It’s Magical to the Core: An Exclusive Guest Post from Josh Winning, Author of Burn the Negative

Hi, my name is Josh Winning, and I’m a pop-culture obsessive. Sometimes, I feel like a grown-up version of those kids in Dawson’s Creek — I can’t not speak in movie quotes and, for the longest time, Entertainment Weekly has been my bible. 

I suppose it was inevitable that I’d end up writing books that dissect and celebrate media in its various forms. Without the inspiration that TV, books and movies provided, I wouldn’t be a writer, and my novels are all indebted to the media I grew up loving (and still love). Burn the Negative is about a journalist reporting on the remake of a cursed 90s horror movie that she starred in as a child, while The Shadow Glass is a love letter to the likes of Labyrinth and The NeverEnding Story, in which movie puppets come to life in the real world. 

Pop culture is a constant source of inspiration for me. As a film journalist, I have not only written about popular culture, but been there to see it happening in real time. Burn the Negative was informed in part by a press trip I took in 2016, when I visited the home of Lorraine Warren — she was the psychic whose story has been adapted for the screen in the Conjuring movies, where she is played by Vera Farmiga. I loved the idea of pairing a psychic with a journalist and seeing what sort of drama (or horror!) would unfold, and Burn the Negative was born. 

The concept of my first novel, The Shadow Glass, was similarly sparked by the movies. In 2013, I visited London’s Pinewood Studios, where I interviewed Kermit the Frog before he acted out the Tower of London sequence on the set of Muppets Most Wanted. The sight reminded me just how much I loved Jim Henson’s puppet creations, having grown-up with Labyrinth, Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal and Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. My yearning for more TV shows and movies like that motivated me to sit down and write my own. 

I consider myself very fortunate to be able to engage with culture in this way. I love movies and I love writing, and somehow, I’ve managed to carve out a career for myself in the middle of that Venn diagram. I approach writing a story like I am making a movie. I think about what the sets look like. Which actors are playing the characters. What they wear. How they move. Which movies they love. I build a soundtrack on Spotify that I listen to on repeat. To my mind, there is no distinction between a novel and a movie. They’re both visual mediums, they just beam images into our brains in different ways. 

This is the thing that I love most about popular culture: it’s magical to the core. The more you learn about TV shows and movies, the more fascinating they become, and what goes on behind the scenes is often as interesting as what ends up on-screen. That’s what I really hope comes through in my novels. If you start peeling that enchanted onion, you just find more magic, and that, to me, is endlessly inspiring. 

Horror movies to watch after reading Burn the Negative