Horror Joy

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/

Brian and Jeff continue their haunted house series on Horror Joy with guest Ally Malinenko, discussing her middle grade novel This Appearing House alongside R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps debut Welcome to Dead House.

Malinenko describes the joy of horror—especially for kids—as teaching readers how to face monsters, offering catharsis, and providing language to process fear and trauma.

She explains how This Appearing House uses a haunted-house structure to explore anxiety and the lasting effects of her cancer diagnosis without centering a “cancer book,” including why the diagnosis is largely unstated for young readers.

We also dive into bullying, parent-child gaps, rules and rule-breaking in Stine’s work, of Petey's death, and the nostalgic influence of Scholastic book fairs and iconic cover art.

In this episode Jeff and Brian welcome award-winning writer and editor Dan Coxon to discuss his new book, Come Sing for the Harrowing (Clash Books, April 2026), and how it interrogates and reshapes folk horror’s rigid archetypes through humor, modernity, class, and hybridity.

They also talk through the connections between horror and joy, emphasizing the genre’s supportive community and his preference for weird, uncanny, atmospheric horror that makes the world feel stranger and more exciting.

Coxon explores how genre functions as a bookselling and marketing tool that can limit readers and publishers.

They analyze liminality, ecstatic tonal shifts, and the writing process variability.

Dan recommends Will Maclean’s Solace House and Lucy McKnight Hardy’s Night Babies, and the video game, Disco Elysium.

Check out Dan's work at https://www.dancoxon.com/

In this episode of Horror Joy, Brian and Jeff examine Zach Cregger’s 2022 film Barbarian as a haunted house story without the supernatural, arguing the “haunting” comes from misogyny, capitalism, and systemic failure embedded in an Airbnb in decayed Detroit.

They outline the film’s triptych structure—Tess’s uneasy stay with Keith, AJ’s arrival as the absentee landlord facing rape allegations, and an ’80s flashback revealing Frank as the house’s original torturer—framing these men as escalating forms of masculinity.

The discussion connects hidden basement tunnels to epistemic tension and genre concepts like the Terrible Place, monstrous feminine, and Final Girl, noting failures of policing and protection, and interpreting the title Barbarian as critique of domestic invasion and violence.