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Posted on February 1, 2019

Ten Women Authored Ghost Stories from the Gilded Age

Guest Post

If you’re like me, you love a good ghost story in the dead of winter. The season commands all that is spooky, desolate, and lonely. Fortunately, American literature is rife with ghostly stories written by women, the Gilded Age being an era when the genre was particularly enjoyed, highly published and serialized in magazines like Harper’s, Scribner’s, and New England Magazine. Topics range from marriage, motherhood, to unruly women, but all retain an unerring sense of the otherworldly. I highly recommend curling up with these stories on a cold winter’s night.

Below is a ranking of some of the best ghost stories of the Gilded Age (and some from just slightly after it, too). If you’re a fan of the era, you’ll recognize some of the more famous names, but there are some hidden gems, too. By no means is this list exhaustive, and I encourage you to find your own favorite stories from the era, as well! Read more

Posted on November 18, 2018

Five Snowy Horror Films You May Not Know About (And Should)

Dawn Keetley

Here are five horror films set in frozen landscapes that you may not have heard about—and that are all really worth watching. It’s a beyond-The- Shining-and-beyond-The-Thing list—for all those who love the harsh bleakness, the existential desolation, of those snow-blasted films.

Posted on September 29, 2018

Top 10 Episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Guest Post

Obsessions always have a beginning. If you rewind the clock 26 years, you would find hordes of kids crowding around the television at 9:30pm to catch Are You Afraid of the Dark? on Nickelodeon before being corralled and taken to bed. The series became the subject of nightmares and terrors and created a new generation obsession with horror. A combination of Tales from the Crypt and The Twilight Zone, mixed with kid-friendly subject matter, Are You Afraid of the Dark? was always destined to be a hit. The success of the series helped green light Goosebumps and one episode even inspired M. Night Shymalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), but unfortunately, the show now sits in relative and completely unwarranted obscurity.

Needless to say, this Canadian-American classic has a special place in my heart and, in honor of its 26^th anniversary, what follows is a list of my top ten episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark? Now, I don’t claim to be a master of 90’s television and the list is very subjective, but know that I have ordered the episodes by least-to-most frightening. Moreover, every episode is a gem in its own way and a list of only ten episodes could never do justice to this amazing television horror.

So. Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I call this article, The Top Ten Episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Posted on January 26, 2018

10 Horror Films about Sleep Disorders

Dawn Keetley

Sleep is becoming one of the crisis points of late modernity, as the steady encroachment of the “24/7” plugged-in world only intensifies sleep’s already uncanny nature.[i] To sleep is to slip into a realm of darkness, irrationality, and the supernatural. This realm is not only profoundly opposed to the contemporary illuminated world, but it has always lain uncomfortably close to death. Indeed, the Western way of sleeping has been described as a “lie down and die” model.[ii] To walk or talk while sleeping, moreover, is to act in ways divorced from the world of light and reason, to act without volition and the consent of the mind. The body that acts becomes something other than the person it appears to be; it generates uncanny doubles and evokes the profoundly uncanny uncertainty as to whether, as philosopher Dylan Trigg puts it, “‘I’ am truly identifiable with my body itself.”[iii] Horror films in the twenty-first century in particular have turned to sleep to exploit its inherently uncanny nature and the way it suggests that we are not always in control of who we are and what we do.

Posted on October 21, 2017

Top 10 Spine-tingling Goosebumps Episodes

Elizabeth Erwin

With pumpkins abounding and the bite of frost in the air, it’s time to take a look again at that classic horror series for kids from the 1990s, R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps. For generations of fans, Goosebumps was their first entry point into horror. With plots running the gamut from ghosts to monsters to possession, no horror trope was off the table, and the series remains an excellent example of how horror can be reconfigured for younger audiences in such a way that its bite stays firmly intact. Goosebumps is especially worth a watch for both its storytelling prowess and creepy atmosphere. So if you want to curl up at home with these oldies but goodies, here’s where to start. And you can find them all on Netflix.

Here’s my ranking for the top ten episodes of Goosebumps!