Cute Creeps From Pop Culture: Scared Silly

Monday, October 26, 2009

Scared Silly

Monsterama pal Paul Castiglia is launching the Scared Silly blog on Halloween as a lead-in to his forthcoming book (of the same name) about classic Hollywood horror-comedies. Scared Silly examines the popularity of mixing humor and horror-- which is precisely our purview here on Monsterama, so you know I'm excited! Castiglia’s blog and book will offer readers a fun overview of horror-comedy films spanning the 1920s through the 1960's, including films with Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd on through The Little Rascals and Bowery Boys, to Bob Hope, Abbott & Costello and Don Knotts. It's going to be great.

"Horror and humor have been on intimate terms at least since the time of Elisabethan and Jacobean drama. Shakespeare's darkest tragedies were leavened with a gallows wit..."

-David J. Skal The Monster Show

"Even as we deny that our flesh must decay, however, we surround ourselves with fictional images of the very fate we strive to hear nothing about. They are everywhere: in books, films, and TV, in advertising, in toys and games for all ages, in children's breakfast food. No American child (even one lucky enough to escape Count Chocula) can grow up without learning what a vampire is..."

-Walter Kendrick The Thrill Of Fear

"... through expressions such as the comical Hyakkiyagyõ emaki, an inversion occurs, and that which should not be gazed upon is rendered visible-- and gazed upon with pleasure. The unseen (unseeable) is transformed into spectacle; the mysterious spirits of untamed nature are transmuted into familiar everyday objects; terror turns into humor; pandemonium becomes parade."

- Michael Dylan Foster Pandemonium and Parade

"The horror movie asks you if you want to take a good close look at the dead cat (or the shape under the sheet, to use a metaphor from the introduction to my short story collection)... but not as an adult would look at it. Never mind the philosophical implications of death or the religious possibilities inherent in the idea of survival; the horror film suggests we just have a good close look at the physical artifact of death. Let us be children masquerading as pathologists."

-Stephen King Danse Macabre

"No one will ever love a story the way a kid loves a story, whether told in a novel or as a ghost tale furtively whispered around a campfire. That's because no adult has an imagination quite like that of a child, where monsters might be real and lurking just under the bed."

-Monica S. Kuebler Rue Morgue

Monday, October 26, 2009

Scared Silly

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