I select a thematically appropriate horror movie for each day of the year and tell you about it.
Why?
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
How do you get to decide what qualifies as a horror movie and where each one goes on the calendar?
I am the Mayor of Horror Movies.
Are all these movies good?
Oh gosh no. But I recommend all of them to the adventurous viewer.
What’s with the CWs?
In horror movies, disturbing material is part of the entertainment package. But for some viewers, elements like sexual violence or bigotry ruin the fun. For those folks, I include content warnings. That said, the warnings are based on my personal reactions and should not be expected to cover all potential cinematic skeeviness, so proceed with caution.
Who are you, aside from the mayor?
I’m Shaenon K. Garrity. I’m mostly a cartoonist. I watch a lot of scary movies while I draw cartoons.
Never watched this one, never will—even if it’s a completely crappy adaptation, the original novel freaked me out too much, even before I had kids of my own. It’s the only story of Stephen King’s I can’t bring myself to reread.
But I do occasionally pull the book down to reread just the last two paragraphs, probably the most perfect lines in any of King’s novels (except in Salem’s Lot, where he uses the matchless opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House as an epigraph).
The story freaked King out when he wrote it. His family lived in a house near a blind turn on a busy road. Across from that road was a little wooded space. His kids and other from the neighborhood had a game called “funeral.” They would take a wagon and collect the animals that got hit on their stretch of road and bury them in that wooded patch. One day King’s son was either struck or came close to being struck by a car (either way, the child recovered). And King was just struck by the idea of his son being buried with all of the animals in the children’s animal cemetery. He wrote the novel quickly, and was so horrified that he locked it in a drawer and refused to look at it again for about a year.
Never watched this one, never will—even if it’s a completely crappy adaptation, the original novel freaked me out too much, even before I had kids of my own. It’s the only story of Stephen King’s I can’t bring myself to reread.
But I do occasionally pull the book down to reread just the last two paragraphs, probably the most perfect lines in any of King’s novels (except in Salem’s Lot, where he uses the matchless opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House as an epigraph).
The story freaked King out when he wrote it. His family lived in a house near a blind turn on a busy road. Across from that road was a little wooded space. His kids and other from the neighborhood had a game called “funeral.” They would take a wagon and collect the animals that got hit on their stretch of road and bury them in that wooded patch. One day King’s son was either struck or came close to being struck by a car (either way, the child recovered). And King was just struck by the idea of his son being buried with all of the animals in the children’s animal cemetery. He wrote the novel quickly, and was so horrified that he locked it in a drawer and refused to look at it again for about a year.
I’ve always felt that if the cat had been, say, a puppy none of this would have happened.
“Man, that cat’s being kind of a dick since he came back from the dead.”
“Yeah, cats are great but they can be moody.”
Versus
“Man, since I reanimated my golden retriever he attacked two people. Maybe I wont put my kid in the ground that birthed that canine abomination.”