Enough with the sexy vampires

I’ve never been very interested in vampires, as a kid I never found them very scary and as an adult I never found them very sexy. It seems the attraction to the genre comes from one of those two (often with a sprinkling of fascination for immortality, which I also find intriguing but authors rarely have a good way of going about it). Most modern authors have completely leaned away from the scary vampire...

Is the Heroes Journey Overused?

As a film major and a creative writing minor, I have gone over the Heroes Journey SO. MANY. TIMES. Every version of it, and a few remixes (The Heroines Journey exists apparently). Now, I’ve never read the ‘Lord of the Rings’ books, but I’ve seen the films, and I’ve never seen ‘the Hobbit’ films, but I’ve now read ‘the Hobbit’. Tolkien’s work follows the Heroic Journey like the formula was written...

Asian vs Western Horror: What Makes a Story Scary?

I’ve seen a few of the asian horror films, such as ‘a Tale of Two Sisters’ (and its American remake, ‘the Uninvited’) and one thing I find interesting when putting the films side by side is how horror is portrayed. Asian horror films are often.. softer, I suppose? There aren’t jump scares and the focus is more on the relationships between the people. In western media, we lean heavily on jump-scares....

The Social Outcasts and the Witches

Historically, women (and men) who were called witches were those who weren’t ‘normal’ or who refused to go with the status quo. The single, old women who spoke their minds, the people who didn’t stay involved with the local community. Often these people were the easy targets when the witch hunts would start. I doubt many of them (at least in european cultures) were actually in anyway practicing...