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Monster Movie Month: Friday the 13th

I’m guessing that since it’s Monster Movie Month and today happens to be Friday the 13th that you might wonder if I’m going to write about the subgenre everyone thinks about when the topic of horror movies comes up- slasher movies. Actually, I’m not that good at planning ahead, but when I realized today was Friday the 13th, I thought I should probably come up with something to say. Certainly, they were coming out in droves as I was growing up. But, honestly, this is a genre that I really don’t enjoy all that much, and outside of the first few Nightmare on Elm Street movies and a few of the more self-referential movies of the 90s and beyond, I haven’t seen the movies and don’t plan to.

It’s kind of hard to write about or even talk about horror movies without knowing the tropes, though. The plots and characters are so predictable that the denizens of the Shocklines horror community forum even compiled a horror movie survival guide... so predictable that moviemakers and can make fun of them and manipulate them (and movie watchers will enjoy it) in such films as the recently released movie The Cabin in the Woods (reviewed here, and accompanied by a great readers advisory one-sheet created by reviewer Benjamin Franz)

TVtropes.com provides a nice summary (with links) of the tropes of the slasher movie here. You can scroll down the page there to find a partial list of slasher movies. Along with Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th is considered an iconic film in the slasher genre, and the trope codifier.

If you’d rather try out a book in honor of the movie of the day, you can visit our page of reviews on Human Horror and Psychological Terror. Note that books in this genre are not for the faint of heart- they can be graphic, brutal, and gory, but much of the time they’re also psychological in nature, which makes them a different kind of creature.

Whatever your plans, may your day be a lucky one!

Posted on July 13, 2012 by , Reply

Welcome to Monster Movie Month!

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, and it’s true that in a horror movie you can experience in a a moment a feeling of terror you might never capture with words. With the right camera shots, music, and special effects, films do more than give a face to horror– they add new dimensions to storytelling. There are a lot of horror readers who also love horror movies (reviewer Colleen Wanglund is currently spending a lot of time at the New York Asian Film Festival)Yet there’s a divide between horror movie watchers and horror fiction readers–there are lots of people who watch horror movies who don’t read horror fiction, and there are many readers who don’t watch the movies.

This gives readers advisory librarians a special opportunity to share the horror genre with both audiences–watchers and readers. It can be hard to know what to suggest, especially if you don’t know much about the genre. In the recently published second edition to The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror, author and RA librarian Becky Siegel Spratford suggested ten horror films for horror readers. Then my six year old Monster Kid asked if we would write about monster movies (he’s a big Godzilla fan). So we are declaring this July Monster Movie Month (I apologize to all those expecting Werewolf Month, but I promise we’ll still have something for you).

We created a Monster Movie Month web page where we’ll be posting reviews of some of the great movies in the horror genre, with suggested watch-alikes and read-alikes, and we’ll also have several guest blogs- you’ll want to take some time to read what Becky Siegel Spratford has to say about marketing horror, and what the podcasters from The Cutting Room horror movie podcast think about horror movies, books, and libraries.

We’ll also be sharing a variety of resources for further investigation- in addition to links on the web page, visit our Monster Movie Month board on Pinterest and you’ll find additional resources. Right now, we’ve got some great information on Lovecraftian horror movies and Godzilla, kaiju and giant monster movies, and there is more to come. Visit us often to see what new things we’ve posted to this blog and added to the Monster Movie Month web page. There is a ton of cool stuff here so take time to explore! And thanks for joining us for Monster Movie Month!

To find the resources for Monster Movie Month easily, check out the links below, and search for posts about Monster Movie Month on this blog’s tag archive under Monster Movie Month!

Monster Movie Month Web Page

Monster Movie Month Pinterest Board

Posted on July 1, 2012 by , 2 comments

Asian-American Authors of Horror

Rose Fox at Genreville is compiling a list of Asian-American authors who write science fiction and fantasy. One person commented that it seemed like once again horror is being treated as a genre fiction “stepchild” and that the list should include Asian-American authors of horror as well (Genreville is supposed to cover horror as well as SF and fantasy). Rose is looking for suggestions. If you have one, you can leave a comment here.

Or, if you’d like to comment here instead, I’d be curious to know who you come up with. Just in case anyone ever asks me.

Posted on May 15, 2012 by , 1 comment
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