Tag / Horror

by Moreau Vazh

Field Report: Crossroads, Issue 1

Field Report is an infrequent series tracing physical zines that move in the same circles as this blog: Folk Horror, Forteana, Weird History, and Occultism. It takes the place of my earlier Zine Corner series. The rest of the series can be found here.

VIBE:

A confident and ambitious first issue that approaches American Folk Horror as something still in the process of being defined. Though it begins by trying to justify that project in abstract terms, it soon comes alive through its examples, moving across film, folklore, and history. The result is not only stimulating but energising. This is the kind of zine that makes you want to be part of the conversation it is trying to build.

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by Moreau Vazh

A Poe anthology by Thomas Ligotti


Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through.

Thomas Ligotti’s reworkings of Edgar Allan Poe do more than pay homage; they expose a fundamental difference in how both writers understand horror. Where Poe constructs meticulously controlled stories that generate dread through ambiguity, Ligotti returns to those same narratives and strips that ambiguity away, insisting that the horror is not psychological or symbolic but structural and inescapable. By revisiting “William Wilson”, “Ligeia”, and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Ligotti transforms Poe’s carefully unresolved effects into expressions of a single, underlying system, one that governs not just his characters, but everyone.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: The Fisherman by John Langan

First published in 2016, John Langan’s The Fisherman won the Bram Stoker Award and has since become a staple recommendation for readers interested in Lovecraftian horror.

One of the defining characteristics of Lovecraftian horror is its portability. Lovecraft developed a set of images and tropes that are not only instantly recognisable but also applicable to a broad range of story-types. For example, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country used those images to explore the experience of living in a country so profoundly racist that instances of petty bigotry and systematic mistreatment combine to create a pressure so intense as to be almost existential in character. Conversely, in Minions & Monsters, Lovecraft’s most famous creation Cthulhu appears as a faintly comic grump who serves as agent to monsters looking to get hired by Hollywood.

Having long since reached the point of pop-cultural saturation, the tropes and trappings of Lovecraftian horror are no longer in and of themselves frightening. Their power lies in the willingness of authors to use them to express something deeper and more personal, which brings us back to The Fisherman.

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by Moreau Vazh

On “The Man of Stone” by Hazel Heald and H.P. Lovecraft


Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.

What happens when Lovecraft’s cosmic machinery is dropped into something as lurid and domestic as a tale of jealousy and revenge? “The Man of Stone”, his early collaboration with Hazel Heald, is a slight and often silly story, but it reveals something far more interesting than its plot. In stripping Lovecraft’s ideas from their usual structures and embedding them in melodrama, the story exposes how easily his obsessions can be separated from their original context and made to function elsewhere. Rather than a late development of his posthumous fame, this portability may have begun much earlier, at the point where collaboration and financial necessity started to loosen his control over his own work.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Hard Light by Elizabeth Hand

The early novels in Elizabeth Hand’s series about punk photographer and professional self-saboteur Cass Neary are defined by a tension between psychological excavation and narrative propulsion. What began as a dense, literary exploration of a washed-up photographer confronting the corrosive nature of artistic genius edged closer to crime fiction as the series expanded outward, from a collapsed New England commune to the ruins of the Norwegian black metal scene. Neary made her name photographing punks and junkies at the moment of their deaths and continues to stumble over dead bodies with camera in hand.

Significantly longer than its predecessors, Hard Light expands the series’ field of view. Now dodging police across multiple countries, Neary arrives in London, allowing Hand to turn her attention to the legacy of the swinging sixties. Where the earlier novels focused on artistic damage within specific scenes, Hard Light roots itself in history and geography. London emerges as a place where past cultural movements persist in altered form, flattened, repackaged, and put to work. This is a novel about how trauma and creativity move through time, embedding themselves as much in spaces as in people.

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by Moreau Vazh

On Shut-Ins by Thomas Ligotti


Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through.

The “Shut-Ins” section of The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein deepens Ligotti’s growing critique of existence as a self-perpetuating system. Building on earlier stories about immortality and genius, these tales present characters who seem perpetually on the verge of escape yet only move deeper into structures that sustain themselves through their suffering. In both “The Ever-Vigilant Guardians of Secluded Estates” and “The Scream: From 1800 to the Present”, the promise of change or liberation proves illusory. Ligotti’s bleak suggestion is that there may be no outside of the system at all, and that the only true exit lies beyond existence itself.

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by Moreau Vazh

TR: The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)


Things Resurface is an occasional series in which I write films and TV series from in and around the ‘Folk Horror’ genre. While the spine of this series comes from the Severin films’ ‘All The Haunts Be Ours’ box-sets, it will also venture further afield. The other posts in this series can be found here.

The Blood on Satan’s Claw is often treated as one of the central works of cinematic folk horror, but its politics are far stranger than the label suggests. Originally conceived as a horror anthology before being reshaped into a single narrative, Piers Haggard’s film is driven by a queasy tension between fascination and disgust. As a rural community descends into a cult of sexual awakening and demonic ritual, the village elders move to crush it with violence and fire. Yet the film frames both rebellion and repression in unsettling terms. Through Dick Bush’s meticulously layered cinematography and a narrative steeped in generational anxiety, The Blood on Satan’s Claw emerges not as a simple warning about pagan excess, but as a portrait of a society so uneasy about change that it can only oscillate between hysteria and control.

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by Moreau Vazh

On “The Dreams in the Witch House” by H.P. Lovecraft


Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.

Written at a low point in Lovecraft’s career and dismissed by some of his closest collaborators as a failure, “The Dreams in the Witch House” has long divided readers. This essay argues that its apparent incoherence is not a flaw but a breakthrough: a deliberate rendering of madness from the inside out. Blending biography, close reading, and literary context, I explore how the story’s warped geometries, restless prose, and collapsing dream logic reflect a writer turning inward, away from cosmic spectacle and toward the instability of perception itself. Far from a misstep, “Witch House” may be one of Lovecraft’s most modern and unsettling achievements.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Available Dark by Elizabeth Hand

Originally published in 2012, Available Dark is a direct sequel to Generation Loss and the second book in Elizabeth Hand’s series of novels about Cass Neary, a psychologically damaged and drug-addled bisexual disaster-punk who also happens to be a lapsed photographic genius.

Despite being marketed as a work of crime fiction, Generation Loss wound up treating murder as little more than set-dressing in a decidedly literary novel that was primarily interested in exploring character psychology and the idea that artistic genius is a viral form of psychological damage.

As dense in ideas as it was in atmosphere, Generation Loss seemed almost resistant to continuation, its worldview too heavy to support the machinery of a crime series. Hand’s solution was to pull back from psychological excavation and steer the series toward the cleaner lines of crime fiction and the literary fantasy that first defined her career. The emphasis shifts and the density thins, but the ideas articulated in Generation Loss continue to shape what follows.

Available Dark is undoubtedly a lighter and more conventionally structured novel than the work that precedes it, but while its bones may be less dense, its flesh remains strong, not only by Hand’s deepening portrait of Neary herself but also by the decision to broaden the series’ examination of artistic genius by moving from art photography to Norwegian black metal. What does damaged genius look like when it lands in suburban Iceland rather than a decaying hippie commune? What does damaged genius look like when expressed through Nordic folklore?

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by Moreau Vazh

On Loners by Thomas Ligotti

Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through.

In the “Loners” section of The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein & Other Gothic Tales, Thomas Ligotti turns away from inherited monsters and toward a more intimate horror: the collapse of self-authored identity. A schoolmaster waits in vain for a vampire who may never have come; a playwright fashions the perfect companion only to discover that she is nothing more than his reflection. In both cases, fantasy does not liberate but encloses, and when the sustaining fiction gives way, what unravels is not romance but the self itself. These are not tales of temptation or rejection, but of isolation so complete that imagination produces only mirrors… and when those mirrors crack, there is nothing beyond them to fall into.

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by Moreau Vazh

TR: The Dreaming (1988)


Things Resurface is an occasional series in which I write films and TV series from in and around the ‘Folk Horror’ genre. While the spine of this series comes from the Severin films’ ‘All The Haunts Be Ours’ box-sets, it will also venture further afield. The other posts in this series can be found here.

A helicopter, a sealed chamber, a massacre unearthed, and a silence that lingers. The Dreaming wants to confront colonial violence, yet turns its gaze inward, toward the uneasy consciences of its descendants. Caught between haunting and history, the film reveals the real horror may not be possession, but inheritance.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Strange Houses (2025) by Uketsu

First published in 2021, Strange Houses is the debut novel of a Japanese YouTuber who goes only by the name of Uketsu. His videos (primarily in Japanese, though increasingly translated into English) often revolve around mysterious and ambiguous objects, which Uketsu presents to his audience while wearing a black body-stocking and a papier-mâché mask.

Speaking through a voice-changer that introduces a deliberate gap between what we see and what we hear, Uketsu typically frames these found objects as uncanny in one register before manipulating them to reveal a second, deeper strangeness. The videos are great fun, and it is easy to see why they are so popular.

As Uketsu’s audience grew, this success expanded into other forms: a series of novels, followed by manga adaptations and, eventually, a film. Strange Houses was his first novel and the work initially targeted for adaptation. However, it proved significantly less popular than his second novel, Strange Pictures, which was the first to be translated into English and is often treated as the opening entry in what has since become an ongoing series of three books.

I mention the character of Uketsu’s online activity and the fact that this was his first novel not merely to set the stage, but also to provide a degree of explanation. While Strange Houses is a formally unusual and visually interesting attempt at a mystery novel, it is plagued by technical missteps which weaken it to the point of distraction. These problems make considerably more sense once it becomes clear that the book was produced by someone whose dominant areas of expertise are visual and conversational rather than literary. Strange Houses is an interesting book, but I would struggle to call it a good one.

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by Moreau Vazh

On “The Trap” by Henry S. Whitehead and H.P. Lovecraft

Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.

Written during H. P. Lovecraft’s 1931 visit to his friend Henry S. Whitehead, “The Trap” is a curious and quietly revealing collaboration: a story that neither man would likely have written alone. Part occult detective tale, part metaphysical thought-experiment, it centres on a vanished schoolboy and an antique mirror whose horror lies not in spectacle but in stasis… an eternity without sensation, change, or agency. Light on dread but rich in ideas, the story’s real interest lies in its seams: the shift from dialogue to exposition, the crossing of genre boundaries, and the glimpse it offers into Lovecraft’s emerging fascination with abstract imprisonment, an idea he would soon revisit, more forcefully, in “The Dreams in the Witch House”.

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by Moreau Vazh

On Gothic Heroines by Thomas Ligotti

Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through.

In Ligotti’s hands, Gothic heroines do not escape haunted castles and country estates so much as carry them forward. Terror does not end when the ghosts vanish, and care does not heal what is already broken. These stories ask a darker question: not who is guilty, but who survives long enough to transmit the damage.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand

They say that everyone has at least one novel in them, but reading Elizabeth Hand’s Generation Loss left me with the uncomfortable sense that my skull had been cracked open and that someone had used scalpel and clamp to cut this book directly from my brain like a malignant tumour.

This was not recognition in the flattering sense of influence or affinity, but something closer to diagnosis: a feeling that the sensibility and anxieties animating the novel had long been growing within me, unnoticed, drawing nourishment from the same conditions of damage, attention, and exhaustion that the book itself anatomises.

Generation Loss, first published in 2007, is the opening novel in a four-book sequence that straddles the porous boundary between crime fiction and horror while returning obsessively to themes that recur throughout Hand’s work: artistic inspiration, psychological damage, ritual practice, and the long aftermath of contact with something corrosively real. Its appearance coincided with a broader literary interest in hauntology and psychogeography, and while any direct influence is likely accidental, the overlap is telling. Like those modes, Generation Loss is preoccupied with ruin, with memory that refuses to settle, and with futures that have already been foreclosed.

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by Moreau Vazh

On The Shadow over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft

Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.

The Shadow over Innsmouthis often remembered for its chase, its town, or its monsters. This essay argues that its real significance lies elsewhere: in a brief, fragile alignment between technical restraint and psychological doubt that Lovecraft never managed to sustain. Reading Innsmouth alongside Lovecraft’s early work and late collapse, this piece treats the novella not as a culmination or a confession, but as a failed attempt at self-reckoning: honest, costly, and quietly devastating.

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by Moreau Vazh

WTD – True Detective (season 1)

Watching the Detectives is a series about fictional figures who investigate the paranormal, the occult, and the unexplainable—and what their methods, failures, and obsessions reveal about knowledge, authority, and belief. The rest of the series can be found here.

When True Detective first aired, it was widely received as a work of cosmic horror, its antlers, spirals, and nihilistic monologues read through the lens of writers like Robert W. Chambers and Thomas Ligotti. This essay argues that this response, while understandable, repeats the show’s central mistake. Rather than uncovering a hidden metaphysical order, True Detective is concerned with the investigative, cultural, and critical scaffolding erected to keep violence from appearing banal, contingent, or meaningless. By examining its landscape, its detectives, the conspiracy they assemble, and the killer who ultimately refuses to sustain it, this piece treats investigation not as a path to truth but as a habit of interpretation shaped by genre, institution, and exhaustion—one that produces meaning where none can reliably be found, and quietly rebuilds itself even after it collapses.

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by Moreau Vazh

Maps made of People

Over Christmas, I listened to an episode of Thomas Manuel’s Yes Indie’d podcast in which the YouTuber Quinns remarked that dungeons function as a kind of lingua franca within the roleplaying hobby. Not because they are universal, but because they remain one of the few shared points of reference in a space increasingly fragmented into specialised silos.

Most people enter the hobby through Dungeons & Dragons, and they carry with them the ideological traces of that experience. These traces are not so much mechanical preferences as habits of attention: assumptions about what play is meant to look like, what a character is for, and where meaning is expected to arise. Even games that define themselves in opposition to D&D often betray its influence through the shape of their reaction.

One such trace is the assumption that adventures and campaigns are best expressed geographically. Across mainstream D&D, the OSR, and older trad games like Call of Cthulhu, play is commonly framed as a sequence of events unfolding in specific places. Worlds are mapped, locations are keyed, and significance accrues by moving through space.

This is not the only way roleplaying worlds can be imagined. Long before the rise of storygames and their emphasis on social conflict, there was a traditional roleplaying supplement that attempted to build a city out of relationships rather than locations. This essay is about Chicago by Night, a 1993 Vampire: The Masquerade setting book, and the particular vision of a game-world it tried (and failed) to articulate and support.

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by Moreau Vazh

On Leading Men by Thomas Ligotti

Canon Fodder is an occasional series in which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works of Thomas Ligotti which I will slowly be working my way through.

In the “Leading Men” section of The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein, Thomas Ligotti reworks two familiar figures, the Phantom of the Opera and the Phantom of the Wax Museum, into studies of how genius circulates, is consumed, and is discarded. Stripped of romance and psychology, these stories present intensity not as insight or transcendence but as something procedural, something that passes through bodies, pleases audiences, generates value, and leaves nothing behind. What matters here is not who understands, but how understanding is processed, applauded, and allowed to vanish without consequence.

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by Moreau Vazh

On At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft


Canon Fodder is an ongoing series in which I return to authors and bodies of work over time, reading them closely and piece by piece. This essay forms part of the Lovecraft strand; a chronological index of my Lovecraft writing can be found here. Other Canon Fodder posts can also be browsed via the series category.


At the Mountains of Madness is often treated as the apex of H. P. Lovecraft’s career: a monumental fusion of cosmic horror and scientific imagination. This essay argues the opposite. The novella’s opening reveals a genuine technical breakthrough, a moment where Lovecraft finally mastered restraint, implication, and epistemic dread. What follows is not escalation but retreat, as the story collapses under the weight of explanation, history, and misplaced sympathy. Read closely, At the Mountains of Madness becomes a record of an author briefly seizing control of his art—and then recoiling from what that control required.

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