What's a little puzzling about these avatars is that being Peter Straub seems pretty darn sweet all on its own. A modest, eminently amiable bear of a man, Straub lives on the Upper West Side with Susan, his wife of 43 years, in a five-story brownstone stuffed with books, art, photographs and the biggest collection of jazz LPs and CDs you're likely to see outside a library or radio station. Tucked into every nook of the place is some memento of an interesting experience, literary passion or brilliant friend, from a set of Raymond Chandler first editions (gifts from Otto Penzler) to a framed photo of Straub and King on the day they decided to collaborate on "The Talisman" to the Boorum & Pease notebooks in which Straub wrote "Lost Boy Lost Girl," "In the Night Room" and other novels -- each decorated with an enigmatic collage reflecting the book's themes. There are awards on the mantel, Palomino pencils on the desk, stacks of poetry volumes by C.P. Cavafy and C.D. Wright in the study, Paul Desmond on the stereo and a sleek, friendly tabby named Hector on the living room sofa. When people fantasize about "being a writer," chances are the life they're imagining looks a lot like Peter Straub's.

Straub's literary specialty, however, is not dreams but nightmares; many people name "Ghost Story" as the scariest book they've ever read. He's particularly adept at the kind of creepy psychological yarn pioneered by Henry James and modernized by Shirley Jackson, two of Straub's writerly touchstones. That's the taste Straub has brought to bear on his latest project, editing the two-volume anthology "American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny," just published by Library of America. (Straub also edited the LOA's H.P. Lovecraft collection.) The project has given him a century-spanning perspective on the art of making readers squirm uneasily in their chairs.

Most of the stories you include in this anthology don't involve a tremendous amount of violence.

No, that's less interesting to me. A lot of books on the horror shelves now, for example, are totally exterior. Take Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter novels. The one I like best is [the first book] "Red Dragon," because it's more interior, and shows you more of what's going on inside someone like that. It's more complex, more nuanced.

A few years back I guest-edited an issue of the literary journal Conjunctions, focusing on what we called the New Wave Fabulists. And I realized that most of the stories people sent me had to do with loss and grief. To me those are the defining emotions of the genre of horror.

When I was working on that issue, I was excited by what Kelly Link, Dan Chaon and a lot of other writers were doing, a somehow unplaceable kind of story that wasn't mainstream, wasn't realistic exactly, that had a fantastic tone like science fiction or fantasy but it wasn't any of those things. It was out there by itself. I liked that definitions of genre that I'd grown up with as a young man seemed to be dissolving. And this is purely pretentious, but I thought I'd done something to help that along. Dan Chaon sent me a high school photo of himself reading "Ghost Story." Take a writer like Brian Evenson, whose work is very serious and smart, with a high literary quality, but definitely, it's horror.

Did you learn any new secrets about scaring readers from going through so many stories for this new anthology?

I'm not sure I can explain exactly how it works. It has to do with creating believable people for whom the reader can feel affection, then putting them in danger of the unnameable and unseen. And it has to be suspended. You can't just pull a gun out and have them get shot. You have to allow the sense of underlying unease to intensify over time. As crucial as fear is dread. Dread is essential.

How would you distinguish the two?

Well, dread leads to fear, to shame and to terror. And before dread comes foreboding.

And foreboding is ...

A prescience that something bad is about to happen. You don't know why you don't like that guy, but you just have a bad feeling about him. Dread is when foreboding shows itself to be justified. Something like foreboding is built into all fiction, I think. Even Barbara Pym novels have a point where you think, "Is that altar cloth going to work or not?"

In your novel "Lost Boy Lost Girl," there's a serial killer antagonist, but there's also this other story line about Tim Underhill's desire to rescue the nephew he loves so much from his own brother, who's just crushing the kid's spirit. In its own way, Tim's powerlessness to save that child is as horrifying as the killer's power to hurt him. The way you weave the fantastic threat in with that realistic emotional dimension makes the book especially devastating. The exterior action mirrors this complex interior danger. It emerges from the psychology of the characters, in a way.

I hope so. For Underhill, of course, all of this started with his Vietnam experience. He had post-traumatic stress disorder. I never had that, but I had its little brother [Straub was in a severe car accident at age 7], which is called adjustment reaction, according to my shrink.

Do you think that you have to have that kind history to write the sorts of things you write, or even to read them? I certainly know people who say, "I can't believe you want to read about such unpleasant stuff!"

I have no patience with people like that. They are deliberately not looking at something right in front of them that they should look at. In my novel "The Throat," Tim Underhill says, "The world is half night." You have to appreciate that, and if you do there is a kind of beauty to it all. There's nothing beautiful about violence and savagery, but there is in the human response, that we can feel ourselves deepened by unhappy things that happen to us. Grief is a very painful emotion because it depends on love. It's the price you pay for love. If you live to have actual experiences, you come face to face with real darkness.

Even the more surreal touches in your books do seem to feed back into very real anxieties. Tim Underhill meets a strangely hostile fan/collector in "In the Night Room," and this man tells him that when a book is published, every so often a copy comes off the presses that isn't the book the writer actually wrote but the book that he or she meant to write, sort of the platonic ideal of that book. There are people who collect just these copies, and of course they don't think much of authors because they know just how badly authors mess up their own ideas. Now that's a concept that strikes right at the heart of every writer's fears! You're face to face with this guy who knows what you should have been able to do and totally failed to do. So when you mentioned shame earlier as being part of the progress from foreboding to dread to fear, that really struck me.

It's definitely one of our most powerful, unpleasant emotions.

But shame implies responsibility. If your characters are just these blameless suburban innocents and then bam, something evil pounces on them, it's not the same.

Yes, and after a while I was only interested in the kind of story you're talking about. The external threat only seemed valid to me if there was some connection between the thing and the people perceiving the thing. It's a short hop from there to having everything being a projection from the psyches of the characters.

Do you find that ambiguity more scary?

Probably. Because you have to be really good to make the straightforward supernatural pay off. Stephen King can do it, but I've seen a hundred guys get only halfway there.

So that was the kind of story you were drawn to in putting this new anthology together?

Mostly, although there are some stories in there that are more straightforward. One story, "The Jelly-Fish," is pure pulp about a scientist who shrinks himself to microscopic size and gets eaten by an amoeba. That's just fun. Where I really used my taste is in the last half of the second volume, where story after story is grown-up, complex and surprising. And overall there's a preponderance of stories where everything is implied or ambiguous. It's less obvious and it's more literary.

Whatever the reasons are, the mainstream American-made horror movie has been in dire condition for at least the last decade. A shambling corpse with rotting ligaments and lolling eyeballs, it just can't keep up with us. We want it to chase us away from the campfire and into the dark, deep woods, but it just shuffles around doing third-rate showbiz impersonations -- a little Jerry Lewis, a little George Romero -- and sinks back into its TV coma.

It was bad enough when horror movies just became unimaginative gore 'n' grossout spectacles, as in the "Hostel" period. It was worse when they became warmed-over formula remakes and celebrity rehab vehicles, as in the Paris Hilton/"House of Wax" period. Worst of all, most horror movies these days are both boring and careless, put together as cynical business deals aimed at separating young viewers from a few dollars and made by people with no feeling for the traditions, demands and highly discerning audiences of the genre.

With the release this week of Ti West's neo-retro, early-'80s-style "The House of the Devil," it appears that all is not lost. (A hell of a lot is lost, but not quite all.) Rather than assemble another one of those haunted-pumpkin lists of the scariest movies ever, which always tend to reshuffle the same 15 or 20 films, I thought I'd pick out a few recent horror highlights, and along the way argue for an enduring if unofficial alt-horror tradition. I'm not necessarily talking about ultra-low-budget indie films, although there are a few of those on this list. Mainly, I'm saying that horror movies based more in storytelling, character and psychological creepiness than in shock value and formula have never died, and you can find them in all kinds of places at all levels of production.

I'm not discussing here the enormous Japanese and Korean horror wave of the '90s and 2000s, which has been highly influential in Western horror but is really its own phenomenon. (And as eventually became clear, a lot of those movies were just as formulaic in their own way.) I am including a couple of Euro-horror films made in this decade because you should know about them if you don't already, and because the European take on classic American horror has helped bring the genre back to basics.

I am not writing about Rob Zombie (director of "House of 1000 Corpses," "The Devil's Rejects" and two "Halloween" remakes) because I don't like his movies that much and I'm not sure what to say about him. Make your own damn list, Zombie acolytes. As will be obvious, I'm giving a fair bit of credit for reviving 21st-century horror some of the credit for keeping horror viable to the New York indie scene around West and his producer Larry Fessenden, also a director, writer, actor and all-around genre-film Svengali. (West is also behind the IFC.com vampire-dating series "Dead & Lonely," and has made a still-unreleased sequel to Eli Roth's "Cabin Fever.")

Some of the movies on this list are more like instructive examples than shining moments in cinema history: I watched "Dark Mirror" because it was getting lots of eyeballs on IFC Festival Direct, and found that it was exactly the kind of mid-level, TV-grade, reasonably competent horror flick the cable networks used to make but don't bother with anymore. Let's begin, though, with the stuff that's absolutely terrific.

"I Can See You" This tremendous debut from writer-director-editor-composer Graham Reznick begins with the most familiar horror-movie plot device you can imagine -- a group of ill-prepared urbanites head out for a camping trip -- and ends up as full-on, post-Kubrick, experimental-film freakout. Produced by the ubiquitous Fessenden, who also appears as an increasingly sinister corporate pitchman from the distant TV past. What is that character doing at the rural retreat of a hipsterized Brooklyn, N.Y., ad agency, whose star designer (Ben Dickinson) is having some weird problems getting a painting of his father finished? There's no way to explain that until you see the movie, which goes from comic-realistic mode into full-on psycho meltdown with more terrifying adroitness than any other movie of this decade. Just out on DVD. See. It. Now.

"Drag Me to Hell" Nowhere near as obscure as the other movies on this list, but it's noteworthy that Sam Raimi's return to low-budget, '80s-style horror -- after much, much too long spent in the mind-deadening Peter Parker universe -- was met with widespread delight by both critics and paying customers. And can we just say that Sam and his brother, Ivan Raimi, were smoking some genius herb when they made their doomed main character (Alison Lohman) a loan officer forced to evict an elderly Gypsy woman and then face her mystical wrath? I hope Lohman's character is enjoying having her eyeballs boiled in Satan's cauldron, that's all I have to say. (Just out on DVD.)

"Trigger Man" This is the feature West made before "The House of the Devil," and although it has a fraction of the budget it may be even more effective. Yet another Fessenden production (and he appears in a brief, villainous cameo). Nearly wordless and plotless, "Trigger Man" follows two guys into the wilderness, where their manly getaway is interrupted by a mysterious sniper attack. Beautiful and genuinely frightening, this plays like an attempt to strip the rural-assault movie down to its basic ingredients. Oddly similar to both "I Can See You" (above) and to Kelly Reichardt's über-indie anti-bromance, "Old Joy."

"Murder Party" I'm actually surprised to realize that writer-director Jeremy Saulnier's urban-hipster horror-comedy doesn't have anything to do with Larry Fessenden. Ultra-cheap, loaded with gore and very funny throughout, "Murder Party" follows an ordinary schmo to a Halloween party held by a group of self-involved Brooklyn "artists," who've invited him there to kill him -- as, you know, a "project." Watching it, I kept thinking the broad satire was about to get unbelievably stupid, but Saulnier is spoofing the art world from the inside, and the relentlessly raunchy good nature of "Murder Party" is impossible to resist.

"The Last Winter" One last big dose of love for Fessenden, who directed this atmospheric Alaska-set eco-catastrophe thriller that channels, or so he claims, both John Carpenter's "The Thing" and Kurosawa's "Dersu Uzala." Frankly, Larry, the big spectral secret revealed at the end of the movie is pretty goofy, but that's made up for by the tense, near-future setting in which an isolated oil-field crew is drilling through the melting Alaska permafrost -- and things are starting to go very wrong. And that last shot, the one where this movie collides head-on with "An Inconvenient Truth"? Devastating.

"Calvaire (The Ordeal)" European horror directors offered all sorts of odd formula tweaks in the 2000s, but none weirder than Fabrice du Welz's psychotronic journey into "the Siberia of Belgium," where a low-rent, Tom Jones-style lounge singer is imprisoned by the way-too-friendly proprietor of a country inn. I really can't explain anything that happens in the movie after that; don't miss the homoerotic barroom-dance scene, set to quasi-avant-garde piano music. Continuing a venerable European tradition, du Welz followed this memorable and profoundly demented debut by making an execrable English-language film ("Vinyan") that went thankfully ignored. Back to the Walloon Siberia with you!

"Hardware" A minor cult classic made almost 20 years ago and only now appearing in a definitive double-disc DVD edition, Richard Stanley's post-apocalyptic "Hardware" may have struck early-'90s viewers (those few who caught it) as a low-budget blend of "Terminator" and "Blade Runner." Well, what's so wrong with that? Nasty, gory and tense, "Hardware" features future TV stud Dylan McDermott as the rakish scavenger who brings a disassembled android home to his metal-sculptor girlfriend (Stacey Travis). Of course the damn thing knows how to rebuild itself, and is trained to kill anything that's warm and moving. Hilarious hairdos aside, this is a dirty, atmospheric and nearly lost fragment of movie history. Cameos by Iggy Pop and Lemmy of Motörhead!

"High Tension" Speaking of foreshortened Eurohorror careers, French director Alexandre Aja made an international film-fest splash with this twisty, unusual take on the Yank psycho-killer genre. A pair of attractive college pals (Gallic starlets Cécile de France and Maïwenn), with some unresolved Sapphic business between them, are pursued by a slasher (in a vintage Dodge Charger with Confederate flag plates, of all things). Aja builds suspense briskly and effectively, and "High Tension" offers a narrative switchback I've never exactly seen before. Let's just say that the hulking, blood-spattered killer isn't quite who he appears to be. Aja then went on to make some dreadful-sounding Kiefer Sutherland vehicle that I haven't seen.

"The Descent" Although set in Appalachia and starring (mostly) American actors, Neil Marshall's all-female, ultra-claustrophobic spelunking adventure was actually made in England. "The Descent" begins with one of the most horrifying shocks I've ever seen in a movie, and the general mood is one of deep, dark unsettling dream. Protagonist Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is taking the spelunking trip largely to forget a haunting tragedy, but her team of macho chicks will find that somebody, or something, in this unexplored cave really, really wants to meet them. Eventually becomes a standard chase-nightmare, but a highly effective one throughout.

"Dark Mirror" A minor film-fest and video-on-demand hit, director Pablo Proenza's nifty little L.A. gothic features a couple of attractive TV actors (Lisa Vidal of "E.R." and David Chisum of "One Life to Live") who find out that their lovely new Arts & Crafts cottage holds some strange secrets. I've never seen a horror film based on the principles of feng shui before, but I guess it was inevitable. Proenza handles the contrast between the sunny setting and the creepy occurrences ably, and although the script is indifferent I genuinely didn't see the big switcheroo coming.

Frighteningly enough, though, that question about zombies could also be asked of America's political culture.

It was only a year ago that "zombie" first entered the colloquial economic lexicon during the collapse of the financial institutions that were cannibalizing the economy. From a balance-sheet perspective, many of these firms were dead. But they were quickly reanimated as zombie banks with trillions of taxpayer dollars.

Like a typical zombie outbreak, the initial plague spread.

On Wall Street, we have zombie executives -- those who destroyed the economy but nonetheless kept their same jobs and now continue paying themselves huge bonuses. At the White House, President Obama hired zombie advisors whose zombie economic ideologies and records manufacturing recession conditions should have killed their careers, but who now sit in high government office letting out moans in support of the zombie banks.

On Capitol Hill, the scene this Halloween season looks like Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. Decrepit zombie politicians with the funk of 40,000 years stalk Congress with the very zombie lobbyists that the election was said to disempower. Lately, they are working in tandem to construct zombie health insurance companies -- for-profit corporations eternalized by public subsidies, customer mandates and almost no regulation or competition. At the same time, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that should have already concluded keep plodding on with an unchanging zombie strategy -- all while media zombies push zombie myths about death panels and birth certificates, effectively feasting on the last functioning lobes of the American brain.

Call me a zombie pundit, but I agree with "World War Z" author Max Brooks' suggestion that the concurrent rise of zombie pop and political cultures is no coincidence.

"Zombies are an apocalyptic threat, we are living in times of apocalyptic anxiety (and) we need a vessel in which to coalesce those anxieties," he says.

In fact, I'll go out on a severed limb and take it further: If zombies specifically represent the apocalyptic downsides of immortalized mindlessness, then today’s zombie zeitgeist is not merely a result of scary quandaries created by stupidity. It is a reaction to both those problems and the sense that they can never be thwarted.

Here we are, a year after a financial implosion that should have driven a stake in the heart of free market fundamentalism. Here we are, a year after an election that was supposed to pour holy water on Wall Street vampires, exorcise the economy's demons and challenge the ancient mummies of neoconservative foreign policy. Yet here we are, with virtually nothing changed, watching the same zombie crises indomitably stumble forward.

And so what do we do? We flee to entertainment venues that let us enjoy the campy thrill of confronting the undead -- even though we've lost the ability to do that in real life.

"The zombie is a way for us to explore massive disasters in a safe way," Brooks says. "You can't shoot the financial meltdown in the head, but you can do that with a zombie."

© 2009 Creators.com

“Orphan" star Vera Farmiga postulates that “we’re more emotional creatures and it’s such an emotional experience,” while Spines observers that young girls “like to cuddle” and that horror offers girls “an excuse to inch a little closer to their beloved.”

Not everybody’s buying the snuggle theory, though. “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” remake producer Brad Fuller points out that women have more ticket buying clout in general, while “Orphan” producer Susan Downey cuts to the female empowerment angle: “Girls get the sense ‘I can face my demon.”

While that doesn’t let any of the tackier, more exploitative examples of the genre off the proverbial meat hook, it does get at something interesting. Horror movies almost always rely on a female protagonist. While it never hurts the box office that she’s inevitably a hot babe, the enduring allure of these films hinges on the girl in jeopardy’s ultimate heroism. Contrast the ass kicking women do in horror with the window dressing role they provide in most superhero-driven action films as a reference point. And speaking of opening up the whupass, what the EW story failed to address is how often women in horror are the antagonists as well. From creepy kids to she-devils to run-of-the-mill ax-wielding psychos, horror lets women be very, very bad. However you slice it, scary movies offer cathartic respite, a world where a female who possesses ingenuity and physical prowess isn’t regarded as a domineering bitch. For women looking for strong role modes, sometimes the safest place in the world is the chamber of horrors.

"Drag Me to Hell" opens with a flashback to 1969 Pasadena, in which a desperate Mexican couple bring their cursed child to a medium (played by Adriana Barraza), who fails to prevent the lad from being swallowed into the abyss of hell. She vows that someday, she'll get another crack at the demon-spirit who caused all the trouble. Cut to present-day Southern California, where we meet spunky farm girl-turned-loan officer Christine (Alison Lohman). Eager to move past her modest, pig-princess roots, Christine hopes to be next in line for a promotion at her bank. But her boss (played by the fine character actor David Paymer) indicates that a brown-nosing colleague, an Asian-American who goes by the intentionally incongruous name Stu Rubin (Reggie Lee), is most likely going to get the job. Christine, wide-eyed and with a perpetually quivering lower lip, thinks her chances for advancement will be improved if she acts like a tough businesslady. So when an elderly woman with ratted hair and a milky eye (played by the fabulous Lorna Raver) shows up at the bank, begging for an extension on her mortgage payments, efficient little Christine, after weighing the options for all of 20 seconds, tells her no.

And that, of course, is where all of Christine's problems begin, and where all of those disgusting bodily fluids start flowing freely. Not even Christine's sweet, caring, academic boyfriend (Justin Long) is of much use, though he tries. Raimi keeps making the gags broader and broader, as if to see how much he can get away with. And he gets away with just about everything, although cat lovers, in particular, might be dismayed by one scene. (For those who want to keep every plot detail a surprise, the following constitutes a spoiler, so you might want to stop reading here.) Raimi apparently scoured the earth to find the cutest, stripiest kitten ever, only to give him an ignoble end. But even so, Raimi advances through the scene discreetly (nothing happens on-camera). And the idea, writ comically large, is that he's contrasting the kitten's complete innocence -- plus, did I mention, his amazing cuteness? -- with a human character's ugliness and depravity. So Raimi's transgression against kittenkind is forgiven. But just this once.

As for the rest, "Drag Me to Hell" is somewhat plotless, though like many horror movies it does have a strong moral underpinning. As the clueless and, really, not-very-nice Christine learns the hard way, we must treat others with compassion and maintain a sense of humility. Because if we don't, someone's yellowy, oozing eyeball is going to show up in the piece of cake we're trying to eat. If that isn't motivation enough for trying to be a good person, then I don't know what is.