Coffin Hop: Happy Halloween!

Welcome to Coffin Hop 2014!

** Be sure to stop by the main Coffin Hop site and visit a bunch of authors, artists, etc. Coffin Hopping through Halloween. There'll be prizes, giveaways, ghoulish fun and more!  (See all the Coffin Hop books at the bookstore. Don't forget the giveaways we have on most of our posts here. See page tab at top or side logo for day one.)


Movie and Book Monsters, Oh My!
By Christine Verstraete


What is so alluring about being scared?

I don't mean real life scared, but monster movie or scary book scared?

You sit and read Stephen King or Dean Koontz, holding your breath, or you peek around your hands, afraid to look at the screen, but you do. You can't help it. You have to. 

I've loved monsters since I don't remember when. The classics,  the Universal Monsters - the Wolfman, Dracula, Frankenstein - especially thrilled me not because they were scary to today's mind, but I think of their original effect. I remember my mom saying that when she saw Frankenstein as a girl, she was petrified and had nightmares. As a child in the 1930s, this was an unimaginable horror, a dead creature walking. Sheer terror.

What makes those movies so great, I think, is that they present terror in its simplest form, preying on your senses without the Technicolor bloodbaths of today's movies. Sometimes simpler can better.

Of course, to be truly scared today, the author and filmmaker must take fear to another level.  It's the absolute horror of what will come next in the Saw movies;

It means waiting, heart beating, for Freddy Krueger (Nightmare on Elm Street) to appear with those horrible knife talons;

It means waiting for that chainsaw revving up and the absolute horror of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

While I love watching zombie movies and reading about them, when it comes to super-scary, I'll pick Freddy Krueger as the "monster" who scares me the most. Maybe because he's a person and he has this horrifying ability to show up anywhere, anytime, knowing you cannot escape.

That is scary. Thank goodness, it's only a movie.

Right?

Wait.... did-did you hear... something? 

ARGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!

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THIS JUST IN!!! NEW ZOMBIE BOOK NEWS!

 

 
The perfect tie-in. Speaking of horror films, co-blogger Pembroke Sinclair (writing as Jessica Robinson) has just released her new nonfiction book, Undead Obsessed: Finding Meaning in Zombies 

About the book: Horror films are a great lens to examine concerns society has about modern science. Let’s face it, when it comes to horror movies, science has a bad reputation. Blind ambition, experimental serums, and genetic experiments are often blamed for the giant monster terrorizing the city or the reason aliens are taking human prisoners or the cause of the dead rising from the grave to consume living flesh. 

Using film, literature, and interviews with experts, Robinson examines how zombies portray real-world fears such as epidemics, mind control, what may or may not exist in space, the repercussions of playing God, and the science behind the fears. Robinson's goal is to explore how zombies become a metaphor for our fears of science and what could happen if science gets out of hand.
(Paperback and coming to kindle).

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I hope you enjoyed visiting our blog and Coffin Hopping with us as much as we enjoyed planning it. Do come back as we schedule more posts later talking about zombies, other creatures of the night and whatever weird stuff strikes our fancy. Please subscribe and follow us. Thanks for stopping by!

Animations: http://www.heathersanimations.com/halloween.html

Twitter:  @caverstraete

 ** GIRL Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie - What happens when you're 16 and turn part-#zombie? 

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