We covered a lot of ground: my strange, sideways relationship with goth subculture, the heavy metal origins of my particular flavor of darkness, how symbolist and decadent art first found me through my mother’s tarot collection and album covers, the building of the Art in the Margins series, and some fumbling attempts to articulate what the occult in art means to me. There’s also some talk of what’s coming in 2026. I hope you’ll give it a read.
Art in the featured image includes Alphonse Mucha, Odilon Redon, Chet Zar, Unica Zurn, Joseba Eskubi .
Most nights around 11 p.m., I’m watching a stranger’s scalp get massaged in extreme close-up. Fingers working through wet hair, nails scratching patterns across skin, the soft scrape of a wooden comb. Or I’m watching someone’s spine getting adjusted, the therapist’s hands finding each vertebra, that moment of pressure before the crack, the satisfying pop of joints realigning. Or a woman named WhispersRed is tucking an invisible person (me) into bed, smoothing imaginary blankets with deliberate strokes, whispering that everything’s going to be okay while fabric rustles and pillows get fluffed.
Sometimes it’s ear cleaning videos where tiny tools scrape and tap inside silicone ears. Sometimes it’s someone slowly brushing their hair for thirty minutes, each stroke amplified to an almost obscene degree. I cycle through my favorites, zenheads, tokyo asmr massage, mondragon chiropractic, itsblitzz’s gentle massage work, asmr twix, little me carmie. I guess I’m hunting for the off-switch my brain doesn’t have, and these videos are the closest thing I’ve found.
I’ve been doing this for years now. ASMR videos, those autonomous sensory meridian response tingles that start at your scalp and travel down your spine when you hear certain sounds.
A lot of ASMR is someone tapping their fingernails on objects for twenty minutes straight, or whispering directly into a microphone in a dark room. That doesn’t work for me. I need the sounds to be part of something, incorporated into an activity. The click of scissors trimming hair. The squelch of shampoo being worked into a lather. The snap of a fresh towel being unfolded. The rhythmic scrape of a pumice stone on a heel. Sounds that happen because someone is doing something – usually care or grooming related – not just performing sounds for their own sake (which I’ll agree here with the haters, this is actually kinda annoying and obnoxious.)
Then, a few months ago, I stumbled across a clip from John Waters’ Serial Mom while scrolling late at night. I am pretty sure you know the scene: Beverly Sutphin is watching her son’s friend’s family through their window, eating a roast chicken dinner. The camera zooms in on wet mouths tearing at greasy meat, lips smacking, tongues working over chicken skin, throats swallowing audibly. Sounds designed to be absolutely revolting.
And I thought: …wait. I’m kind of into this?
That’s when things started to click, and all the lightbulbs went on, all at once. A cascade of realization!
Those Serial Mom sounds were the same ones putting me into a trance every night. And then: oh god, how many horror movie sounds had I been responding to this way my entire life? Freddy’s finger knives scraping metal railings. Michael Myers’ breathing behind his mask. Shower curtain rings sliding. The rhythmic tick of a clock in an empty house. Every creaking floorboard in every haunted house.
Horror had been doing ASMR before ASMR had a name.
Once I saw the connection, I couldn’t unsee it. I started making mental lists of horror sounds that gave me tingles and began to wonder if other horror fans experienced this too… or if I was just weird and freaky? I started thinking about how horror directors have been manipulating intimate audio space for decades, long before YouTube ASMRtists figured out the same trick. And that’s when I knew I had an article for Rue Morgue!
P.S. The header image for this post is from a 2018 video I wish I had stumbled across when I was doing research for the piece – Lucy Hale (Aria from Pretty Little Liars, though if you already recognized her I probably didn’t need to tell you that) doing ASMR recreations of horror movie sounds to promote Truth or Dare. She stabs a pumpkin for Halloween, types “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” on a typewriter for The Shining, rubs lotion on her hands for Silence of the Lambs. PLL AND ASMR! Total dream come true! Someone at W Magazine understood the connection between horror and ASMR way before I did. Dangit!
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The final Trinkets & Treasures newsletter of 2025 is currently winging its way to your inbox! This month: books about bodies and hunger, a perfume like bandaged amber and bitter cardamom, and a collection of lovely little things that elevate mundane routine and ordinary tasks into small moments of beauty and enchantment. You can read it in the browser if you have no intention of subscribing, and how dare I even suggest it. Or but hear me out, you could just subscribe.
Clicking “Subscribe” on this blog (found in the right-hand menu) only gets you Unquiet Things post notifications. My Trinkets & Treasures newsletter is a completely separate thing with its own signup page and platform (you can also find the link in the top menu) if you want a peek at favorite things and current recommendations.
Why two things, a blog and a newsletter? I don’t know, man. People kept telling me to make a newsletter. So I did. But then I had to differentiate it from the blog somehow. That’s why it’s a separate thing. I did what the people wanted, and I think it’s probably left the other people even more confused. Anyhow, if you want THE WHOLE SARAH EXPERIENCE, subscribe to the blog updates (the blog, this thing you are reading right now) as well as the monthly newsletter.
My latest column for Rue Morgue Magazine is out now! Well, it’s the November/December issue, but my copy only just arrived today!
In The Tiny Murderers In My Garden (Are Really Bad At Murder!) I explore finishing Sarah Maria Griffin’s recent offering, Eat the Ones You Love – a novel narrated by a carnivorous orchid plotting to devour its beloved florist – and the immediate urge to acquire tiny potted predators of my own. Spoiler: Baby the orchid’s predatory scheming is a lot more dramatic than the reality of bog water maintenance and humidity checks.
Turns out that bringing horror home just means learning about distilled water requirements and obsessing over light exposure while Patty and Selma (my venus flytrap and pitcher plant) laze about in the Florida sun, proving themselves more decorative than dangerous. Pick up the issue to read about scheming and scandalous blooms, the uncanny oppression of overwhelming greenery, a shocking confession about a beloved horror classic, and the anticlimactic reality of actual carnivorous plant ownership.
P.S. I was also thinking about naming them after The Duras Sisters, Lursa and B’Etor.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
This month in Rue Morgue Magazine, you can find my piece “An Uncanny Coterie: Confessions of a Doll Collector,” a love letter to all the creepy porcelain beauties that horror movies have trained us to fear. Those sweet-faced antique dolls with their fixed gazes and milk-white complexions, originally designed as childhood perfection but now possessed of the calculating malice of porcelain predators in pretty dresses.
It’s really just me confessing my love for the very objects that make other people cross themselves and back away slowly. My shelves are lined with eyeless porcelain ladies and babies clutching invisible rattles (or knives?), and I find beauty in what Francis Bacon called “some strangeness in the proportion.”
From childhood memories of periwinkle-dressed beauties to my current coterie of perfect, precious potential assassins, this is my meditation on embracing what makes others uncomfortable. Which has a real “I’m not like other girls, I like dark things” energy, ugh. I guess what I mean is I’m curious about the psychology of collecting things that make most people’s skin crawl; why some of us are magnetically pulled toward the very things that give us the creeps. Grab a copy when it’s on stands next week if you want to read about finding charm in what others consider cursed!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Friends, I have some exciting news to share! My article “She Died As She Lived: Deliciously (Notes From A Death Café)” is published in the current issue of Rue Morgue Magazine, and I’m thrilled to announce that this piece marks the beginning of my new role as a regular columnist for this beloved publication! I’ve been sitting on this news until I could hold a physical copy in my hands, but now it’s here, so I guess it is official!
My journey with Rue Morgue has been a series of is-this-real-life??? moments. First came the thrill of being interviewed about my book The Art of Darkness—seeing my thoughts and work featured in a publication I’d treasured for so long felt surreal. When the opportunity arose to contribute a piece on horror-inspired perfumes for their March/April 2025 issue, I poured my heart into examining how scent artists capture the essence of fear in fragrance. But becoming a regular columnist? That’s a dream I hardly dared to imagine.
My Ghoul Next Door column debuts with an exploration of Death Cafés – those gatherings where strangers meet over tea and cake to discuss mortality. Some longtime readers might remember my blog posts about hosting these events in Orlando from 2014-2016, and I’m excited to revisit the topic for a wider audience. What exactly the column will cover going forward is still evolving, but expect a strange brew of the weird and wonderful things I’ve long been passionate about – a space for exploring oddities and curiosities, weaving together the beautiful and the macabre, the strange and the melancholy. I’m looking forward to sharing these explorations with Rue Morgue’s readers.
The current issue featuring my debut column is now available, and I’d love to hear what you think if you get a chance to read it! Thank you all for supporting my particular brand of weirdness all these years. Here’s to many more adventures in print!
Eau La La by Genevieve very kindly featured me on her most excellent and fun Shelfie Sunday Instagram Series and I had a blast waxing extremely, purple-y poetic and at great length (because this is the only way I know how hehehe) about my lifelong fascination with fragrance and perfume and my 20+ years of collecting.
Here’s a brief snippet…
“In a world trapped in the claustrophobic confines of hideous reality, perfume is the crack that lets the light in – an expansive, boundless playground of the imaginary and surreal. It may only be a bit of psychic gossamer, elusive as poetry sculpted in mist, but it lets you slip through the world in a veil of elegance or a melancholy cloud of romantic longing, moving you to beauty that transcends the visual and tangible. A perfume might carry me to arid deserts with binary moons or moonlit forests where witches dwell in chicken-legged huts – places only imagination can conjure but scent somehow manifests.”
You absolutely must visit her account and peep at how she so beautifully pieced all my words and imagery together! Read more here!
Hello friends! Just a little update video from my birthday weekend to catch you up on various things and to share some favorite things! This video was pretty spontaneous and not very well edited, so please excuse that random photo of skincare stuff that pops up in the perfume segment (or screencap it if you need the details!)
Anyway, grab a cup of tea or a fancy c/m-ocktail and come along with me while I show you my messy house and some favorite things. And you should definitely leave me comments on the video because I don’t ask for much in this world, but it’s my birthday, dangit!
If you enjoy these ramblings, or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
POV: you visit my home when I’ve just woken up, and we chat about our goals for the new year. We both have bedhead and no makeup and I’m still wearing my pajamas–maybe you are, too!
But in all seriousness. I’m not trying to have a wildly popular channel and lots of subscribers; I just want to be a little more consistent with making videos. I hate calling this stuff content. I am not a content creator. I’m just sharing snippets of my life! I love to watch lifestyle videos and “what I do in a day” videos…but I don’t see a lot of people in my Gen X age bracket, who don’t have children, who are maybe a little off-kilter. So I thought I might be the weird I wish to see in the world!
Making videos is time-consuming, and it’s a little fraught, not because I don’t like talking to the camera (I love it, believe it or not, even if I sometimes sound like a ding dong) but because what I don’t love is my face. However! What I dislike more than my actual face is wearing a faceful of makeup. I hate makeup and I hate the time and energy it consumes to fool around with it. And in all honesty, that’s what keeps me from making these videos more often…because applying makeup and worrying about the results is just so damn nerve-wracking. So you know what? I thought, “fuck it” and I didn’t bother. I’ve said it before, but this is the only face I’ve got, and I think all ten of you who watch my videos do not give a single crap about how my face looks.
Is Book It my entire personality now? Not quite! It was part of a bigger project I’ve been working on this summer, in service of little-Sarah.
To back up just a bit, and hopefully not make a long story longer, I was inspired to do this from a few conversations and tarot readings with my friend Angeliska of Sister Temperance Tarot. Trauma from my childhood was a theme that was repeatedly discussed, and the subject of reparenting was introduced to me. Growing up in dysfunctional families or in homes where parents were overwhelmed, grieving, depressed, or where there was substance abuse, many of us did not have the loving parent we desired or deserved. Our bodies store that trauma, neglect, and rejection, and, that yearning for the parent that you never actually had, or emotional childhood needs that were never met, to quote my friend on a recent blog post of theirs, is a hunger that never, ever goes away – and is never really sated or fulfilled. Reparenting the inner child focuses on making sure it feels the value, love, and protection it lacked during childhood, where, as adults, we learn to nourish ourselves, and tap into that connection within, and elsewhere in my life.
There is a whole lot of stuff to address in this conversation, and it involves a lot of tools that I don’t have, but which I am very slowly adding to my arsenal, among them some suggested reading, therapy, and showing up for myself every day in the act of lovingly tending to little me. I am not so naive as to think that any of this stuff in the video is an entire solution, and hopefully it doesn’t come across that way in my presentation! I know that would be pretty irresponsible. But these are things I started doing for myself and seemed like a fun, not too intimidating place to begin. As an adult, I’m not even sure that I know how to have fun, and I am fairly certain this has roots in the things that happened when I was a kid. Hypervigilance about things and situations feeling or seeming too good (because historically, mom- disaster was always looming and there was just no point in feeling good) and repression of my feelings overall (because in addition to her struggle with alcoholism, my mother was BPD with those erratic mood swings and behaviors) and I think in never wanting to be like that, I squashed all feelings altogether. Fun …just seemed like something that other children got to have.
In this video, I chat about treating my inner child, and some of the activities I engaged in as part of that. There’s a lot of work to do in service of healing my little-me, it’s hard to know where to start …so I thought I might begin with things that are fun! If you are interested, I hope you will go have a peek…even if you just keep it on the background, while you do some fun things for your little-you.
If you do have a visit, please leave me a comment if you hear something that resonates with you, or if you have ideas of your own that you’d like to share!
Writing and sharing on the internet can feel kinda lonely sometimes and I am always so appreciative of the folks who take a moment to say something nice, or even just say, hi! Or hello! Or, I see you there!
