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Posted on September 12, 2026

We Turn Gruesome at Night Review: Confinement, Change, and Cycles of Cruelty

Guest Post

D.S. Burton

We Turn Gruesome at Night is the second installment of Eric LaRocca’s Burnt Sparrow Trilogy following 2025’s transgressive small-town horror We Are Always Tender with Our Dead. Here the horror returns to the body; not the dead, but the living body’s place in the world and with others, and what we do to satiate our need to occupy that place.

We return to Rupert and Gladys after a decade of imprisonment in End House, no longer only degraded by their warped families and community, but also themselves. End House doesn’t just feel lived in, it feels used and exhausted itself, from its too-thin walls to the familiar yet often foreign feel of worn leather and well-trod hallways. The claustrophobic atmosphere leeches into the narrative, sucking threads and characters into the house, not outward, and physicalizing the increasingly internal struggles of the series protagonists.

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.

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.

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.

Posted on August 8, 2026

Suburban Blandness and Visual Violence The Mise-en-Scène of the Opening of Scream

Guest Post

Gary Miceli

Scream (1996) centers on Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a high school student in California who becomes the target of a costumed serial killer named Ghostface on the anniversary of her mother’s murder. Directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, the movie also stars Skeet Ulrich, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Matthew Lillard, and Drew Barrymore. The opening scene of the movie is widely considered one of the greatest and most horrifying openings in the history of the horror genre. It completely subverted expectations by brutally killing off Drew Barrymore, an actress the audience expects to be the star of the movie, within the first ten minutes. This shocking narrative subversion mirrors a technique previously executed by horror legend Alfred Hitchcock in his classic 1960 movie Psycho. Ultimately, Wes Craven manipulates the stereotypical slasher rules that we all know, making his own rules – all of which we see in the powerful mise-en-scène of the opening scene.