Between The Covers

​ Manderley. The Overlook Hotel. The Bly Estate. The Marsten House. These are just some of the most (in)famous haunted houses in literary history. ​ As one of the most common tropes in the horror genre, the haunted house can either play a central role in the story or be a key character in and of itself, often anchoring the narrative and framing unfolding events. ​ Just as literature has evolved alongside changing societal norms, historical eras, political views, and attitud

Historical background The origins of Southern Gothic as a literary genre can be traced back to American Gothic, which itself arose from the European Gothic popularized in the closing years of the 18th century. Gothic literature uses settings such as remote, ancient, and gloomy environments -old manors, graveyards, haunted castles, and the like- to convey fear, isolation, and dread. Arguably, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic Story was the first purely Gothic w

There's a conflict in every human heart. Between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil, and good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. If you're into cinema, you will immediately identify where that line comes from. In context, that short speech refers to how one man has reached his breaking point, how he has become unmoored from reality and lost any sense of decency, empathy, and mora

A distant bell tolls. Three women in mourning attire watch as their men lift a coffin into its sepulchre. Cue the psychedelic rock track from Acanthus, a graveyard in silhouette and a smoke machine and you will quickly see why The Shiver of the Vampires (Le Frisson des Vampires, 1971) is unequivocally A Product Of Its Time. If you like frumpy velvet outfits, the long takes of 70s French horror (the perfect antidote to the jarring cuts of the 60s New Wave), the verité of on-l

Cinema has featured liminal spaces for decades. In Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), every room, corridor, garden path -and arguably, the Overlook Hotel itself- exuded liminality. The empty subway tunnels in 2025's Exit 8 are another perfect example of the creepy nature of liminal spaces, as is the most recent Backrooms (2026), itself inspired by an almost decade-old internet creepypasta. Cinematic liminal spaces are traditionally associated with horror movies, though thi

“Having reached the end of my poor sinner’s life, my hair now white, I prepare to leave on this parchment my testimony as to the wondrous and terrible events I witnessed in my youth.” So opens Jean-Jaques Annaud’s The Name of the Rose (1986). The words are those of Adso of Melk, a minor character and novice to Franciscan friar William of Baskerville. As a child, watching it on lowly DVD, they captivated me as they could have come right out of any of Lovecraft’s ‘confessional’