Kickstarter: My Experience and Thoughts on a Failed Campaign

By: Keith Anthony Baird

Everyone starts off as a crowdfunding virgin. I had a vision for it, high hopes in fact, but also a very pragmatic approach (for me, that’s come with age).

I didn’t think for one minute it was going to shake the world but I did believe it had a chance of success. Boy, was I wrong!  To go into all the specifics in this short article would be difficult, so I’m going to narrow it down to a certain set of fundamentals I believe were at the heart of its failure.

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I Contain Multitudes

By Rivka Crowbourne

There’s an old(ish) saying: “Everyone makes fun of the Catholics until they need an exorcism.” The complex and mysterious ritualism of the Catholic Church has always fascinated horror writers, regardless of their personal convictions: the Irish Protestant Bram Stoker (Dracula) fell back on Latin orthodoxy to inter the undead, and the non-denominational demi-Buddhist James Wan (The Conjuring) idealized a Roman Catholic couple to expel the unclean. What is it about the Church that seems to keep her cheek by jowl with the various things that go bump?

As a horror-writing cradle Catholic, I’ve always insisted that one of the great scary story benefits, along with catharsis, is inoculation: a mind that’s been exposed to evil in trace amounts, thus building up a certain tolerance, is arguably better equipped to withstand a real-life encounter. I’ve also always feared that the depicting of evil, though inevitable and necessary, is a somber undertaking for the storyteller. Evil is, by its very nature, tempting; you can’t portray it in any meaningful way without becoming a vessel for its allure. Catholics are notorious for not knowing their Bibles, but I often reflect on Jesus’ remark: “Woe to those by whom temptations come! It were better for them to be cast into the sea with a millstone hung about their neck” (Luke 17:1-2).

To a nonbeliever, the point may seem moot, but consider: even if the serpent on the knowledge tree is a metaphor, there’s still a reptile coiled around your brainstem. H.P. Lovecraft was an atheist, but he clearly managed to net a few of the massive shadows gliding through the icy murk of our collective unconscious, or his work wouldn’t resonate with such wide, still-spreading ripples. And, like his good friend Robert E. Howard (suicide by gunshot), he neither lived nor died in happiness. Their fate is not, of course, unavoidable—but it’s a stern admonition to those who strike matches in the basement of the intellect. We all know Nietzsche’s maxim about the hazards of the gaze; an exorcist or vampire-hunter might well add that when you enter the Abyss, the Abyss enters also into you.

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To Punch Me Is to Know Me

By Howard Blaise

How do you portray conflict in a horror story? Perhaps more than any other genre, horror fiction tends to offer antagonists (vampires, werewolves, zombies, &c.) that turn us into them. At what point does this strange ambivalence swing from the risk of being transformed to the desire of being transformed? Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a horror protagonist.

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How to Take Your Love of Horror to The Next Level 

By Kelly Florence and Meg Hafdahl 

As we’re celebrating the re-vamp of our podcast and YouTube show Horror Rewind, we thought we’d talk about turning horror into more than just a pastime. 

Sure, when we were reading Stephen King books and watching slasher flicks on summer breaks, we had a vague idea that a few, special people got to live and breathe horror as a career. Meg even used to pretend to be interviewed with a fake microphone in her mirror as the “next Stephen King” in grade school. 

But then that stupid thing called reality came settling in, you know, rent, gas, diapers, the popcorn and movie ticket fund. Horror was our hobby, and for you, maybe that’s all it needs to be. Meg’s husband is content painting and playing Warhammer for fun, and Kelly’s husband is an avid golfer who doesn’t have ambitions to go pro. Though, if you’re like us, and have an inkling of interest in making horror more than a pastime, let us give you a few tips from our years in the gory trenches. 

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Horror – A Sort of History

By James L Hill

People have been afraid of the dark since time began. For good reasons, we don’t have the night vision of a cat, the hearing acuity of a bat, or the sense of smell of a dog. We compensate for our lack of physical abilities with our superior mental prowess. But that opened its own can of worms.

By the way, worms terrify people, usually not on a one-on-one basis, but n mass, they cause nightmares. It is our higher intellect that is the source of most of our fears. Some of those fears are ingrained in our DNA, part of our fight or flight survival response, like a bump in the night that raises the hairs on the back of our necks.  Others come from millennia of stories meant to shape our morality and make us better people, like bad things happen to bad people. Or shame on you if you do this, tell your children the monster under the bed will get them if they get out of bed one more time, even if you need peace and quiet. By the way, which will only cause more nightmares making you get out of bed to quieten the children again.

Armed with a basic idea of fear, we can talk about the history of horror. Horror can be broken down into three forms, natural, supernatural, and technological. Natural horror stories are understandable. We are not the most physically fit of the creatures on Earth. These stories build on primal fears, being hunted by some beasts, lions, tigers, and bears. Oh My!

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How to Use Descriptions of Light to Create Suspense

Have you ever felt your heart pounding as you flipped through the pages of a book, desperate to find out what might be lurking in the shadows? Part of this experience comes from an author’s use of suspense. Suspense isn’t just about cliffhangers and plot twists — it’s also about withholding information and then revealing it slowly to create a feeling of uncertainty.

Descriptions of light in particular can be a powerful tool in your arsenal, particularly when writing thriller and horror genre books. Here are three effective ways you can use light to create suspense in your own writing:

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Baby Reindeer: Horror and Trauma

By Kelly Florence & Meg Hafdahl

This article contains spoilers for the 2024 series, Baby Reindeer, streaming on Netflix.

With the title, Baby Reindeer, we weren’t sure what we were getting into when we started the seven-episode series last month. Intrigued by the seemingly innocuous name, it became clear that horror can exist in even the most innocent settings. What begins as a tale of a man offering kindness to a woman in need, the story turns out to be one of stalking, assault, trauma, and healing. Based on the true story of what happened to writer, actor, and creator, Richard Gadd, the series takes on a whole new level of horror as the audience realizes they are watching the man, himself, relive the terrible things that he went through earlier in his life.

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