girlies of indian horror (part 2)

shobana in manichitrathazu//revathi in raat//urmila matondkar in bhoot//tripti dimri in bulbbul//vidya balan in bhool bhulaiya//juhi chawla in darr//waheeda rehman in kohraa//lima das in aamis//sadhana in woh kaun thi?

Black Narcissus, 1947, dirs. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

Bulbbul (2020) | dir. Anvita Dutt

Posters for Woh Kaun Thi? (1964)

Better than Bollywood?

In this episode of NOW SLAYING, Colton & Rowan break open the new Indian horror film, IT LIVES INSIDE! Does this usher in an exciting new horror director? Does the entity bear a striking resemblance to another horror creature from this year? And, does Rowan continue to call this movie by a more X-rated title?

Tune in to find out if we gave this film a NAY, OKAY, YAY, or SLAY!

Available now on your favourite podcast app!

rip 1920′s Conrad Veidt fangirls, you would have loved 2020′s tumblr

I Was a Teenage Slasher by New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, The Only Good Indians) will be published on July 16, 2024 via Simon & Schuster.

A slasher story told from the killer's perspective, the 384-page horror novel will be available in hardcover, e-book, and audio book. Jon Bush designed the jacket cover. Read on for the synopsis.

1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, the unfairness of being on the outside, through the slasher horror he lives but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.

Pre-order I Was a Teenage by Stephen Graham Jones.

2024 Book Review #8 – The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham James

This has been on my tbr for long enough that I entirely forget what originally put it there – the only thing I actually knew going in was that the author was ‘the My Heart is a Chainsaw guy’ (I have not read My Heart is a Chainsaw yet either). Given the genre, that was honestly probably ideal. As was the fact that a blizzard hit a couple days after I started it and I’ve been reading it looking out on a frozen snowscape – it’s very much a winter sort of story.

The story’s told in five parts of wildly varying lengths, each with it’s own endearingly cheesy b-horror movie title and each following a different protagonist. The first four each follow one of a friend group who, as a bunch of fuckup teenagers, trespassed on hunting grounds that were really supposed to be reserved for elders and shot a bunch of elk they had no right to – including a pregnant young cow who was for one reason or another special. Ten years later, the Elk-Headed Woman drags herself back into the world, and begins getting her vengeance for the death of her and her child on each of them (and everyone they care about) in turn.

I have a longstanding opinion that a full-length novel is just too long to sustain a real horror story – by 300 pages things have fairly reliably collapse into urban fantasy or action or farce. The breakup into different parts solves this very well – they’re all very much connected and interwoven, but each feels like its own distinct narrative unit with its own tension and rising action.

And this is very much a horror story in the classic, just barely short of shlocky sense. A trespass against vague but understood sacred laws that leads to horrific and bloody retribution against everyone involved is as close to archtypal horror as you can possibly get, after all. The last section is even focused on a Final Girl! Specifically, it’s a subgenre that I can’t really name but feels very familiar to me – and one I’ve always been a huge fan of, anyway. It’s somewhere downstream of The Count of Monte Cristo, a story where the agent of supernatural doom spends the majority of the story consciously working in the background, manipulating events and exacerbating the protagonist/victim’s flaws to lead them to a contrived but tragic end? Think the netflix Fall of the House of Usher, but like about the exact opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Class is very much something the book cares about. All four protagonists grew up poor on a reservation with little in the way of wealth or opportunity, and by the time they’d turned eighteen all four of them were the kind of young asshole who made life just a little bit worse for everyone around them dealing with the same shit. Ten years latter the three of them who’ve survived that long have gotten over themselves and matured in their own way (and to their own degree), but none of them are exactly flush with cash or living lives of bourgeois respectability (though Lewis comes close). The precarity and only tenuous connections to the society around them just make them better prey for what’s hunting them, of course – in every case, death comes after the (either metaphorical or very viscerally literal) destruction of the few close ties they have, and the only one to survive is also the only one who could really expect people to come rushing to their rescue.

Speaking of close ties the protagonists have – the book’s conception of gender is fascinatingly weird, or at least fascinating in the sense that I’m not at all sure how intentional it is. Of the four main victims, one dies alone at eighteen, and the other three who survive the next ten years are all pretty much explicitly saved (or at least improved and uplifted) by a relationship with a woman who, if not flawless, is basically strictly his moral and practical better. Even the most consistent fuckup of the group has a redeeming feature of being willing to do just about anything for his daughter (despite having lost the chance to really be a big part of her life several times over). With one exception, these women all then die, messily, entirely and explicitly to fuck with and ruin the lives of their men. It’s like someone read Women in Refrigerators and went ‘well there’s an idea...’. It’s blatant enough that I feel like it’s got to be making a deliberate point, but (unless it’s just genre emulation) what the point is does escape me slightly.

Also on the note of stuff I’m quite sure is going over my head at least a bit – basketball! It’s a pretty vital thread running through the entire book, to the point that one of the big set pieces of the final act is literally a basketball game with the monster. Which, like, I watched enough bad anime as a small child to find contrived game-playing under unclear mythic rules with things that really want to kill you instinctively endearing, but I can’t really do anything with this except just point at it.

So as the title might imply, this is a novel that’s concerned with race – all but I believe exactly one character is either is either Blackfeet or Crow, more than half the book takes place on a reservation, and a chunk of the rest is spent having to deal with racist assholes of varying severity. Now, I admit that I have at this point a probably overly cynical view of books that end up on breathless ‘socially conscious horror’ or ‘s/ff from diverse creators you NEED to read’ lists online, but I was still rather pleasantly by how matter-of-factly this was handled? I suppose the best way to put it is that culture, upbringing and racialization deeply inform everyone’s characters, but it never feels like the book is preoccupied with providing some assumed naive and impressionable audience any Important Lessons or provide Good Representation to valourize or emulate? Which is probably just a sign I need to raise and re calibrate my expectations, but.

The monster doesn’t exactly work as, like, a coherent character in terms of her skills and abilities, but as a monster the Elk-Headed Woman is great. But then I love contrived fucked up tragedies and am a longstanding partisan of Spooky Deer Horror, so I suppose I would say that.

So yeah, fun read!

girlies of indian horror pt. 2 (part 1)

shraddha kapoor in stree//jasmine in veerana//anushka sharma in pari//remya nambeesan in pizza//bipasha basu in raaz// Pooja bhatt in junoon//madhubala in mahal//jyothika in chandramukhi//urmila matondkar in kaun?

🕸️💞🕸️💞🕸️~happy october~ 🕸️💞🕸️💞🕸️

day 24 of horror mythology: nale ba

the myth goes that a witch roams the streets at night and knocks on doors. the witch speaks in the voices of your kin to trick you into opening the door. if you open the door, you will die. to protect themselves, residents write "naale baa" outside their doors and on their walls. "naale baa" means "come tomorrow".

Deer Lady from Reservation Dogs and Elk Head Woman from Stephen Graham Jones' book The Only Good Indians is the horror team-up we need.

[Elk Head Woman 🎨 by @shoomlah]

Nagina (1986)

Caribe's Mystery/Thriller/Horror Fiction TBR - Part 1

if stephen graham jones has a million fans, then i'm one of them. if stephen graham jones has one fan, then i'm THAT ONE. if stephen graham jones has no fans, that means i've died a horrific, slasher-worthy death.

A playlist for one of the best literary horror girlies: Jade Daniels from the Jade Daniels trilogy (My Heart is a Chainsaw, Don’t Fear the Reaper, and The Angel of Indian Lake) written by Stephen Graham Jones.

I had to make this as I read an advance copy of The Angel of Indian Lake (out later this year!!) with a moodboard because I’m well into my feelings about the series and Jade.