Tag: Takashi Shimizu

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Your last chance to see Jim Mountfield at Horrified

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

Some sad news I’ve heard recently is that Horrified Magazine, the ‘British horror website’, is closing down.  Dedicated to media – films, television, plays, novels, short stories, comic books, etc. – involving the macabre and produced in the United Kingdom, Horrified has been a prime source of entertaining reading and valuable information during the past few years.  A newly-appeared message on its main page informs readers that “From late October 2022, this website will no longer be updated with new content.  Feel free to browse until such a time as the website is taken down.”

 

Horrified contains a short-story section, in which I’ve had two items published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, the name I put on my scary fiction.  Both of these should still be accessible until the plug is finally pulled on the site.  Therefore, this is your last chance (at least for a while) to read the following…

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

Published in 2020, Don’t Hook Now is a story set in the near-future where advances in technology, especially in the field of virtual reality, make it possible for people to take part in scenes from movies – the technology simulates the scenes, interactively, around them.  For bona fide film fans, this would be magical.  Imagine being on that rooftop near the end of Blade Runner (1982), beside Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) when he delivers his heart-breaking ‘tears in rain’ monologue, or being at the airport for the climax of Casablanca (1942), when Rick (Humphrey Bogart) says goodbye to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman).  However, human nature being what it is, I suspect such wondrous technology would end up being used for trivial, if not sordid, purposes.  Thus, Don’t Hook Now features an app that allows people to take part in simulations of sex scenes from certain movies, and is used by lowlifes, sociopaths and perverts in pursuit of their thrills.

 

Don’t Hook Now’s subject matter was such that Horrified decided to give it a trigger warning and recommend it only for ‘mature audiences’.   In my opinion, though, the main reason for recommending it to mature readers was because only people of a certain age would be familiar with the masterly 1970s British horror movie that gives the story its grim twist later on.

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

From 2021, meanwhile, is Where the Little Boy Drowned, which belongs to a sub-genre I like to think of as ‘constant jeopardy’.  This is where the main character or characters spend the whole story, or most of it, trapped in a dangerous situation where the odds are stacked against them getting out of it alive.  I won’t give too much away about Where the Little Boy Drowned, other than to say that its plot includes include a length of rope and a flooded river.  There’s also a supernatural element to it, with a faint nod to Japanese horror films – J-Horror – and particularly to Takashi Shimizu’s 2002 chiller Ju-On: The Grudge.

 

So, for a little while longer, Don’t Hook Now can be accessed here, and Where the Little Boy Drowned here.

 

And thank you to the staff at Horrified for all their hard work these last few years.

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Hanging around with Jim Mountfield

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

I’ve just had my first short story published in 2021.  Where the Little Boy Drowned, which is attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pen-name I put on my horror fiction, is now featured in the ‘Stories’ section of the online magazine Horrified.

 

The story belongs to a sub-genre that I like to think of as ‘constant jeopardy’.  The main character or characters spend the whole story, or most of it, stuck in a dangerous situation where the odds look stacked against them getting out of it alive.

 

Examples of constant-jeopardy stories include Jack Finney’s Contents of a Dead Man’s Pockets (1956) and Stephen King’s The Ledge (1976), both of which have their protagonist trapped on a narrow ledge high up the side of a towering apartment building.  Two other examples are stories I’ve read by the Spanish writer Vincente Blasco Ibáñez and by Winston Churchill (who very occasionally wrote fiction when he wasn’t politicking) that are both called Man Overboard.  As their shared title suggests, these are about someone falling off a fast-moving ship, into the middle of the ocean, without anyone else noticing that they’ve fallen off.

 

However, the most gruelling constant-jeopardy story I’ve come across is The Viaduct, written by Brian Lumley and first published in 1976.  It’s about two boys who, for a dare, decide to cross the titular viaduct not by going along the top of it but going along underneath it – using 160 rungs, which for some reason the structure’s builders have installed there, as monkey-bars. The viaduct straddles a very deep valley and you can predict that this isn’t going to end well.

 

I don’t want to give too much away about Where the Little Boy Drowned, but one of its key plot elements is a length of rope.  There’s also a supernatural element to it, with a faint nod to Japanese horror films – J-Horror – and particularly to Takashi Shimizu’s 2002 chiller Ju-On: The Grudge.

 

Where the Little Boy Drowned can be read here, while this link will take you to Horrified’s main page.