horror

The premise is deceptively simple: A group of girlfriends reunite on a Maine camping trip for the first time in years. They come across three military men, long-ago acquaintances from school, and the groups merge for a lakeshore party. Alcohol is imbibed, and one of the girls heads off to the woods with one of the men.

The best stories are the juicy ones. This episode of our feminist pop culture podcast is all about pulp (timely, right?). We talk with best-selling thriller writer Chelsea Cain about how her pregnancy inspired her to get started writing gory stories and she reads us a horrific short story about a hungry zombie baby. Then, we feature a sneak-peek excerpt from Monica Nolan's new lesbian erotica pulp, Maxine Mainwearing: Lesbian Dilettante. Finally, we talk with everyone's favorite mystery writer Laura Lippman about love, money, and reality television. 

All that, in just 20 minutes. Listen in! 

Read on for the transcript of this show and other listening options.

You’d think that kids these days would know better than to read what's inside of a book bound by human skin, especially if those kids are taking shelter in a cabin in the middle of the woods. 

I believe this movie stirred something in me. Perhaps the feelings I had for my ’97 sea foam Geo Metro? That was a similarly creaky and stressful thing that I’d have preferred to chop up for parts.

For good or for bad, Mama opens with a far more chilling scene than any of the film's subsequent ghostfoolery:  It’s the beginning of the Great Recession and a freshly-ruined man in a suit runs horrific errands around town—first, shooting partners in his office and eventually making his way to his estranged wife and children. After a sad, heavy gunshot in an unseen room, the man kidnaps his two young daughters by car (naturally, the license plate: reads “N1 DAD”).

Here's your warning: This rest of this review will contain some spoilers.

Candyman is my new favorite horror film—never mind that it came out in 1992.

The series' penultimate post reciprocates holiday cheer with House and Coraline, two films about girls who live in haunted houses.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, "Tupelo" (click for lyrics)

On election day I was cheerily envisioning a future beyond hate and war with Robyn and Janelle Monae. Yesterday and today I woke up and the future looked impossibly angry and male and white, surging up from the past, all grudge-guns firing.

For some reason, there is an outdated notion that women don’t like horror movies. The truth is, women don’t just like horror—they’ve been making it for decades, and the genre would not be itself today it if it weren’t for the perseverance of women in the industry. Here are three women that made it possible...

You feminist horror fans out there probably already know that The Exorcist is being re-released next week on Blu-Ray and DVD, complete with new special features and an extended director's cut. What you might not know, however, is that your friends at Bitch Media (hi, that's us) have five copies of said DVD that we'll be giving away throughout the month of October as a part of our Horror Show series celebrating feminist horror in pop culture! Read on to find out how to win one of these horror-filled DVDs—if you dare!!!

The fourth season of Dexter premiered this Sunday, and I was rather more excited about it than I would like to admit.  I started watching back in the day because it was Michael C. Hall, and I was a Six Feet Under fan from waaaaayyy back, and I made it my business to ensure that the wonderful actors of that show continued to be employed for the forseeable future.  As it turns out, Dexter was about as different a role from David Fisher as one could hope for, and I still loved Hall anyway.  And then Dexter turned out to have a fallible narrator, which is a favorite literary device of mine.  And then, also, it turned out to be bloody.  And it had Julie Benz (Darla from Buffy and Angel)!  Also there were Latino actors who were not total background characters!  I've been hooked ever since.  It's camp, and camp can be thoroughly enjoyable when it's as well-written and acted as Dexter is.

But that aside, I tend to have a lot of difficulty justifying my love of Dexter to myself in feminist terms.  The macabre is not terribly woman-friendly, after all.  Horror movies tends to feed on the startling contrast between blood and really hot  blonde chicks, and there's more titillation in it (pun intended), one supposes, than anyone would like to admit.  I don't know what makes us morbid; I do notice, though, that the ratio of men to women of my acquaintance who hate horror, and don't like "dark" themes in their arts and entertainment, is roughly 1:1.  So perhaps it's an experience that's less gendered than I might otherwise be inclined to say.