Library Spotlight: Halloween

How did Halloween become what it is today? This book explores how holidays like the Celtic Samhain have blended with the British Guy Fawkes Day and the Catholic All Souls' Day to produce the modern Halloween, and explains how the holiday was reborn in America, where trick-or-treat rituals have become new customs, showing the influence of the Mexican Day of the Dead and the effect Halloween has had on popular culture through the literary works of Washington Irving and Ray Bradbury and through popular films and TV shows.

Why do we celebrate Halloween? A survivor of our pre-Christian, agrarian roots, it has become one of the most popular and widely celebrated festivals. This collection of essays examines the evolution of Halloween from its Celtic origins through its adaptation into modern culture, discussing customs, communities, and material culture to reveal how Halloween has manifested itself throughout all aspects of our society.

From vampire apocalypses to murderous dolls bent on revenge, horror has been part of the American cinematic imagination. But why does it captivate us so? Why Horror Seduces shows how the horror genre is a product of human nature. Through analyses of popular modern works of horror - Rosemary's Baby; The Shining; I Am Legend; Jaws; and several others -the book tells how these works target evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms, exploring the cognitive processes behind spectators' need to scream.

The original edition of this anthology appeared as a kind of homage to the "golden age" of the American horror film, covering the history of the genre through the early 1980s, discussing directors such as John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, George Romero, David Cronenberg, and Wes Craven. This revised edition takes on rediscovered classics and recent developments in the genre such as the yuppie horror film, Japanese horror films, an updated analysis of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and analyses of William Castle's The Tingler and Roger Corman's Pit and the Pendulum.

The definitive, annotated edition of Mary Shelley's classic novel.

This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. Today the best-known tale of Colonial horror is Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Many other pioneers of American horror fiction such as Cotton Mather, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and H. P. Lovecraft, are presented afresh in this breathtaking volume for today's reading public.

An exceptional collection of classic stories from the lord of literary darkness himself--the inimitable Edgar Allan Poe--accompanied by enthralling essays from twenty of his bestselling acolytes and admirers.

Let illustrator Pedro Rodríguez lead you into a world of terror, insanity, and the supernatural with these seven classic horror stories that will keep you awake at night: The Hand by Guy de Maupassant; Sir Dominick's Bargain by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; The House of Nightmare by Edward Lucas White; The Vampire by John William Polidori; House B on Camden Hill by Catherine Crowe; The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson; and The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe.

A collection of twenty-two stories, this is classic Stephen King. A supermarket becomes the place where humanity makes its last stand against unholy destruction, a trip to the attic turns into a journey to hell, a woman driver finds a very scary shortcut to paradise, an idyllic lake harbors a bottomless evil and a desert island is the scene of the most terrifying struggle for survival ever waged. Features the novella The Mist

An African-American journalist on the verge of breaking a major story and a vampire who has done the unthinkable by falling in love with a mortal must face the results of their passion and ambition.

A collection of two novellas by Yan Lianke--"China's most feted and most banned author" (Financial Times). Marrow is the haunting tale of a widow who goes to extremes to provide a normal life for her four disabled children, especially by making a soup from the skeleton of her dead husband. In The Years, Months, Days, an elderly man stays behind in his small village, becoming the lone inhabitant, along with a blind dog, in an epic life and death battle with nature.

In order to escape the stress of modern life, Nathan Gardner (Nicolas Cage) and his family decide to move to a farmhouse. Everything is going well and the family is settling down nicely when an object from the skies crashed near their property. Soon enough, unexplainable things start to happen in this adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft tale.

Based on the Nebula Award-winning novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, an all-female team of different scientists must enter into and uncover secrets of a deadly world of mutated landscapes and creatures in attempts of annihilating a growing phenomenon that threatens all life.

A young African-American photographer (Daniel Kaluuya) is nervous at the thought of meeting his white girlfriend's parents (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) for the first time during a trip to the latter's country estate. However, his anxiety soon turns into outright terror when he discovers that the family's seemingly idyllic community is hiding a sinister conspiracy.

During the last days of the Spanish Civil War, a twelve-year-old boy who, in the wake of a tragedy, is sent to a haunted rural orphanage full of terrible secrets. Del Toro expertly combines gothic ghost story, murder mystery, and historical melodrama.

One of the most highly regarded haunted house films ever produced, Robert Wise's The Haunting from 1963 (based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House) weaves the dark tale of a questionably sane young woman and a sinister house which holds a terrifying past.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931):
Fredric March won an Oscar® for playing the title character of Robert Louis Stevenson's story. Dr. Henry Jekyll is an honorable man of science & Hyde is the fearsome creature he turns into. The (1941) film version: Spencer Tracy plays the creature, along with Ingrid Bergman & Lana Turner, breaking with convention by showing Hyde in a menacing psychological air as opposed to the usual physically grotesque monster.