Jeff welcomes Damir Debanic, owner of InterHuman Games, to discuss his upcoming board game Jure Grando, a Croatia-based, vampire-adjacent folklore horror title on GameFound.

Debanic describes horror’s cathartic link to joy, his path from organizing events in 1990s Croatia to 15 years at sea, and why board games are “programming with paper” and a vehicle for story. He explains that horror board games mainly appeal to board gamers drawn in by theme, then outlines Croatian vampire/štrigoi lore, krsnik monster-fighters, and how Slavic mythology informed Dracula’s supernatural elements.

Jure Grando emphasizes simple folk protections, no dice, minimal combat, and a two-phase race against encroaching darkness, a demonic cat, and the endgame arrival of Jure Grando, with multiple scenarios and endings.

Debanic also summarizes prior games (Within Walls, Propuh, and Fear of the Dark) and previews future folklore projects and a possible Jure Grando sequel.

InterHuman Games

On Horror Joy’s Meet Your Maker, Brian is joined by Undertone writer-director Ian Tuason. They discuss the relationship between joy and horror, distinguishing joy as a sustainable state from fleeting happiness and describing horror as a creative outlet that can offer safe thrills and catharsis, especially for people shaped by trauma.

Tuason recounts his path from writing poetry, stories, and short films to making a low-budget feature designed around sound, which he chose out of necessity and because audiences’ imaginations make the unseen scarier than visuals.

They discuss Undertone’s reliance on silence, noise-canceling headphones, and off-screen space, as well as its religious imagery rooted in Tuason’s Catholic upbringing, where guilt functions like an antagonist and Mary and Abzu represent opposing sides of a maternal archetype.

Tuason shares that he is rebooting Paranormal Activity, drawing on the first three films’ unseen terror while exploring the male gaze as a nemesis.

In this episode of Horror Joy, Brian and Jeff make an unplanned stop on their “haunted house tour” by traveling from U.S.-centered hauntings (slavery, Jim Crow, Reagan-era policies, conquest) to Japan, discussing Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 cult film Hausu and Junji Ito’s Fragments of Horror story “Wooden Spirit.”

They compare how both texts present “haunting houses” animated by spirits and brought out through women, linking them to gender roles, eroticism, and the fetishization of culture and material heritage.

They analyze Hausu’s deliberately camp, self-aware style, the named archetypes of its seven schoolgirl protagonists, its comedic-horrific deaths, and themes of girlhood’s end, queerness, postwar trauma, and consumption.

They read Wooden Spirit as eco-horror and cultural fetish, emphasizing wood’s “eyes,” seduction, and men’s uselessness, and close by finding joy in horror’s weirdness, comedy, and formal experimentation.

Breaking the Mirror: Hausu and Bad Love Objects by Erin Nunoda

Hausu of the Rising Sun: Death of the Girl by Georgia Thomas-Parr

Beyond the Panel: Cinematism and Affective Responses in Itō Junji's Tomie by Ivan Darío Jaramillo Chávez

Brian and Jeff welcome director/writer/producer BT Meza to discuss his new film Affection, released in theaters May 8 and on video on demand June 5.

Meza connects horror and joy through his love of watching horror, recounts early influences like reading Pet Sematary and Jaws and watching The Exorcist, and explains how he began making work by constantly photographing and filming, including music videos.

He describes getting Affection made through supporter collaboration, producer Austin Walk’s advocacy, and persistence through pandemic delays.

The conversation highlights filmmaking’s collaborative demands, Affection’s blend of sci‑fi and horror rooted in plausible technology, and its commitment to practical effects created by Slither effects artist Dan Rebert with no CGI.

Meza discusses the three-character cast (Ellie, Bruce, Alice), themes of memory, identity, grief, and a tension driven by Bruce’s need for certainty.

Affection

On this episode of Horror Joy, we discuss Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves on Horror Joy, framing it as a dense, meta haunted-house text built from layered narratives: Johnny Truant, an unreliable LA tattoo artist, edits the manuscript of the blind academic Zampanò about the possibly nonexistent documentary The Navidson Record, whose house contains impossible, expanding interior spaces.

We explore the book’s paradoxes, footnotes, shifting typography, and the Minotaur motif (including red strikethroughs like track changes), arguing it satirizes academic monographs and demands active “detective work” from readers.

We connect the novel to internet-era hyperlink logic (blue “house”), liminality and Backrooms, and themes of trauma, memory, remediation, and community, while noting student reactions and ending with joys found in the Navidson explorations, playfulness, and characters like Tom.

The book is an almost impossible labyrinth of references and self-references. But we manage to find some joy.

Brian and Jeff are joined by award winning author Keith Rosson to talk about his most recent book, Coffin Moon.

They explore the role the Vietnam plays in the novel, how the nature of the vampire changes the requirements for the story, and how it acts as a model for bad parenting.

Keith also talks through his understanding of genre, including his own reading habits and how he came to write horror.

Keith offers his take on the role of joy in horror and recommends reading the short fiction of Gordon B. White.

You can find Keith's work and more information here: KeithRosson.com

This is a special, Fresh Cuts version of Horror Joy. Brian and Jeff are joined by long time friend, Jamie to offer immediate thoughts about the recent A24 film, Backrooms.

This recording occurred just minutes after the movie ended outside of a rural movie theater. Please excuse the buzzing and the audio.

We talk about the jump from internet shorts to full length movie, the possible downfalls of trying to collapse the collective imagination into a single entity, the liminal horror, and the incredible sound design.

This is a spoiler free conversation, so listen even if you haven't watched the movie.

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Brian Onishi and Jeff Stoyanoff discuss Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved as a haunted house and ghost story that forces readers to reckon with the historical traumas of chattel slavery, racism, and the “smooth operation” of a world that treats people like property.

They outline the novel’s core cast—Sethe, Baby Suggs, Denver, Paul D, and the embodied apparition Beloved—alongside figures like Schoolteacher, noting the book’s basis in the real story of Margaret Garner and its depiction of lynching, abuse, and infanticide.

Drawing on scholarship and concepts such as rememory, spectrality, and Gothic tradition, they argue Morrison rejects easy “Scooby-Doo” reveals or exorcism in favor of communal acknowledgement and reintegration, supporting their broader claim that America itself is haunted while asking how, and whether, joy can be found in such horror.

Jeff is joined by Scottish writer Jane Flett, whose debut novel Freakslaw is out from Doubleday (UK) and Zando (US), with a forthcoming novel Welcome to the Chaoskampf (May 14).

Flett describes how horror and joy connect through different ways people enjoy fear—adrenaline junkies, “white knucklers,” and “dark copers”—placing herself in the first group.

They discuss haunted houses as horror rooted in inescapable, corrupted “safe” spaces, including hotels and the idea of buildings persisting on longer timescales.

Turning to Freakslaw, set in a late-1990s Scottish mining town disrupted by a traveling funfair, Flett explores small-town conservatism, class, suffering, and joy as disruption, including queer community and Derek’s coming-of-age.

She previews Welcome to the Chaos Camp as a New Orleans story involving climate weirdness, filmmakers, arson, and cult-like non-hierarchical organizing, and recommends Feast While You Can, Carrion Crow, and the film Saint Maud.

https://janeflett.com/

On this episode of Meet Your Maker, Brian is joined by Aimee Pokwatka to talk about her novel Accumulation and the link between horror and joy.

Pokwatka distinguishes pleasure from deeper joy and argues horror places us in “communion with terror,” reminding us of death, grief, and shared human vulnerability in ways that can be sustaining.

She connects this to parenting and domestic life, recalling living in Newtown during the school shooting while nursing her infant.

Pokwatka explains Accumulation’s haunted-house frame as a flexible metaphor for women’s labor, repetition, doubt, and entrapment—including financial constraints—while noting her real house, a found doll, and a sighting of a ghost informed the novel.

http://www.aimeepokwatka.com/