“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.” ― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Another week drops off the calendar, another week closer to Christmas, and I’m still searching peoples heads for their fears. This week I have a wonderful guest in Karla Forbes author of the Nick Sullivan series of political thrillers, including her latest offering Fallout, who has shared her darkest fears with me, and again I am fascinated by how we are all fearful of something, and that it always seems to come from something in our younger days when our young minds are grasping at the threads of the world, pulling our dreams out of the clouds and sometimes, unveiling nightmares. Welcome Karla….
Even though I don’t actually remember watching it, I know for a fact that the film that scared me most as a child was the original Walt Disney version of Snow White. Let me explain.
I have a lifelong phobia of ghosts and the dark. I didn’t admit it to anyone, not even to close family members until just a few Christmases ago when we had driven to a holiday home we used to own in Germany. It was late in the afternoon on the shortest day of the year when my husband slipped on the ice and broke his ankle. As I watched him being taken away by ambulance, I knew that I’d be spending the night alone in this large house situated on the outskirts of a dark and gloomy forest. For the first time ever, I was being forced to face up to my biggest fear and I didn’t cope at all well. I spent most of the evening on the phone in tears to my two adult children who were not only shocked that their dad was in hospital but that their mum was blubbing down the phone because of a phobia that no one had ever suspected.
The moment we arrived back in the UK, I decided I needed professional help. Since then, I’ve had numerous counselling sessions and even tried hypnotherapy but nothing has changed. My phobia is as severe today as ever but my bank balance is a bit lighter as counselling and hypnotherapy don’t come cheap.
So where did it come from? Well, that’s an easy one to answer. My mum was heavily into spiritualism and filled my young head with her talk of the spirit world. In my mother’s defence, she had no idea of the damage she was causing and for some reason, I never plucked up the courage to admit that she was scaring me witless.
But I have an older sister who was also frightened by all this talk of ghosts but as she grew up, she left her fears behind whereas I have been stuck with them for my entire life. I have often asked myself why this could be. What was different about my sister which enabled her to move on whereas I become a small, scared child whenever I’m alone in a house at night?
One possible answer brings me back to Snow White. At the age of three, I was so frightened by Snow White that I had to be taken out of the cinema, screaming in terror. I don’t even remember the incident as I’ve probably blocked it from my mind but I know it happened because my mum mentioned it in conversation a few years later when I was a young woman. I suspect that it’s this incident that cemented my fears somewhere in my child brain and meant I could never move on.
The irony is that I’ve never had a paranormal experience in my life. I’ve never seen, heard or even sensed a ghost. The problem for me is that authors have too much imagination. I don’t need to see a ghost to fear it because it’s all there in my head.
I avoid anything ghostly. I never read anything spooky and if I find myself accidentally watching anything vaguely supernatural on the television I panic and grab the remote control to change the channel.
A literary agent once told me that I should embrace my phobia and learn to love it because it helps bring out the best in my writing. I refrained from telling her what I thought of that particular theory.
My fear of the paranormal, doesn’t mean that I can’t write anything scary. My books contain murder, terrorism and blackmail. Fallout is the first book in a series of nine thrillers featuring the same protagonist. It’s about a consignment of plutonium, left over from the cold war, which is discovered by terrorists and used to make dirty bombs. It’s contains scenes of violence but there is also humour because that’s what life is like, a mixture of good and bad, nice and nasty. One thing you can be sure of though is that none of my books will ever contain anything even slightly supernatural.
I think you are onto something here Karla – I realized while reading this that its the only Disney movie I watched once and wont watch again. Looking at images from it now I am reminded of how terrified I was of the witch and of the woods. And anyone who’s read my book Purgatory Hotel knows I might have an issue with woodland…..Thank you so much for sharing this with me, and for awakening my own fears again…..
Following on from my chat with Rumer Haven last week, who cited this lady as being very capable of scaring her, this week I am honored to welcome Shani Struthers, author of the bestselling Psychic Survey’s series and This Haunted World series. Her latest book ‘Cades Home Farm’ has just been released and looks pretty damn scary. I just love finding out what scares people, especially those who like to scare others….
What movie/book scared you as a child?
I don’t remember being scared by a book or a movie as a child, not to the point of being disturbed by it. Rather I enjoyed the creepy goodness of an author called Ruth Manning Sanders, who is now (sadly) out of print. She wrote twisted fairy tales, and they could get very dark indeed. As a teenager, I moved onto Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Clive Barker. Of them all, Clive Barker’s books truly scared me, as did those Hellraiser films of his! I remember watching the first one in the franchise and not being able to sleep a wink for fear of those cenobites coming to get me, especially the one with the chattering teeth!
What was your biggest fear as a child?
Spiders! And it still is. I’ve had so much therapy for it, but the fear is too deep-seated. The therapists have all given up on me!
Do you like scary movies? Which one is your favourite?
I love scary movies; they’re my favourite. An all-time favourite is the black and white version of The Haunting with Claire Bloom, based on Shirley Jackson’s absolutely brilliant The Haunting of Hill House. It’s a real ‘less is more’ type of movie, it leaves so much to interpretation, which, in my opinion, makes it far, far scarier!
I am usually most afraid of ghosts when I’m reading a book. Have you ever had a paranormal experience in real life?
Yes, I have and that is perhaps the reason I write about the paranormal now. To be honest, my experiences were mainly as a child, including one that took place on a beach in North Cornwall, when I was five. I’d wandered off from my mother and was playing happily in a cove. There are six of us kids and sometimes we could be hard to keep an eye on! Anyway, next thing I know, I’ve looked up from the sandcastle I’m building, and the tide has come rushing in, effectively cutting me off. I’m the only one in this cove and I can’t swim! I climb onto some rocks, climbing higher and higher as the sea rises. I remember looking out and seeing nothing but sea and being very scared. Suddenly, I turn around to see a couple more people on the rocks, a man and a woman. I remember the woman in particular, she was wearing a tweed jacket and matching tweed skirt, not exactly beach attire! They started talking to me, calming me, telling me I was going to be okay, that whatever happened, it wouldn’t hurt. They assured me they’d stay with me, that they wouldn’t leave me. I did calm right down and remembered thinking that it was true, it was going to be all right, whatever the outcome. A few minutes later, a lifeboat came tearing round the corner with my mum in it, pointing at me and screeching. I was rescued. Only me. When I asked my mum – and this was years later – why the man and woman hadn’t been rescued too, she said ‘what man and woman? There was only you there.’
Has a book ever really scared you?
The only book I’ve never been able to read at night (and I’m pretty hardcore when it comes to horror novels) is Sarah England’s Father of Lies, it kept giving me nightmares!
Can you share with us an example of fear in one of your own novels?
Fear is a common theme in all my novels, either imagined or real. Actually, it’s the imagined fear that fascinates me, how it can completely paralyse us.
This extract is from Blakemort, a book about a very haunted house indeed. Five-year old Corinna and her brother, Ethan, have gone to explore the dark confines of the attic, but her brother – as brothers do – has left her in there, closing the door behind him…
He stepped over me – literally stepped over me – made his way to the door and banged it shut behind him. No longer open, or even ajar, it confined me within – imprisoned me. What was overhead immediately started fluttering again and in dark corners I could sense writhing. Who was it that had whispered? A boy – the same age as Ethan or thereabouts and even worse than him, if such a thing were possible. My arms were on the floor behind me, supporting my weight but I sat up straight and drew them inwards, trying to curl into a ball instead, to make myself tiny, tinier still, invisible. I had to get up, get out of there, but I couldn’t move. I swallowed, my eyes darting to the left and to the right. Who are you? Who’s here?
Something swooped – the bat, the owl, whatever creature it was, black feathers in my face and a smell so bitter it blinded me further. I screamed but worse than that I wet myself, my arms flailing in an attempt to keep the damned thing away. Even in my terror I felt shame that I couldn’t control my bladder – that urine was pouring from me – all over the photos, staining them, destroying them. I wanted them destroyed!
“Get away! Get away! Get away!”
Surely my screaming would alert Ethan and he’d come rushing back.
“Get away!”
I pushed myself upwards. If no one would save me, I had to save myself.
The thing that was beating about my head retreated – vanished, as if it had never been. Gone. Just like that. Somehow that was even more frightening – its sudden disappearance. Looking back, I’m not even sure it was real. In fact, right now, at this moment, sitting here writing, I’d bet money it wasn’t. It was simply an illusion, some kind of magic trick. Certainly, it never appeared again. But alone as I was, or more accurately not alone, I didn’t have time to contemplate it. My chest rising and falling, sobs starting to engulf me, snot pouring from my nose, my legs hot and sticky, I could only contemplate escape – but damn my feet, they wouldn’t work!
In real life what is your biggest fear? Do you use that when you write?
Nothing terrorises me more than the sight of an eight-legged beastie! I don’t mind the small ones but the big ones, I literally quake with terror. One of my characters in my Psychic Surveys series, Theo, is also scared of spiders. She may battle with dark entities on a regular basis, but it’s an arachnid that can be the undoing of her! In Eve (A Psychic Surveys Prequel), the entity she’s dealing with is turning her own fears back on herself and yep, she’s seeing spiders everywhere, as big as dinner plates. She really has to try and come to terms with her fear, face it head on, but as we know, it’s never that easy…
Thank you so much for answering my questions Shani, I’m definitely with you on The Haunting, I love that movie, suggestion is always more terrifying. And also spiders are a big NOPE for me too, my house is full of them and I’m tempted to buy a flame thrower to deal with them.I’d never heard of Ruth Manning-Sanders but now I’ve seen her books I want them all!
Shani has an amazing back catalogue of terrifying novels, if you haven’t had the pleasure, and you like a good spooking, get yourself onto her website for more info!
Born and bred in Brighton, UK, Shani Struthers is the author of nineteen supernatural thrillers (so far), some set in various locations in England, others in more far-flung destinations such as Venice and America. Having been brought up with an understanding of the Occult and alternative views on religion, she threads this knowledge throughout her books, often drawing on real-life experiences of her own, from people she has known and from well-known Occult figures too. Please Note: her books tend to revolve more around PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR. You won’t find gore, vampires, werewolves, zombies or the like in her fiction. Her various paranormal series have proved very popular indeed, including the Psychic Surveys Series, This Haunted World, Reach for the Dead and Jessamine. She has also written a set of Psychic Surveys Companion Novels and two Christmas Ghost stories: Eve and Carfax House. All have topped the Amazon genre charts in both the UK and the US. For more information on new releases, competitions and general news, sign up to her newsletter via her website.
American actress Vera Miles stars as Lila Crane in the horror classic ‘Psycho’, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Halloween may have passed but for some of us folk, its Halloween every day! I’ve been a fan of this lady for a while and have long suspected we have a fair bit on common as far as what things we enjoy watching and reading and this chat made me want to talk even more about spooky stuff! Rumer Haven, author of several excellent books featuring the 1920’s and the dear departed, and most recently a collection of short stories – Myths, Mothers, Mystics. She’s my kinda gal!
What movie/book scared you as a child?
Poltergeist was hands down my favorite scary movie, though it truly frightened the daylights out of me (scary clowns, skeletons in pools, and, good God, that scene where the guy peels his face off? Gah!). I still say that one holds its own; I watched it more times than I could count as a child and have seen it at least a couple of times again as an adult, and…yeah. Still scary. Impressive special effects for the ’80s and actually some great acting. I’m in denial that there was ever a remake in 2015, but I’ll acknowledge it enough to say that it’s absolute rubbish, so stick with the original—ye old cathode ray tube TV as a portal to the dead (“They’re heeeeeere!”) is way scarier than a dumb drone sent into the spirit world. The 1982 Poltergeist even had me fearing the tree outside my bedroom window!
But while the original Poltergeist was (and might still be) my favorite, the film that actually terrified me even more as a kid was The Entity. Starring Barbara Hershey, this was another 1982 horror film that I probably shouldn’t have been watching when I was so young, but it was a sleepover favorite. I don’t think I could watch that one again as an adult, honestly; it frightened me that much. Felt too real, like something that could actually happen if a malevolent spirit were to attack, and while Poltergeist is filled with wonderfully scary and atmospheric visuals, it’s what you can’t see in The Entity that paralyzes me in fear even just thinking about it now.
Book-wise, I automatically think of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. Truly, I think what scared me most about those books as a kid were the illustrations. I don’t know how to describe them, but there’s just something so liminal and watery and…hairy about them…like the kind of loose hair you’d find in a drain, which isn’t to say they’re gross, just creepy AF.
What was your biggest fear as a child?
Probably that damn tree outside my window! But seriously, aside from day-to-day fears like jumping off the diving board at the local pool or hanging upside down from monkey bars, paranormal stuff was probably the most consistent fright that manifested in many ways: fear of the dark, any creaking in the house, the space underneath my bed, dolls…(I was Team Stuffed Animal, with the exception of my Cabbage Patch Kid. Animals = cuddly and love you. Dolls = creepy and want to kill you.). As much as I was afraid of ghosts, though, I couldn’t get enough of them in stories and movies. I was just asking to be scared.
I will say, though, that my early fascination with the afterlife may have, unbeknownst to me at the time, been very closely related to another fear: death. Even as a young child, while saying my prayers at night, the line “And if I die before I wake” gave me pause. I think I really did fear every night that I might die in my sleep. What a blessing it was, then, to wake in the morning to my mom whistling and throwing open the curtains, letting in the light.
Do you like scary movies? Which one is your favourite?
You bet I do! Not gory slasher films (though I’ll indulge in those, too, around Halloween) but ones about spiritual hauntings. As mentioned earlier, Poltergeist has remained a firm favorite since childhood, though another one to emerge during my adult life is The Others with Nicole Kidman. Released in 2001, that film is exactly the Gothic atmosphere and subtle touch that I love in a scary story. It’s what’s left to the imagination that I personally find most frightening, which is why blood-n-guts or easy jump scares ultimately don’t do it for me.
I am usually scared the most by ghosts when I’m reading a book. Have you ever had a paranormal experience in real life?
The closest I’ve come to a paranormal experience was while staying at a Tudor-era holiday cottage in Herefordshire, England several years ago. By then, I had already come to realize that I can sense…something in certain places, that I’ll sometimes feel a distinct pressure on my chest that leaves me gasping for air a little. Some places are heavy with their histories, I figure. But during our first night at that cottage, I saw the fringe of my husband’s scarf sort of flutter upward from where the scarf was hanging on a coatrack. But it didn’t so much look like it had been blown upward as it was being tugged at. Just when I was about to dismiss it as my eyes deceiving me, I hear my husband say, “Did you see that, too?”
He’d witnessed the exact same thing and was actually the one staring at it more straight-on than me. That had us up on our feet and investigating the entryway around the coatrack, trying to debunk the movement as having been caused by the wind. We checked the gaps between the front door and the doorframe, the mail slot, etc., but for an old cottage, it had actually been renovated with quite modern features and was airtight. There was no breeze coming through from anywhere, and it wasn’t windy outside in the first place. We even checked the radiator, but no blowing heat was coming from that, and there weren’t any vents to be found—and, anyway, if air had blown in from any of these possibilities, the scarf was on the opposite side, facing a wall and shielded on the other side by our coats. In any case, we just dismissed it for the time being and went about our leisurely evening, watching TV and snacking.
And that’s when I heard a scraping sound right in front of me. I looked down at the floor at my feet in time to see the Doritos bag that was setting there tip over a few inches and then return to right-side up, scraping against the edge of the coffee table as it did so. Directly in front of me, with the lights on; I watched this happen plainly—the bag leaning at an impossible angle without tipping over, and not only did it not fall, it stood itself back up. My husband was on his laptop at the time, so he didn’t see it himself, but he was sitting right next to me and did hear the scraping. And once again, we immediately set about debunking what I saw. I know I had not moved my feet, but my husband had been sitting with his legs crossed and wondered if he’d been swinging his foot, causing a breeze. We tried to recreate it, with him swinging so feverishly it was funny and obviously not what had happened, and again, windows and everything were sealed tightly with no draught, and we’d have been hard-pressed to explain how one could’ve caused the bag to sway side to side the way it did anyway.
Later that night, I experienced a lucid dream in which I thought I had woken up in the same bedroom where we were staying—everything the same except for a desk by the window and an armoire against a different wall—and I met a little ghost girl who told me her name was Sarah. She had long blond hair in braids and wore an old-fashioned dress, and I clearly remember the brief conversation I had with her, asking if she minded that we were there and if there were others there, too. Fortunately, she was fine with us being there but didn’t seem as reassuring about the others, who apparently were there. At any rate, there were no occurrences beyond that first night, only that heavy pressure on my chest every time I entered the bedroom. We were intrigued by it all but not scared; it felt harmless, indeed like a curious child inspecting our things and feeling out the new strangers in a house that was probably used to sitting empty.
Has a book ever really scared you?
Automatically, I think of how American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis nearly made me vomit—literally—but that was more to do with its graphic nature. Otherwise, I’m racking my brain for one that would’ve had me leaving the light on at night… Not to say that hasn’t happened, as I certainly have gotten chills from Gothic tales like The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting of Hill House, and The Woman in Black—and anything these days by Shani Struthers and Sarah England is sure to frighten!—but for being so bookish, I actually think I’m more skittish when it comes to movies. Not sure why.
Can you share with us an example of fear in one of your own novels?
Fear creeps across all my stories, and in my paranormal ones it’s usually my main characters’ fears that render them more vulnerable to the supernatural—not in that they’re preyed upon by a malevolent entity for that reason, but that their human frailty genuinely connects them to someone in the past. That’s usually the point of any “haunting” in my stories, not really to terrify but to show the universality of the human condition across time.
Yet to cite a specific example for this question, I’ll look to my most recent story, “Revolve Her,” a novella that now features in my short story collection, Myths, Mothers, and Mystics. In this one, my main character, Ellie, immediately finds herself freaked by a murder she might have just committed, only to find it was all in her mind, which proves almost (if not just) as scary. She’s questioning whether she’s had a psychotic break or not when she begins to suspect there could be someone else’s emotional baggage that’s affecting her—a presence in her hotel room that haunts her both in dreams and her waking life. Ellie has just experienced a shocking heartbreak in her relationship with a doctor, and she’s traveled far from home, feeling alone in an unfamiliar landscape, so her sense of betrayal and sadness and loneliness all compounds to make her relatable to a ghost because of what had led to that person’s death and the ethereal existence they’ve had since. Over the course of the story, we see not just fear but the different ways people might choose to act on that fear and what the consequences could be.
In real life what is your biggest fear? Do you use that when you write?
Currently, my biggest fear is anything happening to my family while I’m overseas. I live in London, UK but am originally from Chicago, Illinois, and this separation from my family in the States during COVID is a nightmare. Aside from missing siblings, nieces, and nephews terribly, my parents are highly at risk right now, so I’m terrified of them having any contact with this virus, along with just not knowing how long it will be before I see them again, if I’m losing precious time.
I honestly think that fear is actually preventing me from writing lately. But moving away from my family in the first place did heavily influence my first novel manuscript, which was my second book to be published: What the Clocks Know. I started drafting that story while in the throes of depression, soon after relocating to London from Chicago in 2008. Since I wasn’t working for a time to follow the move, I ended up pouring my emotions into Clocks…the loneliness of missing family and friends back home and not having anyone near me besides my husband, the blank and drifting feeling I had without familiar surroundings and a sense of structure and purpose…
That big unknown about the future and not having a local network of support was incredibly frightening, and even scarier was the fact that, most days, I didn’t even really know myself anymore. I didn’t know what defined me any longer, if what I thought defined me before even had in the first place. In my early thirties, I was facing a bigger identity crisis than in adolescence, so a lot of that got dumped into poor Margot, my protagonist. I had her come to London on her own steam in an attempt to live vicariously, to feel more empowered about my own situation overseas rather than feeling like the “trailing spouse” (a horrid term, if you ask me), and I gave her my depression but with the hope that, hey, maybe it isn’t her—maybe it’s a ghost! A presence in her new flat that might be imparting its own emotions onto her, just like I pondered when I myself sat alone in my new Victorian-era space. I wished so badly that it was just residual negative energy, trapped within those walls, that would explain why I felt the way I did, why I didn’t feel like myself—because that would be less scary than the realities of my mental and emotional health. So, I explored that in the book, and, well…now it is what it is!
That’s probably the most personal example of how I’ve used fear in my writing, but even as the characters I write become less and less like myself, I still use my own fears in thinking up scenarios that would frighten me as a reader. And even if I can’t relate directly to a character’s life experience, I think fear is key to finding common ground. Ultimately, we’re all human and vulnerable and afraid of something, and even if those fears take different forms, their nature is essentially the same at the core and can topple even the giants among us.
Huge thanks Rumer, we really do have alot in common! The Entity ruined me for years, I still can’t watch it, and Poltergeist is absolute tops (and yes that remake didn’t last very long on my screen, eve with the presence of Sam Rockwell). And on the subject of American Psycho – the reason I only read it once? The Rat.
If you fancy a dip into the paranormal world of Rumer, please use the links below and get yourself some lockdown reading by stacking her books up on your shelf or virtual shelf.
“Of all base passions, fear is the most accursed” – William Shakespeare, King Henry VI Part One
So very happy to welcome Jennifer Wilson to my blog during the festive season! As you may know Jennifer loves writing about spooks as much as I do, only hers are a tad more regal than mine. Author of the Kindred Spirits series, Jennifer has raised the dead monarchy so many times she deserves a spot on Most Haunted. I think her stories are awesome so I’m very excited to have her here to talk about fear…..
Hi Anne-Marie, thanks for inviting me to your blog today. It’s fair to say I’m a naturally jumpy and easily-frightened individual, so I’m confident that of all your guests, my responses are at the coward’s end of the fear scale…
What movie/book scared you as a child?
I have really vivid memories of reading a book from the ‘upstairs’ library, for the upper juniors in primary school, which really freaked me out. I can see the cover, with two boys running, and I’m sure it was called ‘The Runaways’ or something similar. In one scene, a wall fell over, almost crushing either one or both of them. That image stuck with me for a long, long time, and gave me nightmares about being crushed. Horrific. I should have stayed in the ‘downstairs’ library, where I belonged, but I’d finished all the books it had to offer!
What was your biggest fear as a child?
Well, apart from walls… I’ve always had the most random fear of dust-bin lorries. That, and dinosaurs. Both stem from films. I watched the Turtles live-action film, where Shredder is, well, shredded, in a dust-bin lorry, and from that day, I’ve hated them. We used to have to walk up a really narrow wynd to get up to college, and on dust-bin day, I’d be petrified of accidentally slipping into the back of it. As for dinosaurs, that’s the fault of Jurassic Park. I had this terrible fear that if I opened my curtains at night, I’d see the eye of a t-rex, just staring back at me…
Do you like scary movies? Which one is your favourite?
As you can probably guess from the above, no, I do not like scary movies… I’m not really a film person anyway, but the most I can tolerate is a bit of a ‘jump scare’ which at least is over quickly!
I am usually scared the most by ghosts when I’m reading a book. Have you ever had a paranormal experience in real life?
Yes, and the most recent was in Greyfriars Kirkyard, in Edinburgh. As it’s the setting for part of my own book, Kindred Spirits: Royal Mile, and it was a lovely, quiet morning (I was early for an exhibition), I decided to pop in and get some nice photos of the blossom. There was one guy sitting having a coffee on a bench as I walked in, but that was it. Around the front of the church there was a lovely view down the graveyard of blossom, which I snapped, but as I went to put my phone away, I felt somebody touch my handbag. I panicked slightly, and put my own hand down to the zipper / strap, whilst turning to my left to confront them. Out the corner of my eye, I saw a tall gentleman in a dark suit and a white shirt, with dark hair. Later, I thought he had also been wearing a hat, but I cannot swear to that, and may have added it in my imagination afterwards. But the man himself was clear as day. Heart racing now, I turned fully around, only… Nothing. Nobody anywhere near me. Anyone who knows the site will know that if you’re in the middle of the paving in front of the church itself, there’s not enough time to get somewhere hide in the second it took me to turn around (Usain Bolt himself wouldn’t make it). The only other thing I felt was the strangest sensation of cold.
Greyfriars Kirkyard
I got out of there quicker than I’ve ever done anything in my life! Once out the gates, I did what every self-respecting thirty-something who has had a scare would do, and called my mum. She laughed initially when I told her, but then admitted she believed me, because she could hear the genuine fear in my voice. I was very glad to get away into the safety of the museum after that…
Has a book ever really scared you?
Other than the one I talked about above, not really, but that’s partly down to the fact that I can usually sense when something is about to get too much for me, and I skim / skip appropriately. It’s the same technique I use with overly-graphic crime novels!
Can you share with us an example of fear in one of your own novels?
Since the Kindred Spirits series follows the adventures of the ghostly communities inhabiting some of Britain’s most famous landmarks, fear definitely plays a part in my novels. For the most part, this is the ghosts instilling fear in the tourists who visit their homes, such as George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, rising from a barrel of malmsey in the Tower of London, or Katherine Howard haunting ‘her’ corridor at Hampton Court Palace. In one of the closes off Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, some students ready to play a trick on those taking part in one of the city’s famous ‘ghost tours’, the students themselves become the victims, terrified as Mary Queen of Scots enjoys herself in the occasional haunting. In these situations though, I think it’s fair to say that the living are almost-willing participants in the game. After all, you wouldn’t go on a ghost tour along a famously haunted street, at night, with somebody dressed as a ghoul, if you weren’t at least partially expecting to be scared witless, would you? So can the ghosts really be blamed, when they’re practically giving the tourists what they’re expecting?
In some instances though, I’ve wanted to explore things a little ‘bigger’ than just ghosts jumping out at unsuspecting visitors. I’ve talked about ghostly characters finding their ‘white light’ and moving on from their haunting, but this is by choice – if the white light appears, then a ghost can choose to move on, or stay. But I also wanted to give the ghosts something to genuinely fear, otherwise, they seemed a bit too invincible. I had this idea that if a ghost was injured too many times, they would gradually fade away to nothing. That would stop characters fighting each other – there had to be a consequence of their actions.
In Kindred Spirits: York, I pushed things a little further, and actually introduced a ‘bad guy’ into things, rather than just an unpopular character. Here, the ghosts didn’t quite know what was going on, which, for characters who can slip through walls and overhear almost any conversation without being observed, was something unknown, and for a lot of people, isn’t that one of the most frightening things?
In real life what is your biggest fear? Do you use that when you write?
If you take away dust-bin lorries and dinosaurs, then being very serious for a moment, I’m always scared of letting people down, or disappointing them. Perhaps this isn’t quite as relevant in the Kindred Spirits series, but in The Raided Heart, Meg has a strong sense of wanting to do the right thing, and not let her family down, and in the WIP I’m currently working on, loyalty and needing to work together are strong motivations for the key characters, as they try to do their best in difficult situations.
Thank you so much for joining my study of fear Jennifer. I too fell foul of Jurassic Park, had several T Rex nightmares after seeing that at the cinema! And your Greyfriars experience deserves a blog post of its own! How creepy was that? Feel free to stop by with ghost stories again please!
All of Jennifer’s books are currently in the big DarkStroke Halloween sale over on Amazon, you can get all titles for 99p/99c this weekend! Go go go!
About Jennifer C. Wilson
Jennifer C. Wilson stalks dead people (usually monarchs, mostly Mary Queen of Scots and Richard III). Inspired by childhood visits to as many castles and historical sites her parents could find, and losing herself in their stories (not to mention quite often the castles themselves!), at least now her daydreams make it onto the page.
After returning to the north-east of England for work, she joined a creative writing class, and has been filling notebooks ever since. Jennifer won North Tyneside Libraries’ Story Tyne short story competition in 2014, and in 2015, her debut novel, Kindred Spirits: Tower of London was published by Crooked Cat Books. The full series was re-released by Darkstroke in January 2020.
Jennifer is a founder and host of the award-winning North Tyneside Writers’ Circle, and has been running writing workshops in North Tyneside since 2015. She also publishes historical fiction novels with Ocelot Press. She lives in Whitley Bay, and is very proud of her two-inch view of the North Sea.
To me soundtracks have always been a huge part of what makes a movie great and unforgettable. I always felt more moved by the music or song that was playing in a scene, and I wonder if I would have cried as much at movies like The English Patient if the music had not been so beautiful. Music Scores have populated my CD collection since I was old enough to save pocket money for them; I recall getting the bus into town just so I could buy the Michael Kamen soundtrack to ‘Robin Hood; Prince of Thieves’, and not long after doing the same to get the soundtrack to ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ by Wojciech Kilar.
Initially my love of soundtrack music was due to having liked the movie, but I was also developing a taste for the composer rather than the movie it went with. I knew the soundtrack to ‘Betty Blue’ long before I was old enough to see it and soon was hunting out other soundtracks by Gabriel Yared such as ‘The Lover’ and years later ‘The English Patient.’ I was also very fond of Eric Serra after having seen ‘The Big Blue’, he went on to do other amazing works such as ‘Leon’ and ‘Goldeneye’. One composer whose soundtracks I loved so much was Vangelis. I had not seen any other movie he had done apart from ‘Blade Runner’ but I soon had a collection of his other soundtracks.
It was rare that I liked a soundtrack that had actual songs as opposed to a score. The first one of these I owned was Dirty Dancing (I still love those fabulous 60’s songs,) shortly followed by the soundtrack to Young Guns 2. I know, shameful, but i was a big Bon Jovi fan when I was a young teenager!. I think the next one i had put on my Christmas list was ‘Until the End of The World.’ An amazing Wim Wender’s film that i did not see for some years after I got the soundtrack.
Since then there have been a plethora of great movie soundtracks, my CD collection is still largely soundtracks and even in this time of MP3 and i-tunes, i still like to own the CD. I could do a huge list of great soundtracks but this blog will not include the music scores, I’ll save those for another time…..
Here’s a list of some favourites, click the movie title to link to viewing the rest of the soundtrack.
Highlights; Sweetness Follows – REM, Have You Forgotten – Red House Painters, Last Goodbye – Jeff Buckley. And the Sigur Ros Song that is not included on the CD – The Nothing Song.
The Comic Book. For years their contents were the stuff of the small screen, Superman, Batman, Spiderman, The Hulk, all became fabulously successful TV series, even now they are still entertaining, perhaps for reasons of nostalgia rather than for the quality of the acting and special effects.
Over the years other big screen movie franchises have produced very good and also very poor comic book adaptations. The 80’s Superman was everything a family movie was about when I was little, a hero, a baddie, the world in danger and a girl that needed saving. I think Superman movies are the reason I fell in love with comic books and the movies that were created from them.
Tim Burton’s Batman was the movie that cemented my love of Batman and the reason I began reading Batman comics. And it also made The Joker my favourite comic book bad guy. The Batman films that followed wobbled in and out of entertainment, different directors and actors made the role of Batman become less of the batman I had in mind.
Reading comics such as Arkham Asylum, The Killing Joke and Judgement on Gotham (somebody PLEASE make a movie of that comic!) gave me a love for the darker characters that were Batman and Joker. While I will always love Tim Burton’s Batman, for me the best portrayal of Batman came with Christopher Nolan’s dark and epic Batman Begins. It seemed more styled around the bat flapping darkness of Dave McKean’s art, the creepy and twisted world of Arkham and its residents finally came to life in Nolan’s vision of Gotham. Similarly, when he made The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger’s Joker finally had the frighteningly insane edge that I had found in Grant Morrisons comic Arkham Asylum.
And it seemed that the cinema discovered the world of comics en masse. After the original Batman movies fell into the ‘Un-cool’ after the awful Batman and Robin, one would have thought comics books could slip back into the realms of geekdom again. But luckily a rash of adaptations sprung up, X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, Elektra, The Fantastic Four, Spiderman, and Superman. A super hero renaissance proved massively successful with a whole new generation and comic books became cool again.
Aside from the huge Marvel and DC comic movie franchises, the popularity of comics allowed for several other Graphic Novels to be made into movies.
Frank Miller’s Sin City was a long time favourite set of comics for me, and when i knew a movie was being made, I wondered how it could be done. One of the things I loved so much about the comics was the art, the simple images and basic colours that had a film noir quality to them. Robert Rodriguez’ movie was everything it should have been, visually beautiful, brilliantly acted. It was as though the pages of the comic had come to life.
Similarly Mike Mignola’s art was present in Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation of Hellboy. An unlikely superhero though he was, the Big Red was popular enough that a sequel was made. It might not have had all the clout of the first movie but it was still a visual feast for the eyes with lots of the usual Hellboy humour.
Another very unlikey hero was brought to life from my favourite graphic novel by director James McTeigue with V for Vendetta. Written by The Wachowski Brother’s of Matrix fame, it may not have had the box office success of films like X-Men, it had a huge cult following. The faceless vigilante voiced by the fabulous Hugo Weaving was a dark hero, much like The Crow had been, meting out justice in a rather violent way. Revenge is always a great reason for amazing knife fights and shoot ‘em ups.
I’m not sure if it was my interest in Jack the Ripper or just my love of the graphic novel but I also really enjoyed The Hughes Brothers adaption of Alan Moore’s From Hell. Aside from an odd choice of casting Heather Graham as Mary Kelly, I liked it.
I can’t not mention Tank Girl, just because I think she rocks and Jamie Hewlett’s girl deserves to be more loved than she is. I liked the movie, not many others do, even Jamie Hewlett doesn’t like to talk about it, but I liked her, even though she was played by an American.
There are so many comic book adaptations now, i lose count, a great deal of them don’t get the following they deserve, I liked The Punisher, but so many didn’t; I sort of liked Ghost Rider and almost nobody did; I hated 30 days of Night and yet so many people loved it. Comic movies like Ghost World would never be mainstream in the same way as Fantastic Four but then neither was the subject matter. However, comic fans always know the good ones shouldn’t be forgotten.
Comic Cool is still running at full speed with recent movies such as Watchmen, Iron Man and its sequel, Kick-Ass, Jonah Hex, The Losers and Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. And we have yet to see Captain America, Men in Black 3, Thor, Green Lantern,Wolverine2, Iron Man 3 and the much anticipated Avengers.
I honestly never thought comic books would storm the cinema in the way they have, making me realise I had been wrong all along about comics. They aren’t just the domain of geeks, they belong to everyone, or at least the geek that lives in everyone.
The close proximity of Halloween along with watching Mark Gatiss ‘History of Horror’ on BBC 3 has got me thinking about the great scary movies that we should all be watching this Halloween weekend.
The first scary movie I saw stayed with me for the rest of my life, one scene in particular presenting itself in nightmares. ‘The Evil Dead’ was and is my favourite Zombie movie; to be fair I don’t actually like zombie movies, all that eating of brains and insides just makes me feel ill, but ‘The Evil Dead’ has a great sense of humour about it and Bruce Campbell makes it totally watchable.
Beyond that I saw a variety of the late 70’s early 80’s horrors, one of which I have never heard mentioned when discussing movies, perhaps because it was so awful? ‘Christina’ i think it was called and seemed to be about a Frankenstein type experiment putting the vengeful mind of a introverted, bullied and facially disfigured girl into the body of a sexy beautiful woman. Needless to say, madness and murder ensues.
Hammer Horror never appealed to me, the pinkish orange of the blood never sat right with me, I preferred black and white thrillers such as ‘Psycho’ and comedy thrillers like Bob Hope’s ‘The Cat and the Canary.’
It wasn’t until I was 18 that I saw the movie I consider the scariest film ever. ‘The Shining’ and other paranormal horrors that followed seem to bother me more than any vampire, serial killer or zombie ever has. The desolation of the hotel, the endless long corridors of empty rooms stretching away in the cold hotel would probably send any one mad even without the help of murderous spirits. The simplicity of a children’s ball rolling down an empty hallway towards the young boy is enough to raise hairs. These simple scenes, though creepy, are like warnings of the more graphic and grotesque scenes that follow Particularly, the scene in the hallway where Danny sees the two girl ghosts inviting him to play with them ‘forever’ with a spliced frame of their bloody murder……I still have to look away at that moment.
If I have learnt anything about what scares me when it comes to movies, it’s that you throw a haunting from a dead child in the mix and I am going to have trouble going to the bathroom during the night. Japanese horrors used that imagery and back story to great affect in The Ring, The Grudge and Dark Water and while not as good in its entirety; A Tale of Two Sisters has a few alarming scenes thrown in. The American remakes of these movies don’t quite have the same feel to them as the originals, however the sight of Samara crawling out of the TV in ‘The Ring’ or the vengeful blood soaked ghost of ‘The Grudge’ crawling down the stairs translates fairly well. Another spooky children offering worth watching is Spanish movie The Orphanage, with its unexpectedly disturbing faceless child ghost.
More mainstream movies that delivered in that area were the TV movie of ‘The Woman in Black’ (soon to be remade by Jane Goldman) featuring a ghost child who likes to throw balls and leave toy soldiers in peoples beds, and the 1980 George C Scott movie ‘The Changeling.’ Scott plays a recently widowed concert pianist who moves to an old house in the desolate Pacific Northwest only to find that something in the house is trying to get his attention. The use again of desolate wintry locations and the children’s toys add an effortlessly creepy tone to the movie.
Another parapsychological horror that slipped under the radar for many was ‘The Machinist’ director Brad Anderson’s early movie ‘Session 9’, about a group of men clearing asbestos from a derelict insane asylum. English actor Peter Mullan does a fabulous turn as the foreman bothered by the asylums lingering inmates.
I deliberately haven’t mentioned some of the more run-of-the-mill horrors that everyone knows and loves; while ‘Halloween’ is still one of my favourite movies of its genre, I cant say it ever kept me awake at night. If you want more ideas for Halloween viewing, get onto the BBC iPlayer and watch the 3 part series ‘A History of Horror’, its a damn good look at the genre from the early black and white’s to the American slasher movies of the 70’s. Plenty of viewing material there to give you a Halloween scream.
I figure the scariest it can get for me is if someone made a movie about an insane asylum haunted by the ghost of a small child. Still waiting.
All That Mighty Heart 