Special Guest Author Hailey Piper Shares 10 CURSES FOR YOUR MEDIA

[Editor's Note: Author Hailey Piper, whose book This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want was just released by Titan Books, is our special guest for a feature on Cursed media.]

Cursed media is such a fascinating subject. We create art harnessing the idea that art itself can hurt us, not solely with an emotional “Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo?” gut punch, but in a tangible manner that reaches into the world beyond the art, our world, and gives everything we know about reality a hard shake.

With my cursed film novel This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want coming out from Titan Books, I wanted to share 10 fascinating and inventive books and movies featuring cursed media, some famous, a little more obscure, but all of them approaching in their own way the idea that no art is completely safe.

Ring/The Ring

This is probably the most famous example of cursed media today, at least for many of us. Even if you haven’t read Koji Suzuki’s 1991 novel, the 1996 manga, heard the audio dramas, or seen the multiple TV and film adaptations, you’ve probably heard about the strange VHS tape that kills you seven days after you watch it. My first brush with the story, and still my favorite, is the haunting 2002 American adaptation, but you really can’t go wrong with any version. The video itself is hypnotic, and you can understand characters not believing in its lethality until it proves itself, but the mystery surrounding it is what really holds you close and in the end gave us the horror icon Sadako.

The King in Yellow

Another famous one, though much older. Robert W. Chambers published The King in Yellow in 1895, a collection of short stories, four of which relate to a fictional play of the same title that drives its readers to madness. Once considered weird fantasy, the tales are also examples of pre-Lovecraft cosmic horror, delving into the maybe-real world within and beyond the play that has been inspiring artists, musicians, and storytellers (including myself with A Game in Yellow) to revisit its land of Carcosa for over 130 years.

In the Mouth of Madness

While we’re on world-breaking texts, do you read Sutter Cane? John Carpenter’s fantastic 1994 cosmic horror film In the Mouth of Madness stars Sam Neill as an investigator in way over his head trying to find an elusive (and perhaps illusive) horror author and manuscript while the world steadily falls apart from his creations. The books in the movie seem like odes to Stephen King, but their impact on their surroundings eventually asks if there’s any difference between art and reality, and the ending is so mind-bendingly bleak, you might even laugh.

The Shoemaker’s Magician

Flipping into books about movies, Cynthia Pelayo’s The Shoemaker’s Magician is a little bit murder mystery, a little bit of cursed (silent) film, and a little bit cursed horror host. A horror afficionado discovers a connection between her husband’s recent movie paraphernalia-laden homicide cases and the Vincent Price-style TV host of a show she’s been watching all her life, that connection being the 1896 film The House of the Devil (not to be confused with the 2009 Ti West film). The parallel investigations dig into cinema of yesteryear awash in blood new and old, tying together Chicago history, fairy tales, Greek mythological imagery, and more into a gutsy finale built for horror fans and heartbreak.

Black Flame

On the surface, Gretchen Felker Martin’s Black Flame is about a film restoration artist in 1980s New York City working to repair a film reel once lost due to the Shoah in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s. But of course, it goes much deeper. Calling the film at the novel’s center “cursed” may be a misnomer, but it is certainly a conduit of power, exposing the gulfs between artistic result and artistic intent and how that reflects the gulfs within ourselves. It is also a ceaselessly gripping story of intense abuse, haunting imagery coming to life, surprising triumphs, and burning fascists.

Silver Nitrate

While we’re on possibly magic-imbued celluloid, putting movies back together, and dead Nazis, there’s Silvia Moreno Garcia’s Silver Nitrate. The novel follows a sound editor in 1990s Mexico City as she’s pulled into a scheme to complete an unfinished horror movie, the shape of which might itself be a magic spell. Moreno-Garcia plays with expectations throughout this oddly sweet story, toying with whether the sorcery at hand is real or not. But the movie in question is unmistakably dangerous, and might become more so if she’s able to finish it.

Mister Magic

Cursed children’s shows are nowhere as common as cursed films and cursed books. It seems ripe source material though, eerie when you zoom out, often speaking directly to the viewer as if the host is in your living room, or as if your children are the ones who appear in the show. Kiersten White’s moving novel Mister Magic returns to such child stars decades after their show ended. Now adults, their memories of their broadcast time are fuzzy, even absent. But the show is coming back at a time when the powers that be feel guidance for children is needed most. No matter the consequences.

Mr. Crocket

But what if you wanted to be one of those kids on the show, yet you were stuck outside the TV? What if the show could change that? In the 2024 film Mr. Crocket, a video cassette for a show starring the titular host comes in a clamshell case, echoing Disney VHS tapes of old. Put it in the VCR and your child might be entertained for a while, but soon it’s all they’ll want. Enough that they might disappear entirely. There’s some fantastic lore behind the show itself amid the search for the missing kids, but on-screen there’s an almost-playful menace of practical effects and gore that would be right at home with Tales from the Crypt. 

I, Madman

I had never heard of this movie before a few months ago. I, Madman is a bizarre 1989 pre-Scream meta-slasher film about a bookseller’s obsession with a pair of novels by an elusive author. When a series of murders surrounding the bookseller echo the plot of one book, she realizes the author’s work might not be fictional. This is a wild, wonderful movie that keeps offering unexpected ideas, kills, and delights. The opening even has a stop-motion monster, the wonderful Jackal boy. A Jackal boy! Of course you need to watch it.

The Sun Dog

How do so many Stephen King adaptations get second chances (or third or fourth or fifth in some cases), but no one’s adapted his underrated tale of cursed photography “The Sun Dog” yet? Capping off the collection Four Past Midnight, the Castle Rock-set story centers on a kid who gets a much-desired Polaroid camera for his birthday. Trouble is, no matter what he points the camera at, the photo shows a distant dog. And with each photo, the dog gets a little closer. What follows is a patient journey of mounting dread to learn about the camera, exploit it, and ultimately face the horror within, far worse than any canine. After all, enough still images put together forms a moving picture. Even a cursed one.

---

About This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want and Author Hailey Piper:

This Movie Doesn't End the Way We Want hits shelves this September, from Bram Stoker award-winning author, Hailey Piper! A woman haunted by the disappearance of her sister and best friend thirty years ago uncovers the terrifying urban legend behind the last film they watched together, in this chilling riff on the cursed film subgenre by the award-winning author of Queen of Teeth. Perfect for fans of Gretchen Felker-Martin and Andrew Joseph White.

In November 1994, three girls visit their local movie theater to see an obscure film. Only one of them is ever seen again.

Thirty years later, Val McQueen has never forgotten the day she lost her little sister and best friend, but she’s closed the curtain on it, certain she’s moved on despite her parents’ resentment and hounding by true crime enthusiasts.

That is until a stranger’s murder brings it all screaming back—a terror she’s tried to tell herself is only a movie. Enlisting the help of cinephile and former classmate Roxie de la Fontaine to find the film, Val soon realizes that hers is not the only pursuit. Someone, or something involved with the movie is on the hunt, too…

… For the girl who got away all those years ago.

Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth, A Light Most Hateful, The Worm and His Kings, No Gods for Drowning, and other books of horror. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, with over 100 short stories appearing in various publications. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their occult rituals are secret. Find her at www.haileypiper.com.

---

To learn more and purchase from Titan Books, visit: https://titanbooks.com/72300-this-movie-doesnt-end-the-way-we-want/