Today we welcome Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum to Ginger Nuts of Horror to mark the release of their fantastic collection.  Zhiguai: Chinese True Tales of the Paranormal and Glitches in the Matrix (read our review here), with an amazing article:- 

Some of our favorite horror stories are not fiction, but rather creative nonfiction.

Take Joy Williams’ short memoir “Hawk,” for example. Published in Granta in 1999, it weaves together meditations on the life of Slaughterhouse-Five composer Glenn Gould with the narrative of Joy William’s sudden, shocking mauling by her German Shepherd, Hawk. Hawk’s attack is a bloody one, in a story that’s also shadowed by disease, casual cruelty, the ultimate unknowability of other living beings, and Joy William’s decision to have Hawk put down.

The story even seemingly leaps into the paranormal when Williams presents an ominous dream visit by Hawk, who is as much totem as flesh-and-blood being, the night before the attack:

“In my sleep, in the strange bed in the old farmhouse, I saw a figure at the door. It was waiting there clothed in a black garbage bag and bandages. Without hesitation, I got up and went to the door and opened it and Hawk came in [ . . . ]. ‘Oh there are ghosts in that house,’ our friends said later.”

“Hawk” is a fabulous if unsettling achievement. It’s Cujo filtered through Kelly Link. And our students are all googly-eyed when we cover it in class to talk about the moves it makes as animal, illness, and relational memoir. But it is also an example of several notes of horror too—ranging from dread to the grotesque, the weird, and the uncanny.

In this, “Hawk” is emblematic of a stream of literature that’s just starting to get wide recognition—horror creative nonfiction.

This subgenre is powerfully illustrated by longer memoirs like Carmen Maria Machado's Dream House and Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem’s The Man on the Ceiling. One finds shorter examples all over the modern literary landscape too. These range from the brief memoirs in Granta’s horror issue (#117) and the Hippocampus Magazine’s 2015 possession-by-trailer story “Things in the Shapes of Trailers” to our current obsession, the autobiographical genre of “glitch-in-the-matrix tales”—short but harrowing first person-accounts about encounters with strange entities and dimensions of reality which, when it comes to artistic polish, run the gamut from told-in-the-rush social media posts to reflective personal essays.

Of Monstrous Children

While horror creative nonfiction might seem like the latest flavor of pomo genre-crossing, it goes back to horror’s beginnings in early religious accounts. Such tales detail encounters with demonic spirits and angelic OTHERS, alternate states of consciousness, psychic phenomena, divine interventions, and of course confrontations with evil. In addition to their distinctive subject matter, these accounts are habitually marked by striking liminality too. This is to say that they gleefully violate the boundary between our material, everyday world and various spiritual planes, as well as the boundaries drawn between myth and history, narrative and philosophy, and the literal and the symbolic.

Far from disappearing with the secularization of literature, this liminality profoundly influenced the moves made by creative nonfiction early in its history and set important precedents for later creative nonfiction, effectively giving it permission to be highly experimental in form and speculative in content despite its fidelity to mimetic reality.

Take the work of Michel de Montaigne, for example, who is credited with popularizing the literary essay. In his 1580 "Of A Monstrous Child,” Montaigne narrates an encounter with a conjoined set of twins, whose aunt, father, and uncle are carrying them around to display for money.

Montaigne begins his short piece by graphically describing the twins in vivid, proto-scientific detail. The description is the textual equivalent of a display in a museum of medical anomolies. We see a breast forced into the twins’ shared mouth (they have only one head between them). We learn that their cry is odd. We are given a detailed physiological map of their fusion to one another. Montaigne then shifts gears to offer us a meditation that is both religious and philosophical on the twins’ metaphorical meaning, while also moving the reader to question who the real monsters are in the piece: the twins or their parasitic relatives who exploit them. Along the way, he delivers lines so powerful that they inspire centuries of horror writers to come:

“Those that we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of His work the infinite forms that He has comprehended therein.”

East Asian Strange

The deep roots of horror creative nonfiction are by no means consigned solely to the West. In the Chinese tradition, one finds just as many—if not more—early examples.

Want a predecessor to Andy Muschietti’s 2013 Mama, in which two abandoned children are cared for by a ghost? Then check out the Soushen Ji, a collection of strange, historical narratives assembled by the famous imperial historian Gan Bao (286−336 CE) in order to demonstrate “shendao,” the way of spirits. It’s filled with such stories. And Gan Bao’s decision to compile the Soushen Ji was motivated by his own own experiences—as recorded in the Tang dynasty historical chronicle, the Jinshu. One such experience concerns a maid who Gan Bao’s mother sealed inside his father’s tomb alongside his father’s body, after discovering an affair between the two. This by itself is shocking enough in a “The Cask of Amontillado” way. But then it is revealed how ten years after this cruel act of revenge, the tomb is opened and the maid is discovered alive—having been fed this whole time, according to her, by the ghost of Gan Bao’s father.

Closer to our own century, and more sophisticated in their narrative moves, are the creative nonfictions of Ji Yun (1724−1805), most recently collected in The Shadow Book of Ji Yun. Ji Yun was Special Advisor to the Emperor, Head of the Departments of War and Public Works, Imperial Librarian, and one of the most brilliant scholars and writers in Qing dynasty China. He was also, incredibly, an investigator and artful teller of true weird and supernatural tales. These he assembled into five volumes, alongside urban legends, parables, and satires.

Far from being outdone by their more fictional siblings, Ji Yun’s autobiographical and biographical accounts are just as, if not more, disturbing and chilling than his more fictional inclusions in these collections. He details encounters with ghost cities, and explores unsettling reincarnations, Tibetan black magic, sentient fogs, and even an early alien abduction. There are less supernatural horrors in abundance too—from accounts of unnatural human appetites and criminal depravity to darkly comic experiments with aphrodisiacs.

The Horrors of Childhood

When you think about it, the long, global history of horror creative nonfiction is to be expected. Horror is perhaps the most primal of genres, and one finds its tropes not just in horror literature itself but in that which came before and gave rise to horror literature: children’s play and dreams.

As the scholar Jonathan Gottschall points out in his 2013 The Storytelling Animal, at the center of children’s play is trouble. Citing a study of 360 stories told by preschoolers, he lists some of these typical troubles: “trains running over puppies and kittens; a naughty girl being sent to jail; a baby bunny playing with fire and burning down his house; a little boy slaughtering his whole family with a bow and arrows; a hunter shooting and eating three babies; children killing a witch by driving 189 knives into her belly.” The predisposition of children for horror storytelling is so strong in fact that it led educator and play theorist Vivian Paley, who won a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” for her work, to refer to children’s play as “the stage on which bad things are rehearsed.” Such rehearsal, mind you, adds to an already existing proclivity in children for occult thinking, which expresses itself in everything from a fascination with psychic powers and magical objects to habitually, in an animistic manner,  attributing consciousness to toys, imaginary friends, etc.

Children’s dreams continue the pattern of serving as stages for bad things and occult thought, as well as serving as stages for giving misshapen bodies to fears and anxieties. As such, they too are wonderful sources for proto-horror stories, as are adult dreams (over a 70-year lifespan, btw, a person has around 60,000 scary REM dreams according to a 2009 study by Katja Valli and Antti Revonsuo in The American Journal of Psychology). Our young daughter, Frankie, for example, has taken to naming her dreams, especially those whose themes repeat. Among these are “Log Monster I” and “Log Monster 2.” And don’t even get us started on her evil bunny pictures.   
                                
Of Abject Genres and Forbidden Philosophies

Given all this, you would expect horror creative nonfiction to be a fairly robust subgenre today. However, most horror outlets don’t recognize this Frankenstein’s monster. Sure, you’ll see calls for horror nonfiction, but once you read about what a given award or magazine is looking for, generally you’ll discover that the call is for articles about horror, not for horror creative nonfiction (although there are notable exceptions, such as Nightmare magazine, which recently featured E.K. Wagner’s brilliant memoir piece, “Let Me Be Clear”). The same holds true for publishing categories. Horror narrative prose is generally assumed to be fictional, and horror nonfiction is generally assumed to be scholarly.

It’s even worse in the field of creative nonfiction itself. Mention horror creative nonfiction, and most colleagues will flash you a look no less shocked than if you’d pulled a dead ferret out of your underpants and flopped it in the middle of a café table during a business meeting.

Why is the very concept of this subgenre so abhorrent? After all, our lives are full of all kinds of horrors.

A major reason is of course the ever-continuing misrepresentation of horror’s range and potential sophistication in many literature departments, where the field of creative nonfiction is largely situated.

We’ve yet to teach a single horror class where the majority of literature and writing students aren’t shocked by the genre’s range. This is largely due to their being taught that hoary old fallacy that genre lit sacrifices everything—from thematic depth to artistic skill—at the altar of plot and titillation, while literature with a capital L hits on all the higher notes of what it is to be human.

But there are less discussed reasons as well.

For one thing, horror is, let’s face it, a bad fit for some universities—which, for good reasons and bad, are devoted to taming, ordering, and taxonomizing the irrational and the emotional; and dedicated to generalizing, defanging, and depilating the sensual. Even when sex is discussed, it is discussed in a peculiarly sexless and disembodied way—largely divorced from personal experience, idiosyncratic perversions, and the description of liquids and flecks—the conversational equivalent of a naked barbie doll. As far as violence or darker human impulses are concerned, they almost always conveniently belong to someone else. In other words, the unspoken general rule of academia (although, thankfully, there are many exceptions) is the fewer smells, teeth, and sticky hairs the better. When it comes to the mind/body split, it is usually very much on the side of the mind.

But perhaps the biggest reason of all for the frequent non-recognition of horror creative nonfiction in both the university and the wider world is the most interesting.

At the end of the day, horror—even though much of it revolves around the non-supernatural—is nevertheless strongly associated with the supernatural and the occult (one perhaps sees this, for example, in the fact that the name of the Horror Writers Association was originally the Horror and Occult Writers League). Because of this, horror is also strongly connected in many people’s minds with a supernatural model of reality amidst an ongoing, centuries-old culture war between that model and a materialist one.

Writer and scholar Victoria Nelson (following in the footsteps of critics like Kathryn Hume, Rosemary Jackson, and Robert Scholes) lays out the connection between genre and models of reality exceptionally well in The Secret Life of Puppets. 

On the surface, Nelson argues, most moderns seem wedded to a “Neo-Aristotelian” view of existence: a materialist, deterministic, and mechanistic model that privileges empirical [Western] rationalism and that holds that the world is the result of material properties and their interactions. In this view—which is replicated in the front-page news—nature is de-spirited and the subjective and objective are distinct, as are mind and matter.

But scratch this surface Nelson goes on to say, and you see people also commonly entertain another model of reality on the downlow: the “neoplatonic,” even if they’re often too embarrassed to talk about it in public or in professional circles.

This model is basically the opposite of the first. It sees the world not as the product of dead matter but as the product of consciousness. Furthermore, it holds that our material reality is but one plane of existence among many and espouses the belief that we reside in “a living [and animistic] cosmos in which all things in the world exist in a hierarchy of interconnections with one another and with a timeless, invisible world.” In this model, mind and matter interact, the subjective and the objective entangle, and our identities are multiple and multidimensional. It has room for astrological beliefs, signs, omens, precognitive dreams, spirits, magic, exotic physics, weird biology, astral and virtual realities, and all that good stuff.

In a nutshell then, the genre of horror is a major place where this second model can be safely explored. Or, as Nelson puts it: “Art and religion have reversed roles in the last several centuries. Whereas art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion [and taboo occult and metaphysical ideas of the non-religious variety], covertly, through art and entertainment.”

Nelson’s claim certainly seems borne out in the playing field of our classrooms.

In addition to teaching creative nonfiction, we both also teach speculative fiction. In such classes, we typically begin the semester by asking students why they read horror or fantasy.

Inevitably, their first response is “escapism,” largely because that’s what they’ve been taught to say.

Certainly, escapism is a wonderful use for literature, and we embrace this literary function nearly every night when we hit Netflix or Kowaca. But, as the semester goes on, it becomes obvious through further conversations and student work that students are not just seeking to “escape” from reality through horror and other speculative literature. They are also seeking a deeper engagement with reality by exploring other models of it and other ways of understanding their own experience in the world. Our students love anime like Airbender and Mushishi, and authors like Tang Fei, Chen Qiufan, and H.P. Lovecraft because of the space they provide for all kinds of metaphysical speculation about the nature of qi, the cosmos, beauty, identity, nature, mind-matter interaction, you name it.

This holds true even when exclusively non-Western horror is being discussed. Because while Nelson frames her materialism/idealism argument via drawing upon Western schools of thought, similar divisions of worldview can be found in the differences between Taoism and Confucianism or between other schools of thought—because, really, what we’re ultimately talking about are ancient and primary ways of interacting with, and conceptualizing, reality—ways that furthermore are not mutually exclusive but interdependent and mutually defining.

Out of the Dark

Victoria Nelson makes a final observation in The Secret Life of Puppets that we find useful to think about—as both writers and teachers of horror:

“The greatest taboo among serious intellectuals of the century just behind us, in fact, proved to be none of the ‘transgressions’ itemized by postmodern thinkers: It was, rather, the heresy of challenging a materialist worldview.”

While “greatest” is certainly an arguable modifier here, it’s hard to deny some measure of validity to Neslon’s point after even a cursory glance at syllabi, essays, and reading lists, or after paying attention to the preconceptions and assumed premises of hallway conversations between faculty. In short, it seems likely to us that this unspoken taboo is at least partially responsible for horror creative nonfiction striking many as a shocking proposition. At the same time, however, this taboo is also one reason that horror creative nonfiction is such a valuable and necessary subgenre, one whose time has come. No matter how scary the idea may be.

​In this collection, award-winning writers and translators Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum share paranormal and glitch in the matrix tales from across present-day China. Confided by eyewitnesses, these true stories uncannily echo Western encounters with chilling dimensions of reality and supernatural entities. At the same time, they thrillingly immerse the reader in everyday Chinese life and occult beliefs.

Zhiguai: Chinese True Tales of the Paranormal and Glitches in the Matrix includes such accounts as:
*The reincarnation of a teenager whose fate eerily mimics his predecessor’s
*A girl who dies in the womb but nevertheless continues to communicate with her twin
*Terrifying shifts into demonic parallel universes
*Walls desperately painted with blood to save a family from tragedy
*Huge populations that disappear into thin air
*The revenge-seeking ghosts of murdered cats
*Weird temporal shifts
*Occult murders
From the terrifying to the uncanny, this collection will not only change your understanding of China but of reality itself.

Demonic is an innovative mix of supernatural horror and science fiction. What was the inspiration for that?

It was really a combination of things. When the pandemic occurred and my other projects were put on hold, I wanted to do something we could control and just go out and shoot. References for that were films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, so I decided to do something in the horror realm. I also had this idea of using a new technology called volumetric capture, which lent itself more to science fiction. So it became a case of how do you create a story with those elements.

Some of your best-known films, including District 9, Elysium and Chappie, have had a science fiction component. What is it that draws you to that genre?

I’m not trying to make something overtly science fiction, I’m just following ideas that interest me. The concept of the brain as a computational device for external senses, and the idea that those inputs can come from your body but could also be connected to other sources, was something I found fascinating.

On the horror side, did you do research into traditions regarding demons or did you invent the film’s mythology?

It’s a combination of both. I did read a lot about the beliefs in different cultures having to do with demons, which was pretty fascinating. But the one in our film is synthetic. Carly Pope, who plays Carly, is in virtually every scene and it’s through her eyes that we experience the film’s varied realms: simulations, nightmares, hallucinations and supernatural events.

How did you cast her and what qualities did she bring to the role? ​

I think Carly Pope is really likeable, and if you have an actor who’s likeable, the audience will go on a journey with her. Plus I had cast her in a bunch of projects for my company, Oats Studios, and she also had a small role in Elysium and I’ve always enjoyed working with her. When I was writing the script I pictured someone similar to Carly and I could see her executing it well. She turned out to be awesome.

The simulation scenes are stunning and also quite unnerving. Can you explain how they were created?

We used an extremely new technology called volumetric capture, which I don’t believe has been used in a film to this extent before. It’s basically three-dimensional video, where you’re turning your actors into geometry. You need about 260 cameras arranged in some sort of grid or dome that can see the actors from all points of view.

So the actors are in a controlled environment with all these cameras, and then the background is added in later?

Yes, it’s all these independent elements. On our stage where we had our 260-camera volumetric setup, the only thing we were gathering was the actors. They were in a very difficult nonconducive-to-acting environment where there was scaffolding and cameras everywhere they looked. And the only elements we got out of those sessions were the actors in that volume. Then separately we photographed the environments they would be put into, which are turned into 3D objects. And then you drop your actor captures into those 3D environments. Once they’re combined, you can set up the shot exactly as you want to see it in the movie and film that with your virtual digital camera.

Probably one of the scariest scenes in the film is when Sam (Kandyse McClure) drops by Carly’s house in the middle of the night and says she’s going to show Carly a trick she can do. How was that sequence achieved? Was it CGI?

What’s interesting about the scene with Sam is that there were absolutely no visual effects whatsoever. It’s all down to one amazing performer. His name is Troy James and he’s just highly flexible. So that whole sequence was just him doing what he does, and we just filmed it normally, and it was amazing.

What kind of conversations did you have with your DP, Byron Kopman, about the look of the film?

I hate how in a lot of horror films the dark environments feel overly lit and synthetic. So the main discussion with Byron was about how much light we could not have in there, in order for it to feel real. For instance, we have scenes that are illuminated only by car headlights or flashlights the actors are holding — none of this giant moonlight with smoke going through the air. The idea was that it would be more believable and hopefully create more of a sense of fear in the audience.

Where and when was Demonic filmed?

We shot the film in the early summer of 2020 in British Columbia in an area called the Okanagan. We did volumetric capture in July and it took another eight months to put the simulation scenes together.

Composer Ola Strandh is probably best known for his acclaimed music for the video game TomClancy’s The Division. Why did you select him to write the score for Demonic?

Music is a huge wealth of inspiration for me; I’m listening to music pretty much all the time. So whenever I come across new artists I really like, I make a note of them. I had heard Ola’s videogame scores and thought they were really amazing. They didn’t automatically make me think of a horror film, I just liked what he was doing with a lot of the electronic sounds. So I contacted him to see if he was interested. It ended up being an awesome collaboration. I love the score and think he did a fantastic job. 

​We are living in a golden age of horror on TV. Shows like ‘The Walking Dead’, ‘Supernatural’ and ‘American Horror Story’ have effectively taken the genre mainstream, offering weekly doses of gore and mayhem to the masses. Go back a decade or two however, and genre fans had far fewer options to choose from. Anthology shows, like ‘Tales From the Crypt’, ‘Monsters’ or ‘Tales From the Darkside’ were king during the horror heyday of the 1980s, providing cheesy and cheerful tongue in cheek horror in half hour bites. It wasn’t until 2005 that the TV horror anthology show got serious, and delivered arguably the most consistent, memorable and scary anthology show to date.
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The brainchild of horror legend Mick Garris, the show’s title is no hyperbole. ‘Masters of Horror’ brought together the best horror talent Hollywood (and beyond) had to offer. Episodes directed by undisputed genre luminaries such as John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento and Stuart Gordon were like hour long movies brought to your TV screen. High production values, A-List talent and a free reign to do whatever they pleased resulted in some truly unforgettable work from a group of horror legends let off their leash. These are stories that have stayed with me in the fifteen years since many initially aired and, in this series, I’ll be revisiting all twenty-six episodes, one at a time, to shine a light on a fondly remembered and undeniably influential moment in horror TV history.

Join me as I take a look back at;

Dream Cruise
Directed by: Norio Tsuruta
Starring: Daniel Gillies, Ryo Ishibashi, Miho Ninagawa, Ethan Amis
Original Air Date: 2 February 2007
Synopsis: A young lawyer suffering crippling nightmares linked to a trauma in his childhood boards a rich clients ship to spend time with the man’s wife, with whom he is having an ill-advised affair.

​Twenty-five episodes down and only one to go and, I’m not going to lie, I’m a little sad to be wrapping things up with this final episode of Season Two (and last ever Masters of Horror episode) ‘Dream Cruise’, by ‘Ring 0’ and ‘Premonition’ director, Norio Tsuruta. It feels fitting that the last episode I watch for this series will be one that I have precisely zero recollections of watching back in 2007 when it aired. It’s almost like watching a brand-new episode! Let’s hope it’s another good one.

When we’re first introduced to Jack (Daniel Gillies) he is having terrible nightmares about a traumatic event in his childhood. We are shown a flashback of a much younger Jack and his little brother Sean as the brothers are out at sea. Sean tips the boat over whilst trying to grab his hat out of the water and the pair go overboard. Jack gets back to the boat ok and tries to grab Sean, but he can’t quite hold on and Sean begins to sink. Adult Jack wakes up before we see more, but it is strongly suggested that Sean drowned, leaving poor Jack with some serious guilt and a severe aversion to going out on the water.

Sucks to be Jack, who is now a lawyer with a major Japanese company. His biggest client, Eiji Saito (Ryo Ishibashi) has run into a spot of legal bother and Jack needs to see him urgently. He speaks to Eiji, who is quite happy to meet up, on the condition that it is on his boat. If Jacks major water phobia didn’t make this a bad enough idea, he is also having a secret affair with Eiji’s wife Naomi (Miho Ninagawa). These three people getting on a boat sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, so I’m all for it.

It’s worth mentioning the context in which this episode first aired. While the genre has lost a little of its mainstream appeal in the West in recent years, back in 2007 we were at the tail end of an explosion of Japanese horror movies. ‘The Ring’ had been a massive success in 1998, spawning multiple sequels, and ‘The Grudge’ had been released just a few years prior to Dream Cruise. We were being inundated with inferior American remakes, which just made the Japanese originals all the more popular. Bearing that in mind, ‘Dream Cruise’ came along at just the right time, offering an authentic J-Horror experience when remakes were becoming more prevalent and the original Japanese content was beginning to wane, at least in terms of availability outside of Japan. There are a lot of J-Horror tropes to be found in Dream Cruise, but we'll get to that later.

So, Jack, Naomi and Eiji are all on the boat, they’ve cast off and they are very much alone out on the open sea. Eiji can’t possibly know about the affair though, right? Wouldn’t that make for a boring episode! It’s pretty clear as soon as they are safely away from dry land that Eiji knows exactly what's been going on and that he intends to do something about it. Before he gets his chance the boat's propellor gets stuck in some seaweed and Eiji goes down to investigate while, on the surface, Jack and Naomi argue about whether to kill him (Naomi is staunchly pro-murder, Jack not so much). Eiji seems to get caught in the propellor, which surely makes this debate moot but, lo and behold, Eiji comes back out of the water, seemingly fine. Something fishy is going on here…

I’m talking a lot of plot at the moment and, in my defence, that’s about all there is to talk about at this stage. It has all been a very slow burn of a start. There have been a couple of early jump-scares but, other than that, this is very much in drama, possibly thriller territory. Certainly not much in the way of horror, but it is pretty tense. It was pretty clear from the second they got on the boat that some kind of showdown was inevitable, and the journey getting there has been very effective at keeping viewers on edge. The question now, is does it pay off?
​
So, I think it’s fair to say that I got a little lost at this point. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of exciting stuff happening. I just don’t claim to fully understand it. From what I can gather, there is a ghost on board but it is not Sean, haunting Jack for letting him drown. It is actually Eiji’s first wife, Naomi, who Eiji had murdered (on this very boat no less). Oh, and also, Eiji is dead and is possessed by Naomi, and has been dead presumably since he went down to fix the propellor. There are some awesome effects in these sequences, like when we see Eiji’s face as it truly is (i.e., horrifically mangled), or when Jack thinks he’s gotten the better of Eiji, only for his severed arm to start attacking him. The final reveal of Naomi is also very effective and she looks, well, like pretty much every J-horror ghost from the noughties, but it’s a trope because it works dammit! 

If I have things right, Yuri then gets possessed by Naomi and attacks Jack, who defends himself but stops short of killing Yuri with an axe when Sean appears to him. I’m not quite sure what Naomi’s problem with the pair are, or why ghost Sean has chosen now to make an appearance, but Jack and Yuri jump overboard to escape. Free from the ship and safely ensconced in a life raft, the unhappy couple seem safe, until the (very angry looking) ghost of Naomi starts floating across the water toward them to finish them off. The image of Naomi slowly gliding across to them, in the dark, out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but empty sea wherever you look, is pretty scary stuff. Dream Cruise may have been low key for the most part, but that image will stay with me.

Out of options and with nowhere to go, Jack and Yuri are surely doomed now, yes?

Wrong.

Sean to the rescue! Ghost Sean grabs ghost Naomi and sinks to the bottom of the sea clutching her, saving the day whilst simultaneously demonstrating to Jack that he doesn’t hold him responsible for his death. Damn Sean, you got me right in the feels with that one.

Dream Cruise is a solid episode and is a rare entry in the Masters of Horror canon in that it is, for the most part, a very slow and atmospheric offering that relies on building up tension as opposed to big set pieces and bold practical effects. Having said that, I can’t help but feel that it is quite a slow-going episode to end the season on, and I would have liked to have seen Dream Cruise swap places with The Washingtonians so we could have ended on a cannibal massacre as opposed to a low-key moment where a man comes to terms with his young brother’s death as he stares wistfully at a photograph as the credits roll. I don’t want to take anything away from Dream Cruise, which is a creepy little thriller with some very well-done supernatural elements. It may not have been the ideal episode to end the series on, but it is a good episode and one that offers something different to the twenty-five episodes that came before it. In fact, I think that sums up Masters of Horror very well. Consistently surprising to the very last.

Thank you for joining me on this thirteen week long look back at a seminal series that is so near and dear to me. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series as much as I have. In fact…

Anyone up for a rewatch?

​We are living in a golden age of horror on TV. Shows like ‘The Walking Dead’, ‘Supernatural’ and ‘American Horror Story’ have effectively taken the genre mainstream, offering weekly doses of gore and mayhem to the masses. Go back a decade or two however, and genre fans had far fewer options to choose from.
 Anthology shows, like ‘Tales From the Crypt’, ‘Monsters’ or ‘Tales From the Darkside’ were king during the horror heyday of the 1980s, providing cheesy and cheerful tongue in cheek horror in half hour bites. It wasn’t until 2005 that the TV horror anthology show got serious, and delivered arguably the most consistent, memorable and scary anthology show to date.
​
The brainchild of horror legend Mick Garris, the show’s title is no hyperbole. ‘Masters of Horror’ brought together the best horror talent Hollywood (and beyond) had to offer. Episodes directed by undisputed genre luminaries such as John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento and Stuart Gordon were like hour long movies brought to your TV screen. High production values, A-List talent and a free reign to do whatever they pleased resulted in some truly unforgettable work from a group of horror legends let off their leash. These are stories that have stayed with me in the fifteen years since many initially aired and, in this series, I’ll be revisiting all twenty-six episodes, one at a time, to shine a light on a fondly remembered and undeniably influential moment in horror TV history.
Join me as I take a look back at

Poe chases Pluto down into his cellar where Cissie follows to see what all the noise is about. She finds her husband desperately trying to get his hands on the cat that has been taunting him. In an inconsolable rage, Poe picks up an axe, hoping to kill the cat once and for all, takes a swing when he sees it run past him, and misses in quite spectacular fashion, cleaving Cissie’s head in two instead. Cue almost a full minute of poor Cissie, still alive, running around the cellar with a bisected head, trying to pull the axe out while Poe basically just panics and does nothing to help until she seemingly drops dead. It comes out of nowhere (I’ve read the short, knew it happened and was still taken by surprise) and is so ridiculously violent, it is quite a shock since up until now it has been a relatively tame episode by Masters of Horror standards.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that ‘The Black Cat’ is some of Stuart Gordons best work. It is a slower burn than his more famous horror output, although not without its explosively gruesome moments. The period setting is a nice change of pace and looks great on screen, and it feels like a bigger budget production than it truly is. The real MVP of the episode however is Jeffrey Combs, who spends much of the episode as the only character on screen (a writer’s life is a solitary one after all). He throws himself into the role and is a joy to watch. The whole episode, in fact, was a joy to watch and this stands out to me as one of the most watchable and underrated of the run.
​
Join me next time as I’ll be looking at episode twelve of the second season, Peter Medak’s ‘The Washingtonians’. See you then!

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If you missed any of Richard's previous Revisting The Masters of Horror articles, you can find links to them all here on our handy landing page 
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THE MASTERS OF HORROR ​

Last year we interviewed Steve Urena about his amazing comic book creation Slow Pokes, a brilliantly funny and violent comic about killer psychotic Sloths.  Yeas you read that right.  Today we are excited to brig you news of Steve's latest project which if Slow Pokes is anything to go by will be a must read for horror fans.  

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From the messed-up brain of Steve Urena, the guy who brought you fast killer sloths, (Slow Pokes) comes a romance horror-comedy that is full of zombies, romance and even a grandmother fighting a horde with a chancleta.

Drawn by Sergi Domènech, colored by Joe Jensen and edited by Allegra Calderaro, this unforgettable reimagining of the zombie genre is a hilarious action-packed thrill ride that will sink its teeth into you while leaving you on the edge of your seat.
“I want to give my take on a zombie story while doing something a little different than what people are used to”, says Urena.

“We’ve all been on awkward first dates. But what if you were trying to put your best foot forward and a zombie outbreak happened? What would you do? Zombie Date Night helps me answer that question in the craziest and most fun way possible.”

If you like Zombies, over-the-top-violence, and a love story for the current age then…

​Click the link and pre-order now!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/steveurena/zombie-date-night-a-zombie-romance-horror-comedy

Follow us on this crazy comic journey on Instagram and Twitter for more updates and bonus content!
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@TheSteveUrena
@ZombieDatenight
@Sergi_Domenech_comic
Or you can email us at Zombiedatenight@gmail.com