The possibilities of being terrified in one’s own home (or of your home) are endless. It seems strange that one’s place of comfort and reassurance can hold such potential for horror, but it is a theme the genre media has heartily embraced. House arrest, a curtailment of your freedom to escape the horrors within, is a particularly dominant subtheme.

What makes us love fear? Why do we willingly hand over money to be terrified by clowns, ghosts, or possessed dolls that clearly need therapy?

Livestream, a 2025 release, is a chilling addition to your horror movie collection. If you haven’t seen it yet, it follows Mia, who stays in a cabin. She chooses to stream the whole experience, but as night approaches, she soon finds that she’s not quite as safe as she thought she would be.

“They talk about death being cold. It’s life that’s the cold thing.”

If it were possible to sum up Edith Nesbit’s horror fiction in a single line then this quote from one of her final tales would be as good an attempt as any. As Melissa Edmundson tells us in her introduction “[Nesbit’s] characters are always hiding something … whether it be a disappointment, a regret, a fear, a screen, or a crime.” The gaps these acts of hiding create become, inevitably, filled with the chill of ghosts but Nesbit’s unexpected statement that life, not death, is cold also indicates some of the contradictions at the heart of her own life.

Guillermo del Toro is no stranger to sending audiences back in time with his films. The Devil’s Backbone (2001) takes place during the Spanish Civil War, while both Hellboy (2004) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) are set during World War II—not to mention the 60s-set The Shape of Water (2017) and post-depression era Nightmare Alley (2021)…

Racism is not always loud or violent—it can be quiet and even polite, and in those cases, hidden behind a fake smile. The horror movie Get Out perfectly shows these kinds of racism, and I actually didn’t expect this movie to turn out the way it did.

Let Us Prey is a horror film with just the right amount of gore and scares. But when it comes to the deeper meaning of the movie, there are religious aspects that are too obvious. That’s what made me stick and actually watch the entire movie. At its core, the story feels like a lesson about sin, guilt, and judgment.

The Haunting of Hill House came out on Netflix in 2018, and it quickly gained a lot of attention. The series was created by Mike Flanagan and was inspired by Shirley Jackson’s classic novel. It tells the story of the Crain family and how their lives were forever changed by the time they spent in Hill House. If you're a fan, you've probably read a lot of reviews about this TV series. But beyond the scary story, it actually carries a lot of depth in terms of the pain we carry as people.

In the '90s, after the precedent was set over the last decade, two wildly different trans characters were brought into existence just two months apart. The first, Special Agent Denise Bryson, DEA in Twin Peaks. The second, serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of The Lambs.

Novels about art works, and novels about archaeology, have something of the ghost story in them. The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, by Ellery Lloyd, and Nephthys, by Rachel Louise Driscoll revive the long-standing trope of the mummy’s curse. 

Think of weird fiction and, probably without even realizing it, you will think of one thing: men. Whether it’s H. P. Lovecraft’s tentacled monstrosities, the decadent necromancies of Clark Ashton Smith or Algernon Blackwood’s eerie eco-horror, the canon of weird fiction, like many human endeavors, is dominated by male practitioners.

Vigilance Theater, the immersive theater group that recently brought Mac Beth to local theatergoers, is already back in time for the thinning veil of autumn—the perfect time for telling Campfire Stories. This time, Vigilance takes us to Camp Guyasuta, a Scouting America camp in Sharpsburg, PA, where the counselors at Camp Moonside are preparing for their annual Scary Story Competition.

If you’re someone who frequents oddities or metaphysical shops (hell, even antique shops in some instances), you start to get pretty good at sensing the authenticity of not just the items around you but the people, too. You’re able to distinguish whether or not those standing behind the counter love the stuff as much as you or if they’re in it for some other reason, be it money, fad, or something else. 

I honestly couldn’t handle another demonic unborn baby movie or ridiculous pregnancy horror film that left me utterly disturbed. The more I explored this subgenre, the more I realized I wasn’t really going to find something that scared me about the state I was in, just that I would be more scared by the ways filmmakers were incorporating additional elements that tied to pregnant people…. [Instead] I thought it might be fun to explore scary children in horror movies, because hey, why not?

Films with a running time of fifteen minutes or less have racked up millions of views since premiering on YouTube through channels like ALTER, a channel exclusively for horror short films. This (often) low-budget filmmaking mirrors the immediacy of urban legends that play on fears of stranger danger or uncanny worries that something terrible can happen to an ordinary person like you.

Weapons stars Julia Garner (Apartment 7A, Wolfman) as Justine, a 3rd grade teacher whose entire class suddenly goes missing in the night—each student, of their own accord, having woken at 2:17 a.m., walked out their front doors, and ran off into the dark, arms spread like an eerie “Naruto run.”

There’s a hallway, dim. No blood. No screaming violin stabs. Just… silence, and maybe the flickering hum of a fluorescent bulb overhead. That’s unease. That’s dreadful. And it’s what stays. Not the monster that leaps out from behind the shower curtain—cheap trick—but the feeling that something might be there. Maybe. Or maybe not. That’s fear without noise. That’s writing unease.

Dave Franco and Alison Brie star in Together, a body-horror-tinged warning against codependent relationships and a PSA to always bring water purification tablets on your hikes.

“You’re going to need a bigger boat,” Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) trembles, having seen the great white shark Quint (Robert Shaw) and Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) have been collectively searching for—hunting for—for the first time since the people of Amity Island started being consumed by the eating machine.

As a masked figure called the “Sweet Angel” goes viral in a social media challenge, three teens play the game as a joke, each nominating someone they’d like to see die. But when they are unexpectedly chosen by the Angel, they’re forced to follow through on their nominations, or risk death themselves.