horror – Page 2

Appalling Stories 2 Excerpt: Her Bodies, Her Choice

November 15, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Appalling Stories 2, sequel to Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice, will be released in December of 2018. What follows is a sneak peek at the short story Her Bodies, Her Choice.

—

Hey, it’s me. Don’t turn it off! Just…just hear me out.

My notes are written on legal pads and spiral notebooks. I did everything offline. I’ll let you know where I hid the original copies at the end of this video, but don’t just click to the end, okay? Watch the whole thing first. Do this for me. I know you hate me and think I’m a bitch and I don’t blame you, but please. Please. I can’t trust my parents. They’re probably part of this.

It sounds crazy and over-dramatic like…like in a movie, but the only reason you’re watching this is because I’m dead. It means they got me. My former friends and colleagues. If you’d seen my phone…I had writers from The Atlantic to The New York Times who’d take my calls on the first ring. Me. Not even 27 years old and people with bylines in The Daily Beast and The New Yorker knew my name. I was kind of a big shot. But one of them ratted me out for bringing them the story of the century. The millennium. Probably all of them did.

So yeah, I’m dead. It scares the hell out of me, but—

You know what? Forget it. I don’t know if you’re happy I’m dead or what. Maybe you are. I broke your heart, after all. I regret that. Not ending the engagement. Just hurting you. You didn’t deserve that. But I saw your wedding pictures on Instagram like two years after we split up, so I guess you weren’t too, well, broken up about it. She’s pretty. You two look happy.

—

I guess if you hadn’t broken things off with me for taking care of our little…indiscretion, I’d’ve split up with you. It makes sense now, but back then I just felt hurt. With a degree in Women’s Studies from Vassar, pretty much the only option I had after graduation was VP of HR at a Nestle subsidiary while you saved the world one hedge fund at a time. But not long after you proposed, my senior adviser introduced me to some friends of hers, who introduced me to some friends of theirs, and, well, I could either follow your plan for us, or my plan for me.

So I went with me. The abortion and your throwing me out of your life over it was just the icing on the cake. But it launched me into my new career.

I started as an intern. Paying my dues. It sucked because I had to keep asking my parents for money to afford rent and food, but I learned a lot that first year. At Planned Parenthood you can’t claim that sexism in the workplace is keeping you from earning a living wage. I think they were monitoring me. Seeing how committed I was, how hard I’d work. After burning my bridges with you I had nothing else to do, so I threw myself into it.

—

Stay tuned for more information on Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice!

Cannibal Holocaust: My Take

October 31, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

In the wake of a relatively recent post where I discussed the made-in-2000 movie Battle Royale, I figured I’d go deeper into horror’s cinematic past and talk about the notorious 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust.

Very much a movie before its time, Cannibal Holocaust describes the trek of an American anthropologist (porn actor Robert Kerman, complete with porn ‘stache) into the South American jungle to find out what happened to a documentary film crew that had gone missing on their search for primitive cannibal tribes. After various adventures, the anthropologist finds the film crew’s movie reels, which show their unbelievably disgusting exploits and horrific fate. So it’s an early found-footage horror film, and movies like The Blair Witch Project (plus countless others) owe something to it in style, if not theme.

There’s no question that Cannibal Holocaust‘s overarching theme is media manipulation: documentary makers and news crews have a tendency to, if they can’t find footage to make their predetermined point, create the footage (or creatively edit it to fit the narrative they’re looking to develop). Viewers familiar with Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth will understand how unscrupulous filmmakers produce fiction and call it fact. In Cannibal Holocaust, the documentary film crew burns a tribal hut down (with the villagers in it) to tell the false story that this tribe was at war with another tribe. Later, and more disturbingly, they rape a young village girl and then impale her on a wooden stake to create the false impression that the tribe killed her for being impure. So when the tribe finally rises up to take their awful revenge, it’s almost a relief for the viewer. Almost.

Cannibal Holocaust‘s filmmakers killed a number of animals on-screen, including a pig, a turtle, a couple of monkeys, a snake, a tarantula, and a coatimundi. That was horrible and disgusting. I’d seen Bear Grylls murder a turtle on one of his shows years ago, but the movie’s turtle-disemboweling scene was unbelievably bloody and hard to watch. I felt awful for the little pig and the monkeys. They didn’t deserve that. But it worked. The graphic and real animal-killing scenes made you want to believe that the later human-killing scenes were real instead of staged.

You need a strong stomach to watch this film, so it’s not for everybody. I’m not even sure it was for me. But it’s effective. By now, the movie’s notoriety precedes it: my guts started knotting the moment the opening credits rolled. Still, it has weaknesses: the voices were horribly dubbed, the ending was a bit too pat, and the message was lost from time to time in a welter of pig guts and fake blood.

It’s still relevant, particularly today. There’s a reason why many, many films were patterned after it.

The Armageddon Series: The Rest of the Story

October 24, 2018 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

I started writing the Armageddon trilogy in early 2013, with the outline of The Blessed Man and the Witch. My intent was to follow the original Star Wars trilogy style: set up the overarching concern in the first volume (in this case, the end of the world), have the main characters try and fail to overcome this concern in the second volume (The Nephilim and the False Prophet), and then complete the story of good versus evil in the third volume, The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel. So it’s taken me close to six years to write and publish all three books.

Overall, I saw my intent through in the writing. Each book in the trilogy comprises a segment of the overall story of the end of the world. Each character had an individual character arc in not just each book, but through the entire trilogy. When characters like Hector and Siobhan and Ozzie and Kyle weren’t driving events themselves, they were affected by other events, which then altered how they acted in response to future events. Some characters underwent significant transformation both physically and spiritually, like Reyna and Siobhan. Others stayed more consistent…and suffered for it. I wanted to make them as much like real people as possible without robbing the reader of entertainment. If you make everything too realistic, with the real world’s lack of closure and unspoken secrets and unfulfilled ambitions, nobody’ll want to read it. So everything gets wrapped up in the story.

My success in all these things needs to be judged by the reader. Of course I’m going to say I did a good job.

I had two themes that I wanted to bring out in the third book to keep it from becoming a tedious recitation of descriptive horror at the end of the world; these themes guide my faith, so I think they’re important. The first theme is that God is all good all the time. There’s an objective good in the novel, represented by God and His angels, and there’s an objective evil, represented by the Devil and his demons. The second theme builds on the first: even if we don’t know what God has planned for us, we should trust that He is all good all the time, and knows what’s best for us. In other words, I wanted to make the issue of faith a driving force in the story without preaching. So many of the characters (who were areligious or, at the very least, pretty secular before the first page of the first book) come to faith through pragmatism. They learn from their experiences. It’s what mature adults do.

Except for the ones who don’t. And we see what happens to them.

Robert Thorn, Damien’s father in The Omen, wasn’t a religious man until evidence showed him that his son was the Antichrist. Chris MacNeil didn’t believe in the Devil until her daughter was possessed by a demon in The Exorcist. You get it.

Despite all my planning, there were certain story elements, particularly the Watchers’ plan to save humanity, that I hadn’t fully realized until writing the second and third books. I knew it was all going somewhere, but I wasn’t sure where until the end. Dunno how I came up with the Watcher’s Ark. Or what it would look like inside. I can say that Naram-Sin’s Nephilim body came to me in a dream.

But somehow I got there. I got to the end. While I was stalled on certain story elements I wrote or contributed to other books, like the Appalling Stories series. But I always knew I’d finish this story, as difficult as it was. Hopefully it’s satisfying.

What’s next? Something more science fiction-oriented. Less heavy. Smaller stakes. Not as dark. But I think you’ll enjoy it. I’m done with horror for the time being. I’ve written the horror story I always wanted to write. That’s not so bad.

Movie Review: Gosnell

October 18, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

One of my concerns with conservative culture outlets is that they tend to grade on a curve. We need to support right-leaning content creators, conservatives say. I’m all for that, but I’m not going to recommend substandard work, no matter who’s writing it or why. If you get on the field, you have to compete with the big boys, whether you’re left, right, or somewhere in the middle.

Last week, my wife and I went to see the movie Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer. Written by Andrew Klavan and directed by Nick Searcy, it stars Searcy, Dean Cain, Sarah Jane Morris, and Earl Billings. The film tells the horrific story of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who murdered babies born alive during abortions by cutting their spinal cords with scissors (called “snipping”), and was responsible for the death of at least one adult patient. If that sounds awful, it gets a whole lot worse; there’s no way to describe what went on in his disgusting clinic without wanting to vomit.

And yet the movie goes there.

Based on the book Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer by producers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, Gosnell the movie is graphic, but not lurid: Kermit Gosnell’s clinic is a cramped house of horrors littered with red medical waste bags, garbage, food detritus, and cat shit. The refrigerator is full of jars of severed babies’ feet. White patients got the upstairs exam room because it was less trash-filled than the downstairs exam rooms. Details like that, combined with deeply disturbing scenes in the grand jury and trial courtrooms, gave the film a disquietingly realistic feel.

But is it a good movie? Or is it just a good conservative movie?

It’s a good movie.

Deliberately patterned after the Law & Order structure, the first third or so focuses on police work: discovering Gosnell’s crimes, collecting evidence, and making an arrest. This is where Dean Cain shines, even though they didn’t give his character a whole lot to do other than react; he didn’t wrestle with any moral dilemmas, didn’t change from a pro-choicer to a pro-lifer or anything of the sort. His partner, played by Alfonzo Rachel, also did fine with little to work with. Sarah Jane Morris as assistant district attorney Alexis McGuire had the best role and did the most with it, particularly during the trial phase: as the mother of five children, including a baby boy, her character anchors the viewer to the subject matter, as horrific as it is. Earl Billings’s portrayal of Gosnell’s bizarre bonhomie was both sickening and eerie; unlike Hannibal Lecter, this was a real person who committed real crimes, and after this performance I doubt Billings will ever be able to do Aflac commercials again. Nick Searcy played the villainous defense attorney with typical panache, making up for his appearance in the execrable The Shape of Water.

As director, Searcy did a masterful job: the film moved briskly, building up to an absolutely wrenching climax during the trial. He wrung terrific performances from even minor characters, particularly the clinic nurse who, at long last, finally began to suffer pangs of conscience. Janine Turner’s portrayal of Dr. North, an abortionist put on the stand to testify on Gosnell’s behalf, was extremely hard to watch, which was the whole point.

In fact, the entire movie was hard to watch, and I experienced a great deal of it as a stomach-knotting squirm that did not let up until the end credits, and even then it wasn’t over: the filmmakers displayed real-life photos of Gosnell’s clinic and equipment during the titles. How could you hear the testimony of the clinic nurses describing the death of patient Karnamaya Mongar and not be moved? Or the death of Baby Boy A?

Luke Y. Thompson of Forbes dismissed the movie as “A feature-length Law & Order for conservative Christians.” So it’s safe to say that he wasn’t moved except to sneering contempt. I’m not a conservative Christian.

Michael Rechtshaffen of Los Angeles Times called Gosnell “sanctimonious,” even as he sanctimoniously dings executive producer Ann McElhinney for making “a documentary examining ‘global warming hysteria’”. He wasn’t moved, either.

At the time of this writing I haven’t seen any other of the larger media outfits address this film, which isn’t a surprise: it forces you to think, to examine the issue of abortion outside of protest chants and bumper sticker bromides. Who wants to do that?

I can’t promise you a rollicking good time watching Gosnell, but I can say that you’re not likely to forget it once you’ve seen it. The same people who called Brokeback Mountain “important,” “a landmark,” and a “near-masterpiece” are ignoring Gosnell, which tells you everything you need to know about them and it.

Go see it. Find a theater, buy the DVD, do something. But go see it.

(In my latest novel, The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, several scenes took place in and around Philadelphia, including Gosnell’s clinic at 3801 Lancaster. I wrote the book long before I saw this movie.)

New Story Published: Dear Dad

October 16, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

My short story Dear Dad was published in Issue 2 of the literary magazine Cinder Quarterly, and you can get it here on Amazon. It’s arguably my strangest work yet, and serves as a prequel to the story The Bitterness of Honey in the anthology Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice. Don’t let the weirdness turn you off; it’s a solid, fun piece of work that stands on its own. Let me prove it with this excerpt:

Dear Dad:

That’s how you’re supposed to start a letter, right? With “dear.” Even though we haven’t been dear to each other since you kicked me out of the house. No, I’m not writing to rehash the same old shit, so you can keep reading. I know you thought you had good reasons for throwing me out. You and Mom. Maybe I’d’ve done the same thing in your position. I don’t know. I mean, I doubt it, because who puts his only son out on the street for flunking out of college? Other than you. Anyway, lately I’ve been doing some real thinking about this, and I get it now. You were testing me. Putting ice down the garbage disposal to sharpen the blades.

Well, guess what? It worked. You and your MAGA hat-wearing buddies bitch and moan all the time about millennials being weak, entitled, and lazy. Not me. Not anymore. Your snowflake millennial son’s responsible for the end of the whole world. How’s that for accomplishment, you asshole?

Sorry. It just slipped out. Amazing how the same cycles of behavior repeat themselves over and over. You harangue me, I call you names, you tell me to get out, I leave. I guess that’s why they’re called cycles of behavior instead of lines of behavior.

I won’t bother going over the old stuff, before I moved out of state. I’ve been Facebook-stalking Mom’s account, so I know that my “friends” were keeping tabs on me, telling her (and you) what I’ve been doing. I can’t let you know where I am now for reasons that’ll become clear soon, but I can say that I moved to Madison, Wisconsin a year and a half ago. Yes, the liberal paradise, where everyone drives a Prius and has tattoos and calls each other “zhe” and “xher.” Or, at least, that’s how you see it. You’d be surprised at how strait-laced it actually is, especially for a college town.

And now, you better be sitting down for this: I was working for…Greenpeace.

Ha! I’ll bet your face went all white. I wasn’t blocking Japanese ships from harpooning whales or anything like that. I was a canvasser. I walked around the suburbs with a clipboard and a partner and a credit card reader, asking for donations from decent people to keep not-decent people like you from fucking up the one planet we have to live on. As it turns out this was not only a gigantic waste of time, but actually contributed to the end of civilization, but I didn’t know that then. Unlike you, I was trying to make a difference, not a profit.

It’s a tasty blend of science fiction, horror, and environmentalism wrapped in a page-turning narrative crust, and you can get it, plus several other stories from some truly talented writers, for less than $2.00!

My Big, Fat…Armageddon Sale!

October 12, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

To celebrate the long-awaited release of The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, the third book in my Armageddon series, Amazon has lowered the price of the first two books to $0.99 each!

The first book of the series, The Blessed Man and the Witch, depicts the return of the world to a Time of Miracles, where stigmata-stricken psychics, hapless occultists, and unwitting innocents are used as proxies for the final war between Heaven and Hell:

How can you possibly prepare for the end of the world? The end of everything? Armageddon is right around the corner, and there’s no guarantee that Heaven’s going to be the victor. Hell is real, it’s clawing at the edges of the Pit, and its demonically possessed servants are right now gathering powerful artifacts as weapons of war. The End Times are coming. Are you ready?

In the second book, The Nephilim and the False Prophet, Hell’s plans for winning Armageddon bear horrific fruit, harrowing the Earth:

Fueled by brutal, random violence and a worldwide leprosy epidemic, the world descends into chaos. Preparing for Armageddon, Hell plans an atrocity called The Slaughter of the Innocents while Heaven’s scattered agents fight a cold war against superstar evangelist Kyle Loubet, who they believe is the False Prophet foretold in the Bible. The Eremites walk the Earth: black magicians kept alive through unholy relics. Terrible visions assail the world’s remaining psychics, promising an eternal night of blood and fire and endless agony. Caught in the middle, Hector, Ozzie, and Siobhan face terrible dangers from all sides. Now free from their infernal prison, what are the Watcher angels planning? With only days before the Apocalypse, can humanity be saved?

That’s three full-length novels of gripping, Biblical horror for less than $5.00. A steal!