Unquiet
Things

My latest column for Rue Morgue’s March/April issue 2026 is about the personal curriculum trend: a Gen Z TikTok thing where they assign themselves monthly syllabi on whatever they’re obsessed with, from sourdough to astrophysics. (See also “analog hobbies”, or, as us crusty old farts call them, you know, “hobbies.”)

I make the case for horror fans doing the same thing,  actually studying what we love instead of just passively consuming it. In the piece, I offer four example curriculums shaped by my particular fixations: fashion in horror, grief as monster, surrealism and dread, and women directors beyond the Final Girl.

Naturally, the moment I submitted my draft, I realized … I wanted to study other things. Although I don’t know if they would have made the article any more interesting, so that’s okay. Things I’ve been circling around for years, name-dropping without really understanding, using as aesthetic shorthand without doing the work. Time to actually engage with the theory books gathering dust on my shelves! So I’m building my own curriculum around two concepts that keep surfacing in horror criticism:

Hauntology: Mark Fisher’s term for how we’re haunted by lost futures that never arrived,  the world we were promised but didn’t get. It’s not just nostalgia for the past, but mourning for futures that feel more real than the present we’re stuck in. The Cold War’s end didn’t bring utopia; instead, we got a kind of cultural stasis where we endlessly recycle old aesthetics because we’ve lost the ability to imagine genuinely new futures. Is what we remember as “the past” even real, or has it been programmed into us by the culture we consume and the ideologies we absorb? There’s a deep melancholy to this, the sense that we’re living in an epilogue to history rather than its continuation. It’s why folk horror works on us, why the obsession with lost rural pasts feels so contemporary, as well as VHS aesthetics, found footage, etc., they don’t just look old, they feel like artifacts from parallel timelines that branched off from ours. They’re ghosts of possible worlds. Obsolete media becomes the language of contemporary dread because it carries the weight of futures that died before arriving. We’re haunted by what never was.

Julia Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection: The horror of what disrupts the boundary between self and other, the revulsion we feel toward what reminds us we’re just meat. It’s about things that should stay inside the body but don’t: blood, vomit, shit, the contents of a wound. It’s about corpses, which were once a living person but are now just matter, collapsing the line between subject and object. Abjection is that visceral “get it away from me” response to anything that threatens the integrity of the self, that reminds us the body is just a temporary container that will eventually fail and leak and rot. It’s why we recoil from decay, why certain textures make our skin crawl, why body horror gets under our skin in ways other horror doesn’t. Kristeva gives us the theoretical framework for understanding why Cronenberg’s transformations devastate us, why that scene in The Substance made theater audiences physically recoil, why we’re drawn to and repelled by images of the body breaking down. She gives us language for the unnamed disgust. Maybe? I could be wrong about all of that? I don’t really understand it, which is the whole point of all of this!

So that’s my current curriculum. If you’re interested in any of that, I have gathered up the books all in one place. What do you think you might study if you were building a curriculum for yourself?

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