Horror film is a more recent creation, yet still 100 years old with the release of Nosferatu in 1922. It makes my list for its minimalistic effects with maximum fright factor and still holds up today. I also count Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger. Both his magnificent work of fiction and the feature film. Having David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve as immortals is the very definition of gothic horror.

Also on the list is Murder by Decree, the 1979 film starring Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes investigating the Whitechapel murders. Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes? It doesn’t get much better than that.

Penny Dreadful, the Sky Atlantic horror mash-up and not the original penny-a-fright serials that made many a Victorian wet their knickers. Three seasons of Eva Green and Rory Kinnear (who as an actor can do no wrong) set in Victorian London. Come now. It’s every goth’s dream. It’s my number one no matter how many times I’ve watched it.

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is the quintessential haunted house story, but by no means the only one. Her We Have Always Lived in the Castle is equally brilliant. And terrifying. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher rounds out my fiction choices.

Don’t Look Now, the 1973 film starring Donald Sutherland is a classic, eerie, creepy gothic horror film set in Venice that will cause you to never look at small children in red cloaks without suspicion. Also it doesn’t hurt that Warren Beatty, the boyfriend of Julie Christie at the time,  demand ‘that’ sex scene in the film with Donald Sutherland be cut out as it was rumoured there was nothing simulated about it.

There is, however, one final film which for me is chilling from start to finish. And really, it’s not gothic, but truly horrifying as it is based on a true story. Or so they say. The original Amityville Horror with James Brolin and Margot Kidder scared me half to death in 1979 as a twelve-year-old. And it still does today. There is something about the 1970s. A creepy house. A son murdering his entire family and disembodied voices telling totally stupid people to: ‘Get out!’ It just terrifies me. Watch it alone if you dare.

There you have it. My choices. I actually watched every one of these again during pandemic, as well as reading The Hunger for umpteenth time. Simply brilliant.

The Gift, Book 1: Eleanor is the first in The Gift trilogy and out now from Whitefox.

The post The Gift: Author RA Williams talks us through his top gothic horrors appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.

We have an exclusive sneak peek of a lush historical adventure that’s equal parts Gothic horror as it is a tale of lost love. The Gift: Eleanor is the first in a new trilogy that takes you from the Titanic to the trenches of WWI, and Honduran shipwrecks to ancient crypts in the heart of London.

Check out the synopsis here…

The North Atlantic, 14 April 1912.

Amid the chaos of the sinking Titanic, a young Eleanor Annenberg meets the eyes of a stranger and is immediately captivated. As the ship buckles around them, she follows him down into the hold and finds him leaning over an open sarcophagus, surrounded by mutilated bodies. She catches but a glimpse of what lies within before she’s sucked into a maelstrom of freezing brine and half-devoured corpses.

Elle is pulled out of the water, but the stranger – and the secrets she stumbled upon – are lost. Unintentionally, however, he leaves her a gift; one so compelling that Elle embarks on a journey that pulls her into a world of ancient evils, vicious hunters and human prey to find the man who saved her that fateful night.

From trench warfare at Cape Helles in 1915 to a shipwreck in the tropical shallows off the Honduran coast, from a lost mine beneath the towering Externsteine in a Germany on the verge of war to the gothic crypts of Highgate Cemetery in London, Elle gets closer to a truth she has sought for most of her life. But at what cost? Gifts, after all, are seldom free.

We have an exclusive sneak peek at The Gift: Eleanor right here…

Available in ebook now, and hardback 09 December. 

The post The Gift: Eleanor Exclusive Excerpt appeared first on Sci-Fi Tips.