I’ve just posted an annotated list of “Classic Dismembered Hand Stories” on my creative writing weblog, The Goreletter. (This “hands” list was originally scheduled to appear in The Book of Lists: Horror, but was cut for space — but I do have another article in that book on “Top Horror Colleges”!). Stories about dismembered… Continue reading The Uncanny Hands of Horror Fiction
Author: Michael Arnzen
Michael Arnzen holds four Bram Stoker Awards and an International Horror Guild Award for his disturbing (and often funny) fiction, poetry and literary experiments. He has been teaching as a Professor of English in the MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University since 1999.
Pop Song as Product Placement: Doublemint “Forever”
If you watch the latest Doublemint gum TV commercial — featuring Chris Brown dancing in the dark with the product’s new “slim” package — you might be wondering: gee, that song and dance is nice but what happened to the infamously kitschy jingle and the wholesome set of twins? The ad itself is a twin: … Continue reading Pop Song as Product Placement: Doublemint “Forever”
Weirdness Isolation and Sunnydale Syndrome
The TV Tropes Wiki is a useful community-built resource of common plot elements on television shows, which illustrates the high degree of scholarship and close reading that fan culture is capable of producing. It reads like a folklorist’s taxonomy. The majority of the site’s “tropes” — which they define as “devices and conventions that a… Continue reading Weirdness Isolation and Sunnydale Syndrome
Enjoy Uncertainty: Randomization and the Uncanny iPod
Although the iPod shuffle is now an mp3 player that is the size of a postage stamp, the advertising campaign for the device — back in 2006 when it was the size of a stick of gum — asked consumers to “Enjoy Uncertainty.” I can think of no better mascot for the popular uncanny. Typically, uncertainty… Continue reading Enjoy Uncertainty: Randomization and the Uncanny iPod
The Web Browser as Ouija Board
I recently came across The Blog of the Damned — a group weblog that has compiled some interesting instances of “forteana 2.0 and the uncanny internet.” One entry in particular really jumped out at me: The Browser as Scrying Tool — that is, the literalization of the metaphor that “the Internet is haunted, and that… Continue reading The Web Browser as Ouija Board
Bread that Talks
Obviously, no one believes bread can talk. But Schwebel’s ‘taliano — “The Bread with the Foreign Accent” — would like us to believe its Italian bread has an identity so Italian that it can speak to us. I used this example in my recent lecture at the Alpha Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop for Young… Continue reading Bread that Talks
Devil’s Horns and the Evil Eye
A little known fact (to me, anyway…and it may not be a fact at all) about signs of the horns (aka “Devil’s Horns” aka “the Goat” aka “Satan Fingers”): Though not necessarily the first to ever use [horned hand gestures] in a “rock” setting, [heavy metal singer Ronnie James] Dio was without question the one… Continue reading Devil’s Horns and the Evil Eye
Giving Pinocchio Flesh
On Sarah Langan’s “Why I Write Horror” (The Humanities Review, Spring 2008) All genres have their intended effects. In mysteries, readers are asked to analyze. They solve puzzles. In science fiction, they imagine new, and occasionally better, worlds. But in horror, readers are asked to feel. That is why, when they put the book on… Continue reading Giving Pinocchio Flesh
Next Nature
In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud writes: …an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes,… Continue reading Next Nature
Cractroids
Parody is a good barometer for popularity. The humor magazine, Cracked, sends up The 7 Creepiest Real-Life Robots. Robert Brockway’s bawdy, Rated-R write ups include hilarious (yet astutely observed) rationales for “why it’s so, so creepy,” like this one for the “Actroid” robot pictured above: The Actroid is fairly tame on the creepy scale …… Continue reading Cractroids