Nuts and Bolts Interview with John Gray

Brooklyn-born John Gray is an award-winning writer-director-producer of films and television, and the creator of the long-running TV series, GHOST WHISPERER. He has written and directed many feature films and movies for television, including WHITE IRISH DRINKERS, starring Stephen Lang and Karen Allen; MARTIN AND LEWIS, starring Sean Hayes and Jeremy Northam; the Emmy® nominated A PLACE FOR ANNIE, with Sissy Spacek; the Emmy® nominated mini-series Haven with Natasha Richardson and Anne Bancroft; HELTER SKELTER, and many others. Gray has directed numerous episodes of broadcast and cable series, including multiple episodes of the NBC series GRIMM and was also the…

ACTING WITH MALICE: Scare Techniques From Scare Actors

By Tom Joyce The setting sun cast a blood-red glow on the assembly of horrors. Maniacal clowns. Cleaver-toting cannibals. Wrathful ghosts. All gathered in a field, waiting for their victims. Stakes high, as always. It wouldn’t be enough to send shivers down spines. They’d need to make people shriek and recoil. Fill the night air with screams of terrified children. Failure to get those results could bring hellish consequences beyond the most twisted Cenobite’s imaginings. I’m talking, of course, about getting laughed at by a bunch of 14-year-olds. Fortunately, the “scare actors” at Bloodshed Farms in Columbus, New Jersey, proved…

Nuts and Bolts: Interview with Aurora Gorealis

In the tradition of such sinister seductresses as Vampira and Elvira, Aurora Gorealis is a Baltimore-based horror host who weaves dark magic from a combination of campy movies, sassy attitude, and the occasional pun of dubious quality. Since 2017, Aurora (aka: Melissa LaMartina) has been playing the character during “Shocktail Hour” at the Golden West Café in Baltimore, combining live comedy and screenings of off-the-wall classics such as “Phantom of the Paradise” and “House on Haunted Hill” (complete with William Castle-style gimmicks). In the October issue of the Horror Writers Association newsletter, available to members only, she shares some personal…