Horror Book-and-Movie Double Bills by Anna Bogutskaya
Horror has always been my go-to genre. As a young reader, I graduated from R.L. Stine to Christopher Pike and finally to Stephen King. Writing Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us, I’ve revisited the last decade of horror films and TV series to try and articulate what they say about us, the audience. Here are some double servings of horror that I’ve paired together, on screen and on the page, that will make for a delightful double bill for those of us whose appetites are just that little bit darker than most.
If you liked Starry Eyes (Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer, 2014), you’ll like… Silver Nitrate (Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2023)
If you liked Starry Eyes (Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer, 2014), you’ll like… Silver Nitrate (Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2023)
Starry Eyes is an unfairly overlooked indie horror about the darkness lurking beneath the Hollywood Dream, and how far a young actress is willing to go to become a star. Much like Starry Eyes, Moreno-Garcia’s novel, Silver Nitrate ramps up the garden-variety backstabbing of the film industry by weaving in dealings with the devil and the occult. Both are demonically good.
If you liked Pearl (Ti West, 2022), you’ll like… The Eyes are the Best Part (Monika Kim, 2024)
If you liked Pearl (Ti West, 2022), you’ll like… The Eyes are the Best Part (Monika Kim, 2024)
I love an unreliable narrator who believes they are a reliable one. In the film, the titular Pearl is a farm girl with big dreams who ends up going on a killing spree that is totally, completely, logically justified in her eyes. In Kim’s debut novel, The Eyes are the Best Part, Ji-won is an LA college student who becomes fixated on eyeballs, human ones. Her anger towards her father, her mother and her no-good new boyfriend, leads her on a murder spree that is totally, completely, logically justified in her eyes.
If you liked Longlegs (Osgood Perkins, 2024), you’ll like… Red Dragon (Thomas Harris, 1981)
If you liked Longlegs (Osgood Perkins, 2024), you’ll like… Red Dragon (Thomas Harris, 1981)
Longlegs director Osgood Perkins has been open about wanting to create the same experience he had when watching the classic serial-killer thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991). His own serial-killer horror is one of the most talked-about films of the year, and in trying to create an oppressive, satanic vibe, echoes Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon and his terrifying serial killer, Frances Dolarhyde.
If you liked Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021), you’ll like… We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson, 1962)
If you liked Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021), you’ll like… We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson, 1962)
Prano Bailey’s Censor, a Thatcher-era set story of the mental unravelling of a film censor, has a protagonist as tightly wound as the Blackwood sisters in Shirley Jackson’s novel, who live in their isolated and crumbling old family mansion. Recommending a Shirley Jackson novel in 2024 might seem like a cop-out, but no one does it like her.
If you liked Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020), you’ll like… House of Leaves (Mark Z Danielewski, 2000)
If you liked Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020), you’ll like… House of Leaves (Mark Z Danielewski, 2000)
James’ debut film is a family drama wrapped in a haunted-house movie, and directly inspired by the unfilmable cult novel House of Leaves, a story-within-a-story about a tattoo artist who is obsessed with an academic text about a film that doesn’t exist. The manuscript of his obsession is written by a blind man, now deceased, featuring annotations by the author’s mother. Both movie and book are works of twisting, turning brilliance.
If you liked The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska, 2015), you’ll like… Our Wives Under the Sea (Julia Armfield, 2022)
If you liked The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska, 2015), you’ll like… Our Wives Under the Sea (Julia Armfield, 2022)
The Lure transforms Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid into a New-Wave musical gore-fest, where two mermaid sisters of different appetites find themselves working in a cabaret. Similarly mixing melancholy and horror, land and aquatic eroticism, is Julia Armfield’s luxuriously written Our Wives Under the Sea.
Anna Bogutskaya is a freelance critic, author, film programmer and creative producer. She writes for BBC Culture, Guardian, MUBI, the Face, TimeOut, amongst others, and programmes films for BFI, Edinburgh Film Festival and Fantastic Fest. She produces and hosts The Final Girls podcast, created and produced the horror anthology podcast Eerie and has produced podcasts for Paramount, Studiocanal, BFI and Vertigo Releasing, as well as contributing to many others. Her first book, Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate, was published in the UK and US in May 2023.