Entertainment!
Fiction for Forteans
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Coulrophobia and Corn: A Teenage Nightmare
Once, when I was in high school, some friends and I watched the Stephen King film Children of the Corn, and then drove a few miles out of town to run around a local cornfield in the dark. The cornstalks were high above our heads, and it wasn’t long before we couldn’t see one another, having moved around from row to row. That feeling of isolation, of completely losing your bearings (even with knowing that following the row was the way out) was insanely creepy. I won’t say that it scarred me, but I’ll never forget that feeling. At least there were no clowns. Adam Cesare’s 2020 effort, Clown in…
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Haxan Review: Documentary or Psychological Horror? That Which Used to Scare Us
Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages, is a silent 1922 Swedish and Danish co-production, directed by Danish director Benjamin Christensen, whose filmography ran mostly through the silent era, including a five-year stint in Hollywood. Haxan, which was also written by Christensen, takes is a lecture/docudrama in seven parts, covering the Middle Ages, the Inquisition, and the modern era. Unfortunately, it must be said that much of part one will bore the impatient viewer, as it really is a lecture (complete with a pointer!) on the origins of witchcraft. Luckily, the sheer number of paintings, drawings, and woodcuts used to illustrate his points throughout the section is impressive, and even foreshadows some…
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Nightmareland Review: An Overview of Where We Go in our Sleep
Speaking as someone who reads a lot of nonfiction, I love that singular moment in a book that ties everything together, and cements its status as a coherent unit rather than a series of related essays put together by the author. That moment in Lex Nover’s 2019 tome Nightmareland: Travels at the Borders of Sleep, Dreams, and Wakefulness arrives in the first sentence of the Afterword: “Perhaps one of the great questions of life is whether we decide to plumb the depths of the unknown—the worlds beyond worlds within us—or stay in the confines of our mental comfort zone.” To bring us to that moment, Nover guides us through several…
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Afraid of Nothing–A Look Into What Comes Next
FILM REVIEW—Afraid of Nothing (D. Robert Heske, 2019) Among the great boons of the streaming era is the preponderance of films and TV shows dedicated to the paranormal. Where once the creators of these pieces had to develop a pitch, film a pilot or a test reel, and somehow get it in front of a channel executive somewhere, creators can now (relatively easily) get their documentaries or ghost hunting shows on any number of streaming clients. If one of the big ones doesn’t pick up your show, no problem! You can go direct to YouTube or Twitch or other platforms. But the same problem comes up with Amazon Prime, Hulu,…
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YouTube Recommendations: The Paranormal Scholar
Everyone’s done it. You’re bored, you have half an hour to spare, and you pull up YouTube, where you spend 10 minutes looking for something to watch. News? Too heavy. Late-night shows? Nothing’s funny right now. Celebrity gossip? Yeah, right… Eventually, you stumble across something you like. Something covering the odd, the weird, the paranormal. And 20 minutes later, you’re either ready to go further down the rabbit hole or you realize that those are 20 minutes of your life you’ll never get back. Recommendations is the Armchair Fortean’s attempt to provide you with enjoyable, well-curated channels that will not only hold your attention, but will leave you (sometimes) with…
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The Ultimate Lifestyle Shopping Experience: Horrorstor
Have you ever discovered a new author, gotten really into their book, praise them as a new find to anyone who’ll listen, puffing out your chest because no one else knew about them? You can go on for weeks about your discovery, and how they should be praised from the mountaintops and given movie deals and so on. Well, that’s my story with Grady Hendrix. (‘No one else’ in these stories usually means ‘tons of people, just not you’). Awhile ago I came across his amazing history of 70s and 80s horror, Paperbacks from Hell, and was instantly hooked on his writing style. Then, last year, I received My Best…
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‘Every Heart a Doorway’ Takes Us Beyond the End
Most of us, at some point, wished we could open a magic door and find ourselves in a wonderful Elsewhere, our own Narnia, or Where the Wild Things Are, or the 13th Reality, or Oz, or Wonderland. These and many other worlds, accessible to us through books, create rich, vibrant worlds that so many of us would like to visit, to become part of, to adventure through. Countless authors have shown us these doors, and we travel with the protagonists, sharing their struggles, their wonder, and their joy. However, there’s one thing that nearly never gets explored in these tales—what happens when they come back? When they return to our…
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Old Family, Big Secrets–October Faction Review
Every film buff and genre fan knows that January is the month when film studios quietly dump problematic films into theatres, with minimal promotion, in a bid to make at least some of the budget back via a theatrical release. With the rise of streaming services, then, it’s not too surprising to see a film or series quietly released onto a service, adjacent to a more hyped release, in hopes of driving up the numbers for the smaller show. Now, I don’t know if they actually work that way, but it sure seems like it, as Netflix dropped The October Faction onto the platform in the shadow of its highly…
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Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark–Humdrum Horror
Before I begin, let me address the elephant in the room—I am not the target audience for this movie. The source material became popular long after my school days. While I was growing up, there was precious little available for mid-level horror—it went from Scholastic collections of ghost stories to Stephen King, with nothing in between. I read The Shining when I was 12, and will forever have ‘roque/stroke’ burned into my memory. I mention this for a couple of reasons—first, because I WISH I’d had horror that was tailored for my age group, and that I went into this movie without any expectations. There’s no nostalgia factor here to…
