As a method of inculcating authors, their peers and their readers in a unique matrix of referential rhetoric, the use of intertextuality functions as an integral convention of cosmic horror. This practice is traced back to H. P. Lovecraft and his circle who deployed literary cross-referencing as a tactic to hint at a more elusive horror transcending a single text or mythology. Intertextual play became a mode of communication amongst authors and readers in this genre, enriching fictional worlds while also advancing a pessimistic view about humanity’s place in the cosmos. This article examines how this historical practice continues in the work of two contemporary authors of weird fiction: Thomas Ligotti and Richard Gavin. Using two of their linked stories as a running example, I recommend that we see the use of intertextuality in cosmic horror as a form of weird pedagogy. From this perspective the inclination to pass on occult knowledge is woven into the very fabric of writing such texts that seek to upend our understanding of the world and our place in it.
This article examines how Silvia Moreno-Garcia's The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2023), an adaptation of H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), offers a defence of pluralist society. Moreno-Garcia reshapes Wells's tale of atavism into one of an emergent multicultural society using elements from the 1932, 1977 and 1996 film adaptations of Wells. Her critique of imperialism draws on the films' representations of empire, and her depiction of Wells's Beast People as humanized 'hybrids' relies on the film adaptations' long fascination with the Panther Woman. Moreno-Garcia's novel re-historicizes Wells's tale by setting it during the 1870s Caste War on the Yucat & aacute;n Peninsula, making imperial power and self-determination an explicit concern. The Caste War also racializes the hybrids, placing them in the midst of an ongoing struggle over recognition and self-determination. The resulting tale, a hybrid of its many precursors, represents what it means to struggle against imperialism, racism and patriarchy.
This article draws a direct historical throughline between the AIDS epidemic, the Satanic Panic and the ‘warlock film’ in the 1980s to suggest that this particular movie monster served as a microcosm for the homophobic moral hysteria pervasive in the decade. Through a series of case studies and building on the work of Christina Knopf, among others, I argue that this scapegoated figure functions as an occluded form of conservative ‘morale-boosting entertainment’ during this era, made both ridiculous and fearsome in the popular imagination as a means of expressing normative fears of social change.
This article explores the aesthetic distance between horror films and their viewers by reconsidering the philosophical problem, the ‘paradox of fiction/horror’. Referring to Kendall Walton’s theory, I argue that horror film viewing is a game of make-believe for survival in an unpredictable world, which is a motif of meta-cinematic slasher films. By examining Wes Craven’s Scream series, I show how the franchise, rather than maintaining the postmodern condition, accentuates active immersion in fiction for surviving a hyper-mediated society that operates like fiction, an allegory of our current image-society.
This article reads Stefan Grabi & nacute;ski's 1919 collection The Motion Demon as a media-theoretical intervention in horror. Treating the railway as autonomous infrastructure rather than a gothic setting, it analyses the tales through the lens of recursion - systems that loop, regulate and intensify beyond human intention. I situate Grabi & nacute;ski alongside media and horror theory to argue that his fiction anticipates contemporary concerns about automation and infrastructural opacity. Across nine stories, horror arises not from malfunction but from machinic systems that function too well, inscribing and modulating experience and sometimes erasing the subject. This feedback-driven mode shifts attention from supernatural breach to the eerie smoothness of operative continuity while offering a poetics of infrastructure that reveals the uncanny agency of modern systems. Positioned at the intersection of literary horror, media theory and infrastructure studies, the article reframes horror as a genre that diagnoses how media shape what can be sensed and known.
