Franki Colett RCAD Lit of Horror

When the movie Cabin in the Woods came out back in 2012, I remember watching it in high school thinking that it was just the typical horror movie not realizing that it was part of a sub-genre called “new weird”. Watching it now after all these years, the storyline is actually better because I now know what the goal of the film was as opposed to just thinking they couldn’t decide what they wanted so they threw things from every horror movie ever together and called it a day. At first, when you meet the characters you immediately see that they are all extreme stereotypes of people in horror movies; the jock, the dumb blonde, the stoner, the academic, and the virgin. You don’t know until the end that they were all chosen because they were to be sacrificed to ancient gods because of the stereotypes. Because the movie is very typical of horror movies when they break the screen to show a company watching them and taking bets on what is going to happen you’re left confused on how the compa...

Prior to being assigned this book for this class, I had never read anything that was science fiction before, so this book in the “new weird” style was totally a new experience for me. While I didn’t mind the book, I also didn’t enjoy it because it was too weird for me personally. I guess that means that the book achieved it was supposed to since that’s the goal of this genre. I can see however how people would enjoy this style of writing since it truly unlike anything else where everything that you’re reading is made up and new to you so there’s a lot of discovery and thinking involved as the reader. A few of the most standout strange things this book had to offer was Mord, who was a giant flying bear who protected “the company”. Mord was also so large that his fur collected objects as he moved that people would climb onto him and take for survival in their post-apocalyptic world. Rachel, the main character, is a scavenger and I enjoyed seeing her mother like bond with Borne shown in...

This week I read all of the Chinese ghost stories in Lafcadio Hearn’s book Chinese Ghost Stories: curious tales of the supernatural.  These have been the first ghost stories I have ever read, let alone them being Chinese ghost stories. Therefore, I did not know what to expect at all prior to reading. There appeared to be a strong sense of family values (elders being the most important and always listening to your parents) that were present in many of the stories. This didn’t surprise me I knew that in Chinese culture they hold the older generations to a very high regard. What I did expect that I didn’t see (or read) in these stories were any “scary” moments. I assume my expectation for scary parts comes from the typical jump scare culture that we have in American horror film. The Chinese ghost stories in the book did have a common theme of good and evil but not the same kind of evil that we are used to seeing in American horror. American horror makes the “evil” character always...

The relationships in Interview with a Vampire involve the three characters, Lestat, Louis and Claudia. Lestat had turned Louis into a vampire by convincing him that his pain would go away if he was turned. Louis’ transition that Lestat caused always caused Louis to feel a sort of animosity towards Lestat. Lestat convinces Louis to finish turning Claudia, a child, into a vampire as well. Since Louis is still new to being a vampire himself, he is still very reliant on Lestat to teach him. Claudia is now in the same position that Louis once was since she is no longer a normal child. I believe that Lestat was so persistent that Louis turns Claudia because he feared that Louis would leave him. Claudia is now to be raised by both of them as their daughter and when this announcement was made it seemed like Louis was surprised by Lestat saying that. I found this interesting because in most vampire stories I’ve read/ heard, the vampires try to stay away from people becoming too attached to them...