Satisfying Slashers
And a fresh take on the haunted house.
The last few months have been eventful. I had to say goodbye to a family member, have been editing a novel, and finished a mentorship program with the Horror Writers Association. It’s why this newsletter hasn’t come out in a while, and why my TBR pile is at an all-time high.
But despite the highs and lows, new conversations and learning curves, I’ve come to understand the importance of following the things you love. For me, that’s storytelling. Specifically, scary storytelling. It pushes me forward, encourages me to look back, and serves as a constant reminder of what it is to be human.
When I finish any story I love, be that in film, writing, gaming, or something else, I read around it. I watch interviews with the creator or creators, read essays they’ve penned to understand what drove someone to that place. How did they get from here to there?
In doing exactly that for the book I mention below, I learned that “if you do a body scan on someone, until the moment of eruption, a scream and a laugh present exactly the same physiologically.”
If that doesn’t offer some weight to the joy of horror, if that doesn’t give you something to think about, maybe it’s time you settled into something scary.
Last night, I finished My Heart Is A Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones, staying up too late because I couldn’t put it down.
It follows the story of Jade Daniels, someone who’s misunderstood, angry, using her immense, encyclopedic knowledge of slashers to navigate a world that’s been unjust and cruel.
She knows every slasher’s history. She’s noticed every nuance and doesn’t care who hears it. But as new houses for the super-rich start construction in her town of Proofrock, and real blood is spilt in Indian Lake, she turns her love of slashers and final girls into practical knowledge to predict what horrors await.
If anyone’s going to write a standout slasher, it’s Jones. He’s already authored The Last Final Girl and The Only Good Indians (which I talked about here), but My Heart Is A Chainsaw felt different. Different, maybe, from any other book I’ve read.
It felt like a story Jones has been gearing up to share. A novel by someone who loves slashers for someone who loves slashers. It’s worth mentioning here that the more you know about Scream, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Jaws, and so on, the more rewarding this book will be. It oozes trivia.
My Heart Is A Chainsaw is a lot of fun, especially the last 150 pages or so. But really, it’s more than that. It’s a love letter to slashers. A homage to horror. A story that manages to say so much about fear, injustice, and finding solace in the things you love.
For a lot of people, horror is a safe space. Somewhere to escape the true horrors that come thick and fast in the real world. But it’s when horror deals with the struggles of the real-world, and brings them into its stories, that horror can become something special.
About a month ago, I watched His House.
Written and directed by Remi Weekes, it’s about two refugees who flee South Sudan for the UK and, when they arrive, are forced to stay in a rundown property with harsh ultimatums on how it would benefit them to fit into English life. What follows is the realisation that the world outside their new home is unwelcoming, racist, and that the rooms inside it are haunted.
I won’t go into the ins and outs of what that involves, as it’s worth discovering yourself, but I will say that His House is the freshest take on a haunted house film I’ve seen in a long time. Not only does it hit the right beats in creating a tone that’s unnerving, but it offers a disturbing and deep look at grief, culture, and the impact of the refugee crisis.
Before you go
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/ JW