Category: Horror

It Came from the Closet [Review]

It Came from the Closet – Queer Reflections on Horror Edited by Joe Vallese The Feminist Press, 2022 Time to squeeze in one more book review for October! It Came from the Closet is a collection of essays by LGBTQ writers about their favorite horror movie and why they like it. That it scares them …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/30/24: Mummies

The 1930s and 1940s were a golden age for horror movies AND graphic design for horror movie posters. Look at the color, the composition,  the pleasing mix of typefaces in the poster above! It’s gorgeous. Which brings me to the subject of mummies. Mummies are part of the rarefied classic movie monster club that includes …

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AI Art Adventures: Homemade Halloween Costumes

In 2018 and 2020 I posted lists of randomly generated Halloween costumes and I thought it would be fun this year to see what Midjourney came up with for those prompts. Most were variations on ” [person]  dressed as a [randomly generated thing] , homemade costume,  candid, casual photo, Halloween setting –c 15″. The –c …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/23/24: Horror Movie Antagonists

As it’s turning towards Halloween, I thought I’d do a post on second and third-tier horror movie antagonists. The human kind, not monsters. There are many versions of Dracula, The Wolfman, and Mummy and even more imitators. From the get-go, the Silent Movie era spawned Count Orlok (Nosferatu, 1922) an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula …

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The Sentinals

Silent they stood, surveying the quiet countryside. It was a matter of time before they would be discovered, yet it mattered not to them; the world would have changed so drastically by that point that none of the sentients would have been much interested.

Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/17/24: The Best of Twittersnips (Horror and Halloween)

Oh, the horrors! Here’s a selection from Twitternaps of the past. All meant in fun of course.   Horror and Halloween Horror movies The Reptiloid Slayer The Island of Medusa Echoes of the Silence Attack of the Giant Centipede Mark of the Zombie Lake of a Thousand Lunatics Blade of the Werewolf Queen Horror movie …

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AI Art Adventures: Hamster Accident (Refined)

By themselves, the pics in my last post about hamsters and exercise wheels were pretty stupid. But it’s always possible to refine them. I had put “flying” in one of the prompts, but instead of giving me a hamster flung off his exercise wheel and flying through the air, I got superhero-type hamsters wearing capes. …

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AI Art Adventures: Poltergeists

Users of Midjourney know every day brings a new theme word to play around with decided by the site’s creators. (I suspect it’s a way for the owners to iron out problems with the AI’s interpretation of that word.)  One recent word, for example, was generuk, which is a species of long-necked antelope renowned for …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/25/23: Vampires Around the World

  Vampires are a horror staple and one that has, in the Western world, a stereotyped appearance: pale and with elongated canine teeth. They are generally evil, allergic to daylight, and have  magnetic eyes and hypnotizing powers. The mockumentary movie What We Do in the Darkness takes this trope to a whole new level with …

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Human Pomegranate

Some Biblical scholars believe the apple of the Garden of Eden was actually a pomegranate, apples being unknown in the Middle East many thousands of years ago. But I’m sure it wasn’t a fruit like this one, which is beautiful yet eerie.