29/10/2017
Listen up, people! Ahead of Hallowe'en, Coastal Waters show on Brighton and Hove Community Radio is bringing you the Sound of Horror. Caroline Waters and I will be discussing radio horror, featuring an excerpt from a Thana Niveau story about numbers stations, and more stuff about music and sound in horror fiction and cinema...
looking forward to tomorrows Horror special The Sound of Horror. Local author Tom Johnstone discusses the importance of sound in horror , beginning with radio horror, whether it's the shows that used to crawl out through the static of your bakelite wireless set in the 'Fifties or the use of radio stations as a setting and narrative device in films like The Fog. As an example of radio-based horror fiction, we'll hear an extract from Thana Niveau's terrifying short story 'Two Five Seven', about numbers stations. But sound is also crucial in the visual medium of the cinema, from the pounding on the bedroom door in The Haunting to the Foley-based frights of Berberian Sound Studio. Then there's the role of music, not just as the soundtrack to horror movies but as subject matter, in gothic tales of mad composers, tormented concert pianists and devil-worshipping music promoters. We'll be drawing connections between the treatment of this theme from The Phantom of the Opera to Simon Avery's recent novella The Teardrop Method. We'll also hear one of Tom's supernatural stories, 'The Apotheosis of Jenny Swallow
Tom Johnstone's day job sometimes involves the mowing and general maintenance of bowling greens. His experience of this fed into 'The Apotheosis of Jenny Swallow'. His fiction has appeared in a number of publications, including Brighton - The Graphic Novel, Cold Iron - Ghost Stories From The Twenty First Century and Best Horror of the Year #8. The anti-austerity anthology he co-edited with Joel Lane, Horror Uncut, was nominated for a British Fantasy Award and influential US editor Ellen Datlow has tipped him as a 'name to watch' in contemporary horror fiction.
More info at tomjohnstone.wordpress.com
'Thana Niveau is a Halloween bride who lives in a crumbling gothic tower in Wicker Man country, where she writes horror and SF. She shares her life with fellow horror scribe John Llewellyn Probert, in a Victorian library filled with arcane books and curiosities. She has twice been nominated for the British Fantasy award, for her collection From Hell to Eternity and for her short story “Death Walks En Pointe”.'
More info at thananiveau.com
listen live at 4pm on bhcr.org.uk
