Behind the Couch

Described by John Waters as “a sick orchid who seems like the perfect man”, Viktor Wynd is an artist, author, lecturer and the proprietor of The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History in London’s East End. His latest book, The Unnatural History Museum , not only provides a catalogue of his museum’s contents, but acts as a portal through which the reader may pass into another world, the world inside Viktor Wynd’s head: a magpie’s nest of the bizarre and the absurd. Head over to Exquisite Terror to read my full review .

As the director of Night of the Living Dead (1968), George Romero will be remembered as one of the major pioneers of the modern horror film. A truly groundbreaking work, it was released just eight years after Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and like that film,  Night of the Living Dead similarly suggested that monsters can live right next door to us. Indeed, Romero took this notion one step further by suggesting that it is us who are the monsters. Several sequels followed, all of which provided socio-political commentary against the backdrop of a world where the dead return to life and consume the living, an examination of the human condition, and how ordinary people faced with extraordinary, unprecedented events struggle to survive. The horror in these films stems from the things people do to themselves and each other when the world as we know it comes shuddering to an end and humanity fragments and literally eats itself. Following on from Romero's previous Dead film, the am...