Author: Horror Tree

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WIHM 2022: Stories My Mother Told Me

Stories My Mother Told Me

By: Heather Ventura

I was seven years old when the curtains were removed from my room because they looked like an illustration of the Snow Queen from my fairy tales book during lightning storms. When I was eight, I refused to sleep unless my feet were precisely tucked away so goblins couldn’t steal them. At age eleven I had to sleep with the light on because of Gollum. 

You may be asking yourself what these characters from stories by male authors have to do with Women in Horror Month. They share a common denominator: my mother. They were just a few of the stories my mother read to my sister and I growing up. A master storyteller and narrator, my mother would do all the voices and make the stories she read come alive. My love of books, and more specifically, my love of horror stories was carefully midwifed into existence by my mother. 
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WIHM 2022: Themes in Women’s Horror

Themes in Women’s Horror

by: Patricia Stover

 

Some of the things that make women’s Horror so terrifying are the themes that are being explored. Let’s look at Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic as one example. Garcia creates a strong, female main character named Noemí who challenges the social norms of 1950s Mexico. This was not only a time, but a place set under strict patriarchal ideals. The setting is a gothic mansion that reflects the dread and oppression that this patriarchal society has inflicted upon its women. Then Garcia presents us with this creepy family who reside in the mansion. The family seems to be made up mostly of men, aside of the mother. We watch them keep her cousin trapped inside this dreadful mansion, oppressed, and terrified. And it seems as if she is losing her mind. She reaches out to her beloved cousin and Noemí arrives at the house only to find that she too begins experiencing psychological distress. However, Noemí believes the house itself may be the cause of her hallucinations. 

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WIHM 2022: I Want to be the Woman in Horror!

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in his novel ‘Dracula’, Bram Stoker uses the word ‘voluptuous’ a lot. A LOT. If Lucy’s in the scene, she’s voluptuous. If the vampire brides appear, they’re all voluptuous. Even pure, sweet Mina, towards the end, gets the voluptuous treatment. There’s a whole undercurrent of purity versus sin in the novel, of course, and the Victorians loved to equate sexuality and sensuality with sin, so you can see what Bram was going for. And it’s a good, evocative word. But how many times have you ever considered yourself to be voluptuous? 

If you have, all power to you. Personally, I have never once considered myself to be voluptuous. Nor have I considered myself to be a pure, sweet paragon of virtue like Mina. ‘Dracula’ is one of my all-time favourite works of horror fiction. But I am not in that book. Nor am I in Mary Shelley’s classic ‘Frankenstein’. I don’t see myself in these women. While this doesn’t take away from the power of these works, it would be nice to see myself in the story sometimes.

Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place? Let’s jump to more contemporary works of horror literature. Again, more often than not I don’t see myself. I’m not the dazzling Merrin in Joe Hill’s ‘Horns’. I’m not the enigmatic Eli in John Ajvide Lindquist’s ‘Let the Right One In’. I’m not Pandora or Gabrielle or Akasha in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. Sometimes I’d like to be – these women are powerful and driven and have an eternity to meet their goals – and while it’s entertaining and absorbing to enter these women’s minds and travel with them – while I absolutely espouse fiction as a means of escapism – I cannot tell you how exciting I have found it when I find a character I can truly relate to.

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WIHM 2022: Who’s Afraid of the Dark?

Who’s Afraid of the Dark? 

By: Rachael Tamayo

 

When I was a child, like most, I was afraid of the dark. Terrible nightmares haunted my dreams, making me afraid to sleep. I’d say my prayers and ask God to blot out my dreams, terrified of the visions that might come to me. Sleeping with my closet door was a must, as well, since the things that lived just beyond the door liked to tease me into terror that would send me running to my parent’s room in the middle of the night only to get kicked back to my own bed.

I learned to manage, I struggled alone with my fear of the dark. That and the nightmares that my parents swore were caused by demons and devils, I learned to manipulate my dreams and be terrified of sleeping until I was a much older adult. 
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WIHM 2022: Top Horror Movies About College Students

Top Horror Movies About College Students

When it comes to horror movies, people’s opinions vary. Yet, modern scientists confirm that watching them is not such a bad idea, as there are real benefits to indulging in this movie genre. There are also different topics for a horror film. There are ones focused on ghosts, paranormal activities, even time travel, so there is something for everyone to appreciate. It might interest you to know there’s also a decent amount of horror movies focused on college students. It was in college that I fell head over heels in love with horror so I felt that the best way to celebrate this was to feature where the two have been combined. In this article, we discuss 5 of the top horror movies about college students.

The Top 5 Horror Movies About College Students

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WIHM 2022: Upcycling Emotions, or Why I Write Horror

Upcycling Emotions, or Why I Write Horror

by Katherine Quevedo

 

Blood-red paper. Twin blades. An amusement park ride. Sounds like the stuff of horror, right? Except, the ride I’m talking about was a miniature one occupying a corner of my dining room table, next to a sheet of red tissue paper and scissors. One of my sons had a school assignment to collect things destined for our recycling bin and instead convert them into an amusement park ride. He took a paper towel roll, a flattened cardboard box, a takeout beverage tray, and that scarlet tissue paper, and he crafted a carousel. Little red seats hung down from the top wheel, and he painted the central pole blue. It was a lesson in engineering and, to my eyes, a prime example of upcycling—crafting something new out of what would otherwise be discarded as waste, with the end result becoming more valuable than the sum of its parts. 

What does this have to do with writing horror? Everything. Step right up. 

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WIHM 2022: Kristina Rienzi: Beyond The Bio

Beyond The Bio

If you’ve read my bio, you’ll get a pretty good sense of who I am even if you don’t know me and you’ve never read my books. However, there’s more to an author than her writing life summed up in one paragraph. I’m here to let you in on the details I left out. 

If you’ve read my thrillers but never met me in real life, you’d likely believe that I’m an introvert. You’d also probably believe that something dark lurks inside of me. Then, you’d meet me in person and your head might just spin around. 
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Articles / Interviews

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WIHM 2022: An Interview With Cassandra L. Thompson

The Horror Tree Presents An Interview With Cassandra L. Thompson

  1. As you are in the middle of publishing The Ancient Ones trilogy, how has the world you’ve created evolved over time?

 

I actually came up with the idea for The Ancient Ones when I was sixteen, and it took until I was thirty to finally sit down and write it out. I finished it within a year, then I finished the next two the following year. So from the completion of one to three, nothing changed very much, but from sixteen to thirty, incredibly so. As an undergrad, I majored in History with a concentration in mythology, so the more I learned, the more I wanted to include in my stories. 

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