions of fans.

Why? Well obviously Hannibal Lecter is a famous character who was already well-known because of Harris’ novels, the movie Manhunter, and the three Anthony Hopkins films. But that only drew people to the show in the first place. The reason they stayed is because the show’s creators managed to take the concept of a serial killer show, and elevate it to art. Fuller and his team could’ve simply created a simple procedural show with serial killers like The Following with a famous literary and film character in the mix. Instead they built on that premise and made most of the sets exquisite to the eye, turned ordinary conversations into psychologically and philosophically engaging character explorations that could evolve into verbal tennis matches sometimes, and gave every shot a purpose in how it was filmed.

Add into all that the brilliant characters: Hugh Dancy as the socially-troubled empath profiler Will Graham, Lawrence Fishburne as the ends-justify-the-means, will-do-anything-to-catch-the-killers FBI director Jack Crawford, and of course the quiet gentleman devil with a love of grilling up those who are rude or offensive, Hannibal Lecter himself. Every character brings something to the table, making you want to watch them interact with each other right up until the very (sometimes bloody) end. And of course, the brilliant writing. Even at the show’s less exciting moments, the writers till were able to make you want to keep watching, to find out what happens next. From the growing relationship between Will and Hannibal in the first season, to the terrifying flash-forward at the beginning of the second season, and Will’s struggle to truly rid himself of Hannibal in the third season, it just kept you watching.

Hannibal is art. Creepy, bloody, psychologically strange and terrifying art, but it is art nonetheless, and that’s something you don’t usually see with television shows. I honestly can’t say if Hannibal will go on in some form or another (I’m not psychic), but if it doesn’t, at least we know that it had an ending that tied up most of the loose ends of the story, and the ones left behind we can easily guess at. And with streaming and DVD releases, fans could still watch it and relive the beautiful psychological horror that the show was.

Still, I hope for more. The show was awesome, and Fuller had a vision to continue the show, even if he couldn’t get the characters from Silence of the Lambs (I would’ve loved to see how they changed up Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill, seeing as I found one annoying and the other slightly comical). If allowed to continue, we could see some award-worthy horror on our screens someday.

So while we wait and squirm and wonder at the show’s fate, I’ll continue to hope. Because if the story of the strange relationship between a man and a monster in a man’s skin can intrigue me and so many other people, then surely it can attract a TV executive or two. And the story that ended too soon won’t end at all.

Oh and NBC, why do you keep doing this to me?! First Dracula, then Hannibal? Stop cancelling these creepy genre shows I really like!

On the Passing of Wes Craven

Posted: August 31, 2015 in Living and Life, Reflections, Scary Stuff
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Rest in peace, Wes Craven. You will be missed.

The word craven means “lacking in courage; cowardly.” I’m hard-pressed to find a man who embodied the exact antithesis of the meaning of his last man, and who instead managed to pass it onto the rest of us. Wes Craven was a filmmaking genius, a horror maestro who helped to create some of our most iconic movie monsters, including Freddy Kreuger and Ghostface. It is with great sadness that I have to admit that he passed yesterday after a lengthy battle with brain cancer at the age of 76.

I remember the first time I watched the original Nightmare on Elm Street. I was somewhere in my teenage years, and I was in my dad’s basement watching it on DVD. From the very beginning the movie set itself apart from other horror movies I’d seen in the past. The small box displaying Freddy preparing his trademark clawed glove, as if he were coming out of a long retirement to start some marvelous work again. That first dream sequence and death, and everything that came after it. Nightmare was visceral, it was scary, and at the end you wondered what was dream and what was reality, or if maybe they were all one and the same. For a guy who hadn’t had that much exposure to the horror classics of the 1980s (I might’ve only recently turned seventeen at that time and gotten access to my library’s collection of 80’s horror, most of which was rated R), it knocked me off my feet and made me want more.

You see, horror is my drug, and the Nightmare movies were really good blow. In Wes Craven, I’d found a powerful dealer, someone who could give me what I needed when I needed my horror fix. I would later find terror when I saw the Scream movies, and quite a few more (I really liked what he did with the North American remake of Pulse). You could go to him and usually he could provide the goods. Occasionally Craven produced some bad stuff—every filmmaker does occasionally, and in horror bad stuff is pretty common—but on the whole he did great work.

And how did Craven feel about these many fans, these people who saw him as a person who fed their inner desires for terror and probably gave more than one child nightmares for the rest of his or her life? To use his own words, “I come from a blue-collar family, and I’m just glad for the work. I think it is an extraordinary opportunity and gift to be able to make films in general, and to have done it for almost 40 years is remarkable…If I have to do the rest of the films in the [horror] genre, no problem. If I’m going to be a caged bird, I’ll sing the best song I can…I can see that I give my audience something. I can see it in their eyes, and they say thank you a lot. You realize you are doing something that means something to people.”(1)

Indeed Mr. Craven. You did something to many people. You gave us iconic characters like Freddy or Ghostface to haunt our dreams. You helped launch the film careers of Johnny Depp, Sharon Stone, and Bruce Willis (no seriously, he did). And you inspired generations of horror fans, from your protégé Nick Simon, whose new movie The Girl in the Photographs will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next month, to me, a self-published novelist who, while not exactly famous yet, is working hard to create his own stories that maybe one day will scare people far and wide.

So while you may no longer be with us in Mr. Craven, you are very much alive. Like one of your creations, you haunt us in our imaginations and our dreams, making those you inspired take to their pens or computers and create their own wonderful nightmares. And as long as people fear Freddy or Ghostface or those Hills that have Eyes, you will continue to walk among us, leaving your mark wherever you go and giving us our fix when we ask for it.

So tonight, I will raise a toast to Wes Craven, a man with a vision, taken from us when we didn’t want him to go. I will get online and see if I can get a fix from one of his movies. And then soon, possibly tomorrow, I will get to work on my next terrifying creation and hope your ghost whispers in my ears while I do.

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