Horror Homeroom

Posted on February 23, 2026

Death and “A Livin’ Man”: Ambrose Bierce, The Twilight Zone, and Jazz Icon Kenny Clarke

Guest Post

Linda Ganus

A little over 60 years ago, an episode produced for the legendary science fiction TV show, The Twilight Zone, aired on February 28, 1964. It’s surprisingly apt that this anniversary falls during Black History Month; here’s why.

The episode, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, was a short French film adaption (La rivière du hibou) of Ambrose Bierce’s widely anthologized short story of the same name about a Confederate soldier facing death during the Civil War. The director, Robert Enrico, while faithfully hewing to the text of the original story published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1890, boldly added filmic elements that gave the naturalist narrative a modern 20^th-century perspective. The film eventually won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and was one of the first television episodes to win an Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1964. An uncredited performance on the film by African-American musician and jazz master, Kenny Clarke, fiercely transformed the meaning of the story by immersing the viewer in an auditory sound world imagined from enslaved Black Americans’ viewpoints. Clarke amplified their voices, left unheard in Bierce’s original.

Posted on February 18, 2026

The House Was Not Hungry Then – But It Is Now

Dawn Keetley

The House Was Not Hungry Then (2025) is the directorial debut of filmmaker Harry Aspinwall. It is filmed almost entirely within and from the perspective of a single house (located in Angus, Scotland); only the last scenes take us out of the house, although our perspective remains with it. The film is shot by means of static cameras located in several rooms in the house: the cameras don’t move and we get no alternating shots that give us any additional information than what we get in those fixed shots. Aspinwall describes the philosophy and composition of the film on his website:

“I wanted to do something different. I love the dry comedies of Ruben Ostlund and Roy Anderson, and the tongue in cheek morbidity of Edward Gorey. I started to think whether I could make a horror film following the same principles, of distance, of sparsity, of withholding, of brutal objectivity. No inserts, no reaction shots, nothing to tell the audience what to feel, just one single locked off wide for each room. What would that feel like, to be so still, so removed from the human life that wanders in, unsuspecting?”

Posted on February 5, 2026

On Transformation and Addiction in My Novel-in-Progress, Chicana Werewolf

Guest Post

Daniel A. Olivas

I was no older than five or six when my parents first allowed me to watch the 1941 classic Universal Pictures horror movie, The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr., as the titular shapeshifting monster as designed by makeup artist Jack Pierce of Frankenstein fame. This was a different time—the mid-1960s—before Blockbuster Video, cable television, and streaming. So for families that lived on a tight budget, Los Angeles’s local television stations offered unending reruns of old movies from horror to noir, science fiction to westerns, and comedies to musicals. Horror, not surprisingly, sat the top of my favorites.

Unlike Universal’s Frankenstein of ten years earlier, The Wolf Man (1941)—directed by George Waggner—was not inspired by a literary classic but sprung from the creative mind of science fiction writer, Curt Siodmak, who decided to leave Germany for England in 1933 after hearing an anti-Semitic tirade by Joseph Goebbels. He established himself as a screenwriter in his adopted country and eventually made his way to the United States in 1937. Siodmak’s big break in Hollywood came in the form of his screenplay for the 1940 Universal’s film, Invisible Man Returns. His horror chops thus established, Universal tapped him to pen The Wolf Man.

Posted on February 1, 2026

Dooba Dooba – creepy found footage horror

Dawn Keetley

Dooba Dooba is written and directed by Ehrland Hollingsworth and is shot almost entirely on surveillance cameras with intercut analog scenes. It follows a babysitter, Amna (Amna Vegha), who is plunged into the strange and awkward from the moment she arrives at the home of Wilson (Winston Haynes), Taylor (Erin O’Meara) and their sixteen-year old daughter, Monroe (Betsy Sligh) – and things only get more weird from there, eventually becoming downright offensive and violent. Wilson, for instance, seems incapable of managing Amna’s name; “It’s these ethnic names . . . .” he offers in explanation, following that up with an attempt to give Amna money for what he calls “retributions” (presumably reparations). It very soon becomes clear that Amna is way too nice for her own good, constantly reassuring everyone else (and, we suspect, herself), that “It’s okay.” She should instead be asserting that, actually, it isn’t okay and she’s leaving. She doesn’t.

a creepy doll stands adjacent to a dollhouse in the movie poster for Doll House (2020)

Posted on January 4, 2026

CFP: Dolls and Their Houses

Call for Papers

Steeped in the primal discomfort of the uncanny, dolls and the houses they inhabit are an especially fluid and perennially creepy motif within popular culture. Revealing historical and on-going tensions between what it means to be human and what it means to only perform those attributes, these remnants of childhood carry with them specific cultural messaging that has been particularly fertile ground for the horror genre.

For special issue #10 (spring 2026) of Horror Homeroom, we’re diving into the world of creepy dollhouses and their inhabitants. We’re interested in abstracts about the dolls and dollhouses of horror – or of horror adjacent narratives (thrillers, mysteries, science fiction etc.).

You can focus on literal dollhouses, from the sublime (Hereditary) to the wonderfully ridiculous (Amityville Dollhouse, Doll House) – and everything in between (e.g., The Twilight Zone, Betty Ren Wright’s The Dollhouse Murders, Creepshow’s “The House of the Head,” Tales from the Hood’s “KKK Comeuppance,” Doctor Who’s “Night Terrors,” The Lovely Bones, Sharp Objects). Think also miniatures and dioramas. And you can be creative: dolls and mannequins inevitably turn the places they live into de facto dollhouses – so what are the implications of this uncanny move? Read more