Movies
[Books] 5 Horror Novels To Read While Camping
You’re in a flimsy tent, tucked deep into your sleeping bag. A dime-store flashlight is jammed between your chin and shoulder, the dim beam pointed at the dog-eared pages of a paperback horror novel. When a twig snaps outside, you pretend not to hear it. But the night is long, and you drank too many beers around the campfire. You can’t hold it until dawn. And when you finally unzip your tent and clamber out into the chilly, starry night, you desperately try to forget the horror novel you were just reading. You stumble blindly toward the nearest tree, bare feet barely avoiding sticks and thorns, and the last thing you want to think about are hillbilly cannibals, hermit rapists, man-eating plants, or genetically enhanced monkey monsters.
That’s right, Campers. Spring has officially arrived. For those who prefer their great outdoors served up with a side of horror fiction, the following five novels will leave you squirming in your sleeping bag.
The Ruins (2006), Scott Smith
The power of The Ruins lies in Smith’s ability to take an enormously silly premise––killer vines trap tourists on an ancient Mayan ruin––and make it somehow believable. And while Carter Smith’s 2008 film was a successful adaptation in a variety of ways, it doesn’t quite capture the bleak futility of the incredibly imaginative novel. From the oppressive heat of the Mexican jungle, to the tequila-fueled dehydration of its characters, The Ruins is the rare book that paints a setting so vivid, it puts you there.
Camping Callbacks: Features what may be the coolest campsite of all time…if you’re willing to ignore the acidic, man-eating vines.
Watchers (1987), Dean Koontz
Those who feel the prolific Koontz has lost a step in recent years should revisit Watchers, which saw the bestselling author at the top of his game. Revolving around a trio of Koontz’s favorite subjects ––the outdoors, genetic mutations, and guns––the story has a young military vet joining forces with a intellectually-enhanced golden retriever to defeat a mutated baboon creature developed for government warfare. Published before everything Koontz put on paper automatically dominated the bestseller lists, Watchers was later adapted into a regrettable Corey Haim vehicle hampered by shitty production values. It‘s one property that‘s genuinely deserving of a remake.
Camping Callbacks: Nature hikes, a canteen full of orange Kool-Aid. The final showdown takes place in a mountain cabin as Koontz gleefully piles on the gun fetishism.
Off Season (1980), Jack Ketchum
Published in the wake of 1977‘s The Hills Have Eyes, Ketchum’s survivalist horror novel certainly bears more than a passing resemblance to Wes Craven’s hit shocker––both are loosely based on the Scottish legend of Sawney Bean, a notorious cannibal leader from the 1400s. In Off Season Ketchum sends a forgettable cast of stock characters to a secluded island to be pursued and devoured by a horny family of inbred cannibals. After initially defending their cabin in a Straw Dogs-type scenario, the heroes are eventually chased into the woods where the action regresses into pure, unadulterated savagery. Offspring, Ketchum’s 1991 sequel to Off Season, was adapted into a 2009 film from Ghost House Underground.
Camping Callbacks: A remote mountain cabin on a forrested Maine island. A few strangely specific campfire recipes involving human flesh.
Trapped (2010), Jack Kilborn
Arriving a full thirty years after the release of Off Season, Trapped reads like the long lost twin of Ketchum’s cult classic––both novels feature victims camping on a secluded island overrun with mentally regressed cannibals. But Jack Kilborn (a pseudonym for author J.A. Konrath) makes some ballsy moves with his characters, resulting in something deeper and more compelling than the surface shocks of Off Season. Eschewing Off Season’s bland cast of white bread couples, Trapped has a married pair of juvie counselors camping with a diverse handful of delinquent teens, including a couple of gang bangers, a slutty meth addict, and a pudgy sociopath. It’s sort of like Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, only gritty. When the cannibals come a-calling, each member of the group must make a choice regarding survival…and those choices become less obvious as the story progresses.
Camping Callbacks: All the accoutrements of Off Season, but with hot dogs and marshmallows and shit.
The Summer I Died (2006), Ryan C. Thomas
Thomas’s grim little chapbook of pain and anguish probably ranks as the most graphic entry on this list. Best buds Roger and Tooth want nothing more than to shoot some beer cans and smoke a little weed up on Bobcat Mountain. But when they come between a women in distress and the pervy hermit who has kidnapped her, their camping trip takes an immediate detour through Torture Porn Canyon. With loads of mean-spirted, stomach-churning violence The Summer I Died is an endurance test, even at a mere 154 pages. It’s certainly not for everybody. But if you want to freak yourself the fuck out on your next camping trip, you can’t really do any better.
Camping Callbacks: Beer. Weed. Guns. Bobcat Mountain.
At one point or another, nearly every culture on earth believed in malevolent entities that interfered with human affairs. While it’s more likely that this is due to our species’ universal fear of the unknown than the possibility that we share the earth with supernatural monsters, there’s a reason why so many horror movies base their scares on good old-fashioned demons.
Of course, coming up with visual depictions of otherworldly horror is no easy task, and that’s why I’ve decided to highlight six of the scariest demon designs in horror. After all, a creature feature is only as good as its antagonist, so this is one situation where the uglier the better!
For the purposes of this list, we’ll only be including movie monsters that are explicitly described as being demons from an established religion/folkloric tradition. We’re also only considering the demons’ scare factor – not the overall quality of the movie it came from. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own demonic favorites if you think we missed a particularly freaky one.
One more thing – while we won’t be including it on the list since it technically never made it into the movie, I’d also like to give a shout-out to Valak’s tragically unused true form from The Conjuring 2.
With that out of the way, onto the list:
6. Violator – Spawn (1997)
I’ve already written about how this ’90s Blockbuster Bomb is nowhere near as bad as most people say it is, but I’ll never get tired of insisting that John Leguizamo’s Clown/Violator is one of the greatest movie monsters of the ’90s. Not only was this ambitious union of digital and practical effects remarkable for its time, but it’s a genuine miracle that the crew was able to faithfully translate Todd McFarlane’s exaggerated design to the big screen.
While the comic book version of this hellish shapeshifter was already frightening, and I’d argue that the soft-spoken telepath of the HBO adaptation is even scarier, the special effects here really make it feel like Violator is about to leap off the screen and gobble up your entire family.
It’s just too bad that the rest of the film isn’t equally impressive!
5. The Demons – Hellboy (2019)
The 2019 Hellboy reboot may not be a good movie, and it left an especially sour taste in fans’ mouths after the cancellation of Guillermo Del Toro’s final entry in his proposed trilogy, but there’s still plenty of stuff that this ill-advised adaptation gets right. Among this R-rated romp’s good ideas, I’d argue that the film’s demonic antagonists are at the top of the list, especially if you suffer from some form of megalophobia.
While the film only briefly unleashes an assortment of hellish monsters upon the world during the final act, the Eldritch designs and Neil Marshall’s expert direction make these some of the scariest scenes in the entire Hellboy franchise. To be honest, I’d like to see an entire movie about kaiju-sized fallen angels wreaking havoc on modern society.
4. Satan – End of Days (1999)
End of Days is a deeply strange movie. A supernatural action-horror thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as he attempts to thwart the biblical apocalypse, there are moments here that feel like they came out of a parody. Yet, it’s precisely these idiosyncrasies that make the movie so much fun, especially when the filmmakers do their best to make Lucifer himself a formidable opponent for the man who took down both the Predator and the T-1000.
If you ask me, special effects maestro Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery knocked it out of the park with his surreal and undeniably Eldritch design for Satan. Hell, this winged monstrosity appears to have more in common with Cthulhu than anything you’d see in your average exorcism flick, which makes it all the more tragic that the finished film ultimately replaced most of the demon’s practical effects with CGI.
3. The Lipstick-Face Demon – Insidious (2009)
There’s no discussing iconic demon designs without bringing up one of the most popular supernatural antagonists of the past few decades, the Red Face Demon from Insidious. Also known as the Lipstick-Face Demon and The Man with Fire in His Face, he may have only been the main antagonist of that first Insidious film, but this memorable villain has since become the mascot of the entire series as well as proof that familiar iconography can still be scary if presented properly.
That being said, it’s Joseph Bishara’s consistently freaky performance that makes Red Face such a haunting character, with his exaggerated movements and facial expressions helping to bring the design to life. Of course, I’m of the opinion that the demon’s affinity for Tiny Tim songs might just be the scariest thing about him!
2. The Mimic – The Mortuary Assistant (2026)
The live-action adaptation of Brian Clarke’s The Mortuary Assistant may not be quite as scary as its source material, but you’ve got to hand it to the filmmakers for recreating the game’s paranormal antagonists so faithfully – especially since they weren’t exactly working with a Hollywood budget.
Sure, the team benefited from the fact that the most popular of these demonic entities, the grinning Mimic, boasts a relatively simple design consisting of a pale, emaciated body and a doll-like face with uncanny proportions. But I love how they added a corpse-like texture to its skin. Mark Steger’s eerie performance also enhances the effects work and helps to make this one of the most memorable monsters on the list.
My only real gripe with this design is that they gave the Mimic a nose, removing some of the charm of that original design.
1. Porcelain Jesus – Belzebuth (2017)
Emilio Portes’ Belzebuth is a criminally underrated religious horror flick, so it stands to reason that it also features one of the scariest demons on this list. I know I’m technically bending the rules here, as the creature that appears in the film isn’t really the demon itself but a statue that was possessed and corrupted by it, but I believe this blasphemous design speaks for itself.
Over the course of the film, the demonic antagonist possesses a series of unfortunate victims before eventually settling on a porcelain recreation of Jesus, with the ensuing monstrosity chasing our lead characters during the flick’s scariest sequence. As with any piece of religious horror, your fright-mileage may vary depending on your respect for holy iconography, but I’m of the opinion that this design is scary enough to transcend religious barriers.
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