As we close out June, we officially begin Summerween.
Summerween is a little treat for Halloween obsessed horror hounds before we enter into Fall and can start in earnest.
This holiday, began on the TV show Gravity Falls and initially gained traction online, with people posting horror films & books that have a distinctly summer horror vibe.
The holiday seemed to go more mainstream in 2025. So last July, I wrote a little INTRODUCTION TO SUMMERWEEN, which you can read: HERE.
Throughout this upcoming month, I am going to share my own Summerween celebration, by sharing 1 horror film and 1 horror book I’ve read for this years’ festivities. Making a curated double-feature of sorts.
If you’re celebrating a spooky summer this year, drop me a note with what you’re reading and watching:
Here is Summerween I
SQUIRM (1976)
Squirm is a drive-in movie creature feature set in Georgia. It fits perfectly into our summer theme as the locale is hot, muggy, and everyone onscreen is sweaty. The cast features three million earthworms who go berserk when an electrical storm makes them hungry for blood.
Squirm plays like a Southern Gothic melodrama written by Georgia-native Tennessee Williams. Our heroine Geri borrows a truck to pick up her gentleman caller Mick, who arrives from New York City. Mick is immediately a fish-out-of-water as everyone in town clocks him as a ‘city boy’. Mick also makes himself a villain by ordering an egg cream at the local diner.
Mick’s arrival upsets the balance of things in a lot of other ways too. Local worm farmer, Roger Grimes, who is secretly in love with Geri is filled with a jealous rage when he learns Geri has a beau. Geri’s sister, Alma, has strange feelings about a young man being under their roof and it makes her revert into a lot of odd childlike behavior. And Geri’s mother Naomi starts pining for her younger days. Mick helps unleash a lot of pent up sexual frustration everywhere he goes… must be the egg creams. And the worms seem to be a metaphor for the unspoken sexual feelings people try to bury.
Naomi, played by actress Jean Sullivan, made the Williams connection more palpable by speaking in an exaggerated Southern accent, something that not a single other character does. This is something she told director Jeff Lieberman was done as an intentional homage to Williams, and Liberman didn’t stop her.
The third act even plays like a nightmare version of The Glass Menagerie. As a tense dinner scene full of bizarre sexual tension is interrupted by an oak tree crashing through the roof and cutting the ‘domestic’ scene in half.
My favorite bit of dialogue:
Geri: Oh, a skeleton! How’d he get here?
Mick: If it’s even the same one. They all look alike to me.
This movie is goofy but has a lot of affection for it’s wacky cast of characters. The worms are a kind of lame, slow threat for a majority of the movie. Roger has to fully trip and fall face first into a pile of worms for them to become an issue.
Yet this is quickly amended when that fallen oaktree unleashes an avalanche of worms into the house in the final scene.
THE RATS by James Herbert
From worms… to rats!
This story follows a schoolteacher named Harris, whose small neighborhood on the outskirts of London is overrun with flesh-eating rats.
This is James Herbert’s first novel, written in 1973. He originally wrote advertising copy, and you can feel every lesson he’d learned about clean economical prose on full display here. In the introduction, he mentions he didn’t tell anyone he’d written a book until it was published because every single person in his office was a frustrated novelist.
Herbert dives deeply into the inner lives of a vast cast of characters. It almost feels like you’ve spent an entire lifetime with them in only a few short pages. He makes these characters so human and so rich, that it’s genuinely heartbreaking when the rats start to devour them. And they devour almost everyone.
My favorite sequence follows a newlywed couple on their honeymoon. Their little romantic gestures and personality quirks are so well described you’d guess that Herbert is either pulling actions directly from his own life, or he’s a genius of observing human behavior. Often, when reading a horror novel, you skip ahead over the boring human drama to get to the scary bits, but in The Rats it’s the reverse.
There’s an incredible creepy prologue describing a house in the London neighborhood. An elderly couple lives there and have barely any human interactions, except for a weekly grocery delivery. When the delivery boy discovers the previous week’s delivery still remaining on the porch, the police are called and they discover the couple has died peacefully inside. This sequence is Herbert’s best writing in my opinion. While this chapter doesn’t involve the rats in a direct way, there is a weird dark energy in the chapter, and it sets your hair on edge. It asks a lot of questions and sets an ominous mood that the rest of the book pays off in spades.
There’s two sequels Lair and Domain and I am super excited to check them out.
Thus ends Part I of Summerween 2026. One movie & one book. I’ll close out with a Summerween-esque song that I think pairs well with this double feature. I’ll try to add a song each week, because I always associated summertime with “Playlist”, so maybe you can add these to your own.
“Ben” by Michael Jackson
Why Ben? Well, this was the theme song to Ben (1972) the TV movie about a killer rat!
See you next week,
for Summerween II
June 2026.