My Favorite Things with Ian Rogers

They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Ian Rogers, whose short story collection, Every House is Haunted, came out from ChiZine in October!

What does Ian love when he’s not exploring the interstitial places between our world and the supernatural darkness beyond? Spoiler alert: falling for a certain season, a cult-classic that inspired yet another cult-classic, and a found-footage film that stands up to today’s standards. Would you like a hot beverage with this read? Ian offers that too! Read on to learn more!

When I was asked a couple weeks ago to come up with some of my favorite things, it was kind of a no-brainer for me considering the time of year.

The fall has always been my favorite season. As a writer of horror fiction, I find it extremely conducive to telling stories about ghosts and haunted houses and the like. But there’s also a lot of beauty in the fall.

You can go to places around the world where the climate is like summer all the time, or spring, or winter, but there’s no place where it’s forever fall. No place where the leaves are always changing, the sky is that moody shade of grey, and the air has that sharp crispness just a degree or two away from full-on cold. Fall really is a moment in time, and for me it never lasts as long as I’d like it to. I suppose that’s what makes it special.

October especially has a lot of resonance and significance for me. I was born on the 17th, I got married on the 14th, and my very first book came out on the 12th. And then of course there’s Halloween. It might seem like a bit of cliché to say the fall is my favorite season because I’m a horror writer, but it’s true.

This is a time of year when almost everyone indulges in the dark and scary. I’m a horror writer 365 days of the year, but in the fall, and in October especially, it’s my moment to shine! Uh… darkly! This year I finished a new horror-fantasy novella that I’ve been describing as Good Omens meets Ocean’s Eleven. And my wife and I did the 31 Days of Horror challenge, watching as many horror movies as we could, new and old, throughout the month of October.

In light — or dark! — of the season, I thought I’d talk about a few of my favorite things that I associate with autumn.

Twin Peaks doesn’t take place in the fall (it’s supposed to take place in February/March, even though there’s never a flake of snow anywhere in sight), but it has a very fallsy kind of vibe. The leaves aren’t changing on those giant trees that surround the town, but the series itself — and the locale in which it’s set — has a timeless quality that makes it feel like fall. “Twin Peaks is different,” Sheriff Truman tells Special Agent Dale Cooper, the FBI man who has come to town to investigate the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, and ends up uncovering all manner of secrets, including the greatest one of all — that Twin Peaks co-exists with an ancient darkness whose personification is a red-curtained netherworld known as the Black Lodge.

Twin Peaks wasn’t the first show to mix police procedural-type stories with the supernatural, but it’s easily one of the best. The pilot alone was viewed by almost 35 million people, and although the viewership dropped off over time — especially after the Laura Palmer murder was solved in the second season — the show ended claiming its spot as one of the most beloved and obsessed-over cult television shows of all time.

I was in high school when the show originally aired, and I vividly recall the way the show sucked in kids from all walks of life — the brains, the jocks, the nerds, everyone! We even had betting pools for Laura Palmer’s murderer. I won’t tell you who it was (no spoilers here, go watch the show now, it’s on Netflix!), but I will say I lost the bet.

Twin Peaks is my favorite TV show, although The X-Files comes a very close second. Both shows not only perfectly sum up my interests in mysteries and the supernatural, but they’re largely the reason why I write the same kind of stories today. To say they inspired me would be a huge understatement. In the ‘90s, I lived in Twin Peaks and I worked on The X-Files. And let’s face it: the Blue Rose Task Force — of which Agent Cooper is a member — is really just a precursor to The X-Files, anyway. Oh how I longed to see a crossover in which Cooper, Scully, and Mulder worked on a case together! Back in the day I even wrote a fan fic about Mulder and Scully traveling to Twin Peaks in order to rescue Agent Cooper from the Black Lodge. But I digress…

Going back into the woods, I want to talk about one of my favorite movies, The Blair Witch Project. Love it or hate it, you can’t deny The Blair Witch Project’s success. And although a huge box-office is never a sign of quality, I’m gonna go out on a limb (see what I did there?) and say that if the only reason you didn’t like The Blair Witch Project is because it didn’t have any blood or a rubber monster or CGI, then you’re dead to me! Okay, that’s kind of harsh. But seriously, one of the things I loved about The Blair Witch Project is that all of the scares and the sense of impending doom comes from nothing more than the characters being lost in the woods. There are no jump scares, no monsters, no explanation at the end that ties it all together. The Blair Witch Project is the very epitome of a found-footage film, which is why it remains to this day one of the best ever made.

Sure, Heather is annoying, but she’s supposed to be! As the Captain Ahab of student filmmakers, she convinces a couple of friends, cameraman Josh and soundman Mike, to tromp into the Black Hills of Maryland with her in order to shoot a documentary on a local legend. It’s such a great setup that works because it’s so simple and ordinary. After a day in the woods, the trio ends up lost, and they stay that way for the remainder of the film. At first Heather refuses to acknowledge their plight, but when their food runs out and they find themselves being stalked by a force in the woods, even she is forced to accept that they are seriously screwed.

One night the filmmakers are attacked in their tent by an unseen force. Preceding this attack they hear a series of sounds. In another horror movie these sounds would’ve been growls or screams or a deep, thunderous voice. But in The Blair Witch Project it’s nothing more than children laughing and a baby crying. But hearing those sounds in the deep, dark woods, completely out of their usual context, ends up making them absolutely terrifying. Scenes like that are the reason the The Blair Witch Project remains one of the best horror films of all time, and one of my personal favorites.

Although October is behind us, there’s still a little bit of fall left to enjoy before the snow and the general madness of the Christmas season is upon us (which I find much scarier than anything Halloween has to offer). So make sure you get out there and enjoy it!

Oh, and one last, little favorite thing, in the spirit of the season. My favorite fallsy beverage is hot apple cider. Yes, you can also get it in the winter, too, but I personally feel hot cider is best enjoyed in the autumn, when you can drink it under the red and yellow leaves, preferably with the smell of woodsmoke in the air. It’s the official beverage of the fall!

I had planned to include a photo of a Blair Witch-style stickman made out of cinnamon sticks, but our local grocery store didn’t have any. So I’m afraid you’ll just have to close your eyes and imagine how cool and creepy that would look. ‘Tis the season!

Ian Rogers is the author of the award-winning collection, Every House Is Haunted. A novelette from the collection, “The House on Ashley Avenue,” was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. His work has been selected for The Best Horror of the Year and Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Ian lives with his wife in Peterborough, Ontario. For more information, visit ianrogers.ca.

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Author Photo by Kathryn Verhulst-Rogers

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