Horror, besides being entertaining, is also a powerful tool for raising awareness, reflecting both individual and collective fears and concerns. While every country has its own horror manifestations, this essay focuses on Mexico because of its unique and unsettling relationship with horror. This relationship is analyzed under the term “mexplatterpunk.”

If you've seen The Ring, you know one thing—it sticks with you. Not just for the scares, but the eerie silence. The images. The girl. That cursed tape. Even years later, The Ring movie still has moments that make you sleep with the lights on.

The depiction of the undesirable castaway as horrific monster is a tale as old as Frankenstein, and in the centuries that have passed, this archetype has taken many different shapes, and we can thank new applications of abjection for that. Is it because of the violent nature of the mutilation, or is it because of the repugnant visage of the human body?

Technology has provided the horror genre with ample fodder, more so when it comes to social media. The plotline sometimes errs on the side of the absurd, but the outcome is always the same.

The success of any great piece of entertainment depends on misdirection and unpredictability, but this is arguably more important in horror than in any other genre. That’s because viewers buy into the fact that, when they watch a horror film, the director is going to try to scare them. They’re already ready for the shocks, and this can dampen their effect if they’re not done right.

The Celtic tradition of storytelling, shared characters and plots rising and falling depending on the teller’s whim, is more akin to a churning cauldron of narrative than a formal, indexed (some may say less exciting) library. And all this before we’ve even tackled what we mean by Weird…

Last year, I found myself at odds with the majority of moviegoers who saw Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.  The reactions generally ranged from apathy to vitriol—how dare they stain the reputations of such loveable public domain characters? That film garnered only 50% approval from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, and a shocking 3% from critics.

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.

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?