Experimental Film

This book typifies what I love about Weird Fiction. It charts a slow descent from the mundane into the uncanny.

The protagonist is a film historian who discovers what may be an extremely significant fragment of an old movie, and in the process of tracking down the original print discovers hidden truths about an invisible world ruled by ancient gods. 

It's hard to be specific about the plot, because the genius of the story is the author's ability to create a mood of escalating dread. In the best Weird Tales tradition, much of the horror lies in the narrator's inability… show more.

Another fun bit of psychedelic folk horror, combined with a really cool history of the experimental films of Canada.

The narrator is compelling, and the whole time you feel the pull of her obsession to the film she’s looking into, even if it unsettles her and terrifies her at the same time. Love that pull of danger, wanting to look, to see, but knowing that doing so will probably kill you…

It's like horror novel catnip.

Lois Cairns, unemployed film historian, discovers a cache of haunted movies on silver-nitrate film stock. She might’ve discovered Canada’s first female filmmaker, a woman who disappeared under mysterious circumstances nearly a century earlier. This is a novel about obsession, history, art, love, and things that go bump in the night. Files utilizes tropes from weird horror tales, Victorian ghost stories, Slavic folklore, and experimental film theory, and includes an excellent depiction of the agonies and ecstasies of raising an autistic child. She ties all of this together without becoming pretentious or pedantic. Quite the opposite—Experimental Film is intelligent and… show more.

Files is a master storyteller and layers the exhausting rigors of being a parent of a child with ASD (a topic close to my heart) with the terrifying reality of an ancient entity in the modern day. Wielding her knowledge of filmmaking as a catalyst, Files penned an outstanding story filled with suspense, mystery, and a good dollop of fear. I recall diving into the topic of her chosen myth after reading because the lasting impression this story left on me wouldn’t stop resonating. If you don’t shy away from the horror genre, that eerie and spooky first cousin to… show more.

One reviewer has described this book as "oddly weird," and I agree. There's enough reality to keep you grounded, with creeping weirdness to make you wonder. A 21st-century woman is dealing with recognizable life stresses—job loss and an autistic child—but at the same time she's obsessed with tracking down the work of an early 20th-century woman filmmaker. What is actually happening on a short segment of silver nitrate film? Is it a ceremony carried out by people belonging to an obscure ethnic group of Central Europe? Or is a supernatural entity present? In time, the subject of the investigation intrudes… show more.