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Posted on October 5, 2026

“He’s a wild creature. We can’t ask him to be anything else”: Marine Monstrosities in The Shape of Water

Guest Post

Charlotte Troy

In 2017, renowned Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro released The Shape of Water, asking his audience to find comfort in his sympathetic monsters and further question the slippery boundary that separates the natural from the unnatural. Arguably, Del Toro’s filmography has been largely defined by his fascination with mythological and fantastical creatures including everything from vampire slaying half-vamps attired in leather trenchcoats (Blade trilogy) to cigar-smoking half-demons with an adoration for kittens (Hellboy franchise). In both literary and cinematic form, monsters act as the “patron saints of otherness” (Del Toro, “At Home with Monsters”) who are condemned, alienated and even killed “because their physical existence defies our expectations of normality in ways that offend us” and in turn threaten our social reality (Davies 29). Admittedly, monsters appear in Del Toro films as both protagonists and antagonists, but I argue that their central role as unlikely, sympathetic heroes raises questions about how true monstrosity is not synonymous with the nonhuman.

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 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.

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.