We’ve all been there. It’s summer. The weather is finally warming up and your long-awaited vacation has just kicked off. But then, of course, something kind of spooky happens. Maybe the cruise bartender has a sinister scar running down his face. Maybe the cabin you rented suddenly feels a little too secluded. Or perhaps you just ran out of gas on a long and desolate highway. And then someone finally says it: “This is totally how a scary movie would start!” Luckily for you, most vacations don’t play out like a horror film. But if you’re still in the mood for a scare in your downtime, you can always bring some along with you. Here are our top recommendations for scary novels to bring on your upcoming summer vacation.
Editor's Note: To finish out 2018, we're revisiting some of our favorite blog posts from the past year. This post was originally published on 4/3/18.
They say best friends are never more than a phone call away. But It’s 2018, so we should probably revise that to “never more than a FaceTime, Snapchat, or VR sesh away.” Even then, these fancy new methods of keeping in touch really only apply if you exist in the same dimension as your bestie, which to be frank, might not always be the case. Before passing away, Stephen Hawking co-published a final paper on the possibility of a multiverse, prompting us to wonder, can we really even say who our true best friends are? For all we know, they might not even exist in the same time or space. We tested the theory, and sure enough, in the case of these pop culture and literary icons, their perfect matches weren’t even found in the same story, let alone universe.
Horror is hard work, y'all. People underestimate just how exhausting it is. Not only do you have to battle masked serial killers, deadly space aliens, or haunted videotapes, but then you’re expected to clock in by nine if you want to keep your job at the local [insert movie trope here]. That hardly seems fair! Still, work is one of those inevitable things, regardless of whether or not you made it to the final cutscene. So at the end of the day, if you’ve just got to pay the bills, here are a couple of the best gigs in horror movies. Feel free to grab an application. Most of them are hiring...
[source: Stills From Films]
Ever since The Lord of the Rings extended DVDs delivered hours of behind the scenes footage, we’ve been obsessed with learning more about what our favorite actors do to pass time on set. Bungee jumping, drinking, exploring New Zealand—and that was just during The Fellowship! Film stars aren’t the only ones that have fun, though. It can take years for an author to complete a book. That’s a lot of downtime. So we reached out to some famous literary characters to learn more about what they did while waiting for the final pages of their story to be penned.
This month’s release of Solo: A Star Wars Story has a lot of people excited to see the posthumous return of Han Solo. But if you’ve been paying attention to social media, you know there’s a solid chance that ticket sales will equally be driven by Donald Glover’s portrayal of Lando Calrissian. And with good reason. With the flash of a single, mischievous smile, we’re reminded of exactly what makes this character great: the enigmatic man with a perpetual ace up his sleeve. This roguish quality has led to novels, comics, video games, and more. And in each of them, Lando narrowly escapes danger to see another day, truly cashing in on each of his nine lives. And that’s exactly what makes him the perfect inspiration for this post and a leader to those that followed in his steps: absolute heroes that absolutely should be dead by now.
