Hey, Monsters! As the URBAN LEGEND of our podcast spreads further, we wanted to shine a flashlight on the cryptids that make it phenomenal! Bearing that in mind, we are very pleased to introduce Ziggy Schutz, the extremely talented author behind the found-audio piece “A Half Finished Oral Report on the Phenomenon of Autumn's Children.”
In your piece, you reference changelings, Children of the Corn, and Victorian death photography. What inspired "A (Half-Finished) Oral Report on the Phenomenon of Autumn’s Children"?
I think the idea came from… a supernatural version of a face on a milk carton. We create whole personas around missing kids, or (unfortunately) the bodies of unidentified kids, too. What is the horror version of that? And I also like to play around in spaces that are seen as pretty standard and see if I can make them into something else. Ghosts, and a Fear of Creepy Kids, and what if we had a tangible, real life basis for both? Also, I wanted to play around with horror presented as a fact or a report.
How do you connect to the idea of URBAN LEGENDS?
I think URBAN LEGENDS are so exciting, because they really grab onto young folks’ attentions? These are the stories you tell at sleepovers. These are a lot of people’s first introductions to horror, and it’s personal, because ‘I swear, it happened right down the street!’ ‘Yeah, my cousin totally knew a girl who…’ Not only is it the first time a lot of folks felt a personal connection to horror, but it’s also the place a lot of people told their first horror story. With a flashlight, under a blanket, to an audience of giggling friends.
They’ve got such a tradition in oral storytelling, which is why when I saw that MOutC was doing this theme, I got so excited.
Your piece is framed as if it's found-audio. Why did you frame it this way? Do you often write pieces this way? For you, what does it add to the story?
I love the idea of someone getting to tell their own story. I write in present tense a lot. Things are happening in the moment. There’s no time to reflect on the story as a whole, for the narrator. There’s just this moment, captured in time. And to add that to found footage, we get someone telling their own story, and we don’t get to know the ending. Not really. And I think part of the horror comes from that, doesn’t it? From the not knowing, and the assumptions that we have to make.
I also love the thought of taking something that’s such a popular trope of visual media and exploring what it can look like in audio. I haven’t written a lot of audio, but my audio drama is based around the idea of found footage as audio storytelling, too. That one’s more post apocalyptic than horror, but hey! The point still stands.
How did you get into horror? What do you enjoy in the genre? What scares you?
Oh boy. I had older cousins and a need to prove that I was cool, and that’s how I got into horror in general. Trial by fire. And then I lived in a small town and all there was to do if we didn’t wanna party in the abandoned mines on weekends (that is not a joke) was marathon movies, so that’s when I got into zombie movies, and from there, I was gone.
My relationship with the genre got personal when I started working at a haunt, though. My first time acting in a haunted house was eight years ago this October, and I still work at the same haunt! This made me fall in love with the culture of horror, and also my relationship to it as a queer, disabled person was really defined. By acting in a haunt (and then training others to as well), I felt like I was reclaiming space in a genre that had often used people like me for villains or a body count. It made me feel powerful. There’s a lot of power, in the horror genre. Rawness. People are allowed to be ugly in horror, too. Messy. There’s no ‘perfect heroes’ in horror, and that’s something I really love about it.
(Also, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for monsters)
Gosh, what scares me? Hm. My relationship with fear is a complicated one, because I kinda break fear down at work into like… what Makes Someone Afraid. So I could get all technical here… or admit that regardless of how much work I do on the Nature of Fear, heights still make me freak out, oops.
What’s your writing process like?
Hm. I usually start with a feeling I want to try to pick apart or highlight, and then build a story around that. Sometimes it’s more technical challenges, or purposefully wanting to put a spin on a trope that I enjoy (or don’t enjoy and wanna figure out why by writing it), and then going from there. I’m not a big plotter, especially with my smaller pieces. I think a lot about atmosphere and exploring feelings, and then go from there!
How does identity play a role in your writing?
I think identity affects every word I put on a page. I’m a white settler. I’m queer, trans, and disabled. And it was only when I started writing with the explicit understanding that I was… allowed to write from that perspective that I started to have real success with my writing. I’m neurodivergent! I literally see the world differently than other folks. Trying to write in a way that hides or lessens that is just not going to be me at my best. As a trans person, how I write even just the concepts of gender are going to be different than how a cis person writes them. And that’s a good thing! I think a lot of people are told that this or that won’t sell, so we have to limit the stories we tell about those identities. And I do write about people who don’t have my exact set of identities. But it is always with the understanding that I, the writer, am coming from this particular perspective. It helps to make sure I do the Work when writing outside of my identities, and it also it’s part of what makes my writing mine, and my voice unique.
What role do you think horror plays in the LGBTQ community?
I think horror was the first genre a lot of us felt was a place we could play in? Yeah, they were often monsters or villains, but there’s folks in bold makeup here, characters defying gender norms, and again and again, stories of an ‘other’ that people feared, often for no other reason than that they were different. I have complicated feelings around mainstream horror, where I still see too many examples of harmful tropes in regards to the queer community (queercoding villains, bury your gays, predatory gays), but I think there’s also a rich history of queerness in the margins of horror, if you know what to look for. And as we now see more and more ‘horror’ looking at the monsters as someone to be redeemed, and the real monsters being the cis, straight white guys who react to anything different with violence, it really feels like a genre that queer stories can be told in.
In a time where a lot of media that is supposed to be For The Queer Community is largely based around how tragic our lives can be, how hard it is to come out, etc, the horror genre feels like the part of speculative fiction that has been the most welcoming to letting queer stories be told in it, which is so important. Because hey, us queer folk deserve genre fiction, too.
What’s next for you, creatively?
I’m turning one of my short stories into an audiobook, which should be coming out sometime in the next month or so. It’s about found family, convicts, and space mermaids. I’m pretty excited about that. It’s called ‘twice-spent comet’ and it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever written.
I also have a podcast! It’s called Crossing Wires, and it’s a… post-apocalyptic audio drama about isolation and connection after the end of the world. So you can see why it is maybe not updating right now, what with all of the… everything, going on in the world. But it’s still something that is being worked on, and will be returning soon! It really is a hopeful story, about human connection and voices on the radio slowly turning from strangers into something familiar. It’s an ensemble cast, and my team consistently blows me away.
And I’ve got an outline for a novella about high school reunions, fae curses, and what happens when the friendship you used to cage a monster deteriorates over time. So who knows! Maybe that will show up somewhere sometime soon, too.
Any great horror recommendations?
I mean, if you already listen to horror podcasts, you’ve probably already had someone recommend The Magnus Archives to you, but I’m gonna give it a rec here anyway. It’s all about the nature of fear, and has a bit of an anthology taste to it, as well as an overarching plot. The characters? Fantastic. Really gets the complicated and often contradictory moralities that makes a good horror cast down well.
If you like webcomics, I cannot recommend Eerie Crests enough. It’s not a long read but it’s a rich story about a boy whose best friend goes missing in the woods. It’s heavy, and melds a story of real life shit like depression and transphobia with this eerie, stunning horror piece. And the art is breathtaking.
And I gotta recommend Malaise, which is an anthology of horror, all written by marginalized authors. It’s one of my favourite anthologies I’ve ever read, and it is, indeed, very queer (Disclaimer: I have a story in this one. But that’s besides the point! I loved every story in this one, for real). It’s not something you’re gonna be able to find in a traditional bookstore, but if you give it a search, it should pop up!