This is Who We Are: Meet the Contributors
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Pittsburgh, home of the world’s first solely movie-screening nickelodeon and some of George Romero’s most heavy-hitting work, should also be home to a group of horror nerds who clustered around an A24 marathon one mild March day. At that time, blog author Ande Thomas printed and bound the scripts for the movies we watched, giving a book to each of us as a keepsake. Thoughtful discussion comparing the movies to their scripts ignited.
You obviously know how the rest of this goes.
The founding Contributors:
Laura Kemmerer
I wish I could tell you that I was a life-long horror fan, well-rooted in the genre and ready to whip out trivia about all my favorite movies. The reality is that folklore (and mythology) came first.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Ghostly trips to Gettysburg. Watching too many episodes of The X-Files and Millennium as a kid. All roads would eventually lead to horror, but what immediately, finally dragged me into a love affair with the genre was the one-two punch of seeing Robert Eggers’ The VVitch and being introduced to the Folk Horror Revival group on Facebook within a couple months of each other.
The stories in horror that speak to me the most are where faith and experience intersect: the occult, hauntings, witchcraft, religion, folklore—the things that go bump in our psychological night. I also truly love slashers, creature features, monster movies (especially the classic Universal monsters), and horror movies that just do bad well. (I jokingly call The Bye Bye Man my problem gremlin child. What’s not to love about Doug Jones and a roastbeef dog named Gloomsinger?)
It should surprise literally no one that Eggers remains one of my favorite directors. Others also include: Liam Gavin, responsible for A Dark Song; John Carpenter, because of course Halloween; Ridley Scott, responsible for Alien; and I’d be outright lying if I said Ari Aster wasn’t on this list, as he is responsible for Midsommar and the best two-plus hours I’ve spent glued to a movie screen in recent days.
Destiny Johnson
When I was in middle school, I remember finding horror as the greatest type of thrill. I watched the mind tricks, murders, monsters and ghosts, truth- and reality-blurring fiction, anything that made me feel uncomfortable, on edge and helpless. The movies that come to mind are Edwardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project, Gore Verbinski’s The Ring and Bryan Bertion’s The Strangers.
Unfortunately, over the last few years I’ve found myself falling off seeing new movies and even horror altogether. I can’t really explain it except for maybe, life? But, unless something sparked my particular interests—true crime, sharks, ghost stories or honestly, something that didn’t look cheesy or all about the biggest jump scares—I’d give it a shot. However, I did make sure to see David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, Rob Zombie’s 31 and M. Night Shyamalan’s Split.
I like movies and stories that make you question the world around you, more so than what makes you jump. And to me, that can be a series of genres, if portrayed the right way. And it wasn’t until recently that I was brought back to horror, having met great people to experience, discuss, learn and even teach one another about what a particular film made us see. How it made us feel.
My favorite horror movies right now (as they change pretty regularly) are: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, Peter Cornwell’s The Haunting in Connecticut and Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods.
Ande Thomas
My relationship with horror started young. My mom was a huge X-Files fan, which meant so was I. I loved watching any and all of Stephen King’s TV adaptations: IT, The Langoliers, The Tommyknockers, Rose Red; we were always sure to have blank VHS tapes prepped and ready when they aired. I loved them. And they terrified me. They routinely gave me nightmares, had me leaping into bed from distances I hoped were too far for the monster to reach, and kept me up late at night contemplating whether it was better to put your head under your covers or keep it above, so I could see the threat coming. I just also couldn’t look away.
As I matured, I like to believe so did my taste. I ventured off on my own exploration, eclipsing the interest of the rest of my family, pushing me to the darker corners of the house while more palatable fare graced the living room screen. John Carpenter, George A. Romero, and Wes Craven were probably the first filmmakers to etch themselves into my heart. I loved those stories that had a great moral impact, like Night of the Living Dead, or that changed the very fabric of being afraid, like Nightmare on Elm Street, but most of all, I loved the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown, as in The Thing.
Today’s resurgence of horror excites me to no end. Not only are more quality horror films being made, but their profiles have never been higher. With movies like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Jordan Peele’s Get Out getting such wide critical acclaim, the word is out that horror is no longer the cheap scare farm it had primarily been for 30 years. Horror has something to say and I am here for it.
Ande, Destiny, & Laura at the movies, duh
Throughout the decades, slasher film villains have had their fair share of bizarre motivations for committing violence. In Jamie Langlands’s The R.I.P Man, killer Alden Pick gathers the teeth of his victims to put in his own toothless mouth in deference to an obscure medieval Italian clan of misfits.