Seeing the cover of Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1981) has a powerfully Proustian effect on me: my stomach drops a little bit and a shiver of twinned fear and delight runs down ...

‘Every night, I’ll jump,’ John Murdy tells me, as I stand outside one of the eight haunted houses at Universal Studios, Hollywood. The launch of Halloween Horror Nights is almost upon us, and even ...