Celebrate John Carpenter’s Halloween with Noah Welter’s autumnal cocktail featuring browned-butter–washed bourbon, pumpkin syrup, and smoky Scotch.

Some of the most effective moments in horror happen before the threat is seen. A noise behind a closed door, movement on another floor or an unfamiliar sound outside the frame can create a sense that something is nearby without revealing exactly what it is.

Rebekah Faubion’s adult horror debut delivers the bloodshed promised by its “good for her” premise, then asks whether justified anger can become permission to control and punish. Its inherited-trauma metaphor is stronger than its softened final reckoning, but that moral tension gives the revenge story weight.

GWAR hosts a chaotic mixtape of murderous puppets, cosmic terror, and weaponized silence. The latest V/H/S finds fresh inspiration in the horror of sound.

Petra finds a carnivorous plant and immediately starts thinking about medicine. I was mostly wondering how long it would take the thing to digest a person. Tatiana Schlote-Bonne builds What Feeds Below inside that gap. Her narrator is surrounded by organisms that eat, infect and rebuild human bodies, and she keeps wanting to get closer.

An abandoned building starts frightening people long before any ghost story gets told about it. The dread arrives at the doorway, in the first breath of stale air and the first glance down a corridor with no lights.

Nicholas Pineda’s Infirmary starts quietly. There is, of course, the almost obligatory disclaimer at the front that identifies the footage we’re about to see as wholly true and part of an ongoing investigation, but that’s not the unsettling part.

Thomas Ligotti wrote that “the highest aim of the realistic horror writer is to prove, in realistic terms, that the unreal is real”. Nowhere is this sentiment embodied so well as in internet horror fiction, colloquially known as creepypasta (a name riffing on the act of copy and pasting stories across multiple forums i.e. copypasta, and homage to the genre’s collaborative storytelling roots).

Halloween is nearly upon us again, and we all know what that means. TV channels will be packed with horror films, there’ll be plastic pumpkins, and maybe some real ones, lining the aisles at the shops, and gangs of kids, and even adults, dressed in costumes ranging from the mundane to the bizarre will roam the streets.

Horror has a longstanding use for the telephone. Someone calls with a threat, the line goes dead, or help turns out to be impossibly far away. Smartphones complicate that relationship. The device a character reaches for in an emergency also contains their photographs, conversations and location history. Losing control of it can mean giving someone access to much of their life.

In The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, blood carries the violence of colonialism, while a settler’s journal controls whose story survives. This essay examines how Stephen Graham Jones uses vampirism and layered testimony to confront historical erasure.

Games are supposed to make rules comforting. Someone explains what can and cannot happen, everyone agrees to play, and even when competition becomes intense, there is usually a clear way for the game to end. Horror understands exactly how much damage can be done by keeping that structure and removing the safety.

Filmmaker Bari Kang discusses Itch!, from its practical gore and zombie influences to filming in his own NYC store and directing his daughter.

Through a blend of horror studies, philosophical analysis, and aesthetics, Ordinary Horror: The Aesthetics of Deformation from Leopardi to Ferrante by NYU professor of Italian studies Andrea Capra explores undiscussed nuances in contemporary and canonical Italian literature alike.

The term “social horror” seeks to highlight and challenge real-life injustices and everyday violence. It moves away from the notion of the supernatural monster to emphasize the human being as the primary source of violence and cruelty against others.

Revenge asks very little of the reader. Establish a wound. Point the wounded party toward whoever made it. We handle the rest quickly because the arithmetic feels good, and we have been practicing it since we were old enough to be treated unfairly. Scott Hawkins gives you that arithmetic early in Blacktail, then spends the rest of the book taking the calculator apart on the table in front of you.

Are you tired of searching for works that describe transgender experiences accurately, let alone with complexity or compelling messiness? Want to read some horror stories that were written by and/or for trans people? Curious about this newfangled term “trans horror” and wondering where to start? Hopefully, this brief primer will be useful to you.

The Land Down Under has a way of making its landscapes feel—deliciously hostile. In Wake in Fright, the scorched outback is the biggest threat of all; in Wolf Creek, the miles of empty road are essentially accomplices. In Mia’Kate Russell’s Penny Lane is Dead, however, the outback gives way to a beach house, but make no mistake—the beach is no less terrifying than the bush.

The year is 2026, and it’s a good time to be a horror fan. From compelling expansions upon beloved franchises such as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (released January 16), Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (March 20), and Evil Dead Burn (July 10), to inventive new takes on the genre such as Send Help (January 30), undertone (March 13), Hokum (May 1), and Leviticus (June 19), both new and established voices in the film industry have already delivered delicious frights, dark comedy, and searing social commentary that will undoubtedly keep thrill-seekers coming back to the theater for more.

October, 2006. The living dead have once again infested the Monroeville Mall. Their faces green with rot; blood and gore dripping down their chins. Eight hundred ninety-four zombies roam these halls, setting what was then the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of the undead…