I think I first got to know Ross Lockhart – please correct me if I’m wrong about this, Ross – after he bought a reprint of one of my stories for The Book of Cthulhu II, which would put it around 2012.
Not too long after that, Ross launched his own publishing imprint. The first book published by Word Horde was Tales of Jack the Ripper, which came out ten years ago to the day – around three days ago. (I’m a little late making this post.) My story “Ripperology” appeared in there.
Since then, Ross has continued to be my most frequent publisher. I’ve had a story in very nearly every anthology that Word Horde has released, the sole exception, I believe, being Amber Fallon’s Fright into Flight. Perhaps more to the point, Word Horde has published my last three short story collections, all those I have put out since they launched.
Ross and I are also working together on another project. Something that isn’t a short story collection, but I can’t say more just yet. We should be announcing it very soon, though, and I hope my readers will be excited.
I’m excited and proud to have been such a big part of Word Horde’s first decade. Ross has always treated me and my books well, with generous promotion and work behind the scenes that ensures that my books always look amazing. Besides the books with my name on or in them, Word Horde has published a wide array of great titles that I highly recommend.
Word Horde’s first ten years have been filled with unforgettable books, from John Langan’s The Fishermanto Scotty Nicolay’s And at My Back I Always Hear, and many more besides. Word Horde authors include Molly Tanzer, Nadia Bulkin, Scott R. Jones, Livia Llewellyn, Kristi DeMeester, Craig Laurance Gidney, S.L. Edwards, Nicole Cushing… the list goes on and on.
Recently, Ross and company also opened up a physical bookstore, the Word Horde Emporium of the Weird & Fantastic, where they sell much more than just Word Horde titles. Indeed, the Emporium traffics in just about everything suggested by that moniker. I haven’t gotten a chance to visit the physical store in Petaluma, California just yet, but I hope to someday. And in the meantime, here’s to many more years of Word Horde goodness!
As of this writing, I am the author of some seven full-length books with my name on the spine. I have contributed to plenty of others, edited one more, and published a handful of chapbooks and zines. But these seven books are all me, from start to finish, minus the occasional introduction by an esteemed colleague.
Four of them are short story collections, because short stories are my primary raison d’etre. Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, my first collection and first full-length book, has actually been published twice. First back in 2012, in softcover, and then reprinted in a (gorgeous, frankly) deluxe hardcover in 2017 by Strix Publishing. The latter adds new illustrations by Mike Corley and a couple of new stories not collected in the previous edition.
The other three collections are all out from Word Horde, who has been my most reliable and frequent publishing partner. These include Painted Monsters, Guignol, and, most recently, How to See Ghosts. I’m proud of all of them, and all three boast phenomenal cover art by Nick Gucker, who has probably been responsible for selling more copies of any of them than my name ever has.
My other full-length books include two collections of short, informal essays on vintage horror films – Monsters from the Vault, reprinting a column that I used to write for Innsmouth Free Press on the subject, and Revenge of Monsters from the Vault, which continues the theme.
Rounding out the list is Godless, my only published novel to date, written for Privateer Press as work-for-hire, and intended as the first book in a proposed series that never came to pass for various reasons.
Recently, I got royalty statements for most of these books from the publishers, and I thought it might be a good time to talk somewhat transparently about royalties and the writing life and what it means when you buy one of my books. I believe in transparency, in general, and I’ve only gotten where I am thanks in part to the generosity of my fellow writers in this regard.
I am a full-time writer, which most people assume means that I make a living writing novels or even – absurd as the proposition actually is – short stories. This is far, far from the truth. There are writers who make a living writing novels, but I’m not one of them. (I don’t think there have been any writers who made a living writing short stories for… many years.) Instead, my income comes, primarily, from writing “content,” which means any number of things. I write marketing copy of all sorts, from the words on websites and corporate blogs to social media posts to “white papers” and press releases.
I also write for a number of what are sometimes derogatorily called “content mills,” websites that busy themselves with generating a never-ending stream of listicles, articles, and other odds-and-ends. Of these, I am probably most closely associated with Ranker and The Lineup. Ultimately, though, all of this is my “day job,” the work I do to bring in the money to write my goofy little short stories about monsters and ghosts.
Besides all that, I currently produce four regular columns: one on folk horror, one on old horror TV shows, one on board games, and one about… pretty much whatever I want to write about, ranging from muck monsters to Ultra Q and beyond. And I continue to regularly write for Privateer Press, including putting together a large swath of their new Iron Kingdoms: Requiem 5e-compatible RPG.
All of that (with the exception of the columns) is work-for-hire stuff, meaning that, once it is published, I no longer own it. I get paid my fee, and that’s the last recompense I will ever get for the work. Fiction and such is, however, a different beast. When I sell a short story, I am likely to sell it again, at least into a collection down the road. Then, when I publish said collection, I will get a small advance.
Short stories do not pay well, nor have they for many, many years. Short story collections do not pay any better. While advances on novels may vary considerably, one can still potentially expect a few thousand dollars, maybe even five figures, if one is publishing through a larger press. Publishing a short story collection through a larger press is mostly unheard of unless one is already a best-selling author. So, you’ll be going through smaller presses, and your advance is more likely to be in the neighborhood of a few hundred to a thousand dollars, at least in my experience.
The advance is an “advance against royalties,” which means that you have to “earn out” that advance before you start making any royalties. Royalties on a collection are a fraction of the total price of the book. This fraction varies depending on your contract and the form of the book, but let’s say around 5-10% for physical copies, around 25% for ebooks. So, to make the math easy, if you sell a physical book for $1, you’ll make a shiny nickel. If you sell an ebook for the same amount, you’ll get a quarter.
Once you’ve accrued enough nickels and quarters, you will eventually have gotten enough money to pay back your advance, at which time those nickels and quarters start coming to you as royalties. At this point, most of my books (that pay royalties) have earned out, with the exception of How to See Ghosts, which literally just got published at the tail end of last year.
And yet, part of the reason why short story collections don’t pay as well as other books is that they also don’t tend to sell as well. I have been very fortunate, but even then, the number of copies of all my collections that are in circulation – including ebooks – still numbers only a few thousand, less than the print run of the average single novel. This is not a cry for pity or any such thing, but a bid toward transparency. I knew the marketplace of the short story when I got into this business, and I make a nice living with my writing, despite that it isn’t in the form of story sales.
What’s more, as I promised at the beginning of this surprisingly lengthy essay, I want to talk about what happens when you buy one of my books, in any form: I get some money. One way or another, sooner or later. Maybe it’s those nickels and quarters, but they add up. Every three months or so, I get a check from my publishers for enough money that I can buy a couple of nice Blu-rays, or pay part of one of my utility bills. It’s appreciated, and it helps, and that only happens when you buy my books.
And if you’ve already bought my books (thank you), it helps further to blog about them, review them, ask your library to order them. Little books like mine only do well thanks to word of mouth. That’s just the nature of this business. Without people talking about them, posting about them, leaving reviews, and telling their friends, they sink out of existence and into oblivion.
Perhaps even more important, those books selling as well as they do – the numbers might be relatively modest compared to a novel, but they’re pretty nice for short story collections – helps ensure that I’ll have the opportunity for more down the road. I look forward to a nice, long career writing various other stuff on the side so I can keep publishing books filled with stories about ghosts and monsters. And if you look forward to reading more of them, then I hope you keep buying! And for all those who have bought my books so far – I literally couldn’t keep doing this without you!
As you may have noticed, things have been a bit quiet on my end. This is not so much due to not being busy as the exact opposite, but much of what has kept me occupied is the new house and the various trials and tribulations that come along with it. For the most part, things have been good, though a number of expensive problems have cropped up that are often part and parcel of new home ownership, especially for a house as old as this one.
That said, it isn’t as if other things haven’t been going on behind the scenes, with the most notable being the actual release of How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. My fourth full-length collection of short stories, and my third from Word Horde, How to See Ghosts collects everything from some of my most recent pieces to oddities from the earliest days of my writing career, some of them never seen before. I think they all hold together well, and produce a strong collection that takes some different risks than previous things I’ve done. Hopefully, you’ll agree.
I didn’t just come here to say “buy my book,” though. (You should, however. Buy my book, that is. Please do.) I wanted to remind you that, for most of my readers, the holidays are coming up. And most people buy and receive gifts during the holidays. And books make great gifts, whether they’re mine or someone else’s. Notably, why not buy something from Word Horde, who are not only my most frequent publisher but also now an actual brick-and-mortar store filled with all kinds of cool stuff perfect for the weirdo on your list.
Aside from How to See Ghosts, not to mention my two previous collections, if you don’t already have those, they’ve got recent novels by folks like S. L. Edwards and Nicole Cushing, the latest collections from Scott Nicolay and John Langan, and anthologies galore! If you have readers on your list who don’t like scary stories as much – or movie lovers who do – my two books on vintage horror films from Innsmouth Free Press are great stocking stuffers! Monsters from the Vault and its inevitable sequel are both fun, affordable, and compact. Perfect for the monster kid on your list.
And speaking, as I was, about Scott Nicolay, it wouldn’t be a proper list of book recommendations from me if I didn’t mention his continuing work translating the weird fiction of Jean Ray. Buy any of the Jean Ray titles from Wakefield Press to get an idea of the magnificent work he’s doing to bring one of the best writers of the classic weird tale to Anglophone readers like myself. They’re some of my most immediate must-buy books every time a new one is released.
After all, the holiday season is a time for ghost stories. Always has been. The days are short, the nights are long, and it’s good to huddle up and remember why we once feared the dark. If you want my own most recent take on the classic Christmas ghost story, you can find it in How to See Ghosts or listen to it at Pseudopod. A couple of my stories also made it onto Ellen Datlow’s longlist for the Best Horror of the Year this year, including one that’s in How to See Ghosts and another that you can read online at Nightmare magazine.
I’ll be back with more, probably before the end of the year and certainly in 2023. Until then, though, stay warm and read something spooky…
So, here’s a story: Back when I was putting together my very first collection, it was originally going to include a story called “The Tooth.” Around the same time, however, Cullen Bunn was putting out a comic called The Tooth. To make matters worse, his comic was about a monster hero in the ’70s Marvel style that grew from a dragon’s tooth, while my story was about a ghost/monster that grew from a dead wizard’s tooth. What’s more, the publisher of my first collection happened to also be publishing some of Cullen’s stuff.
In other words, Cullen Bunn and I were engaged in a Swamp Thing/Man-Thing scenario, while we were both writing for the same publisher. “The Tooth” got retitled and, ultimately, pulled from my first collection, to eventually find its way into print (under its new and, frankly, better title, “Remains”) first in Strange Aeons and then in my second collection, Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts.
Cullen Bunn and I aren’t friends, per se, but we’ve remained on friendly terms over the years. He lives in Missouri, I live in Kansas right by the Missouri line, which means that we find ourselves at the same conventions and whatnot a lot of the time. In the years since my first collection came out, his career as a comic book writer has skyrocketed, and he has written, well, just all sorts of things, including lots of stuff for Marvel and DC, not to mention the really great Harrow County and The Sixth Gun.
What reminded me of all this was that last night, I finally got around to watching a movie that came out last year called The Empty Man. It’s adapted from one of Cullen’s comics. The movie seems to be divisive, but most of the weird fic folks I know who have seen it like it, and I totally get why. It’s a big swing at cosmic horror, fronted by a cold open that’s basically an M. R. James ghost story with a Zdzislaw Beksinski creature, and told in the form of a detective flick. Think True Detective only, honestly, this does it better.
It’s long as hell, which I actually dug, because I hate when movies are long except when they’re also long and boring. No, wait, what I mean is, I’m a sucker for overlong procedural stuff. People looking at photographs, digging through papers, going to places and putting pieces together. I can watch that all goddamn day, if it’s done even remotely well, and especially if there’s a supernatural component at the heart of it all.
Add to this that the film is set (though mostly not shot) in and around St. Louis, and I was completely onboard for the whole ride. If you haven’t seen it and you dig cosmic horror, weird fiction, and detective narratives, give it a shot. If you have, or if you’re not into it, at least it prompted me to tell an odd little anecdote about one of my stories…
This time, two years ago, I had recently been a guest on the Nightmare Junkhead podcast to talk about the then-new 2019 Hellboy movie from director Neil Marshall. Since then, I have not revisited the movie even once, which probably tells you all about the flick’s quality that you’ll ever need to know.
As has been a recurring theme of late, it feels indescribably surreal to discuss events at once so temporally near and yet which feel so impossibly distant. I saw Greg and Jenius (altogether too briefly) at Panic Fest, for the first time since October of last year and, before that, the last time I had seen them might well have been the October before.
This is all coming up because tonight is Walpurgisnacht, perhaps the closest thing we have to a second Halloween in the middle of the spring. “Walpurgisnacht” is also the title of one of my more popular stories, which originally saw print in the Laird Barron tribute antho Children of Old Leech and was later reprinted in my second collection, Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, which came out lo these six years gone by.
Interestingly, I was reminded of that story recently for reasons other than the date. I’ve been reading the latest Junji Ito manga to receive English-language release, Lovesickness, and the title story in that volume discusses the phenomenon of the Brocken spectre, which figures heavily in my tale, taking place, as it does, atop the peak from which the phenomenon takes its name.
I don’t have any big plans for the occasion this year. Maybe I’ll play a solo game of Cursed City if I become extremely ambitious. More likely, I’ll just work until late and then watch a witchy devil movie like Curse of the Demon, City of the Dead, or Curse of the Crimson Altar. How are you celebrating witch’s night?
This post is not actually about the 1992 Amityville Yard Sale sequel about an evil clock. Just getting ahead of that, to spare you the disappointment. No, this is about kicking 2020 in the ass on its way out the door, and to that end, I just want you to know that there won’t really be a traditional year end retrospective around these parts.
Tonight, at the Horror Pod Class Study Group on Facebook, Tyler Unsell of Signal Horizon and I will be getting together to talk about the (precious few) high points of this trash fire of a year, and over at Unwinnable I contributed a blurb or two to the various best of the year lists, but for the most part, 2020 was garbage and we’re all happier to have it in the rear view.
Was the best movie I saw this year really Underwater? Maybe. Was very nearly the only book I read this year Adam Cesare’s wonderful Clown in a Cornfield? Also maybe. Did I buy a bunch of tabletop games that you mostly can’t play at the best of times (because who has that kind of free time) and definitely can’t play in the midst of a pandemic? Almost certainly. Did I get back into Dungeons and Dragons just in time to go into social isolation and then write about how racist it is? You bet I did!
Does any of that matter, in a world where people are dying and laid off and struggling to get by while the ghouls in their high towers play politics with our lives and balk at even so much as throwing us the scraps from their table? Not one iota.
This is getting a little heavy, though, so let’s pump the breaks. I have some good stuff to talk about. We all learned that octopuses like to punch fish, and Painted Monsters took top honors in a best-of retrospective. And hey, if you’d like to take their advice and pick up either Painted Monsters or Guignol, both are currently on sale (along with the entire rest of the Word Horde catalog) direct from the publisher.
For those who may be genuinely curious about the stuff I normally include in an end-of-the-year wrap-up, I watched fewer movies in 2020 than I have in a while. The lockdown had the opposite effect on my viewing habits than it did for a lot of other people, and I found it hard to watch (or read, or write) much of anything I didn’t have to.
Fewer than usual still means 248 movies over the course of the year, though, 155 of which I watched for the first time, meaning that I, at least, breezed by my goal of watching more new-to-me movies than not each year, even if my overall total was down. Among those, high points that didn’t come out anywhere near this year included Hercules in the Haunted World, The Spiral Staircase, Humanoids from the Deep, Mill of the Stone Women, The Outing, Psychomania, Next of Kin (1982), exploring the films of Shinya Tsukamoto for the first time, Prom Night 2, WitchTrap, The Killing (1956), and watching The Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time on Christmas Eve.
I already wrote about some of the stories I was proud of seeing published this year – and ones that I’m looking forward to in the future – and this year I also started two new regular columns, one in Weird Horror about, well, weird horror, and one at Unwinnable as much about wanting to play board games as about playing them. I got bylines in The Pitch, our local cool-kid newspaper here in Kansas City, and I started writing an occult cyberpunk novella for Broken Eye Books that I’m currently behind on. (Sorry about that.)
All the way back when I made my very first post of the year ten centuries ago, 2020 had already punched us in the mouth not even one week in with the death of our beloved cat, and I said back in that post that “sometimes the only thing you can do then is grin with blood in your teeth.” I was such a sweet summer child in that moment, and I had no idea how much harder 2020 was about to come at us, but those of us who are still standing got out the other side of this entirely arbitrary calendrical delineation, so let’s at least flip it the bird while we’re burning to death.
If you have the stomach for a somewhat more normal end-of-the-year retrospective, join Tyler and I tonight on the Horror Pod Class. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the next year. Stay safe, stay weird.
Now that it’s December, I think I can say with finality that 2020 will mark the first year since 2015 that I haven’t had a new book out with my name on the spine. It would be tempting to chalk this up to, y’know, 2020, and it’s certainly why there may not be one in 2021 either, but publishing is a slow business, and anything that was going to come out in this dark year would have already been in progress before the year began.
In actuality, there is no reason – either sinister or benign – for there not being a book this year, just as there is no real reason for their being a book each of those others. My first collection came out in 2012, the same year that I co-edited Fungi with Silvia Moreno-Garcia. My second, Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, was released by Word Horde in 2015. The following year saw the release of Monsters from the Vault, a collection of short essays I had written as part of a column about vintage horror cinema for Innsmouth Free Press.
I have more than enough stories to complete another collection – probably a couple more – but the time is not yet right for any of them. The stories are there, but they do not all fit together. Eventually, those stories will find other stories and together they will form the collections they are meant to inhabit. Until that time, I keep churning.
The next book that’s likely to come out with my name on the cover is probably going to be Neon Reliquary, the short, occult cyberpunk novel that is currently being released in serial form at the Broken Eye Books Patreon. Some delays happened, and they are my fault, but the second installment should be up in the next month or two.
Several stories have already made their way out into the public in various places that are part of a “story cycle” based around Hollow Earths and similar pseudoscience. Once all of those have made their initial bows, the plan is to collect them – along with some original content – into a book, as well. Almost all of them are written and either published or pending publication – one has even made it into the Best Horror of the Year and been reprinted at Nightmare magazine – but various factors have delayed, well, everything, right?
I spent November working on a 40,000 word tabletop gaming-related work-for-hire project that I should be able to announce probably early next year. I had a few new stories published in 2020 that I’m quite proud of. More than in 2019, though not by much. “Prehistoric Animals” in the Weird Fiction Review, “The All-Night Horror Show” at The Dark magazine, “Manifest Destiny” in The Willows Anthology, which also reprinted some of my unfortunate juvenilia from a bygone age, “Screen Haunt” in It Came from the Multiplex, and “The Double-Goer” in Between Twilight and Dawn.
I’ve also sold several stories that have yet to see publication but should be out sometime next year. A Lucio Fulci sword-and-sorcery tribute in Beyond the Book of Eibon, “The Robot Apeman Waits for the Nightmare Blood to Stop” in Tales from OmniPark – both of which were funded via Kickstarter – and new stories in that Hollow Earth “story cycle” I mentioned that will be out in New Maps of Dream from PS Publishing and Tales from Arkham Sanitarium from Dark Regions Press. Plus some others that I can’t name just yet.
2020 has been 2020 for everyone. Someone on one of the Slacks that I’m on said that we are all a decade older than we were this time last year, which sounds about right. But so far I’m hanging in there, and I’m still banging out words on the regular, so expect to see more from me as we end this accursed year and start another, hopefully better one.
I hope you’re all hanging in there, too. Stay safe, stay weird.
“If it can happen to the gerenuk, it can happen to you.”
In case you were concerned that I was abandoning my core brand with all this recent talk about Dungeons & Dragons and board games, I lately learned that there was a 1962 episode of the show Route 66 in which Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Lon Chaney, Jr. guest star as themselves.
Better still, I learned that it’s currently on Prime. So, today I watched it. Please bear in mind that I have never seen even a single other episode of Route 66 – which a little sleuthing tells me was a show in the same “semi-anthology” format as series-creator Stirling Silliphant’s other famous series, The Naked City, with a couple of recurring characters but stand-alone stories driven by the guest stars – and, indeed, didn’t even know the basic plot of the show before I sat down to watch this episode.
The episode, which is set and shot outside Chicago, originally showed on October 26, 1962. Its dual plots involve our two ostensible protagonists (played by Martin Milner and George Maharis) taking jobs as “junior executives in charge of convention liaison” at a hotel where a secretary’s convention is being held along with a secret meeting between Karloff, Lorre, and Chaney (as well as Martita Hunt from Brides of Dracula playing their legal advisor) so that the trio can plan a new series of horror films they will be producing.
Peter Lorre is convinced that the old ways are the best ways and wants to create new movies in the classic gothic style, arguing in favor of monsters in which people can see themselves. Karloff, on the other hand, doesn’t think that anyone will be afraid of the creaky old monsters, and wants to create new, “adult” horror. (“My kind of horror is not horror anymore,” Karloff would lament just six years later in Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets. “No one is afraid of a painted monster.”)
In fact, this episode of Route 66 makes a good thematic double-feature with the much more serious Targets, which tackles a similar question with regards to the efficacy of classic horror and comes to very different conclusions. Dedicated readers no doubt remember me writing about Targets in the past, and recognize the above quote as the source of the title of my second collection.
This episode, titled “Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing,” came out just six years before Bogdanovich’s film, but a world of difference has elapsed in those six years. If Targets is a film about how horror cinema – and the nation – changed from before the ’60s to after, then “Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing” is an episode that sees that change coming, but still takes refuge in the comforts of what was.
Not that this is a thematically-dense episode. It’s a confection, and mostly an excuse for Karloff, Lorre, and Chaney to have a blast – which they do, from Chaney’s weepy temper tantrums when people aren’t afraid of him to the recurring gag that people are afraid of Peter Lorre, even when he’s not trying.
“You’re the spitting image of Peter Lorre,” the desk clerk tells him, as he’s checking in incognito. “A bit insulting, isn’t it?” Lorre replies, as only Lorre can. Later, as Chaney in his wolf-man getup is frightening the secretaries and causing them to faint, three of them faint dead away upon catching sight of Lorre just standing there like normal.
“I think I resent that,” Lorre quips, aridly.
It’s also a piece of horror history – even while it’s really nothing more than a piece of horror ephemera. Karloff dons a cut-rate version of the Frankenstein’s monster makeup for the first time since 1939, and we get to see Chaney done up as the mummy, the wolf-man, and even a take on his late father’s Hunchback of Notre Dame.
As we all grope blindly in the dark for silver linings amid all the peeled grapes and cold spaghetti of the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve seen a lot of people excited that we’re halfway around to Halloween – though I’ve seen an equal number wondering just what Halloween is going to look like this year, with a plague on and all.
In fact, we’re excited enough about the date that we did a special “halfway to Halloween” episode of the Horror Pod Class, where Tyler and I talked about the 2019 movie Haunt and he history of commercial haunted houses. It’s honestly worth it just for the bit from a pamphlet for parents organizing haunted houses back in the ’30s, which suggests, among other things, nailing raw liver to the walls.
Whatever happens with the pox and all that, we keep Halloween alive in our hearts as much as in our celebrations, right? And we can all watch scary movies and read spooky books anytime, even when we’re in quarantine.
Speaking of which, since this is also Walpurgisnacht, I usually take this evening to talk a bit about the story I wrote of that name, which originally appeared in The Children of Old Leech and can also be found in my second collection, Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts– both from Word Horde.
It’s a night for revels and devilry and old, black-and-white witchy movies like Night/Curse of the Demon, City of the Dead, or Haxan. Over on Facebook, I saw someone watching The Devil Rides Out, and that’ll also do.
* Image from a manga that I don’t know the name of, courtesy of Haunted Horror‘s Steve Banes.
I missed the official 100th anniversary of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by a couple of days – it was apparently February 26 – but it seemed wrong to let the occasion pass by completely without at least marking it in some way.
Caligari was a film that I became obsessed with years before I ever saw it. Two decades ago, when Mezco Toys was still called Aztech, they released a line of figures based on classic silent horror films, including one of Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, looking a bit like Robert Smith of The Cure.
Cesare was the only one of the so-called Silent Screamers toys I ever bought – a decision I regret to this day, when I would love to get my hands on a Graf Orlok or a Golem. But I also still have the Cesare figure by my desk.
The long, sharp shadows of German expressionism and early silent films have long had a major influence on my own aesthetic, even before I had ever actually seen most of them. Caligari, which I first saw in college, not long after buying that toy, remains a movie that I’ve watched only a few times, and yet one that sticks with me in everything I do.
In part, this is because Caligari is a film that can be enjoyed in still frames almost as much as it can be as a movie. I’ve said before that most entire films aren’t as gorgeous or potent as any given frame of Caligari, and I stand by that.
A few years ago, I was asked to contribute a story to The Madness of Dr. Caligari, a deluxe anthology of stories inspired by the silent classic, edited by Joe Pulver. The story I turned in, “Blackstone: A Hollywood Gothic,” concerns an ill-fated Poverty Row production of a 1946 movie called The Corpse Walks, which features some familiar figures.
But it’s far from the only story I ever wrote that had Caligari‘s long shadow over it. “Night’s Foul Bird” in Painted Monsters may be more concerned with Nosferatu and Faust and London After Midnight, but there’s no denying that Cesare is in there somewhere, or that the plot of Caligari (and its successors) runs like a dark vein through “Stygian Chambers,” the story I wrote for Pluto in Furswhich, when I first started writing it, was going to be named for a line from the Robert Bloch-penned 1962 remake Cabinet of Caligari.
Even early stories like “The Mysterious Flame,” which anchors my first collection, are filled with the shadows of German expressionist cinema in general, with Caligari as maybe its most striking exemplar.
Nor am I likely to extricate myself from those painted-on shadows anytime soon. A hundred years gone by, and they’ve still never made another movie quite like Caligari – and it may be that they never will.
The Incredibly Strange Creature 