Some horror and horror-adjacent media
Jun. 1st, 2026 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterA book as well as two more movies! I'm off my sickbed now and a bit movie'd out for the time being, so this will probably be the last of the deluge.
The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher: Trying to get back on her feet after a divorce, thirtysomething Kara (nicknamed Carrot) goes to stay with her eccentric Uncle Earl and help him run his small-town museum of curiosities. She and her new friend Simon (a flamboyantly gay barista from the café next door) are repairing a hole in the museum's drywall when they discover a secret passageway on the other side of the hole that leads to a mysterious other world. At first, they think they've stumbled into a sort of Narnia. They very quickly learn that the truth is much darker.
I'm coming to think of Kingfisher as an author with a very strong brand; every book of hers I've read so far has featured some combination of relatable millennial protagonist (usually sorting herself out after the end of a bad relationship), lovable elderly mentor, casually queer supporting cast, quirky sense of humour, cute-but-has-attitude animal companion, and worldbuilding that straddles the line between horror, fantasy and fairytale. It's a lot of fun to read and has left me with a lovely cosy feeling despite the fairly extreme body horror scares along the way.
The Hitch-Hiker (1953): More thriller/noir than horror, but this seventy minutes of three men driving car through (as far as I can tell) the same stretch of American desert multiple times in a row was up there with many a lauded horror flick for how hard it made me sweat. Serial killer Emmett Myers poses as a hitch-hiker and forces two blokes on a fishing trip to drive him to a port city from which he plans to flee the country. There is something so satisfying about older movies that have not yet fallen prey to our exaggerated modern action/adventure norms: the fact that Myers has a gun he's willing to use is taken really fucking seriously. Nobody is badass-karate-disarming this guy. Not even when he’s asleep, in case he wakes up and shoots them. The lack of daring hand-to-hand combat does not make the film one iota less exciting.
The Shallows (2016): Blake Lively plays a surfer with no survival instincts, who hitch-hikes solo with a strange man in a foreign country whose language she barely speaks to get to a secret beach where no one knows to look for her. When this fails to get her killed, she goes out in the surf and stays there even after the local surfers who know the conditions have called it quits for the night and advised her to do the same. She sees a dead whale floating in the water and swims right up to it to investigate, and in doing so, royally pisses off the massive great white shark feeding on the carcass. She manages to get up onto a tiny rock island that is only above water at low tide, but the shark now sees her as a threat to its hunting ground (I have no idea how accurate this is in terms of shark psychology, though suspicion tells me Probably Not Very) and is so obsessed with killing her that it loses interest in the whale. This was very fun and very dumb and made me love not being a surfer even more than I already do. You will never, EVER catch me out there in water deep enough for sharks. Fun fact, this movie was shot in Australia! Motherfuckers are like, “Oh, Australia is so scary, all the snakes and spiders want to kill you!” and then they come here and go surfing. I have literally never even heard of anyone being harmed by a snake or spider. I personally know a guy who was bitten and almost killed by a shark.
The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher: Trying to get back on her feet after a divorce, thirtysomething Kara (nicknamed Carrot) goes to stay with her eccentric Uncle Earl and help him run his small-town museum of curiosities. She and her new friend Simon (a flamboyantly gay barista from the café next door) are repairing a hole in the museum's drywall when they discover a secret passageway on the other side of the hole that leads to a mysterious other world. At first, they think they've stumbled into a sort of Narnia. They very quickly learn that the truth is much darker.
I'm coming to think of Kingfisher as an author with a very strong brand; every book of hers I've read so far has featured some combination of relatable millennial protagonist (usually sorting herself out after the end of a bad relationship), lovable elderly mentor, casually queer supporting cast, quirky sense of humour, cute-but-has-attitude animal companion, and worldbuilding that straddles the line between horror, fantasy and fairytale. It's a lot of fun to read and has left me with a lovely cosy feeling despite the fairly extreme body horror scares along the way.
The Hitch-Hiker (1953): More thriller/noir than horror, but this seventy minutes of three men driving car through (as far as I can tell) the same stretch of American desert multiple times in a row was up there with many a lauded horror flick for how hard it made me sweat. Serial killer Emmett Myers poses as a hitch-hiker and forces two blokes on a fishing trip to drive him to a port city from which he plans to flee the country. There is something so satisfying about older movies that have not yet fallen prey to our exaggerated modern action/adventure norms: the fact that Myers has a gun he's willing to use is taken really fucking seriously. Nobody is badass-karate-disarming this guy. Not even when he’s asleep, in case he wakes up and shoots them. The lack of daring hand-to-hand combat does not make the film one iota less exciting.
The Shallows (2016): Blake Lively plays a surfer with no survival instincts, who hitch-hikes solo with a strange man in a foreign country whose language she barely speaks to get to a secret beach where no one knows to look for her. When this fails to get her killed, she goes out in the surf and stays there even after the local surfers who know the conditions have called it quits for the night and advised her to do the same. She sees a dead whale floating in the water and swims right up to it to investigate, and in doing so, royally pisses off the massive great white shark feeding on the carcass. She manages to get up onto a tiny rock island that is only above water at low tide, but the shark now sees her as a threat to its hunting ground (I have no idea how accurate this is in terms of shark psychology, though suspicion tells me Probably Not Very) and is so obsessed with killing her that it loses interest in the whale. This was very fun and very dumb and made me love not being a surfer even more than I already do. You will never, EVER catch me out there in water deep enough for sharks. Fun fact, this movie was shot in Australia! Motherfuckers are like, “Oh, Australia is so scary, all the snakes and spiders want to kill you!” and then they come here and go surfing. I have literally never even heard of anyone being harmed by a snake or spider. I personally know a guy who was bitten and almost killed by a shark.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-02 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-04 09:20 am (UTC)It's SO SCARY. I'm sure we all like to imagine ourselves as secret badasses in whom a life-or-death situation would uncover a deep well of intuitive karate skills, but I know in my bones that how those guys coped with being held at gunpoint is the absolute BEST case scenario for how I would cope with being held at gunpoint. Which makes the whole threat so much realer than even the best choreographed action scene.