Author: Horror Tree

Horror Musicals By Kelly Florence & Meg Hafdahl

Horror Musicals

By Kelly Florence & Meg Hafdahl

Ever since we were little, we’ve both been obsessed with the horror genre and musicals. How could the two possibly go together? Surprisingly well, to our delight. We’ve had the privilege of seeing several horror musicals in-person in the theatre over the years and need to tell you our favorites, in no particular order.

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They’re Heeeeeeeere: Aliens in the Horror Genre

They’re Heeeeeeeere: Aliens in the Horror Genre

By Kelly Florence & Meg Hafdahl

From the purported sketches of aliens on cave walls created in India ten thousand years ago to the 1947 Roswell incident in New Mexico, humans have always had a fascination with tales from beyond. As fans of The X-Files (1993-2018), it’s probably not surprising to learn that we both love an otherworldly plot. Likely, our love for this subgenre began with reading copies of Weird Tales, watching numerous episodes of The Twilight Zone on television, and rewatching both of our favorite George A. Romero movies, Night of the Living Dead (1968) or Dawn of the Dead (1978). These plots speculated that something in space caused the dead to arise and become what we now refer to as zombies. We thought that was So. Cool.  

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An Interview with Kiwi author Marty Young

REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An Interview with Kiwi author Marty Young 

 

In this unique interview series, we chat with the contributors of Kiwi horror anthology Remains to Be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa, edited by five-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Lee Murray (Clan Destine Press, 1 October). 

 

Today, we welcome author Marty Young, whose haunting short story “Redwoods on Te Mata Peak” appears in the anthology. 

 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

 

This story, “Redwoods on Te Mata Peak”, is loosely based on a regular weekend for me as a kid – albeit without the terrible ending! But a bunch of us used to cycle up Te Mata Peak on our BMX’s on the weekends – although I’ve no bloody idea how!! I’ve driven up that peak as an adult and I can’t fathom cycling up it on a bike, let alone a bike without gears! But yeah, that’s what we used to do, and one day, we did discover a wrecked car at the base of a gully, and we found a cave next to it, too. We didn’t have any torches with us that day, so we came back the following day, armed with torches and rope, and we went exploring. I remember crawling through spaces only just wide enough to crawl through with one arm held out front, then entering giant hourglass-shaped caverns. The cave system went on for several hours with no end in sight before we decided we had better return before we got lost. And for some reason, we never went back again. I don’t know why. So my story is based around that, only I didn’t want to write a standard cave story. I always felt there was something far more horrific waiting to be told with that set-up.  

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Del Gibson

REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Del Gibson 

 

In this unique interview series, we chat with the contributors of Kiwi horror anthology Remains to Be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa, edited by five-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Lee Murray (Clan Destine Press, 1 October). 

 

Today, we welcome author Del Gibson, whose classic haunted house story “Buried Secrets” appears in the anthology. 

 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

 

A house has four walls, and within those walls, sometimes ghosts and ghouls lurk. Those ghosts live with us, mess with our minds, they can turn our entire lives upside down and inside out. You can feel their presence, see their shadows, sense them all around you. But you can’t see them. That is what makes ghosts so interesting, somewhat dangerous, and insidious.  

 

I chose the setting for this story in a 120-year-old homestead that my dad purchased for his retirement, in Rawene, in the Far North of New Zealand. It was a house where things would go bump in the night. The crawling, creeping feeling of being watched. Having to leave a light on when going to bed, for fear of being in the dark. Running down the long hallway, always sensing something chasing behind. The bathroom felt the heaviest, for some reason or another. Note, my dad passed away in there a few years after he’d brought the homestead.  

 

The hotel mentioned in the story, I worked at for a year, while I was living in Russell in the Bay of Islands. The hotel had a resident ghost, his name was Jack. He’d haunt the upstairs area, where the rooms are located. From downstairs while working, we’d hear him walking along the hallways, sometimes he’d stomp, run, move things about. The story goes, that he was an elderly man who died in one of the suites, from a heart attack.  

 

I wanted to weave a little of my own history into the fabric of this ghostly tale. I endeavoured to mash my love of horror, with a bit of history and a whole lot of freaky occurrences. My love for the macabre came from growing up in a haunted house. I’ve been able to see ghosts, apparitions, since I was 5 years old. I am an avid watcher of true paranormal investigations. So, I thought it would be a great idea to add an investigation of the hotel into the story. The cult aspect, comes from mountains of research into this phenomenon and I thought it would add to the plot. 

 

My main focus was to create a horror with a Kiwi flavour. Adding an old Māori man to push the story along was a great idea. It also helped to leave a massive cliffhanger at the end, for the reader to ponder on for a while. I hope I have pulled this off. I had heaps of fun writing this story and I hope that shows in the writing.  

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Bryce Stevens

REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Bryce Stevens 

 

In this unique interview series, we chat with the contributors of Kiwi horror anthology Remains to Be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa, edited by five-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Lee Murray (Clan Destine Press, 1 October). 

 

Today, we welcome author and editor Bryce Stevens, whose short story “The Spaces Between” appears in the anthology. 

 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

 

Finding I was of Māori Heritage later in life and my growing up in Auckland and Hamilton, attending predominantly Māori/Pacific Island schools was the main inspiration for the tale. I’d always had Māori friends at schools and in the workplace. During my twenties I had Māori friends teaching me the language. Of course, being a young man, I had been most interested in the naughty words. 

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Tracie McBride

REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Tracie McBride 

 

In this unique interview series, we chat with the contributors of Kiwi horror anthology Remains to Be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa, edited by five-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Lee Murray (Clan Destine Press, 1 October). 

 

Today, we welcome author Tracie McBride, whose shocking short story “Her Ghosts” appears in the anthology. 

 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

 

My short story writing process usually takes one of two paths – either I have the entire plot and concept in mind from the beginning, or I start with a seed and have to write my way through to something approaching coherency. “Her Ghosts” fell into the latter category. It took a few months for all the ideas to coalesce, and they came to me in dribs and drabs. 

The idea for my protagonist Callie, a reluctant psychic, came first. My mother and stepfather have been doing a lot of genealogy research in recent years and uncovered some interesting legends about Māori priestesses in my whakapapa. I got to thinking about how their reputed power might have been suppressed over generations of colonialism, and how that might affect someone trying to reconcile such abilities with twenty-first century life and ideas. 

The seismic activity came next. In my early brainstorming, playing around with the premise for the anthology, the phrase “uncanny disturbances” stood out, and earthquakes were the first thing I thought of. I wasn’t sure what role they would play at first, only that there had to be some. There is a theory that the low frequency, inaudible to the human ear, at which earthquake waves travel can cause unusual reactions in living creatures, from feelings of dread and fear to optical illusions. I had forgotten about this until my daughter reminded me after the story was finished; perhaps that knowledge had been working in my subconscious throughout the writing process.  

Finding a suitable antagonist was trickier. Just having a garden variety lunatic running around kidnapping kids felt inadequate. Like Callie, anger does not come to me easily, so I put some thought into the kind of person who really pisses me off – and then I had him.  

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author and poet Tim Jones

REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author and poet Tim Jones 

 

In this unique interview series, we chat with the contributors of Kiwi horror anthology Remains to Be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa, edited by five-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Lee Murray (Clan Destine Press, 1 October). 

 

Today, we welcome author Tim Jones, whose tragic poem “Guiding Star” appears in the anthology. 

 

Tell us about your poem.  

In the late 1960s, when I was around 8 years old, I was sent with my classmates to a school camp at Omaui on the south coast of Murihiku / Southland. 

 

Omaui is a low-lying headland south-west of Invercargill. To reach it, you take State Highway 1 out of Invercargill towards its final destination: Bluff, where my father then worked as a fisheries inspector. You turn off at Greenhills and wend your way along narrow roads, past Mokomoko Inlet, and south to the little settlement and the YMCA camp, which still stands, like a she’ll-be-right version of Hill House. 

 

To the north, the treacherous, shifting New River Estuary, bane of many a barque and steamer, including, in September 1862, the SS Guiding Star. To the south, the southern tip of Rakiura / Stewart Island, and beyond it, the Southern Ocean stretching cold and lonely to Antarctica. Omaui is a little oasis of reforested green on a bleak and southward coast.
 

That camp, tucked hard against the fringes of the bush: the forest has regenerated greatly since the 1960s, stewarded by visionary locals, but in recent photos, the camp looks much as it did back then. The walls are strangely angled: there’s some seriously Lovecraftian vibes about the geometry of the bunkrooms. But it wasn’t eldritch horrors from beyond space I was worried about, it was the boys I was pitched into the bunkroom with. 

 

I don’t think those boys did me any physical harm during that week, and completely contrary to the scenario in my poem, Dad was actually on the camp as a camp parent. So the facts are different: but I remember feeling alone, I remember feeling scared, I remember feeling different. I remember the feel of wet mānuka scrub slapping my face as we went for an interminable route march in the Wednesday rain. And I remember the noise of the other boys after lights out, as I turned to face the vast, indifferent silence and darkness that began just outside the bunkroom window. 

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REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Paul Mannering

REMAINS TO BE TOLD – An interview with Kiwi author Paul Mannering 

 

In this unique interview series, we chat with the contributors of Kiwi horror anthology Remains to Be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa, edited by five-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Lee Murray (Clan Destine Press, 1 October). 

 

Today, we welcome award-winning author Paul Mannering, whose short story “A Throatful of Flies” appears in the anthology. 

 

Tell us about your story in the anthology.  

 

I grew up on a small farm outside of Kaikoura, New Zealand. 

 

Often, during those endless summers of childhood I would go and stay on a sheep station, a sprawling farm in the hills that covered 3300 acres and bred a few thousand Drysdale sheep for wool. On these working holidays, we did everything from mustering stock, to planting trees. Farm chores at home were a drag, here it was a fun holiday adventure. 

 

It was during one hot summer when I was there for a couple of weeks that I was tasked with helping the current farm hand with butchering some old rams. These were elderly sheep, long past their useful lives and now they were to be killed, cut up and fed to the pack of working dogs. 

 

We got the job done and as the story told, somehow a prize stud ram – worth an eye-watering sum, got in the stockyard with the elderly rams. We killed him too. 

The offal pit was real and since I was young enough to remember seeing sheep guts and heads being sucked into that ragged hole in the centre of the sheets of roofing iron – it has haunted me. 

 

I had an anthropologist’s education in religion – all observation and curiosity but no actual faith or ritual other than the token church visit at Christmas so the idea of a portal to hell was not that realistic. If someone asked me to imagine such a gateway, I would see that black hole, fringed with the bloated bodies of massive blowflies. 

 

The pit has appeared in several story ideas in various forms, though this is the first published story to go into details. 

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