Portal:Speculative fiction/Horror


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Horror fiction is a genre of fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle and horrify the audience. Historically, the cause of the "horror" experience has often been the intrusion of a disturbing supernatural element into everyday human experience. Since the 1960s, any work of fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, or exceptionally suspenseful or frightening theme has come to be called "horror". Horror fiction often overlaps science fiction or fantasy, all three categories of which are sometimes placed under the umbrella classification speculative fiction.

Haunting is sometimes used as a plot device in horror fiction and paranormal-based fiction. Legends about haunted houses have long appeared in literature. For example, the Arabian Nights tale of "Ali the Cairene and the Haunted House in Baghdad" revolves around a house haunted by djinns. The influence of the Arabian Nights on modern horror fiction is certainly discernible in some of the work of H. P. Lovecraft.

Achievements in horror fiction are recognized by numerous awards. The Horror Writer's Association presents the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement, named in honor of Bram Stoker, author of the seminal horror novel Dracula. The Australian Horror Writers Association presents annual Australian Shadows Awards. The International Horror Guild Award was presented annually to works of horror and dark fantasy from 1995 to 2008. Other important awards for horror literature are as subcategories included within general awards for fantasy and science fiction in such awards as the Aurealis Award.

Selected horror profile

Olly Blackburn (also credited as Oliver Blackburn and Ollie Blackburn) is an English film director and screenwriter. Born in London, England, Blackburn had an acting role in the 1982 short comedy film A Shocking Accident; the film won an Academy Award in 1983 for Best Short Subject. He graduated from Oxford University in 1993 where he studied history. Blackburn won a Fulbright Scholarship and pursued graduate studies in film and television at the Tisch School of the Arts. While there, his film Swallowed received New York University's Martin Scorsese Post-Production Award.

Blackburn began his professional film career directing commercials and music videos, and became associated with the film production company Warp X. He served as Second Unit Director on the film Reverb. Blackburn co-wrote and directed Donkey Punch, which was his first film to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival. He shot the film on a £1 million budget over 24 days in South Africa. Movie critics likened his work on the film to filmmaker Peter Berg's Very Bad Things, director Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm, and Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water. He went on to serve as writer for the film Vinyan, which critics compared to two films by director Nicolas Roeg, Don't Look Now and Heart of Darkness.

Selected horror work

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a 1982 American horror film and the third installment in the Halloween series. Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace and starring Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin and Dan O'Herlihy, the film is based on an original screenplay by Nigel Kneale and focuses on an evil scheme by the owner of a mask company to kill the children of America on Halloween night through a series of popular Halloween masks: a witch, a jack-o'-lantern, and a skull.

Season of the Witch is unrelated to the previous films featuring the character Michael Myers, and was intended to begin Halloween as an anthology series, releasing a new Halloween storyline every year. The only connection this movie has with the others in the series is a scene where the trailer for Carpenter's original 1978 Halloween is airing on a TV. Besides wholly abandoning the Michael Myers plotline, Halloween III departs from the slasher film genre which the original Halloween spawned. The focus on a psychopathic killer is replaced by a "mad scientist and witchcraft" theme.

Produced on a budget of $2.5 million, Halloween III grossed $14.4 million at the box office in the United States. In addition to relatively weak box office returns, most critics gave the film negative reviews. Where Halloween had broken new ground and was imitated by many genre films following in its wake, this third installment seemed hackneyed to many. One critic twenty years later suggests that if Halloween III was not part of the Halloween series, then it would simply be "a fairly nondescript eighties horror flick, no worse and no better than many others."

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