The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/author/melison)
Meg Elison is a Hugo, Philip K. Dick and Locus award winning author, as well as a Nebula, Sturgeon, and Otherwise awards finalist. A prolific short story writer and essayist, Elison has been published in Scientific American, McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. She lives in Brooklyn. megelison.com
“As a nation, we love to cast our projections on the witches of Salem,” writes Meg Elison as she examines America’s favorite film about witches. “What we want from the real people who died by state violence, the places where they hanged, the hysteria that killed them, is fun. We want Salem to be a theme park, to amuse us and titillate us.”
Meg Elison reviews 2009’s animated film The Secret of Kells, which draws inspiration from the recently-digitized Book of Kells, a fabulously illuminated edition of the gospels. But while the film is set at a Christian monastery, it is full of encounters with Paganism, and these encounters are what will draw viewers back to the film again and again.
“When I was a teenage zealot, I used to imagine what television might be like in a world that was primarily Pagan,” writes Meg Elison. “I’ll never see that world, but this year a small window opened on it. Over the last week, I got acquainted with two Netflix shows about the Pagan world as it might have been: KAOS and Twilight of the Gods.”
Starve Acre is domestic horror only in the sense that Britain itself is the domicile. Dig just a few inches into the soil and a riot of irrational myth and impossible happenings is always just below this family’s feet.
Twenty-five years later, my favorite thing about The Blair Witch Project is that the Witch does bite. The magic is secret and nobody talks too much. The horror is implacable, and the offering is written in a language the viewer is not meant to read.