Can a book be as scary as a horror movie ? Some may not think so, even if their favourite horror movie’s source material is a book. But while a creepy novel might not give you the kind of jump-scare a film can offer, there’s a certain amount of spoon-feeding from a film. Filmmakers use visual and auditory clues through soundtrack, camera angles and lighting to produce unease, and to put you in the character’s mindset, but reading a scary book ignites your own fear.
The reader must create images from their own mind, and we all know how scary our own imaginations can be ...
Can these books be as scary as as the most frightening films? The House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski (Penguin) When this cult postmodern novel was published in 2000, it came complete with a backstory that sounded straight out of a Chuck Palahniuk book: author Mark Z. Danielewski wrote the story – widely regarded as one of the scariest books written – in parts, and printed pages at a time, which he gave to family, friends and left in bars and tattoo parlours in LA, gaining a cult following before he secured a publishing deal.
Which ties in nicely with the novel’s Blair Witch -style synopsis: an LA tattoo artist, Johnny Truant, finds a mysterious manuscript when he moves into the apartment of a blind man who has recently died. The manuscript is an academic criticism of a documentary called The Navidson Record, about Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson and his family, who move into.