Filmmaker Val Lewton was hired by RKO to make movies to rival the Universal monster movies that had made that studio tons of money. Lewton took a different approach to the scary movie. With a smaller budget than Universal, Lewton managed to create a slate of psychological, atmospheric films that hold up today.
Sometimes a long book to get lost in is exactly what is needed. And sometimes a short story or a hair-raising poem is all you need to get in to the Halloween mood.
What do you do when reality isn’t real? When your perceptions are manipulated? What if it was an evil spirit or a haunted house that was doing it? Some of the most unnerving books are ones where the line is blurred and narrators are unreliable.
Sometimes the creepiest thing is a gaping unknown. Whether it’s a disappearance or a mysterious death, there are plenty of books about unsolved events to keep you awake at night.
The novel Frankenstein is many things – the birth of science fiction, a study in Romantic philosophy, a Gothic horror story – but it is also a reminder that the things that terrorize us most are often a reflection of our own obsessions.