October 16, 2019
Happy October, Chicers! The air is crisp, everything is pumpkin-spice flavor, and my boots and sweaters are back in rotation. In other words, it’s decorative gourd season, mofos! (FYI, that article is a classic, but probably NSFW.) Not to mention, this awesome month comes with a prominent holiday: Columbus Day, where we celebrate the raping, plundering, and enslavement of… Wait. We…
June 3, 2019
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, A.M. Rose returns to gush about a new set of favorites. Even better? Her…
October 30, 2018
A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts (2016) Written by: J.W. Ocker Genre: Non-fiction Pages: 315 (Paperback) Publisher: The Countryman Press Why I Chose It: I wanted a book to put me in the mood for Halloween, but I primarily chose A Season with the Witch because I am completing a reading challenge…
October 24, 2018
Welcome back to Sound Off!, a semi-regular column where members of Speculative Chic gather together to chat about the latest BIG THING in entertainment. This time, celebrate the ultimate final girl and discuss Halloween, which premiered in the United States on Friday, October 19, 2018. Sound Off! is meant to be a reaction, but not necessarily a review. After all, while we…
October 23, 2018
Last year I wrote about vampire stories, and talked about how I find Halloween waaay more exciting than Christmas. As a kid I looked forward to December; in recent years Halloween has become my favorite holiday. Every October 1 it’s time to break out the soundtrack to The Nightmare Before Christmas. (And yeah, I also like the Marilyn Manson version…
September 11, 2018
When I heard Linda Hamilton and Jamie Lee Curtis were going to return to the movie franchises that made them famous, I was pretty excited. Hamilton is returning to the role of Sarah Connor in the sixth Terminator movie, and Curtis is returning as Laurie Strode in the latest Halloween movie this November. I’ve talked in the past how reboots…
February 15, 2018
In honor of February being Women in Horror Month, I thought it would be fitting for me to highlight some of my favorite “final girls.” What’s a final girl? Glad you asked. First coined by author Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the “final girl” is a trope found…
October 25, 2017
I really hate being scared. Being scared makes me angry, and being angry makes me cry, which just makes me more angry. This applies to movies, ghost stories, extreme sports. Haunted houses are not my thing, and I’m a bit of a party pooper on sleepovers and camping trips. As a reader I’ve gotten to the point where I actually…
January 24, 2017
In Celtic mythology, “thin places” are spots where this world and the Otherworld allow inhabitants to cross over. The most famous example is actually Halloween, followed by the tale of Tam Lin, and Cristina Rosetti’s classic poem “Goblin Market.” Halloween, or Samhain (pronounced SAH-ween), took place just after the harvest and was thought to be a time when the boundaries…
October 31, 2016
Welcome to a special, giant-sized edition of My Favorite Things! Normally this is a spot for us to share our recent favs, but we couldn’t resist putting a ghoulish twist on the column for one of our favorite holidays — Halloween! There’s no better day for carving wicked jack-o-lanterns, marathoning horror movies, and gorging yourself on way too much candy. Read on…