Friday 31 March 2017

Plague Town, The Divide and two Sherlock Holmes pastiches.

A brief roundup of this week's horror.

To beging with I saw the movies Plague Town and The Divide. Both of them are on Shudder_Uk, which I am putting my weight behind as much as I can. We need a proper horror channel. More on that later.

Plague Town is another one of those "never leave the city" movies which are so popular. Although we are forced to spend part of our time in the company of a warring family where for once I'm taking the side of the blonde cheerleader-type over that of the brunette gothy-type. Once they split up however, the hi-jinks ensue, and by hi-jinks I mean murders. The countryside is terrorized by a group of mutant children, deformed and demented, just how I like them. As we eventually find out, the lucky ones die first. You'll love it.

Secondly I saw The Divide. And all the flippancy I applied during the last mini-review disappears here. This film is gruelling. Part post-apocalyptic claustrophobia, part torture porn, part relationship movie. There are plot holes, the protagonists make stupid decisions, and frequently fail to take the bleeding obvious steps to ensure their well-being or escape their death trap. There is a brief vacation into sci-fi territory, which raises questions but doesn't answer them. And there are people being truly vile to each other. There were moments when even I could barely watch it. The acting in this is truly Oscar-worthy. It's sick, it's twisted, it's compulsive.

Now onto the books.

I have my Sherlock Holmes moments, and am frustrated by the fact that I have read the originals too many times. I have to resort to reading pastiches, and most of them are exploitative, unoriginal and unconvincing. I have even read The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, that presents us with a Great detective so over endowed, one has to wonder where he gets his trousers made.

This week I read The House at Baker Street and The Women of Baker Street, both by Michelle Birkby. They are billed as Mrs Hudson and Mary Watson investigations, and they are damn good. In both books we have some brief appearances by Holmes and Watson themselves, but although we see a different side to Sherlock Holmes than we are used to, they definitely are in the background. Instead we have two resourceful and brave women who set out on their own.

Why am I putting these in a horror blog? Well, in the first one you have a ruthless blackmailer who's victims have a habit of comitting suicide, a hideously disfigured lady in a black veil, and a Jack the Ripper copycat. In the second you have the Pale Boys, a hospital bed with a 100% death rate, and five anonymous graves containing the black clad bodies of murdered children. Pretty grim stuff!

I am off to watch What Have You Done to Solange in a minute, being aware that I have seen very little Giallo, and should have seen a lot of it. I am also going to agonize over not having written the piece on Quatermass 2 for Unfilmable.com yet.

Happy Weekend everyone!




Sunday 26 March 2017


An excellent short movie that all horror fans should watch, especially if they are fans of Lovecraft.

Friday 24 March 2017

The Colony on Shudder UK

I have recently gotten myself a subscription to Shudder UK, which is only five pounds a month, a bargain.

It's catalogue is fairly small, but growing, and includes a wide range of horror movies, vintage, modern, classics, obscure ones, horror comedies, zombie movies etc. These movies vary considerably in quality, and I have seen somevery good ones.

Tonight however, I saw a bit of a stinker. The Colony, a science fiction horror of the apocalyptic variety. It had it's good moments. The sets are wonderful, the acting is good, there are some deliciously gruesome horror moments, and Laurence Fishburne is in it. Also the much missed Bill Paxton. Sadly though, this film is full of inconsistencies. The biggest one is that, although global warming has inexplicably resulted in a new ice age, no-one appears to actually be cold. We are told that the earth is so frozen that we never see the sun, and nothing can live on the surface. Yet here we see people out on the surface, in daylight, bare-headed and with open coats, one with a low necked blouse on, with nary a shiver. Laurence Fishburne, who's name made me choose this movie disappears half way through, and by some miracle, the vampire cast from 30 Days of Night have survived, given up vampirism in favour of cannibalism, and Marlowe has had his teeth cleaned.

The whole film reads like the pilot for a tv series that was never made, and quite understandably.

Don't let this put you off Shudder UK. I'll be watching another of their films tomorrow.


Marlowe says: remember to floss!

Tuesday 21 March 2017

No Such Thing as Ghosts.

Have you heard of Creepypasta?

I'm sure that many of you have, mainly in connection with Slenderman. I have a great love of listening to Creepypastas on YouTube. They vary in quality, from bad to excellent.

This one is excellent. Read by the wonderful Dr Creepen, with the vocal assistance of Black-eyed Blonde and Southern Cannibal, it was written by Ryan Brennerman and is called "No Such Thing as Ghosts".






Monday 20 March 2017

I can't always think of many things to say about a book or a movie, and this is one of many reasons that I haven't started a horror blog sooner. Another is that I doubt my ability to maintain one once I have started.
So whilst I will attempt to write some long, essay-like entries, I will also be doing a lot of smaller entries, some in the form of notes or remarks, others in the form of links.

Such as this one.

Have you seen Baskin? You should. It is genuinely horrifying in a genre that is filled up with routine slashers and feel-good family friendly entries. If you have seen Baskin, did you understand it? I didn't, and I like to think I have a good brain. Anyway, here's a link to a video which you absolutely shouldn't watch unless you've seen Baskin.

Baskin Explained.


Sunday 19 March 2017


This blog is called Morbid and Unhealthy because these were the two insults most commonly levelled at me growing up, because of my love of reading horror stories and watching horror films.
When other little girls idolised Donny Osmond and David Cassidy, my passion was directed towards Christopher Lee, Alice Cooper, and occasionally, Peter Cushing. When other girls were reading Jackie, I was reading H P Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Machen and Clark Ashton Smith and M R James and.... you get the picture.

I started innocently enough with The Armada Books of Great Ghost Stories and Scooby Doo, progressed through Hell Hath Fury (aged 8), Carmilla (aged 9), The Pan Books of Horror (aged 10) and then Poe and Lovecraft. With Lovecraft came his seminal work Supernatural Horror in Literature, which became my reading list. Meanwhile I discovered Vincent Price and those lush Roger Corman movies, Hammer with it's mesmerising Count and Baron, and in time David Cronenberg and Dario Argento. 

With music, my loves were Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus, whose songs frequently reference horror movies and have horror themes. Add to this my penchant for wearing black, loads of eyeliner and patchouli I am Goth as fuck, though I no longer have the patience for elaborate make-up and I'm too wobbly on my ageing pins to wear platforms. The tremendous advantages of the Internet, bringing us Netflix and Amazon Prime and Shudder UK, plus endless ezines and podcasts and YouTube, means there is so much more horror available today than there was when I grew up. Imagine this - you had to wait for weeks at a time for the four measly tv chanels to show just ONE horror film. And that was probably one you had seen before. The best you could hope for was a BBC2 double bill of classics. There was the occasional tv show like Night Gallery, Journey Into the Unknown, Brian Clemens' Thriller and Nigel Kneale's Beasts, and an M R James ghost story for Christmas. That was your lot. 

Now we have horror themed video games like Resident Evil and Forbidden Siren, horror themed table top games like Call of Cthulhu and Arkham Horror, horror themed card games and even horror core music. It's horror nerd heaven! Apart from CGI. Well, you can't have everything.

In this blog I intend to cover horror stories in books and in film either as I read and see them or as the mood takes me, I may also mention video games, merchandise, etc.  I may even rant at various trends that annoy me. Come to think of it, I am at the "get off my lawn" stage of life, though I'm not ranting at clouds yet. A rant may be inevitable. I may also make mention of my YouTube channel, just go there and enter MorganScorpion.  In addition, I have another blog, http://unfilmable.blogspot.co.uk which I had inherited and forgotten about (forgive me Craig Mullins) which needs to be updated.  Wish me luck!