Horror Joy

Jeff and Brian are back to discuss Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Joel Coen’s 2021 black-and-white film adaptation, focusing on how the Weird Sisters function less as scapegoats than as a “permission structure” that tempts Macbeth toward power and moral collapse. They connect the witches’ prophecy, dramatic irony, and Macbeth’s ambition to the film’s stark, claustrophobic Gothic/brutalist architecture...

Brian and Jeff welcome returning guest Gwendolyn Kiste, four-time Bram Stoker winner, to discuss her new novel In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts, a ghost-story extension of The Great Gatsby. Kiste shares current horror joys (new releases, Ray Bradbury’s The October Country, and Disney’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow) and explains her long fascination with Gatsby’s gothic elements, murder, longing, and the...

In a special Friday edition of Meet Your Maker, Brian is joined by Jessica Savitti and E.B. Cogan, co-creators of the graphic novel series Shock-Headed Peter (two volumes out, a third nearing completion and currently funding via Kickstarter). They discuss how joy in horror can come from cathartic fear, adrenaline, and exploring monster humanity and moral complexity beyond strict good/evil binaries...

In this episode of Horror Joy Jeff and Brian discuss Damien McCarthy’s 2026 film Hokum, following mystery writer Ohm Baumann (Adam Scott) to Ireland’s Bilberry Inn over Halloween after an apparition leads him to his parents’ ashes. As Baumann investigates bartender Fiona’s disappearance by breaking into the locked honeymoon suite with local outsider Gerry, he’s drawn into witch lore, dreams, and a...

From a parking lot outside an AMC in Central Pennsylvania, Brian reflects on seeing Brian Duffield’s film adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s Whalefall and traces how a lifelong fascination with deep-water horror, rooted in thalassophobia and shaped by Lovecraft, weird fiction, and eco-weird environmental philosophy, helped inspire the Horror Joy podcast. Whalefall is a survival and ocean horror fused wi...

Brian and Jeff interview USA Today bestselling author Luke Dumas about horror’s link to joy, his path into the genre, and his novel Nothing Tastes as Good. Dumas describes early horror influences with his father, writing seriously since high school, and how Edinburgh inspired his first horror novel. In discussing Nothing Tastes as Good, he cites Stephen King’s Thinner, his experience growing up fa...

From an AMC parking lot in Central Pennsylvania, Brian offers an immediate take on Other Mommy (a James Wan-produced Blumhouse/Atomic Monster film, retitled from Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House) with mixed expectations due to the cast (Jessica Chastain, Jay Duplass, and child actor Arabella Clarke) and skepticism toward Blumhouse style. Brian praises the acting—especially Clarke’s balan...

***WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD*** Brian and Jeff cut deep into the 2016 film The Autopsy of Jane Doe as part of their witch-themed Horror Joy series. Set almost entirely in a Virginia morgue, the film follows father-son coroners Tommy (Brian Cox) and Austin Tilden (Emile Hirsch) as an unidentified, externally pristine corpse becomes a mystery that unravels through forensic clues, escalating eerie even...

Brian reunites with author Brianna N. Cox to discuss her March release, Indigent, after earlier conversations about Sinners and Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory. Cox frames horror as a genre of empathy and connection that makes taboo fears communal and cathartic, and she compares horror and romance as “go big or go home” forms driven by intense emotion and physicality. She explains Indigent as a “...

Jeff returns with a “Horror Joy Stale Slice” to discuss Resident Evil after missing opening night due to post-BlizzCon illness. He teases future Horror Joy topics from Blizzard news (a Diablo announcement, a long-horizon StarCraft title, and World of Warcraft’s upcoming roguelite “Talebound” set in Drustvar or Revendreth). He largely agrees with Brian’s take, emphasizing the film’s distinctly vide...

Brian and Jeff Horror Joy begin a spooky-season series on witches by discussing Robert Eggers’ 2015 film The Witch, outlining its colonial New England setup in which an exiled Puritan family suffers escalating losses and turns toward suspicions of witchcraft and the devil, culminating in Black Phillip’s invitation to “live deliciously.” They trace Western and Christian obsessions with witches to t...

Brian shares spoiler-free thoughts after seeing Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil. He argues Cregger’s work (from Barbarian to Weapons to this film) carries a sense of fun, and praises Resident Evil for evoking video-game mechanics through camera perspective, rule-bound worldbuilding, and a self-aware celebration of playing games. He highlights effective, earned jump scares, strong movement through spa...

Jeff interviews British author Craig Wallwork about the connection between horror and joy, his early exposure during Britain’s “video nasty” era, and how his father desensitized him by explaining gore effects, creating a rare bond through film. Wallwork describes becoming a writer via transgressive and neo-noir influences before turning to horror 17 years ago after his daughter’s birth, using horr...

Brian and Jeff continue their camp horror series with Charlie Polinger’s 2025 film The Plague, set at a 2003 summer water polo camp where the central terror is not a slasher but toxic masculinity, bullying, and an ambiguous “plague” used to create in-groups and out-groups. They discuss how the plague functions as scapegoating and surveillance, how Ben (a new kid with a speech impediment) and eccen...

Brian and Jeff interview Glasgow-based award-winning writer, editor, and musician Neil Williamson about the relationship between horror and joy.. Neil frames horror as the fun of “relishing the darkness” through traditions like Halloween and campy horror. Williamson recounts his path into writing via lyric-writing in a teenage band and into horror through the UK’s Carry On Screaming, Universal mon...

Brian Onishi and Jeff Stoyanoff continue their summer camp slasher theme with 1983’s Sleepaway Camp They are joined by guests Jo Vallese (editor of It Came From the Closet) and T (Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies), and frame the film through queer horror, trans horror, and the queer concept of camp. They discuss the film’s shift from idyllic opening to tragedy, its child and teen cr...

Horror Joy: Meet Your Maker with Kailee Pedersen Brian interviews horror writer and opera singer Kailee Pedersen on Meet Your Maker about the relationship between horror and joy, which Pedersen links to the genre’s transgressive freedom, including psychological unsettlement and marginalized protagonists. Pedersen discusses her writing origins (starting seriously at 13, early Neopets fan fiction, a...

Brian and Jeff return from a July hiatus for a Horror Joy series on summer camp slashers, beginning with Friday the 13th (1980). Their discussion focuses on sexuality, gender roles, and moral judgment, the absence of adult authority and supervision, and how the camp functions as a microcosm for late-1970s/early-1980s anxiety around Reagan-era politics and youth economic prospects, drawing on Kara...

Brian and Jeff are joined for a special episode of Meet Your Maker by Spider One and Krsy Fox to discuss their upcoming film Big Baby (VOD August 7) and the relationship between joy and horror. Spider and Krsy trace their creative paths from small-town upbringings through music, acting, and songwriting into filmmaking, emphasizing that making your own work overcomes industry gatekeeping. They expl...

On Horror Joy, Jeff is joined by author Michael Boulerice about his novella Inhalation (released June 16). Boulerice shares his origin story—writing nonfiction essays online before shifting to horror 4–5 years ago with help from developmental editor Alex Woodrow—leading to short-story sales and publishing with Dead Sky (including Feeding the Wheel). Michael and Jeff discuss why haunted house stori...

Jeff hosts a solo episode of Horror Joy: Meet Your Maker with author Amy Jane Stewart, who grew up in Edinburgh, lives in the Scottish Borders, and whose debut novel Hex House (Titan Books) is a feminist horror fairy tale released spring 2026. She is also completing a University of Sheffield PhD on winged women and received Creative Scotland funding in 2023. Stewart describes horror’s connection t...

Jeff interviews horror author Josh Hanson (King’s Hill, The Woodcutters, Fortress, Marshbank, Minotaur Stories) about the relationship between horror and joy, which Hanson links to story-driven pleasure, safe transgression, and chasing the intensity of childhood fear. Hanson recounts discovering writing in college, burning out after an MFA at the University of Montana amid anti-genre attitudes and...

Brian and Jeff welcome Shane Hawk, a Cheyenne and Arapaho horror writer and editor, creator of the Native Horror Index, and contributing editor at Counterpoint Press acquiring and editing Indigenous North American writers. Hawk explains how horror can produce joy through safe distance, catharsis, and the chance to rewrite grim histories by letting Native characters survive and resist stereotypes....

Jeff welcomes Damir Debanic, owner of InterHuman Games, to discuss his upcoming board game Jure Grando, a Croatia-based, vampire-adjacent folklore horror title on GameFound. Debanic describes horror’s cathartic link to joy, his path from organizing events in 1990s Croatia to 15 years at sea, and why board games are “programming with paper” and a vehicle for story. He explains that horror board gam...

On Horror Joy’s Meet Your Maker, Brian is joined by Undertone writer-director Ian Tuason. They discuss the relationship between joy and horror, distinguishing joy as a sustainable state from fleeting happiness and describing horror as a creative outlet that can offer safe thrills and catharsis, especially for people shaped by trauma. Tuason recounts his path from writing poetry, stories, and short...