Orrin Grey’s Glowing in the Dark collects a decade of critical writing about eerie, uncanny cinema

Orrin Grey lives for horror. Not just the horror of modern existence, but the horror of life itself. It’s easy to be the kind of person who appreciates big jumpscares or killer clowns, but there’s a real talent in the mind that chooses to derive joy from the terror of the minutiae. This eye for detail has helped Grey become a well-known voice in the sci-fi and horror community at publications around the world. In addition to some film coverage here, Pitch readers will probably best recognize Grey for doing our Haunted House Diary series last year—rounding up the best, worst, and genuinely dangerous from Shocktober across the metro.

Tomorrow night, Grey unleashes a new book upon an unsuspecting public.

Glowing in the Dark: Writings on the Horror Film collects more than a decade of Grey’s best writing on film, from Saturday-matinee schlock to award-winning classics, as he explores the silver screen through insightful reviews. Titles considered under Grey’s lens include The Andromeda Strain, The Dunwich Horror, The Mad Magician, Pacific Rim, Suspiria, Tremors, and many more.

Tomorrow night’s book launch event at Stray Cat Film Center is over on 1662 Broadway Boulevard. Tickets for that release (and its secret film screening) are available here. Ahead of that, we chatted with Grey about the new title, how he approaches the uncanny, and why Paris Hilton acts in an annoyingly great mid-aughts horror flick that gets thrown under the bus too often. 

The Pitch: This is far from your first book. Give the folks a rundown on the Orrin Grey discography leading up to this release.

Orrin Grey: Prior to this I’ve published quite a few collections of short horror stories – four and counting, up to now, with the most recent being How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. I also previously published two other short books collecting a column that I wrote on vintage horror film years ago, Monsters from the Vault and Revenge of Monsters from the Vault, both of which are still available, and only one piece from which is reproduced in Glowing in the Dark.

Your introduction lays out a philosophy of writing on horror films, specifically that you don’t see personal value in discussing whether a film is “good or bad” but rather that you write for the kind of film writing you like to read—you want to finish reading and know more about the film than when you started. Why take this approach? And, as follow-up, do you think we’ve culturally moved beyond the need for critics to apply good/bad dichotomy to films—in an era with infinite Rotten Tomatoes scores and Letterboxd accounts?

Grey: I think there is clearly a place for criticism that boils down to “good” or “bad,” and I think that it’s a hard binary to escape completely, even when you’re trying to. But I also think that it’s easy to read that kind of criticism just looking for confirmation bias, and I find it a lot more interesting to look at the experience of watching a film, and how and why that film might resonate (or not). It’s more of a “personal essay” approach to film writing, for me. As much as I write about films with other readers in mind, I also do it as a way to better understand my own reactions.

Having watched House of Wax (2005) this week because of your writing on it… would you like to apologize to me? 

Grey: I will never apologize for having fine taste.

But seriously, House of Wax made me say “holy shit this rips” from start to finish. Do you carry the same affinity as I do for the late 90s, early aughts Dark Castle flicks? Personally, Thirteen Ghosts and House on Haunted Hill are probably the reason I went to film school, and I’m not sure if I should ever share that in mixed company. 

Grey: I do, and House on Haunted Hill ’99 was absolutely a formative experience for me. There’s a rather glowing essay about it in the book and, honestly, if it had a better final reel it would be a genuine classic. I’m willing to die on that (haunted) hill.

In an essay from “The H Word” you say of your approach to criticism: “I’m interested in the tropes and the atmosphere of horror, the phenomena of the supernatural or the uncanny, and being scary isn’t really on my mind at all. So I flinched away from calling myself a horror writer, even while horror is the genre that I love the most and most readily consume.” Tell me more about drives/intrigues you, both as a critic and a creator, about atmosphere over straightforward, knee-jerk fear.

Grey: As someone who lives with a generalized anxiety disorder, I’ve been asked a lot (sometimes by therapists) how and why I enjoy horror, and I’m still not entirely sure I have an answer, except that when everything else scares you, the stuff that’s supposed to be scary can be weirdly liberating. Horror often feels like it exists on the fringes of every other genre, which makes it feel like a home for those who don’t necessarily feel that they fit anywhere else. I think, for a lot of us, horror provides a sensation that the world is grander and stranger than we’re afraid it really is – and that fear, the fear of a world without wonder or mystery, is more terrifying to us than any slashers or ghouls.

Writing on the genre itself, you write: “Why horror? It’s a question that anyone who produces—or even consumes—horror in preference to most other forms will run into sooner or later, and probably frequently. Even once you’ve ensconced yourself among others who share your preferences, you’ll find yourself defending the type of horror that is your preferred poison. Why monsters over more psychological fare? Why slashers instead of more grown-up stuff? Whatever your tastes, someone will want to know why. Sometimes, that someone will be you.” Why do you think specific slices/labels of horror are important? Why is the language of this genre so particular? And why do people question their own specific lane in this genre, where folks wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to examine exactly why they like specific types of dramas or comedies? Sorry, that’s a half dozen questions but here we are.

Grey: I feel like the curating of horror into an endless array of subgenres is partly a result of the larger nerdish tendency toward taxonomy. We want to be able to label everything in order to feel like we have a certain amount of mastery over it. But it’s also the case that horror is, itself, a slippery genre, one that thrives on the fringes and the gray areas, the overlaps and the blank spaces on the map. While scary stories are as old as storytelling itself, the horror genre as we know it today is largely a 20th century construct, built out of an already varied array of traditions from the gothic novel to the ghost story to tales of crime and punishment and beyond. So it only makes sense that we would continue teasing out the threads of those predecessors in modern horror as we try to understand what keeps bringing us back to it.

What’s the best movie that no one reading this has seen, that they need to track down?

Grey: The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre. It’s a 1964 pilot for an unproduced series that was going to be called The Haunted, written, produced, and directed by Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano and photographed by Conrad Hall, starring Martin Landau. It is even better than that sounds.

Finally, summarize why readers need to see Malignant immediately. [I revisited this week thanks to your essay in the book, and I’m mad about how much better it gets with each viewing.]

Grey: We rarely get the quality of high-caliber trash that Malignant provides – haven’t really since the aforementioned heyday of the Dark Castle flicks. In a world where so many movies exist only to remind you of other, better movies, Malignant is boldly, wildly, ridiculously its own thing, and a modern classic of gonzo trash cinema that got smuggled into theaters basically by pretending to be a Conjuring-esque ghost movie when it is… anything but. And yeah, it just keeps getting better with age.