Horror Joy

Brian and Jeff interview horror author Rachel Harrison (The Return, Such Sharp Teeth, So Thirsty, Black Sheep) about the relationship between horror and joy, her writing origin story, and her novel Play Nice.

Harrison describes horror’s joy as catharsis and a safe space for fear, anxiety, and “big feelings,” offering empowerment through survival and, as a writer, control.

She recounts studying screenwriting, moving from LA to New York, working TV jobs, writing short speculative fiction (Bad Dolls), and publishing The Return in 2020.

She discusses finding community—especially through Clay McLeod Chapman and Nat Cassidy—during lockdown and navigating “cafeteria anxiety.” On haunted houses, she emphasizes home as supposed safety, and explores tropes of women not being believed, gaslighting, and emotional abuse, including Play Nice’s book-within-a-book framing.

She previews Kiss, Slay, Replay (Sept. 8), recommends Liz Kerin’s How to Disappear Completely, and praises the Netflix series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.

Jeff and Brian continue their Horror Joy exploration of haunted houses by discussing the 1982 classic Poltergeist.

They ask whether the film functions as a conservative celebration of the nuclear family's resilience or a quasi-Marxist critique of capitalism, unbridled consumerism, and television's pernicious influence on youth.

They discuss the housing development's erasure of history by building over a cemetery without moving the bodies, highlight the implications of downward mobility during the Reagan era, and explore Douglas Keller's scholarship on the film deflecting attention from real-world suffering onto occult figures.

They emphasize the isolating nature of suburban homogeneity and consider the film's messy narrative and contested authorship between Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper.

In this episode of Horror Joy, Jeff talks with author Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold, about the relationship between horror and joy

Sullivan links the joy of horror to subverted expectations, catharsis, and the generative possibilities of horror, especially in books, where meaning is co-created with readers and not all answers need be provided.

Sullivan discusses how his Irish Catholic upbringing functions as an enduring identity that shapes his sense of mystery, belief systems, and worldbuilding, including fragility, debate, and misinterpretation as story engines.

He describes his beginnings as a writer through libraries, early storytelling inspired by Jurassic Park, reading widely, manual labor jobs, and later mentorship in a graduate program with author Miriam Toews.

The conversation turns to The Marigold’s Toronto setting, ecological crisis and wildfires, urban wildlife like raccoons, and the novel’s critique of capitalism, corporate greed, and gig-economy precarity.

Jeff and Brian begin a Horror Joy mini-series on haunted and haunting houses by discussing Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining and the Overlook Hotel as a possibly sentient space.

They ask whether the hotel merely contains ghosts or actively amplifies violence, racism, sexism, and repetition.

They critique the “Indian burial ground” trope, discuss Grady’s claims that Jack has “always been” the caretaker, the final photograph’s time-loop implications, and scholarship on hereditary or cyclical violence.

They emphasize the film’s maze motifs (hedge maze, carpets, corridors) and consider the steadicam and “autonomous camera” as intensifying dread, while noting Dick Hallorann’s disposability and ending with “joy” found in the film’s craft and unsettling images.

References:

• Graham Allen. ‘A Mad Image, Chafed by Reality’: Kubrick, the Uncanny and the 4th of July 1921 Photograph in The Shining
• F. Brigo & S. C. Igwe & N. L. Bragazzi. Kubrick’s The Shining and the erased myopathic face
• Laura Mee. The Shining. Liverpool University Press, 2017
• Paul Sunderland. The Autonomous Camera in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Brian and Jeff are joined by author A.C. Wise to talk about joy in horror, her books The Ghost Sequences (2021) and Out of the Drowning Deep (2024), and her new novel Ballad of the Bone Road (Jan. 26, 2026).

Wise describes horror’s joy as an adrenaline-driven extreme emotional response akin to excitement, and traces her horror roots to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, darker fairy tales, and lifelong ghost-story interests.

They discuss how others react to her genre work, her day job at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and shifts in speculative fiction toward mainstream popularity and genre mashups.

Wise explains Out of the Drowning Deep as a noir/horror/science-fantasy blend exploring faith, meaning-making, and a feedback loop between divinity and belief, including inhuman, unsettling angels.

She recounts the near-rights-issue backstory of The Ghost Sequences cover and notes the title story’s inspiration from a ghost-themed art installation.

A.C.'s recent horror joys: Sinners, Staircase in the Woods, The Buffalo Hunter, and the game Dead Take.

A.C. Wise Website

In this Horror Joy episode, Jeff and Brian discuss the 1992 film Candyman as the final entry in an “academic horror” course, focusing on how the movie links urban legend, the university, and racialized violence.

They follow graduate student Helen Lyle’s dissertation research into the Candyman myth at Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, highlighting how academic distance and the “white gaze” turn Black suffering, especially Daniel Robitaille’s lynching, into an object of study.

Drawing on writers such as Zayla Crocker, George Yancy, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Robin R. Means Coleman, they argue the film reflects its early-1990s moment (including Rodney King and the Los Angeles uprising), critiques systemic racism and misogyny, and frames Helen as both privileged researcher and exploited academic.

They Will Say: Ritual Naming and Living beyond the Pale with Candyman

Horror Noire A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present

Bernard Rose’s Candyman and the Rhetoric of Racial Fear in the Reagan and Bush Years

Jeff and Brian are joined by director Rod Blackhurst about his forthcoming independent horror film Dolly, releasing in theaters only on March 6, 2026.

Blackhurst explains how horror can produce joy by confronting internal dread—identity loss, isolation, and moral extremity—through a cinematic language that bypasses reason and provokes visceral response.

He describes Dolly as an extreme, unrelenting film rooted in a real person’s fears about inheriting a “monster” mother’s traits, and as a collision between opposing views of motherhood and family.

Dolls function as uncanny stand-ins for children and chosen family, with a larger, partially withheld mythology.

Blackhurst discusses casting, including Sean William Scott’s dramatic role and Fabianne Therese’s demanding lead performance, emphasizing actor safety, and he rejects “torture porn” as his aim. He also reflects on gatekeeping, genre labels, influences like Barbarian, and using proof-of-concept shorts (Baby Girl, Night Swim) to get features made.

This episode of Horror Joy turns to academic horror through Mariama Diallo’s 2022 film Master, set at the fictional elite Ancaster University. Our discussion treats the film’s central claim that what haunts is not the past but the present and future: racism, microaggressions, elitism, and the suffocating atmosphere of tradition.

We welcome returning guest T (S. Trimble Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto) and first-time guest Joe Vallese (NYU faculty fellow, expository writing), editor of It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror.

The conversation then unpacks Master’s slow-burn dread: Gail Bishop (Regina Hall), the newly appointed first Black master; Jasmine, a first-year Black student; and Liv, a professor up for tenure, all navigating both explicit racism and subtler academic violence.

We discuss the Scarlet Letter as a canonical text used to police interpretation and power in the classroom, including Jasmine’s failing grade and the gaslighting embedded in academic evaluation.

In this episode of Horror Joy, we dive into the intertwining relationship between horror and joy with guest Daisy Pierce, author of 'Something in the Walls,' 'The Missing,' and 'The Silence.'

Daisy shares her thoughts on how horror provides a safe outlet for experiencing fear and anxiety, and discusses her origins and influences as a writer.

We explore the different cultural approaches to folklore in the US and UK, the power dynamics behind traditions, and the challenges of writing horror, especially from a female perspective.

Daisy also touches on her interest in ghost hunting and shares some recent horror media that has brought her joy.

Find Daisy at https://daisypearce.com/

In this episode of 'Horror Joy,' Jeff and Brian delve into Robert Rodriguez's 1998 film 'The Faculty.'

The episode explores the film's portrayal of high school alienation, the nineties cultural backdrop, and the use of alien parasites as a metaphor for societal issues.

We discuss the film’s all-star cast, its nostalgic nineties aesthetic, and its underlying themes related to drugs, authority figures, and football culture.

The episode also highlights the anti-lesbianism strain evident in late nineties teen movies and the joy found in the film’s tongue-in-cheek horror elements.