Quarxx experiences 'Pandemonium' 🚪, Disturbed Book Club debuts📚, Pride recap🏳️‍🌈, & more!

This week, the Brit’s have taken over the newsletter… That’s right, Brett and Bee have handed over the quill to two depraved girlies who love ruining their own days with the most vile & nihilistic horror books. 

Every week, we’ll be bringing you the Disturbed Book Club with a recommendation guaranteed to make you shudder, shake and sick. Maz and I have always been spooky gals with a love for roleplaying Buffy the Vampire Slayer as kids, watching Shaun of the Dead like a religion, and letting our dads convince us The Blair Witch Project was real. 

We know y’all will be celebrating July 4th, so we’ve gone for a suitable book rec – or potentially offensive depending on your humor! We can’t wait to dissect more girls books with you.

Issue 005’s Letterboxd list can be found here

We might all be film lovers here, but sometimes you just need to curl up with a good book and let your imagination do the rest. To celebrate July 4th and show our patriotism from across the pond, we’re recommending Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. 

A timeless classic for the depraved. I love this book for its masterful blend of dark humor and psychological suspense. I thoroughly enjoy the stark contrast of Bateman’s day-to-night character, from ambitious and charismatic to violent and unhinged. Sure to be a favorite amongst horror fans.

Essential Scares in House on Haunted Hill

There’s great value in jump scares. Especially well-placed, jump scares get the blood pumping in ways subtle scares do not. Subtle scares slither into your bone marrow and quicken your breath. Conversely, jump scares jolt you awake when you least expect it. They’re like a Jack-in-the-Box. Even if you anticipate them, a jump scare can frighten you and give you nightmares.

As House on Haunted Hill turns 65 this year, I wanted to revisit a few of the film’s most effective scares. There will be spoilers – you’ve been warned. Starring Vincent Price as Frederick Loren, the film tells the tale of a supposed haunted house sitting atop a secluded hill far away from town. Inviting five random strangers, Frederick hosts a ghost party and offers his visitors 10 grand to spend the night. Once the help leaves for the evening, promptly at midnight, the guests will be locked in for eight additional hours with no possible way to escape.

The night unravels slowly. The cast of characters, which includes pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), Dr. Trent (Alan Marshal), and journalist Ruth Bridges (Julie Mitchum), share a few barbs and toss back a few drinks. Most are skeptical about the house being haunted, everyone except Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook Jr.), who now owns the estate and has rented it out to Frederick for this special gathering. Watson warns the group about the ghosts and how seven people have died at their hands, forever trapped by their deaths inside the mansion’s crumbling walls.

Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig), a worker for one of Frederick’s companies, sees an old woman's ghost on two separate occasions. While Nora investigates a secret passage in the cellar, the woman appears out of the shadows – eerily gliding forward before vanishing as quickly as she came. The image is torturous, a tantalizing primer for the film’s most iconic scare.

Later in the night, Nora finds herself back in the cellar. With a candle grasped firmly in her hand, she knocks on the wall to find exactly where the passageway exists. As she takes a step back, she turns to find the old woman popping out of the darkness. This time, the woman bares her teeth and lifts her hands in a claw-like fashion. Her eyes widen while she floats through the room and out into the greater basement space. Nora, quite the Scream Queen – and we don’t talk about her enough – lets out a blood-curdling cry and darts from the room.

This moment, in particular, emerges as one of the most influential jump scares in horror history – it’s right up there with the bus scene in Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 feature Cat People. It’s effective in that the film banks hard with the subtle scares, so when this creepy pounce happens, you’re rattled to the core. There are few scares quite like it.

In the aftermath, Lance attempts to console Nora but doesn’t believe she saw what she claims. Many of the others aren’t convinced of her experience, either, and Dr. Trent even diagnoses her encounters as fear-based delusions. In her frightened state, Nora succumbs to the terror and becomes consumed in her mind.

Nora falls victim to yet another scare in the third act. Annabelle (Carol Ohmart), Frederick’s wife, hangs herself at the top of the stairs and later appears in ghost form outside Nora’s bedroom window. Annabel hangs in mid-air, her gown blowing in the storm. A mysterious rope wiggles through the bars and wraps around Nora’s ankles. Frozen in fear, she can only scream, probably bursting a few blood vessels in the process. The eeriness of the scene crawls under your fingernails and hangs there, tearing at the nerve endings.

The film also features one more essential scare. I won’t give too much away about the ending – but a character witnesses a skeleton rise out of a vat of acid (hidden beneath a trap door in the cellar’s floor) and move about the room, seemingly on its own. A voice wafts in the air, as though a spirit from the other side reaching out.

The moment is both silly and terrifying. Who would have thought a dancing skeleton could strike such fear – but it excels on every single level. Such are all the scares in the film. They’re peppered throughout the story in places where you least expect it, so when they happen, you’re left gasping for breath and clutching your teddy bear.

When I think about haunted houses and ghost stories, House on Haunted Hill, along with 1963’s The Haunting, remains the benchmark by which all others are judged. It’s creepy fun with so much ghostly imagery that will haunt your dreams. Clocking in at just over 70 minutes, it works overtime in sending frights tingling down the spine.

It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve watched it, it’s just as effective as the very first time. If you haven’t seen it yet, I invite you to experience a menacing performance from Vincent Price and enough screams to fill a stadium.

July 4th isn’t just a day of barbecuing, swimming, and kicking back with a few brewskis. It’s a day to escape the heat, crank up the A/C, and sit back with a few horror films. We put together a list of 7 films to watch today (or any day) to lift your (American) spirits! Check out the list on Letterboxd.

Silver Scream Con, the horror convention that brought 5,000 blood-thirsty movie fans to Boston's North Shore in each of its first two iterations, brings the Three-quel everyone's been dying for to Worcester’s DCU Center on September 13-15, 2024. Tickets and information are available now at silverscreamcon.com.

The Fantasia International Film Festival will celebrate its upcoming 28th edition with an electrifying program of screenings, workshops, and launch events running from July 18 through August 4, 2024, returning yet again at the Concordia Hall and J.A. de Sève cinemas, with additional screens and events at Montréal’s Cinémathèque québécoise and Cinéma du Musée.