Forgotten Fiction

Paris brings the gothic soap opera that invented the sympathetic vampire. Dark Shadows ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971, attracted nearly 9 million daily viewers at its peak, and was condemned by evangelist Jack Chick as Satan's favorite TV show. Teenagers raced home from school to watch it. Then Tommy brings House from 1985. Fred Dekker's 15 page treatment became a comedy horror film about a...

Paris brings the funniest TV show that never aired. In 1999, Ben Stiller, a then-unknown Jack Black, and a brand new writer named Dan Harmon made a pilot about an astronaut whose brain expanded after flying too close to the sun, on the run from NASA with his talking motorcycle voiced by Owen Wilson. Fox passed. It became the most expensive unaired pilot in network history, survived only through bo...

Paris brings the book that invented the modern zombie before zombies existed. Richard Matheson published I Am Legend in 1954. George Romero called it his primary inspiration for Night of the Living Dead. Three film adaptations followed across forty years: The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, and the 2007 Will Smith version. Every single one of them missed the point. Then Tommy brings a movie that...

Paris brings the series that drew up the blueprint. Rod Serling came home from World War II with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and something to say. The Twilight Zone ran from 1959 to 1964, introduced a forgotten episode written by Richard Matheson and became the most influential science fiction series in television history. Paris has seen every episode multiple times. Then Tommy brings the book...

Paris brings a vampire Western that got buried by Lost Boys two months before it hit theaters. Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 debut featured forty night shoots, a cast pulled straight from Aliens and Bill Paxton as a hitchhiking vampire. Tommy brings the book that launched a thousand school board meetings. Alvin Schwartz & Stephen Gammell at their finest. Folk horror dressed up as a children's...

Paris brings a Stephen King original. Not an adaptation. An original screenplay King had been sitting on since 1966 about a small island cut off by a blizzard and a stranger named Andre Linoge who knows everyone's darkest secrets. Give me what I want and I'll go away. Storm of the Century premiered Valentine's Day 1999. Then Tommy brings the first book published under the Point imprint...

Paris brings a 2015 found photography horror film. An entire Arizona border town of 57 people is killed or disappears overnight. The only survivor is an undocumented Mexican immigrant covered in blood. The only evidence of what actually happened is 37 photographs of things that should not exist. Then Tommy brings a 1975 psychological thriller with six Goodreads ratings. Diana Ramsay was a pen name...

Paris brings the movie that almost ended Guillermo del Toro's career. Mimic. 1997. Bugs genetically engineered to save New York City evolve to mimic humans. A great concept challenged by the Weinsteins. Bob Weinstein barged onto the set. The film flopped. But the new Director's Cut is worth streaming. Then Tommy brings the book Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones. A 12 year old na...

Paris brings a show NBC didn't know what to do with. Eerie, Indiana aired in 1991, ran 19 episodes, and disappeared. A 13 year old moves from New Jersey to the strangest town in America and spends one season investigating it with his only normal friend. It's YA Twin Peaks shot on film. The episode about a humanoid ATM named Mr. Wilson giving a kid free money hits differently in the age of AI. Then...

Paris brings a 1989 film that almost nobody has seen and yet somehow Tommy has. Riverbend follows a Black Vietnam veteran and his men who hide out in a Georgia town being terrorized by a racist sheriff and decide to fight back. Shot in Texas, buried on VHS, and rescued from obscurity by a filmmaker who put it on YouTube. It is Red Dawn meets The Color Purple run through an 80s action filter and it...

Paris brings Tommy a Stephen King adaptation some constant readers haven't even seen, The Dark Half, directed by George A. Romero in 1993. Two horror legends. One forgotten film. Then Tommy brings a book his daughter Ella called one of her favorites she's ever read... after it sat on her shelf for over a year. George Selden's Cricket in Times Square belongs in the same conversation as Charlotte's...

Before Blue Ruin. Before Green Room. Before anyone knew who Jeremy Saulnier was, he made a micro-budget horror comedy in Brooklyn with his friends about a lonely meter maid who finds a Halloween party invitation on the sidewalk and really should have stayed home.

The show that kept a generation of kids up at night sits next to the 1819 novella that invented the modern vampire. Tommy makes the case for John Polidori, Lord Byron's personal physician, who wrote the first aristocratic vampire story at the most famous literary gathering in history. These remembrances will have everyone saying, "I'm Cold."

Paris and Tommy kick off Forgotten Fiction the way they do everything... by ignoring the plan. What was supposed to be a simple introduction turns into a deep dive on Tim Curry playing in a forgotten Tales from the Crypt episode, and Tommy's rabbit hole into why you can't actually stream a complete season of Beavis and Butt-Head anywhere. Rights issues, physical media, and the specific kind of nos...