Posted on September 7, 2026

Black House: Ecohorror and Influence in Stephen King and Peter Straub’s Underrated Novel

Guest Post

Andy Hageman and Ryan Gjerde

The sequel to The Talisman (1984) by Stephen King and Peter Straub has been hiding in plain sight for twenty-five years. Like the eponymous building at the dark core of Black House (2001), the novel itself has largely eluded the readership of scholars and fans alike. Considering the long-running popularity of The Talisman, including the recent boost from Duffer Brothers adaptation rumors, this overlooking is especially odd. With the final novel in the trilogy (Other Worlds Than These) set to release on October 6, however, now is an ideal time to read, research, and teach Black House. Beyond its present timeliness, Black House deserves attention as a terrifying, and often poetic, tale of a serial killer, the Crimson King (who is also central to King’s Dark Tower tales), the beloved protagonist Jack Sawyer, and other wonderful characters both new and returning from The Talisman. In this essay, we provide an ecohorror approach to the novel’s setting in a small Midwestern town on the Mississippi River, including insights on Straub’s personal connection to this region that ripple across Black House’s pages and into King’s other works as well.

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Posted on September 3, 2026

Endless Night: Agatha Christie for Horror Fans

Dawn Keetley

Agatha Christie published Endless Night late in her career, in 1967. It’s a stand-alone novel, without the stabilizing center provided by either of her famous detectives, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. It is, perhaps because of that, a good place to start for horror fans interested in how Christie’s work as mystery writer frequently veers into horror. While the novel itself contains many horror elements, I’m focusing here on the (quite faithful) 1972 film adaptation, which brilliantly amplifies those elements.

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Posted on August 26, 2026

Exploitation Horror: Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust

Guest Post

Spencer Stoller

In 1980, Ruggero Deodato released Cannibal Holocaust, a film that represents the height of Italian cannibal exploitation cinema. The movie became notorious for showcasing real animal deaths and graphic physical and sexual violence, and for its documentary and found footage aesthetics, which fueled rumors that the actors had been murdered. The film was confiscated by Italian authorities upon release and Deodato was subsequently put on trial for obscenity. It was banned from distribution in several countries, lumped in with “video nasties,” a term formerly used in the UK to describe lowbrow horror, typically distributed on VHS. Despite its notoriety, the film contains a structurally complex critique of colonialism and the consumption of violence in film and television. It asks its viewers to reconsider the trope of the civilized versus savage dichotomy as fictional Western filmmakers manufacture atrocities and abuse Indigenous people to produce sensationalized footage: Deodato’s production involved a great deal of exploitation, including the killing of animals and unsafe treatment of cast members, particularly the unpaid Indigenous extras. Cannibal Holocaust must be understood simultaneously, then, as a product of Italian exploitation cinema and of the demand for brutality onscreen, a critique of Western media and colonial violence, an experiment in documentary realism and audience manipulation, and an ethically compromised production that replicates the violence it condemns.

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Posted on August 23, 2026

The Monsters Are Here on Oak Street: David Robert Mitchell’s Throwback Creature Feature

Dawn Keetley

David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street (2026) is a glorious throwback. While it may seem a bit of a swerve from Mitchell’s previous films, both The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010) and It Follows (2014) are actually also suffused with nostalgia: indeed, a key scene early in It Follows involves Jay (Maika Monroe) and Hugh (Jake Weary) at a classic art-house cinema preparing to watch 1963’s Charade, with Hugh talking wistfully about how he wants to be little again. The End of Oak Street evokes – in just about every way it can – a time that is past. I loved it for that, and for all its echoes of mid-twentieth-century film and television. There’s also inevitably a profound regressiveness to it all, too, though.

The End of Oak Street tracks a family (husband, wife, two children) as their neighborhood appears to travel through some kind of portal – transplanted to a prehistorical era when dinosaurs rampaged. Chaos ensues, as the family and their neighbors seek to evade, fight off, and outrun the gigantic predators with whom they now share Oak Street. There’s a sense that everyone’s in shock (not surprisingly) – not thinking clearly. There’s a lot of carnage.

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Posted on August 15, 2026

The Digital Etchings of the Scaffold: The Executioner’s Anonymity and Audience Participation

Guest Post

Declan Ackroyd

In his seminal study of the English people and their attitudes toward execution V. A. C. Gatrell notes that, even before the abolition of public executions in 1868, ‘the polite’ of Victorian society had begun to distance themselves from the spectacle, resulting ‘in a deepening embarrassment about any unseemly display’ that these acts entailed.[1] Having shifted the violence of the state away from public view it took until 1968, another hundred and one years, for execution to become completely banned in the UK. (1969 in Northern Ireland). In our modern era the consumption of public violence is now widely considered taboo, but it still appears in parts of our society in differing forms, from the sport that we watch to the cinema that we consume. This essay will explore the latter.

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