Extreme Horror Masterlist

Overview

I've hated horror movies since I was a kid. I remember going to Family Video with my dad and following him through the adult section after browsing the video games, a Gamecube game held tight in my hands.¹ I always kept my head down whenever we passed scary movies, though DVD covers snagged my peripheral vision on occasion; I had nightmares about Jigsaw for days after seeing a glimpse of the Saw movie covers.

I also struggled in the movie theater during the opening trailers. To this day I still duck my head after the rating screen flashes, waiting for onimous music or any other signs of impending horror. I was in middle school when Paranormal Activity released. It was touted as the scariest movie of all time, and many of my classmates boasted about going to see it (in hindsight they could have been lying, but the thought hadn't occured to me at the time). Several people tried showing me the trailer—I never lasted more than a couple seconds.

Despite all of this, I am still intriguied by horror themes and concepts. I often read reddit threads listing the "scariest movies ever made." I'll read each comment, look up the Wikipedia article to read the plot, then move on to the next film.

After an adolesence characterized by extreme bouts of depression, suicidal ideation, and self harm, I was well acquianted with the deep, dark corners of my own psyche. I think horror holds a mirror to such experiences, helping us process what we find out about ourselves and others at our lowest points. It also offers a way to externalize intrusive thoughts that are too frightening, macabre, or otherwise innapropriate in regular contexts.

Last year my wife lent me a copy of Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite. It sat on my bookshelf for months, unread, despite my wife pleading me to pick it up. She'd only given me a brief impression of the plot, and I jokingly referred to it as "the gay murder book". I had pictured some sort of dark, academia-toned novel about two handsome, posh men who happened to be deeply in love and were, conincidentally, clever serial killers—maybe like an unrated, explicitly homosexual, and doubly as violent version of A Separate Peace. I pictured tweed suits, slick quiffs, cigarette smoke, tongues lathing exposed necks, and hands soaked in blood.

Instead, I found myself thrust into the seedy underworld of New Orleans' gay nightlife, circa the late 1980s. Brite wrote such shudderingly disgusting content with the most beautiful of prose. Per the novel's Wikipedia page, Brite described the story as: "a necrophilic, cannibalistic, serial killer love story that explores the seamy politics of victimhood and disease."

I won't go too much into the novel itself—this is a masterlist, not an aggregation of reviews!—but I wanted to give credit where credit is due. Exquisite Corpse was my gateway drug to extreme horror, and continues to be the highest standard of the genre for me.

Upoin finishing Exquisite Corpse, I was left feeling hollow. The stimulation it provided me touched on a part of my inner psyche that I hadn't been in contact with since I was younger; even then, I never really looked at it directly so to speak. Extreme horror provided a space where I could safely explore that side of my mind, and dare I say indulge in it. It gave me a perverse excitement, and from then on I was hooked.

Anyway, here's what I've read so far,² in loose chronological order:

The List

Warning: this genre is called EXTREME HORROR for a reason. Proceed with caution.³

Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
Woom by Duncan Ralston
Self-Made Man by Poppy Z. Brite
The President's Son by Jon Athan
Gone to See the River Man by Kristopher Triana

TLDR;

For anyone looking for a place to start: I recommend beginning either with Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite or Gone to See the River Man by Kristopher Triana. Go into either book blind. Exquisite Corpse is a longer and denser read, and vastly more explicit than Gone to See the River Man, which is shorter, snappier, and less grandoise in its storytelling aims but no less enjoyable; the twist absolutely floored me in the worst way possible.

Probably a copy of Pokemon Channel or Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, both of which I rented over and over again until I completed them.↩
As of initially writing this post, I've only read a handful of books. However, I'm confident that my small sample size runs the gamut of the subgenre, from poetic stories of dark desires to schlocky torture porn to pulp gore fests. Eventually I will write reviews on each book, which I will then append to the list here. I demoted this to a footnote under the assumption that the list will grow in time to encompass a much larger collection of titles.↩
At some point when I get around to writing reviews, I'd like to devise a system of giving each book an overall horror "rating" to give an idea of what to expect without veering into spoiler territory. I will also append these ratings to the list.↩