Invasion of the Body Snatchers

I’ve heard about this 1956 sci-fi horror film a thousand times since I was a kid but didn’t watch it till just the other day. Directed by Don Siegel, noir in style, and starring Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, it’s considered a classic scary picture. For the first ten minutes or so the plot felt silly to me, but then the premise settles in, and the affairs driving the storyline start to work in some light touch of a way that has a frightful effect. And this approach is fitting considering that, when all’s said and done, the body-snatching monsters are just an invasive species of plant.

Best bits:

1. Pods in the greenhouse crack open one by one and foamy daikon-colored bodies start unfurling out. 2. Hiding from the mob under loose planks in the abandoned mine. 3. Dr. Bennell, at the end of the film, tries to convince the authorities in another town that the invasion is real, and that he’s not psychotic—he who at the start of the film believed his patients must be suffering from Capgras syndrome.

The Human Chair

"The Human Chair" (人間椅子, 1925) by Edogawa Rampo isn't so much a scary tale as it is a deviant's disturbing fantasy come to life. An ugly furniture maker crafts a chair into which he can slip to sit unbeknownst to those (mostly women) sitting atop him. You can hear the wheels turning in Rampo's head as you read this; everything you might want to know about holing up in a chair is covered here. It's a fun story written in a serious tone. It also embraces that typically Japanese form of horror that's rooted half in the quotidian and half in the frightfully bizarre. Put another way, Eugene Thacker, writing for The Japan Times, described it as "exemplary of a particular trope in Japanese horror where an innocuous, everyday event sends a character chasing a single idea — methodically, bit by bit — to its logical and terrifying conclusion."

An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street

A very good "haunted house" story, and my first time reading Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). Years before the "present-day" narrative, a Judge Horrocks, who'd earned a reputation as the "hanging judge" or "the hangin'est judge that ever was known in Ireland" had ended his life by hanging himself. This was in an old Dublin house, to where the narrator and his cousin Tom Ludlow move, as it's close to their lecture halls and amusements and also, since the building is owned by Tom's father, they can lodge there so long as it remains unlet. The young men are then haunted to the brink of insanity.

These lines stood out:

"One of the most remarkable phenomena connected with the practice of mendacity is the vast number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of all persons, we can least expect to deceive. In all this, I need hardly tell you, Dick, I was simply lying to myself, and did not believe one word of the wretched humbug. Yet I went on, as men will do, like persevering charlatans and impostors, who tire people into credulity by the mere force of reiteration; so I hoped to win myself over at last to a comfortable scepticism about the ghost."