On episode 11 of Our First Fears, Pushcart Award nominee, Joe Vallese shows me the path beyond Stephen King's Pet Sematary and up into the haunted hills where the buried-dead have a tendency to rise and wreak havoc on the living. Together, we explore how certain aspects of stories that frightened our childhood-selves can end up being quite different from what gets to us as grown-ups. We talk unreliable narrators and characters, whether or not too much research might be a bad thing for writers, and how, and at what age, we humans begin to process our own mortality.

Joe’s anthology, It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, is chock-full of interesting ideas about scary movies and queer themes, and it is available now at your local bookshops and libraries. 

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(Content warning: death, mortality, illness, violence, harm to animals and children)