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!

4 comments:

  1. Hi Morgan! Nice to see you back around these parts. Best of luck with the new endeavour. I am hoping you still wear patchouli. Cheers!

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    1. Thankyou, and the answer is "occasionally".

      - MorganScorpion

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  2. Glad you're doing this. I can't wait to read more.

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