The Scariest Things is proud to announce the winners of the Best of the Horror Genre for 2018! We honor all the films, big and small from the year that was.

The Oscar nominations just got announced last week, and despite all the wonderful offerings that they could have picked from, they pretty much gave the genre the shaft. No Toni Collete? Come on! How about make up for Suspiria? No? More Kids table for you, horror films!

It’s sad. I really love awards shows, and I do have a love/hate relationship with the Academy Awards, but as the saying goes, if you can’t beat em, try beating them again until they are a bloody pulp on the sidewalk. Wait, no? That’s not the saying?

Well, we were wise to the ways of mainstream Hollywood and came up with The Thingy Awards a few weeks back, and some of our favorite people got involved in the voting. So it’s up to us to do the genre proud!

And in order to do so, we’re getting the band back together! Several of our Top 100 jurors came back for this, and a fair bit of new blood to boot.

Now, to be fair, we let our esteemed filmmakers stump for their own films, but The Scariest Things Nominated them because we thought their films were awesome! But, in order to judge scary, you need to know scary, and these judges are not the scariest, but the smartest people for the job!

The Scariest Things Crew:
Mike Campbell
Liz Williams
Robert Zilbauer
Amy Faust
Eric Li 

Our esteemed film makers:
Marc Martinez Jordan (Framed)
Chris McInroy (We Summoned a Demon)
Al Loughler (The Dollmaker)
Ryan Barger and Katie Akana (The Hamster)
F.C. Rabbath (A Brilliant Monster)
Danny Gosser (Immortal Macabre)
Pawel Lukomski (Folk Tales)
The Festival Folks and Industry Insiders!
Max Federman (Wizard World)
Gwen Callahan (The Portland Horror Film Festival, HP Lovecraft Film Festival)
Justin Harlan (Buried Alive Film Festival)
Jessica Safavimehr (Fangoria)

The horror press:
David Day (Horror Movie Talk Podcast)
Bryce Hanson (Horror Movie Talk Podcast)
Joseph Perry (Diabolique, Ghastly Grinning, Gruesome Magazine)
Luca Pincelli (Horror World and Reviews)

Our Patreon Patrons! (Thank you SO MUCH!)
Sharon Yablon
Nathan Tice
Ian Parker
Matt Howl

A horror movie actress!
Marsha Fee Berger (St. Agatha)

Our most passionate Scariest Things supporter!
Tom Carter
And last, but certainly not least, the most knowledgable horror fan in existence:
Jeff Dean (The Portland Horror Trivia Massacre)

We’ll post the results in a bit… but if you want to know who won NOW, you’ll have to listen to the Podcast!

Episode 52:  THE Thingy Awards!!!

The 1954 film The Creature from the Black Lagoon is the pinnacle of the monster movie cannon. While it was made over 60 years ago, it is still providing inspiration to filmmakers, recently Guillermo del Toro with his 2017 Academy Award winning best picture The Shape of Water, and you’d be hard pressed to find a makeup or effects craftsperson working in the genre today who will not list the Creature among their inspiration. When you watch the film the makeup is credited to Bud Westmore but in her new book The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, Mallory O’ Meara is here to make sure you know who really designed the creature and whose role as creator was subverted by the patriarchy of Hollywood.


The author, Mallory O’Meara
Milicent Patrick’s, until now, undocumented life is fascinating. From growing up on the grounds of Hearst Castle, to becoming one of the first female animators at Disney; from bringing an idea of Ray Bradbury’s to life, to designing the Creature, she did it all with much lauded style and grace. What really shines the most in this book though is O’Meara. The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick is a true labor of love and that absolutely comes through in the pages of this book. It’s a painstakingly researched biography woven with autobiographical details of O’Meara’s life focusing on her quest to produce this book and discovering parallels between her own experiences working in Hollywood today and Patrick’s years ago.  The book is completely of the zeitgeist addressing the “me too” movement and painfully detailing O’Meara’s own experiences handling the disgusting misogyny of Hollywood. I especially loved getting to know O’Meara through her snarky footnotes that helped to lighten it up when shit got heavy.


Milicent and The Creature
Full disclosure, before I picked up this book, I had not seen The Creature from the Black Lagoon. If you’ve listened to the podcast then you know that the classic monster movies are my horror blind spot. After devouring the book, I watched the film and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it because of the Creature makeup effects and let’s be honest, Kay’s myriad outfit changes while floating down the Amazon. Milicent Patrick legacy is now living through a new fan and I think that’s what O’Meara really wants readers to take away from her book.

Lady From the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick will be released on March 5, 2019 by Hanover Square Press and is available to pre-order on Amazon, Powell’s or wherever you buy your books.

If you listen to the Reading Glasses podcast which O’Meara co-hosts with genre actor and director Brea Grant you will hear Mallory’s voice  in your head the whole time you’re reading so I’d highly recommend the audiobook which O’Meara will be narrating.

Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Hanover Square Press; Original edition (March 5, 2019)
ISBN-10: 1335937803

Scariest Things Extra: Interview with author Mallory O’ Meara

Eric and Mike examine the late 60’s, getting beyond Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby to recommend some classic films you may not have been aware of!

As we talked about in Episode 51, the 1960’s allowed the horror movie to return to adult fare. As the culture was rapidly changing around Hollywood, the appetite for blood and sex grew in film goers, and the horror movie really started to push some taboos. But before you think it went straight to sleaze, the 1960’s was also had some very sophisticated takes. But, let it be said, we do like the sleaze at TST!

As the genre matured, it became the testing ground for up and coming directors and actors. Two names would set the trends for much of the genre scene in the 60’s, Alfred Hitchcock and Roger Corman. Hitchcock with Psycho opened up the possibilities for visceral horror, allowing directors like Hershel Gordon license to go full-on with gore. With The Birds, Hitchcock established the template for the grim apocalyptic tale, that presaged Night of the Living Dead and George Romero’s decidedly bleak view of the fate of mankind.

Roger Corman’s presence was not just that he was the Godfather of the B-Movie, having It Conquered the World, Not of This Earth, Wasp Women, and countless other fun, cheap, and independent films under his belt, but he managed to turn the corner and also lead the genre into a period piece Gothic era of Edgar Allen Poe. There he helped elevate the careers of Vincent Price, Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, and innumerable others through his mentorship at American International Pictures. Hollywood’s old studio system began to give ground in the sixties, and Corman’s can-do school of inexpensive independent film became hugely influential for decades to come.

With the stigma of horror as kid’s stuff rapidly fading into the background, many seasoned actors and actresses began to find their way into the horror genre. In this episode, some of Hollywood’s bluest bloods will make their appearances is horror-thrillers in this decade, a real rarity in a genre usually populated with actresses selected for their ability to scream or look good in a sweater. And yet, the genre was still kind to the aging horror stars , though, as Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney still plied their trade through the decade.

The foreign films that really emerged in the early part of the decade continued their prominence in the later years. And like their American counterparts, they too were diversifying. Equal measures of schlocky fun and arthouse seriousness.

We’ve already talked at length before about Night of the Living Dead, Black Sunday, Psycho, The Haunting, and Rosemary’s Baby, as they all were prominently featured in our Top 100 Selections. What really begins to stand out in the back half of the decade is how diverse horror has become. Psychological thrillers. Gore. Somber haunted houses. Devil cult worshipers. Art house foreign horror. Independent Gothic Noir. Sci-Fi horror meets the space race. There’s a different flavor for everyone! I’ll take two scoops of grindhouse, with some Hammer sauce and Ghidora chips, please.

This diversification trend will really blossom in the 70’s as the MPAA kicks in, allowing for much more sex and gore, but the late sixties run up really knocked the door down to allow for all kinds of genre offerings. Eric and Mike have found eight other great films of the era that might just be new to you! Enjoy episode LIII (53)

Episode 53: Diversification of Horror -- 1965 to 1969

Your gateway to horror films! We track the trends and tropes of the horror genre.

The Scariest Things Podcast