In The Midnight Shift, Detective Su-Yeon is investigating a series of apparent suicides at Cheolma Rehabilitation Hospital, where elderly patients keep jumping from the sixth floor with handwritten suicide notes but mysteriously drained of blood. When she encounters Violette (a Korean adoptee raised in France who now works as a mysterious vampire hunter) Su-Yeon gets an answer she wasn’t expecting: a vampire is targeting the hospital’s loneliest, most isolated patients, the ones nobody will miss. The novel alternates between Su-Yeon’s present-day investigation, Violette’s backstory in 1980s France (particularly her intense, Carmilla-esque relationship with a vampire named Lily), and the perspective of Nanju, a nurse at the hospital with her own complicated connection to the supernatural events. Cheon builds a marvelously moody atmosphere around the idea that vampires hunt “lonely blood,” that is, people so isolated that they’ve forgotten how to cry, whose abandonment has altered the very chemistry coursing through their veins.
The French flashback sections were fantastic, capturing Violette as a lonely adoptee drawn to Lily in ways that feel both dangerous and beautiful and vital. That gothic, sapphic tension could have sustained an entire novel on its own. The premise about vampires targeting society’s most abandoned people (the elderly patients warehoused in facilities where no one visits) is compelling social commentary wrapped in supernatural trappings, though this leans more melancholy and atmospheric than actually frightening.
But I found myself increasingly confused by things that were referenced but never actually explained or shown. Vampire lore is mentioned constantly (there’s some code between vampires and hunters, as well as specific rules about when Violette can kill them), but I never quite understood how any of it actually worked. How does Violette kill vampires? What exactly are the rules she keeps referencing? Who does she work for and why? Characters kept talking about things like they made sense, but the actual mechanics and logic stayed frustratingly vague. The characters themselves never quite came alive for me either: Su-Yeon drifts through her investigation in this oddly detached way, Nanju hints at interesting backstory but gets so little page time I couldn’t really get invested in her troubles, and even Violette (despite all her flashback chapters) I never fully understood what drove her or how she’d ended up in this life.
The ending left me cold, partly because I was genuinely confused about what had actually happened and why. Things wrapped up quickly with what felt like important revelations, but I couldn’t quite follow the logic or see how the pieces connected. Maybe I missed something, or maybe crucial information just wasn’t on the page; either way, I finished feeling like I’d only gotten half the story. After all that atmospheric buildup, I wanted clarity and emotional payoff, but instead got rushed explanations that raised more questions than they answered. The ambition is clear: blending crime procedural with Gothic horror and exploring queer longing and cultural displacement, but the execution leaves too much unexplained. I kept reading because the mood and premise were enjoyably intriguing, but by the end, I felt like I’d watched a movie with several key scenes missing.
Bonus! Three new cryptid-inspired scents from Poesie (against an eerie Burchfield backdrop)…
Nessie: Tea steeped with blossoms and honey, a thick floral sweetness of highland flowers’ pollen suspended in viscous light. A kind of gold that pools slow, catches afternoon sun slanting through old glass, turns a chipped ceramic mug into a chalice. Wool blankets hung near yesterday’s fires, smoke absorbed into the weave, the ghost of peat clinging to fabric. Rain-grey mornings of soft, tannic ritual matters, steam as prayer, rising toward low clouds.
Mothman: Spiced warmth with its aggressive, bitter edges sanded down, autumn’s recognizable onslaught muzzled by dried leaves’ somber poetry, and tobacco’s civilizing influence. Red musk behaving itself for once, button-popped bodice replaced by a cashmere turtleneck, nutmeg simmering quietly, minding its own business instead of all up in yours. Unruly spices acting right, like their Gran is watching from heaven, turning potential chaos into orderly aromatic gorgeousness. Tea brewed strong enough to stain porcelain, threading through like the dirty bass line in a song you can’t stop humming, even though maybe it’s quite naughty, and who knows, maybe Gran IS listening.
Jersey Devil: Pine resin, cool and sharp, needles sun-baked but chilly, their green gone eerily concentrated and alien. Coastal salt drifts through forest density, ocean air wandering inland, turning shadows crystalline, evergreen ghosting translucent at the edges. Arboreal incense, blood-dark and frost-blessed, threading through branches that claw and clutch. Tea as shadow, as sanctuary, as a centering, grounding the strange marriage of forest meeting shoreline, land suspended between what roots deep and what erodes away, between darkness that grows and salt that preserves.
Looking for more 31 Days of Horror? Day Three 2024 | Day Three 2023 | Day Three 2022 | Or check my 31 Days of Horror category for more!
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After yesterday’s disappointment, I needed something good. Or at least something not terrible! Final Destination: Bloodlines was exactly the combination of not terrible and actually quite good that I was hoping for! Full transparency: I began watching this movie a month ago, but stopped after 20 minutes because I decided it would make good October fodder. And I was right!
The premise is ridiculous, and if you’ve seen even one, you know all you need to know: Death has a design, and if you mess with it, Death will find increasingly elaborate ways to correct the cosmic ledger with outrageously elaborate Rube Goldbergian setups. Is this movie dumb? Absolutely. Does it make any logical sense? Not even a little. Does it try to say something profound about fate, mortality, or the human condition? Well, sort of, a little? But that’s ok! But the big difference between this and yesterday’s crappy waste of time is that Bloodlines knows it’s ridiculous and leans into that with such absolute commitment and affection that it is genuinely joyful to watch.
The setup: In 1968, Iris has a premonition about a Space Needle-esque restaurant disaster and manages to save everyone. Flash forward to the present, and her granddaughter Stefani is having recurring nightmares about that night. Turns out Death’s been working through the original survivors and their descendants, everyone who shouldn’t exist because they were supposed to die that night. (I just visited the Space Needle recently, and I thought about that opening scene A LOT when I was gingerly stepping on the glass floor! As a matter of fact, those are probably the scenes that freaked me out most, which is why that’s mostly the imagery I’ve selected for this post.)
It’s a neat expansion of the franchise’s mythology that seems to respect what came before while giving us something new. The “bloodline” angle makes the stakes feel bigger and the design more convoluted and intricate.
But we’re not here for the plot. We’re here for the deaths! And Bloodlines delivers. An MRI machine. A backyard barbecue. A garbage truck. Everyday situations transformed into elaborate death traps where one wrong move sets off a cascade of carnage. The film understands these sequences work best when you can see all the pieces being set up, when you’re silently screaming at characters to notice the garden hose, the glass shards, the precarious positioning of that lawn mower.
The tone is exactly right. This isn’t torture porn, it’s slapstick with arterial spray. There’s a darkly comic sensibility running through every kill that acknowledges the absurdity without winking so hard it breaks the tension. When someone gets demolished in the most convoluted way possible, you’re allowed to gasp and laugh. The film gives you permission to have fun with the horror.
The practical effects are gory, gorgeous chaos. Bodies don’t just die—they’re eviscerated, impaled, crushed, and dismembered with genuine craftsmanship. Kind of makes you appreciate the artistry while also wanting to look away and maybe puke a little bit.
Tony Todd. Oh, Tony Todd. His final film role is here, playing the series’ mysterious mortician who always seems to know a very weird amount about Death’s design. He was clearly unwell during filming, and watching him deliver his lines with that iconic voice coming from a visibly weakened body is heartbreaking. The film gives him a proper sendoff, finally explaining his character’s connection to everything in a way that’s both satisfying and surprisingly moving. It shredded me, honestly. This absolutely legendary performer, knowing his time was limited, giving us one last performance that’s a goodbye to his character and (whether intentionally or not, but it surely must have been) a meditation on mortality itself in a franchise built around cheating death.
Bloodlines gets it: you don’t need to pretend you’re saying something profound to make an effective horror movie (or an effective movie, period). This is a movie about wacky, sadistic Looney Tunes-esque cartoon deaths, and it never tries to dress it up as something more important.
It’s funny, it’s gross, it’s inventive, and in its own weird way, oddly heartfelt. Exactly what I needed.
Looking for more 31 Days of Horror? Day Two 2024 | Day Two 2023 | Day Two 2022 | Or check my 31 Days of Horror category for more!
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Imaginary Authors The Abandoned Mansion
Haunted tiki bar, spectral mai tai floating in the periphery while some scratchy exotica album plays from a speaker you can’t locate, Martin Denny maybe, or Les Baxter’s jungle fantasies, that mid-century escapist thing that was already nostalgic for something that never existed, already haunted by its own appropriations, its own colonial fantasies dressed up as lounge entertainment, which is absolutely not what this fragrance is about but it’s where my nose took me, this tiki bar detour having nothing to do with the brand’s actual abandoned mansion concept.
The fruit here does exactly what I want fruit to do in fragrance, which is be weird about it, ashen and dusty and somber, bruised and semi-preserved like fruit that’s been drinking alongside the patrons, drifting in its own languid dissolution, melting into the upholstery, losing definition under hazy torch light, not trying to be fresh or bright or engaging, just strange and a little sad and smoky.
There’s a mustiness here, old wood and older paper, that particular smell of closed-up places where the air has gone stale and sweet at the same time, resort towns in the off-season where the bars are shuttered and the bamboo decorations gather dust and you can still smell a thousand phantom drinks soaked into the floorboards, lime and orgeat and something vaguely tropical gone sour in the humidity. Beach cottages abandoned after hurricane season, with everything softly deteriorating in the damp air, fruit bowls forgotten on kitchen counters, paperbacks yellowing and swelling and smelling like vanilla and wood pulp slowly decomposing, all of it fading together. This is October in places where October doesn’t mean sweaters, where fall is more conceptual than meteorological, where the season changes because the calendar says so, but the air is still thick and warm.
Something resinous and golden underneath, woody-amber earthiness, not cold-earth but tropical-earth, the smell of wood that’s never known frost, rooms that stay humid year-round, dust that never quite settles because there’s always moisture in the air. The smokiness like the ghost of a bar where fruits lounged and got tipsy, daddy-o, got a little loose, a little wild. The kind of abandoned that’s specific to semi-tropical places, where things don’t freeze and die back, but just slowly molder and transform, go spectral in the heat.
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categories: 31 days of horror
First things first: Weapons. That’s the title. Just… Weapons.
The film’s concept: a witch is using spellwork to “weaponize” people, turning them into instruments of violence through dark magic. And what do the filmmakers decide to call this? Weapons. Because when you have a potentially interesting supernatural premise about possession, control, and human bodies turned into literal weapons through witchcraft, why bother with nuance or intrigue in your title? Why not just take your core concept and reduce it to the most literal, obvious single word possible? It’s a title for an Idiocracy timeline, the kind of aggressively dumb choice that makes you wonder if anyone in the room raised their hand to suggest, perhaps, something with a shred of mystery or poetry to it.
As for what Weapons is actually about: In the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, seventeen children from the same third-grade class wake up at 2:17 a.m., walk out of their homes with their arms outstretched, and vanish into the night. Only one student, a quiet boy named Alex, remains. His teacher, Julia Garner, arrives at school the next morning to find her classroom empty save for this one traumatized child.
The town immediately turns on Justine. Someone spray paints “WITCH” on her car, parents hound her at meetings, and she becomes the focal point of everyone’s rage and grief. Among the devastated parents is Josh Brolin, whose obsessive investigation into his son’s disappearance leads him down increasingly dark paths. The film unfolds through multiple perspectives: the aforementioned two, as well as the school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong, who they did so dirty here), a troubled cop, and a desperate junkie.
Through this fragmented structure, which works …sorta…for about the first two perspective shifts and then becomes exhausting, we eventually discover that Alex’s “great-aunt” Gladys is actually a witch who has moved into the family home. Using bells, talismans, and blood-soaked branches, she can turn people into zombified puppets and siphon their life force to sustain herself. She had Alex bring home personal items from each of his classmates, which she used to activate and summon them to her basement, where they’ve been kept in a trance-like state ever since. Meanwhile, poor Alex has been forced to spoon-feed soup to his catatonic parents and seventeen classmates to keep them alive.
The “horror” of Gladys is almost entirely predicated on the fact that she’s old and sick. Her wrinkled skin, her frail body, her age itself, all presented as inherently monstrous and terrifying. When she puts on makeup and a wig to venture out, the film frames it as grotesque. It’s lazy shortcut horror that substitutes “eccentric old lady is scary!” and “wrinkles are bad!” for actual menace. We never even see her plan working; she looks just as decrepit at the end as the beginning. So what was the point? Why did she think stealing children’s life force would help her? The film has no answers because it hasn’t actually thought any of this through.
The characters make baffling decisions that exist only to keep the plot lurching forward. When Gladys cuts Justine’s hair for a spell, why not just grab something from her car right then? Why keep Alex alive when he becomes a massive liability—the ONLY surviving kid, living in a house with newspaper covering every window?
Yes, the police investigate Alex’s house…once. Gladys does her creaky old lady act, they leave satisfied, and that’s it. In a small town. After the most bizarre mass disappearance imaginable. With the FBI supposedly involved. Okay…? Meanwhile, the entire town has turned on Justine based on nothing, but nobody thinks the weird newspaper-covered house with the sole surviving child warrants a second look? Lordy be with the lazy writing that needs everyone to be stupid for the plot to function.
And then there’s the inexplicably dumb dream sequence where Josh Brolin sees a giant automatic weapon with “2:17” displayed on it, floating above a house. It’s heavy-handed AND ham-fisted imagery (it’s so bad I have to use both) that mistakes obviousness for profundity. A floating gun with a timestamp! Get it? Do you get it?!! The film seems desperate for you to think this means something deep, but it’s just sloppy visual shorthand. Too blunt to be unsettling, too undeveloped to serve as actual commentary. It’s probably there because Cregger thought it would look cool and vaguely Important.
The segmented structure feels like padding. The junkie and cop segments exist purely to deliver exposition and get themselves caught so they can serve as weapons in the climax. Remove them entirely and you lose twenty minutes but virtually nothing of substance.
Speaking of the climax: Alex somehow knows how to use witch magic (how? why? can anyone do this?) and turns his hypnotized classmates against Gladys. They tear her apart in a scene that can’t decide what it wants to be—is this supposed to be horrifying? Darkly funny? Both? The film lurches between treating the violence as genuinely disturbing (children ripping an elderly woman to shreds) and playing it for absurdist laughs (look how over-the-top this is!), but it never earns either response. It needed to commit to one tone or find a way to blend them skillfully, the way something like, say, Evil Dead 2 manages. Instead, you’re left watching something that feels accidentally ridiculous when it’s trying to be serious, or oddly mean-spirited when it’s trying to be fun. The spell breaks, the kids go home (wait, didn’t the opening narration say they were “never seen again”?), though most remain mute and traumatized. Alex’s parents are institutionalized. Roll credits.
I didn’t find it scary, not even remotely. Not that I need my horror to be massively scary! Sometimes, inflicting a mild sense of disquiet works just fine! But this was a few cheap jump scares, zero sustained dread. Julia Garner’s performance is flat and unengaged. Benedict Wong brings genuine warmth to Principal Marcus, and the film thanks him by having his character violently bash his boyfriend’s head in before being killed off unceremoniously in the middle of traffic. Lovely.
Weapons mistakes withholding information for building mystery, conflates visual obviousness with symbolism, and passes off “weird old lady” for a functional villain. It’s mystery-box storytelling at its most hollow. Booo!
Not exactly the auspicious start to the month I was hoping for. At least there are 30 more chances to find something better? Peep at my Notion list to get a gander of what I’d like to watch this month, maybe you’d like to watch along with me!
Looking for more 31 Days of Horror? Day One 2024 | Day One 2023 | Day One 2022 | Or check my 31 Days of Horror category for more!
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?
For the final day of my horror marathon, I’m watching Ghost Story from 1981 – a choice that feels meant to be after spending time with Alice Krige in She Will yesterday. Throughout this month of horror viewing, I’ve followed various threads and themes, and one of the most intriguing has been my unplanned journey through Alice Krige’s performances. From Gretel and Hansel to She Will, I’ve found myself drawn to her remarkable ability to transform from vulnerable to vengeance-seeking, from earthly to otherworldly. Ghost Story, one of her earliest roles, seems a perfect way to close this journey, as it showcases her gift for inhabiting characters who move effortlessly between our world and something more mysterious.
Though I read Peter Straub’s novel years ago, the details have largely faded from memory, leaving behind only atmospheric impressions and half-remembered plot points that feel more like déjà vu than actual recollection. It’s a peculiar way to approach the film adaptation – familiar yet fresh, like returning to a house you lived in as a child. [Edit: I just read this review to refamiliarize myself with the book, and they make it sound so good that I almost want to read it again.]
The story follows the members of the Chowder Society, four elderly friends who gather regularly to share ghost stories. When one of their sons dies mysteriously, it forces them to confront a terrible secret from their youth. Through flashbacks, we learn of Eva Galli, a beautiful and mysterious woman who captivated their younger selves. During a drunken encounter, their unwanted advances led to her death – a crime they covered up and have kept secret for fifty years. Now, a woman named Alma Mobley, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Eva, has appeared in their lives, seemingly intent on revenge. Even though I don’t recall much of what I read, I’m realizing that the film strips away much of what made Straub’s novel so rich – in the book, Eva is an entirely different sort of supernatural entity, and the town of Milburn itself is practically a character, with Straub weaving an intricate tapestry of its inhabitants, their relationships, and the way evil slowly infiltrates their lives. The movie foregoes this larger canvas to focus more narrowly on the Chowder Society and their secret.
The film brings together an ensemble cast of Hollywood legends – Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and John Houseman – as members of the Chowder Society. At first, their old-world mannerisms and antiquated phrases like “twaddle” and “the jimjams” paint a picture of genteel respectability. But as the film peels back layers of time, we discover a far uglier truth. The flashbacks reveal not distinguished gentlemen, but predatory young men surrounding a lone woman, their drunken desire leading to Eva’s death.
Watching this in 2024, it’s impossible not to think of how frequently we’ve seen this pattern play out in real life – respected, powerful men whose carefully maintained veneers of dignity mask histories of violence against women. With each new revelation about a beloved male celebrity or public figure, the shock lessens; the pattern becomes clearer. These men in Ghost Story, with their literary quotations and refined mannerisms, represent a particular type of masculine privilege that uses cultural sophistication to disguise darker impulses. As the internet wisdom goes: “men is too headache” – a phrase that manages to be both funny and devastatingly accurate when considering centuries of similar stories, both fictional and real.
The parallels between Ghost Story and yesterday’s viewing of She Will are striking. In both films, Krige portrays women who suffer abuse at the hands of men in positions of power and influence. Both characters find their way to revenge through supernatural means – Eva through ghostly manifestation, Veronica through the power of the witch-burned land. It’s fascinating to see how Krige, from these early performances to her recent work, has brought such depth to these stories of women turning trauma into terrible power.
Horror delights in showing up everywhere – in perfumes and podcasts, in fantasy shows and folk tales. It lives in vengeful ghosts and haunted apartments, but it also surfaces in unexpected moments, in stories that seem to be about something else entirely. Through films about power and transformation, through tales of revenge and redemption, horror keeps finding new ways to speak to both personal and universal truths. And that’s the thrill of it. Each October, I return to this ritual of shadows – watching past midnight, reading between meetings, stealing moments wherever I can find them – because horror reminds us we’re not alone in our darkest moments. It gives shape to our fears, voice to our rage, and sometimes, unexpectedly, light in the darkness.
P.S. Here’s a little video I shared today of some Halloween fragrance picks!
P.P.S. I also watched the new Salem’s Lot this October, but it was so bad I decided not to even write about it! What did you think?
Day Thirty-One of 31 Days Of Horror in years past: 2023 // 2022 // 2021
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For day 30 of my 31 days of horror celebration, I found myself drawn to She Will, a 2022 psychological horror/folk horror film that feels like a hidden gem in the “good for her” subgenre. If you’re not familiar with this particular corner of horror, it encompasses films where women who have been wronged find their way to revenge or redemption, often through supernatural means. Think Jennifer’s Body or The Vvitch, where female trauma transforms into something powerful and terrible. Midsommar frequently comes up in these discussions, though there’s ongoing debate about whether it truly fits the category, given how the cult systematically manipulates Dani, breaking her down and rebuilding her as part of their commune through careful orchestration of trauma and false community. These genre conversations are always evolving as we collectively examine these films through different lenses. What matters is what resonates with you, and She Will definitely felt like a strong addition to my own list.
Beyond its compelling premise, what sealed the deal for me was the casting of Alice Krige in the lead role. Having just watched her mesmerizing performance in Gretel and Hansel earlier this month, I believe I’m entering my Alice Krige era. Though I primarily knew her as the Borg Queen from Star Trek, I’m now discovering her extensive career in horror – a delightful revelation that’s perfectly timed with my month-long horror deep dive.
In She Will, Krige plays Veronica Ghent, an aging film star who retreats to a remote Scottish healing center following a double mastectomy. Accompanied by her young nurse Desi (Kota Eberhardt), Veronica arrives at a mystical woodland estate where the ground is tragically rich with the ashes of women burned as witches centuries ago. As Veronica grapples with her own trauma – both from her surgery and the abuse she suffered as a child actor – she discovers that the land itself seems to be offering her a supernatural means of retribution.
The film cast its spell on me immediately, reminding me, at least initially, of weird fiction wizard Robert Aickman’s eerie story “Into the Woods.” Like Margaret Sawyer in Aickman’s tale, Veronica finds herself at a remote retreat that promises some form of healing or escape. Just as mysterious paths surround Margaret’s Kurhus through dense Swedish forests, Veronica’s retreat is encircled by Scottish woods that feel alive with strange possibility. In both works, the isolation isn’t just geographic – it’s a severance from the normal world that allows for profound transformation. Both women enter these spaces as one thing and risk emerging as something else entirely. The Scottish wilderness in She Will is captured with the same kind of brooding atmosphere that Aickman conjures in his prose – a sense of gloom and barrenness that somehow promises something more than mere desolation. The trees stand like ancient sentinels wrapped in perpetual fog and mist, creating that same chest-clutching unease that Aickman does so masterfully.
Aside from immensely enjoying the brooding atmosphere and reveling in my fondness for “people head off to a remote place and weirdness ensues” horror, the heart of the movie lies in watching the relationship between Veronica and Desi unfold. There’s something quite lovely about seeing their initially frosty dynamic gradually warm into something genuine and meaningful. Their growing connection grounds all the supernatural elements in something deeply human and real.
Clint Mansell’s haunting score further enhances the film’s emotional resonance. As a devoted fan of Mansell’s work on The Fountain (my favorite soundtrack of all time), I was thrilled to find his signature ethereal, swelling compositions enhancing the film’s otherworldly elements.
Looking back, I wish I had planned a double feature of She Will and Gretel and Hansel – both films showcase Krige’s remarkable talent for bringing depth and nuance to roles that blur the line between victim and avenger, between the natural and supernatural. Both stories exist in that liminal space where fairy tale meets horror, where women’s pain transforms into power.
This late in my horror marathon, it’s been fascinating to trace the various themes and performers that have captured my attention – from my exploration of apartment horror to my Osgood Perkins phase, and now this unexpected Alice Krige mini-retrospective. She Will is perhaps among my favorites of this month’s viewing, offering something sophisticated and strange, a folk horror tale about vengeance that feels more like a dark fairy tale about resurrection and redemption.
Day Thirty of 31 Days Of Horror in years past: 2023 // 2022 // 2021
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As we approach the end of our 31 Days of Horror, I’m taking a slight detour from our usual fare of films and novels to explore the visual arts – specifically, the mesmerizing and unsettling work of Marci Washington.
While her artwork appears in my book The Art of Darkness: A Treasure of the Morbid, Melancholic, and Macabre, my fascination with her ghostly visions predates the book’s conception, and if you are unfamiliar, I think you’ll soon understand why her work deserves a spotlight during this season of shadows.
Before we dive into Washington’s spectral world, a brief reminder about The Art of Darkness. This book was, as I’ve often said, born in my blood – a culmination of my lifelong obsession with what lurks in the shadows. It’s a carefully curated exploration of artworks that haunt and horrify, mesmerize and delight, examining how artists throughout history have grappled with the darker aspects of the human condition.
The book spans centuries of artistic expression, investigating how artists have channeled their fears, obsessions, and inner darkness into powerful visual statements, asking vital questions about why we’re drawn to the macabre and what comfort we might find in facing our demons.
In her piece “Through the Thinnest of Veils,” which appears in The Art of Darkness, a shadowy figure in flowing white seems to be simultaneously emerging from and dissolving into the darkened wallpaper behind it. The scene is illuminated as if by nothing more than our eyes adjusting to midnight darkness or perhaps a slim sliver of moon through filmy curtains.
The wallpaper pattern is barely discernible, appearing almost rotted, as if infected by black mold, yet there’s an undeniable beauty in this decaying opulence.
Washington’s work creates windows into multiple dark narratives that exist in a liminal space between past and present. Her Gothic tableaux unfold in series after haunting series: pale, debauched ghosts posed like fashion magazine models against haunted manor backdrops; a grey stone lodge set against an eerily bloodless aurora; a clifftop crowned with a crumbling castle that could have emerged from Simon Marsden’s haunted lens; an enigmatic sphinx with eyes cast moonward in an agony of ennui; twins with long hair and piercing gazes that could have stepped from a Jean Rollin film.
These scenes of decadent society in crisis, these explorations of haunted houses seem to pulse with ancestral memory. Looking at these pieces, one gets the sense that darkness itself is seeking expression through her brush – not as something to fear, but as a medium through which forgotten stories and buried truths emerge. The paintings feel less like creations than revelations, as if Washington has found a way to tune into frequencies that whisper from the shadows, channeling voices that have long waited for their moment to speak.
Working in flat washes of gouache and watercolor, she creates grotesque faces and distorted bodily forms that seem to stare beyond the page into another dimension. Her palette captures that precise moment where fall surrenders to winter – somber dark greens, blacks, and creams punctuated by shocking splashes of blood red and enriched with brown and gold hues that hint at faded opulence. It’s eternally night in her world, whether we’re peering into candlelit drawing rooms or watching figures dissolve into moonless forests.
In her compositions, dismembered bloody hands and heads float suspended in negative space, while livid figures collapse within rooms where the wallpaper itself seems alive with malevolent intent. The patterns, inspired by Edwardian designs, have evolved into something predatory – all sharp angles and hungry shadows where ghosts might make their home. Her world is one of hidden stories, bloody handwritten letters, spirits that refuse to stay buried, forest threats that lurk just beyond the frame, poisoned drinks in crystal glasses, and haunted manors that hold centuries of secrets.
Washington uses the familiar tropes of Gothic horror – the haunted house, the ancestral curse, the vampire’s kiss – to create something that feels both classic and unnervingly contemporary. Her artwork suggests that history isn’t a linear progression but a cyclical haunting. The ghosts of past empires, particularly those of Edwardian England, continue to cast long shadows over our present moment.
Looking at her pieces evokes the great Gothic novels – Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and the like. Like these masterpieces, her work uses the seductive conventions of Gothic horror to draw viewers into a deeper contemplation of decay, both moral and physical. Beneath the surface of her ghostly figures and decaying mansions lies a darker tale of spiritual crisis and cultural anxiety that feels remarkably relevant to our own uncertain times.
Her more recent work seems to suggest the possibility of awakening from this societal stupor, with figures reaching between realms as if seeking ancient knowledge and long-suppressed power. In one striking piece from “A Spell To Break The Spell,” a woman looms with arms outstretched overhead, her pose echoed by a spider suspended in its perfect web beside her. Behind her, a riot of nocturnal blooms erupts – spindly white lilies and other night flowers burst forth while shadowy branches descend and tangle overhead, their yellow leaves flickering like flames yet fluttering like moths.
What at first appears as a gesture of menace reveals itself as something more complex – a position of resolution, of determination. The images are both beautiful and terrible, suggesting that transformation requires facing our darkest truths.
This is why dark art matters. When we engage with work like Washington’s, we’re not just indulging in morbid fascination. We’re participating in a centuries-old tradition of using art to process our fears, confront our demons, and find beauty in the darkness.
As this season of horror continues, I invite you to lose yourself in both Washington’s work and The Art of Darkness. These paintings hold secrets in their shadows – yours, mine, ours – waiting in the darkness between wake and sleep, between past and present, between what was and what haunts us still.
Day Twenty-Nineof 31 Days Of Horror in years past: 2023 // 2022 // 2021
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The First Omen hit theaters this year, promising to reveal the dark origins of the infamous Antichrist story that launched the franchise. But before we get into how this prequel manages to make satanic prophecies boring (how??), I should mention that my experience with The Omen series is pretty much limited to a maybe-memory.
Okay, so here’s the thing about The Omen franchise and me – my earliest memory of it might not even be a real memory? I was like five or six, wandering around my grandmother’s house, and I stumbled into a room where the TV was playing what I think was The Omen. All I remember are Dobermans barking at a gravesite, and to this day, thinking about that scene still terrifies me, and I won’t go anywhere near Doberman… but honestly, who knows if that was even the right movie? My sister claims I made her watch it with me when she was thirteen, but I have zero recollection of that. Then again, I barely remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, which is actually one of the main reasons I do this whole October horror blog thing – and really, why I blog at all. It’s like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for future-me to remember that hey, I existed and did some stuff.
The First Omen commits what might be horror’s greatest sin: it’s boring. Set in 1971 Rome, we follow Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American novitiate preparing to take her final vows at a Catholic orphanage. The setup promises dark secrets, religious conspiracy, and supernatural horror. What it delivers instead is a paint-by-numbers exercise in predictability.
And let me tell you, I called EVERYTHING. Not because I’m some kind of genius film critic or horror savant – this movie is just that obvious. At every turn, even in its most specific moments, The First Omen telegraphs its punches so clearly you’d think it was reading from a “How to Make a Religious Horror Movie” handbook. Margaret’s roommate? Saw it coming. The orphanage’s dark secrets? Called it. The true nature of her own existence? I’d sketched out the entire revelation in my head halfway through the film.
There’s a car accident scene. And not just that this accident happened, and how, and when, but even very specifically what ends up clutched in Margaret’s hands afterward… I saw it coming from a mile away. Actually… there are TWO car accidents and I predicted them both! At this point, I was basically playing Movie Plot Bingo and getting blackout every time.
Bill Nighy shows up as Cardinal Lawrence, which, of course, is great, and in fact, my sister and I joked that this review should merely consist of: “Last night, I saw a movie with Bill Nighy in it.” Nell Tiger Free genuinely tries her best with what she’s given, bringing an earnest vulnerability to Margaret that the movie honestly doesn’t deserve. But when you can predict every “shocking” revelation, every “surprise” twist, and every “dramatic” turn, it’s kind of hard to stay invested.
Here’s the thing about prequels, especially ones dealing with well-established mythologies like The Omen: we already know where this story ends up. We know about Damien, we know about the whole Antichrist business, we know the broad strokes of how this all plays out. So if you’re going to drag us back to the beginning, you better make that beginning absolutely spectacular. You need to show us something we didn’t expect, give us some mind-blowing revelation that makes us see the entire franchise in a new light, or at least tell the story in such a compelling way that we forget we know the ending.
Instead, The First Omen just… connects the dots. It’s like watching someone fill out a paint-by-numbers picture where you can already see all the numbers. Sure, technically you’re seeing how it all began, but in the least interesting way possible. It’s not just that I could predict every twist and turn – it’s that the movie seems completely uninterested in doing anything surprising or meaningful with its position as an origin story. Why even bother telling us how it all started if you’re not going to make that beginning remarkable?
You know what’s funny? That maybe-memory of catching glimpses of the original Omen at my grandmother’s house is more interesting than anything in this prequel. At least that experience left enough of an impression that I’m still wondering about it decades later. This new movie? I’m already struggling to remember parts of it, and I just watched it.
This is exactly why I do these 31 Days of Horror posts. Because otherwise, this movie would just blend into the fog of “oh yeah, I think I saw that once” memories. At least now I have written proof that I sat through it and somehow managed to become a horror movie fortune teller in the process. Not because I’m special – this movie is just THAT predictable.
You know what’s weird? I didn’t set out to watch religious horror this October. My viewing plans were all about late ’90s nostalgia, old apartment-based creepiness, and my ongoing fascination with horror that deals with media, technology, and archivists. I even developed a short-lived Osgood Perkins phase (before Long Legs maybe killed that particular obsession). But somehow, I’ve found myself knee-deep in devil babies and Catholic dread.
Just think about it: we’ve had The Sentinel’s watchful priest guarding an actual portal to hell, Apartment 7A‘s devil-baby cult shenanigans, the Catholic Church’s involvement in Grotesquerie, and Evil‘s X-Files-but-make-it-Catholic investigations into religious phenomena. And now here’s The First Omen, arriving like some kind of lazy, predictable cherry on top of this unplanned religious horror sundae.
Maybe it’s not just me. Religious horror seems to be having a moment right now, which makes sense in its own weird way. In times of uncertainty (and wow wow wow do we have lots of those), people tend to grapple with bigger questions about faith, evil, and what lies beyond. Plus, there’s something eternally compelling about taking the symbols and structures meant to comfort us and turning them into sources of terror. Though I wish The First Omen had done something more interesting with these elements than just checking off boxes from the Religious Horror For Dummies handbook.
Day Twenty-Eight of 31 Days Of Horror in years past: 2023 // 2022 // 2021
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There’s something deliciously horrible about watching a grim serial killer thriller while visiting my baby sister, whose usual viewing preferences lean heavily toward period dramas, Friends, and Taylor Swift tours. She still hasn’t forgiven me for involving her in my 1899 binge a few Christmases ago! She has very little patience for nonlinear, timey-wimey bullshit, for the surreal and experimental, or for disjointed, unreliable storytelling. Also: she is absolutely not a horror fan.
But here I am, eight episodes deep into Grotesquerie on her Hulu account, probably forever altering her algorithm recommendations, wheeeee!
Several people have recently mentioned Grotesquerie to me, and while intrigued, I never actually bothered to look into what it was all about or who was involved. I basically went in knowing nothing.
Turns out this is a Ryan Murphy project, following Detective Tryon (Niecy Nash-Betts) as she investigates a series of gruesome ritual murders murders alongside Sister Duval, a nun with an unusual interest in true crime. In some ways this actually does feel very American Horror Story-esque to me…that sense of lurid, over-the-top sensationalism is there for sure.
While the series draws clear inspiration from things like Se7en and Hannibal, it has a dreamlike quality which takes it to different places entirely. Scenes bleed into one another with nightmarish dream logic – you’re in one location one moment, somewhere entirely different the next, with no clear transition or resolution between them. Around episode seven, this stylistic choice begins to make a disturbing kind of sense… or does it? The more I watch, the more I suspect we’re dealing with an Inception-like layering of reality – dreams within dreams within dreams, each one masquerading as the truth until it too begins to unravel.
My sister and I sat on the sofa until late in the evening watching this, and as of now I have just finished episode nine. Also, I don’t think she was really watching. She had several books and a laptop open in front of her, only looking up occasionally to offer snarky commentary, biting remarks, and withering critique. I suspect I will be making this up to her with a Bridgerton marathon.
Day Twenty-Seven of 31 Days Of Horror in years past: 2023 // 2022 // 2021
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I’m writing this from Indianapolis, where I’m finally visiting my baby sister after promising for years to come see her new house and spend an autumn weekend together. Since I’m writing this via my tablet (not the most efficient setup), this’ll be brief, but sometimes horror, like family visits, is best served in small doses. Hur hur, just kidding Melissa!
My sister isn’t a huge horror fan, but she suggested we watch the 2005 Amityville Horror remake together. While I’ve read the book and seen the 1979 original years ago, I am fairly certain that there are some plot points in terms of backstory in here that are wildly different, especially towards the end. Of course, I could be wrong, like I said, I don’t recall all of the details.
For those unfamiliar with the story, Ryan Reynolds plays George Lutz, who moves into the infamous Long Island house with his new wife Kathy (Melissa George) and her three children. The house comes with a dark history – in 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered his entire family there, claiming voices in the house told him to do it. The Lutz family gets the property at a suspiciously good price, but soon discovers why as George begins to transform under the house’s influence, experiencing vivid visions of the murders while a ghostly presence threatens his new family.
One aesthetic/pop culture detail that particularly resonated with me was the KISS posters adorning one of the children’s walls. Those same posters terrorized me at my cousin’s house when I was young – perhaps planting the seeds for my lifelong fascination with the things that frighten me. Seeing them in a horror film felt like a peculiar full-circle moment.
Despite being set in 1974, the film can’t quite shake its 2000s sensibilities. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but there are some blurry/glitchy effects that seem very 2003- 2007 to me. Quick cuts, those choppy frame-rate effects where ghosts move in this jerky, unnatural way…I am hopeful that somebody knows what I mean, because that’s the best I can explain it!
But what really got under my skin wasn’t the supernatural elements – it was the terrifyingly realistic premise at the heart of any haunted house story: the financial trap. Imagine emptying your life savings into a house, only to discover it’s teeming with malevolent spirits. There’s no escape route when your bank account is empty. You’re stuck there, sharing space with whatever entities claimed the property first. That’s the real horror of Amityville – the crushing weight of homeownership colliding with forces that want nothing more than to shatter your sanity and claim your soul as their next basement tenant.
Day Twenty-Six of 31 Days Of Horror in years past: 2023 // 2022 // 2021
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