Chris Well been a writer pretty much his entire life. (Well, since his childhood.) Over the years, he has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, and books. He now is the chief of the website Monster Complex, celebrating monster stories in lit and pop culture. He also writes horror comedy fiction that embraces Universal Monsters, 1960s sitcoms, 1980s action movies, and the X-Files.
WSB is a labor of love. You can support us by reading our articles, telling your friends about us, visiting our Bookshop page, and shopping our merch. Thank you for being part of the horror community!
Wicked Lit is a dynamic collection of plays adapted from the classic horror literature of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, and more. These timeless stories have been ambitiously reimagined to create surprising and impactful theatrical experiences. Originally devised as immersive theater, the shows in the Wicked Lit collection have previously been staged in cemeteries, museums, mansions, and hotels. Produce them in a theater or in a creative guerrilla setting and watch these chilling horror classics come alive!
A British colonial ambassador tries to rid the African village in his charge of a purported demon, but Anansi the trickster and his friends have other ideas. Freely adapted from the canon of Anansi stories and Ashanti proverbs.
In this play based on the supernatural short story, three wishes are granted to a down-and-out family, but they must pay a terrifying price for interfering with fate. Adapted from the short story by W.W. Jacobs.
Halloween was such a huge success at the box office that it was immediately followed up by Friday the 13th, another film about a killer lunatic in a mask. That was so successful that scores of imitations soon flooded cinemas. Halloween now gets lumped in with Friday and everything else that followed.
Halloween and Friday are actually quite different. Halloween is largely bloodless. Director John Carpenter relied on tension rather than excess gore. The film takes its time to portray actual characters and the suspense comes from the audience knowing things the characters don't.
Friday the 13th, on the other hand, was directed by a literal pornographer. Sean S. Cunningham brought his skin-flick sensibility to the genre, with character-building replaced by as much blood and nudity he could pack in.
Raimi is probably best known as the guy behind the first three Spider-Man movies, but he made his reputation as a filmmaker in the horror genre with Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. If you enjoyed those films then this recommendation is for you.
He and early collaborator Bruce Campbell are open about having been obsessed with The Three Stooges as kids. The influence shows. Raimi delights in tormenting his characters, but somehow avoids feeling cruel. His madcap set pieces veer into slapstick, but the films still manage to be scary.
Drag me to Hell is rated PG-13, so it could be a good option to watch as a family if the kids are old enough to handle some scares. The film has some gross parts, but it's not particularly gory. Instead, Raimi uses sound and shadow to great effect.
It begins with a woman, played masterfully by Toni Collette, mourning the death of her mother. The two had a rocky relationship and it soon becomes clear the dead woman left behind a lot more than just bad memories.
I saw Jaws in the drive-in when I was 8. We had a cottage at a lake and everytime I went swimming after that I kept thinking something was coming for me. I still scream when snorkeling if I see a fish! pic.twitter.com/pj93Pqh7uf
In his previous film Monstrous, writer/director Bruce Wemple combined a Bigfoot creature feature with other horror elements. In his new feature The Retreat, he tackles another North American legend in the Native American Wendigo, again adding other fear-fare ingredients to the mix. The result is a trippy film with an unreliable, not very likable main character that goes into intriguing psychological horror realms.
The Dark and the Wicked is a supernatural horror movie about the Strakers, an estranged Texas family struggling against what seems to be a devil that has targeted them and their home, and here is The Dark and the Wicked explained. The mystery of this devil's origin as well as the movie's ending, though relatively straightforward, could use some explanation. The movie follows siblings Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) as they experience horrifyingly inexplicable events at their parents' farm.
As The Dark and the Wicked explained, they have come to help their mother (Julie Oliver-Touchstone), who has been taking care of their ailing, bedridden father (Michael Zagst) for a long time without their help. She warns them to go away, but they refuse. In one of the most underrated horror movies of 2020, the siblings have been estranged from their parents for a while, and they struggle with guilt, especially now that their father is on his deathbed. This guilt is what originally compels them to ignore their mother's warnings. However, as time goes on, tragedy strikes, and The Dark and the Wicked ending explained a more supernatural turn.
As The Dark and the Wicked explained, the siblings immediately notice that their mother is not behaving like herself, and they are unable to understand why. She continues to warn them to leave, but they are determined to stay. That night, she mutilates her hand and hangs herself in the goat house. They discover her suicide the next morning and, amid their grief, begin wondering why she would kill herself in the horror movie about grief.
They look for answers everywhere, including with the priest (Xander Berkeley) and the nurse (Lynn Andrews) who had been helping their mother in the absence of her children. As The Dark and the Wicked explained, the nurse tells them that their mother had been talking to an invisible someone, possibly a wicked creature; the priest tells them that their mother and their father had come to him for spiritual help when they needed it. The siblings refuse to believe their mother's suicide has anything to do with the supernatural despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
As they struggle to find answers for their mother's suicide, the siblings find her diary. In it, she describes a devil that is trying to steal her husband's soul. She writes that this devil is everywhere and that it makes her want to die. Although the diary in The Dark and the Wicked explained their mother's suicide, the siblings still don't want to believe it had anything to do with the supernatural.
Instead, they accuse the priest of filling her head with those ideas, implying her death is his fault. He defends himself and says that despite their beliefs to the contrary, evil does exist in the world, and it's already in their house. The nurse in The Dark and the Wicked explained the same thing, adding that only love can protect a soul from evil. The nurse's comment about love protecting the soul from evil seems to haunt the siblings; it adds a horrifying twist to the regret they already feel for not being there.
After being attacked by the nurse and post-Michael's death, Louise wakes up from being unconscious to the sound of the phone ringing, and she finally realizes that she has to leave, not knowing that it's too late. She apologizes to her wheezing father, who now seems to be a few breaths away from dying, and leaves. She falls down the stairs outside, and when she hears him gasping and coughing, she can't bear to go. She goes back inside and tells her father that she won't leave him.
As The Dark and the Wicked explained, she hears the devil mimicking Michael's voice, calling her for help, and shouts back at it in defiance. The house creaks while Louise holds onto her father in his final moments. When he takes his last breath, she begs him not to leave her, and then she wails in sorrow. A moment later, she is distracted by her mother's voice singing in the other room. Just as she turns toward her father, the devil grabs her, and she screams.
While Michael is on his way home, the granddaughter (Ella Ballentine) of family friend Charlie (Tom Nowicki) shows up at the farmhouse with news of her grandfather's suicide. Charlie's granddaughter turns out to be an apparition, and it attacks Louise and then disappears. Shaken, Louise calls Michael, but he doesn't answer. When the nurse arrives, she prays for Louise's father and sits down next to him to knit. Louise calls her brother again and finally gets him on the line. The Dark and the Wicked explained that he was on the road and has been driving home all night.
In one of the best supernatural horror movies, as Louise begs her brother on the phone, the devil slowly tries to take control of the nurse. Michael tells Louise that she should leave, that there is nothing left for them there. He tells her that they don't matter and that she should save herself by leaving. After they hang up, the nurse screams from the other room, and Louise rushes to her. The nurse has stabbed herself in the face and attacks Louise right before she stabs her own eyes out, seemingly talking to Jesus.
As Louise lies on the floor unconscious, The Dark and the Wicked explained that Michael is just arriving at his home, expecting to see his wife and children. When he finds them, they are all dead, throats slit around the kitchen table. Despondent at their deaths, he slits his own throat, and just before he loses consciousness, he realizes that their bodies were just another apparition, meaning that he failed to escape the devil's clutches.
b37509886e