I don’t think we talk about horror authors enough. There are plenty of things spotlighting filmmakers and directors, actors, even screenwriters, but horror authors are rarely mentioned. I’m a big reader and would love to hear more from these writers who can bring on the nightmares. This is one of the reasons I’m super excited about the new TV series by Philip Gelatt (The Spine of Night – read our interview with him HERE), First Word on Horror (read our review HERE). This docuseries profiles several popular horror authors (Paul Tremblay – read our interview with him HERE; Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Hand – read our interview with her HERE; Laird Barron; Mariana Enriquez) as they discuss their writing, relationship with horror, and tidbits about their lives while reading some of their work.
To celebrate the release of the show, I chatted with author Stephen Graham Jones (My Heart is a Chainsaw; I Was a Teenage Slasher) about becoming part of the show, the horror genre, how Scream has influenced his life, and more!
PopHorror: I’m a huge fan so I’m super excited to speak with you today! I think First Word on Horror is such a great idea. I loved your segment so much that I watched it multiple times. You had some really great things to say.
Stephen Graham Jones: Thank you!
PopHorror: Philip said that he emailed you asking you to be a part of the project. What made you want to say yes?
Stephen Graham Jones: I think it was two things. I’d hung out with Phil and Will (producer Battersby) at a film festival in Telluride, Colorado and got to know each other over a few days. They seemed like really good dudes. By that time, I’d seen The Spine of Night somehow, the film they did. Blew me away, all that rotoscope action and the grandness, and the scope of that story really impressed me. And of course, I know Love, Death & Robots too so I knew that they did good work, and they were good people. Those two combined made it an easy choice to say yes to this project.
PopHorror: I think that we don’t talk about horror authors enough. We hear a lot about filmmakers, and we see a lot of behind the scenes of the making of horror movies, but I feel like we’re not talking about the books that are out there enough. I love that this is going to open people up to a completely new world. We all need to be reading more.
Stephen Graham Jones: That’s great. Hopefully it does. Let’s get horror into every nook and cranny of the world.
PopHorror: Yes! How did you decide on your short story, Dear Final Girls, as being the one feature in the show?
Stephen Graham Jones: You know, they initially wanted me to do Father, Son, Holy Rabbit. It’s probably my most well-known story. I said, “Sure, I’ll do whatever ya’ll want,” but I told them I kind of felt like Dear Final Girls might work better in front of a camera, or through a mic anyways. So, we ended up doing both. I think I saw recently they just posted a little article or blog post about switching gears at the last moment and doing Dear Final Girls instead of Father, Son, Holy Rabbit and that made all the difference. It did, it worked out really well and they were able to visually illustrate it with those actors and set pieces and all really, really well. It worked out quite fortuitously, I think.
PopHorror: Yes! You said something during your episode that horror is hardwired into us, which I completely agree with. I feel like us horror fans really embrace the genre and the family that the horror community is. Why do you feel that some people embrace horror more than others?
Stephen Graham Jones: Yeah, I do believe that the need for fear, terror, and horror is hardwired into us at the genetic level, instinctual level. But because of the different ways people come up, people have different thresholds for what scares them or what they can tolerate. Maybe that’s a better way to say it. Somebody who watched their best friend get killed by a lawnmower is probably going to be traumatized by watching Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. And I fully understand that. They shouldn’t have to watch it, of course. I know people like this. I have friends like this who don’t engage in horror because they prefer unicorns and kittens and rainbows, and that’s fine too. If we all were the same, it would be such a boring world, you know? I’m glad that those people are out there. What I guess that they don’t know is that rainbows and kittens and unicorns terrify me the same way that my zombies and slasher terrify them.
PopHorror: My sister is one of those. She doesn’t understand my love of horror and she’s all kittens and rainbows and unicorns, but it’s funny. She’s the one who showed me my first horror movie back when I was six and she showed me Poltergeist II, which she denies to this day. She is about 20 years older than I am and she’s like, “I don’t think I would have shown you that when you were that little,” and I’m like, “Oh, but you did! You rented it, we watched it, and it terrified me!” She won’t watch them now. When we’re together we watch things like Grey’s Anatomy.
Stephen Graham Jones: Oh, wow, that’s funny! I know a lot of people too. I came up with them as horror fans and then they had children, and their tastes changed, and they no longer like horror. I’ve heard that from a lot of people.
PopHorror: I’ve heard that too and it blows my mind. I know that you’ve probably talked about this a lot, but I want to talk about Scream because it’s obviously been very influential for you. I find that interesting because a lot of people who are lifelong horror fans and who have been fans for so long, they kind of shy away from the more modern teen slasher. Which I love. Nineties teen slashers are my jam.
Stephen Graham Jones: I guess like I say somewhere, maybe in one of my books, when I saw Scream in 1996, it felt like the homework I’d been doing all my life was worth it because this was the test. I could now pass this test. What Scream did though, I think, that was important is it pulled the slasher into our world. Before Scream, most slashers – I guess I hesitate to say all because I probably haven’t seen all but most of them that I know of anyways – happen in a side world that looks like ours but it’s one where Jason Vorhees can come back from getting shot all the time and all this other stuff like Freddy can ride around on a broomstick in six. That kind of thing in slashers made them grand and fun but also made them safe because they happened over there and not over here. But what Scream did by pulling into the conversation this whole long trail of video cassette rentals at the store and making them actually matter, it signaled that this is happening in our world right here, that Ghostface is part of our world. Ghostface isn’t breaking any physical laws as far as we know. Lots of social laws but no physical laws, and I guess lots of criminal laws too. I think that’s the most important thing Scream did. If people say that Scream is meta… I don’t think that Scream’s goal is to be meta. I think being meta was the only response to living in the world we were living in at the time. In the mid 90s, we were having VH1’s Pop-Up Video, which was putting little captions on everything, and David Foster Wallace was doing Infinite Jest and putting footnotes on everything and that was just the reality that we lived in, where everything had a context and six things branching off it. Scream dramatized that for us in a beautiful, wonderful way.
PopHorror: I remember when Scream came out and it was marketed as being different because the heroine wasn’t running up the stairs away from the killer and really kind of facing him head-on. You said that it brings the slasher into our world, and that’s because there’s nothing supernatural about it. They were human and I think that I resonated with it so much because I was 16 when it came out because the characters were the same age as me and it made them one of us. I remember seeing it in the theater with my friends. That’s what I love about it.
Stephen Graham Jones: Yeah, I totally agree.
PopHorror: I have one last question for you today, and you’re not allowed to say Scream. What is your favorite scary movie?
Stephen Graham Jones: Ahh, no Scream. If we’re just doing scary movies outside the slasher genre, I’ll say The Ring. I saw that at a dollar theater one weekend when my wife was out of town, and I didn’t sleep for the rest of the weekend. I was too scared, you know? That Samara was going to come out of my TV and get me. It still scares me. I’ll still watch it every once and again. I always hold The Ring as one of those horror films that does everything right. Every once in a while, everything is in balance like it should be and I think The Ring is in balance really well.
Thank you so much to Stephen for taking the time to chat with us. First Word on Horror is now available on Substack!
