The Seventeenth Dispatch
I accidentally typed that as "The SevenTEETH Dispatch" (sans capitals) at first, and considered leaving it that way.
THE CUT
Well, we’re officially less than six months from the release of THE CUT! I’m so excited. From everything I’ve heard, things will start to feel more and more hectic pretty soon here. In the meantime, I’ve started scheduling some interviews and bookstore visits and opportunities to yell about THE CUT, pretty much all of them coming in April of 2025, and it’s a pretty surreal (but very fun) experience so far.
You can see one of those interviews live now! I answered Six Spooky Questions with Willow Croft for Horror Tree, it was a fun time!
This month I’ve got the next character introduction (once again, I’m very amateur when it comes to visual art, but I have fun with it, and just like the last drawing this is black charcoal pencil, white pencil, and gray paper) with Jordan “Joe” Mishra, L’Arpin Hotel’s resident chef.
Movie Recommendation: V/H/S/BEYOND
I recently watched V/H/S/Beyond and had a fun time. I found it gory, campy, over the top in just the right way, and once outright horrifying. Usually when I write about a movie in my newsletter, I have wiggle room to give my feelings and thoughts about it without too many spoilers, but that’s a little harder with this vignette format so I’ll give some brief thoughts on each story and equally brief thoughts on the movie as a whole.
The first vignette was called “Stork,” written by Jordan Downey and Kevin Stewart and directed by Jordan Downey.
It follows a law enforcement unit looking for a bunch of missing babies. The campy gore in this one at times reminded me of Raimi and I really dug that. There was one special effects element in it that I didn’t vibe with, but it’s a horror movie effect I never really connect with so I don’t fault the film much for this one. I don’t want to say what that effect is and spoil a big part of the end of this segment, but maybe I’ll mention it in the next newsletter. I really liked the way it ended, and I would probably watch a whole movie around the premise of this segment.
The second segment was called “Dream Girl,” written by Virat Pal and Evan Dickson and directed by Virat Pal.
It follows a couple of paparazzi in Mumbai who have a connection with someone who can get them into the trailer of Bollywood’s newest star, Tara, but they discover a terrible secret and get in over their heads. It’s hard to fit much in the way of character development into a story this short (especially when a solid chunk of the story is another gore-fest that was disturbing and entertaining to watch) but there was a moment when the main character of this segment showed some potential for a little personal growth and I really enjoyed that.
The third segment was called “Live and Let Dive,” written by Ben Turner and Justin Martinez and directed by Justin Martinez.
This was one of my two favorites of all the stories in V/H/S/BEYOND. A group of friends are going skydiving for their buddy’s birthday when things go terribly wrong. The setup was fun, the effects worked for me, the scares were just right, and the way the story escalated at the end was so good. There’s a scene near the end of this particular vignette which touches on one of my own irrational fears (I mentioned it in my previous newsletter but I’ll wait until next month’s issue to tell you which fear) in a way that made my stomach clench. I really enjoyed this one.
The fourth vignette was called “Fur Babies,” written and directed by Christian and Justin Long.
In this story some young animal rights activists pose as potential customers to investigate a doggy daycare owner who has her taxidermied pets displayed in the background of her cheap commercial. The acting was good and the motivations for the victim characters felt pretty realistic. I’m no expert but to me it seemed like this vignette relied the most on practical effects, which I appreciate a lot. Through the first part it all felt a little predictable, but I had fun with the way it took everything to another level at the end.
The fifth vignette was called “Stowaway,” written by Mike Flanagan and directed by Kate Siegel.
This was the second of my two favorite stories in the movie. It follows a UFO enthusiast documenting her attempt to see a phenomenon in a small town, and the serious mistakes she makes along the way. This one starts a little slow (comparatively, for the format) and escalates rapidly as it goes. The groundwork for the most horrifying part of the story (and in my opinion the most horrifying part of the whole movie, and again, I’ll say which specific moment this is in next month’s newsletter to avoid spoilers) is laid out well in the beginning, and this is the only segment in the movie that hit me with actual, deep horror by the end. I was left with one lingering question that felt less deliberate and more like a loose end (and again, maybe I’ll explain that in my next newsletter, after you’ve had a chance to watch this movie), but the way this vignette hit me by the time it finished more than made up for that.
The framing interludes were called “Abduction/Adduction,” written and directed by Jay Cheel.
I really enjoyed the slow build toward the end with these, and the way this story was presented as a straight up documentary about UFOs and aliens for all of the interludes until the closing bit. One thing I miss about the first V/H/S movie is the way the framing interludes felt like part of the story, giving the feeling that the characters in them were watching the V/H/S videos and their awful stories along with the audience. I didn’t get a sense of overall-movie-cohesion from the framing interludes in V/H/S/BEYOND, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that “Abduction/Adduction” was well-made with authentic vibes and a fun, eerie clip that felt like something you really might’ve seen in one of these documentaries to finish off the movie.
Overall:
I think my favorite thing about this installment of the V/H/S franchise is the way each story escalated (I sure used that word a lot today) by the end; each one started with a solid horror premise and then took it to another level every time. Between that and my own preference for sci-fi horror and my enjoyment of found footage as a horror subgenre, I definitely recommend V/H/S/BEYOND for a campy, gory, low-audience-effort, fun-horrible time.
If found footage is a horror subgenre you also enjoy, I have a further recommendation for you:
In ten days, on Friday, October 25th, 2024, FOUND 2: More Stories of Found Footage Horror comes out! This anthology, edited by Andrew Cull and Gabino Iglesias, features 18 short found footage horror stories, and my story A Place Where the Sun Has Never Shone is one of them. It’s a fun collection of stories, and you can pre-order it for your Kindle here, right now!
Bonus movie recommendation for In a Violent Nature:
I watched In a Violent Nature over the weekend, and if you’re looking for a weirdly chill, almost relaxing horror movie that will make you feel like perhaps “murderer in a woodsy slasher” would be a nice, low-stress career change, definitely check this movie out.
Horror Chat
I grew up in a neighborhood that had begun its transition from rural to suburban sometime just before my family moved in, a neighborhood that was fully suburban by the time I moved out on my own. I then spent my early adulthood until my mid-thirties living in cities.
Now I live by the woods. Literally, the forest presses right up to the back of my house. I like the quiet here, I like the way everything looks and feels and smells.
And I like the way it scares me a little bit at night, when I leave my house after dark for one reason or another. There’s no streetlights on the road where I live. When it’s dark here, it’s really dark. Especially under the trees, leaning over my house, watching my small self as I move around at night.
I feel like fear of the woods and what lives in the woods is probably one of our oldest human fears. When I walk outside at night and get that little shiver of discomfort, I feel like it’s something I share with the people who have come before me, all the way back to the first of us. And I think that this fear, of a place unknown or of a known place made strange by darkness, is probably one of the roots of storytelling.
When I go out near the woods alone at night and know that I’m safe but feel that cool touch of unease on the back of my neck anyway, it makes me feel storytelling’s connection to fear, and it makes me feel my connection to storytelling in a living, breathing way.
Man, now I want to go camping and tell stories around a fire.
Fiction as a Time Capsule
I mentioned in a previous newsletter issue that the real life lakeside power plant which inspired part of the setting for THE CUT has been demolished. This was a fairly long process, and friends and family still in that area sent me pretty regular updates about it once they knew that my upcoming book featured that location, so I had a long time to think about how that feels. And when I was last in Ohio I visited, and found that the beach the power plant overlooks is closed now, eroded away and dangerous. I spent a lot of time in my late teens and early twenties at that crappy little beach. I feel like it meant something to the friends I went there with, and I know absolutely that it meant something to me.
There are a few scenes in THE CUT set on that beach. One in particular is such a passing moment for my main character, Sadie, just an awkward evening early in the story when Sadie agrees to meet her coworker and some friends on the beach for a little party and regrets inserting herself into their evening. I can feel and hear that scene, I can smell it, I lived it so many times from the inside, one of the young people sitting around on the sand in the harsh white and stark shadows from the power plant’s floodlights.
And now I live seven hours away from the beach and the power plant, I don’t have any pictures of my own from the times I spent there, and on top of that those places don’t even exist anymore. It makes me think of a 24/7 coffee shop I spent so much of my 20s in. I thought for a while that that place would never change and when it did, because of course it did, it was a loss.
I hope people love THE CUT when they read it. I hope I can make somebody, somewhere, feel like they have walked on that beach and looked up at that power plant. I hope in some way I’ve captured those places and preserved them, even if that only matters to me.
Pet Pics!
That’s it for October!
There you have it, the October, 2024 issue of C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch! I hope everyone has an excellent spooky month and a fantastic Halloween!
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I'll watch a horror movie with you, but not by myself! I am absolutely sure there are creatures no one has ever seen in the woods, where you live. Even if you conjured them in your very active brain! I'm going to check out your interview now.