Dr. Alessandra Pino | Bluesky | Instagram | Website

Hello Horrorverse! I’m Dr Alessandra Pino, a food historian, co-author of A Gothic Cookbook, co-host of Fear Feasts, and host of A Curious Appetite, where I explore food, memory, and the culture of consumption.There is something about horror and memory that becomes especially potent at points of transition, when the familiar begins to shift. Not just nostalgia, but something darker. The way rituals repeat. The way spaces hold onto what has happened inside them. The way food, objects, and bodies can become vessels for something that refuses to stay in the past. I work on what I call “Gothic food”, the idea that what we eat, prepare, and inherit carries memory in ways that are not always comforting. Sometimes those memories linger. Sometimes they return.

Brett Petersel | Bluesky | Instagram | Letterboxd & Sarah Stubbs | Bluesky | Instagram | Letterboxd

🦵 Someone deserves a treat! After the success of Good Boy, director Ben Leonberg will direct Ankle Snatcher, based on the story from Grady Hendrix (author of My Best Friend’s Exorcism).

💞 The Heart Eyes Killer returns on February 11, 2028! Josh Ruben is set to direct (and will co-write with Darcy Fowler, along with original writers Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy) the sequel to his 2025 hit Heart Eyes. The first film received praise from Horrorverse’s Bee Delores and Sarah Stubbs. No news on which cast members will return, but we’ll provide updates here when we find out!

Theatergoers who went to see Lee Cronin’s The Mummy were given a special treat! Before the film, the teaser trailer for the highly-anticipated Evil Dead Burn, from director Sébastien Vaniček (Infested), graced the screens. The teaser, falling in at a little over one minute, brings on the terror and destruction, and is set to be released on July 10, 2026, with Evil Dead Wrath premiering in 2028. Groovy!

We’re one month away from Kane Parsons’ Backrooms and the hype is still building (and building and building…). New spoiler-free stills from the film, which hits theaters on May 29th, show an ever-building landscape, behind the scenes photos, and characters shots. Let’s get lost!

Bee Delores | Bluesky | Instagram | Letterboxd & Sarah Stubbs | Bluesky | Instagram | Letterboxd

Dracula is one of the most known, adapted, and perhaps even beloved works of Gothic literature. However, given my recent obsession (a good choice of words when discussing the Gothic) with silent film, I wanted to talk about one of its unofficial adaptations, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922). This film is one of the most iconic horror films. It has also been remade several times (much like Dracula) and the titular character has appeared in a multitude of things including the episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark, "The Tale of the Midnight Madness" and my favorite episode of Sponge-Bob Square Pants, "The Hash Slinging Slasher". Max Schreck's Count Orlock is clearly the visual inspiration for many vampires in media including Kurt Barlow in Salem's Lot (1979) and Petyr in What We Do in the Shadows (2014). Willem Defoe depicted Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire which is a fictional horror film about the Faustian deal Murnau made with a real vampire to make Nosferatu. I don't think it gets much more iconic than that! I definitely recommend this one also as a starter for someone getting into silent horror. [Written by Sarah]

It's wild to think that Nosferatu was released over 100 years, and now, we're talking about one of the best remakes of all time. Nosferatu (2024), starring Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgåd, and Lily Rose Depp, feels both tethered to tradition and a forward-thinking slice of gothic horror so terrifying that you just can't think of anything else. From the location and set design to costuming and performances, the film reinvents a classic the right way. In the very capable hands of Robert Eggers, Nosferatu pays respects to the source material while also doing something remarkably bold and inventive. I wouldn't mind Eggers being given permission to update any other classic 1930s or '40s horror films. [Written by Bee]

Movie: The Woman in Black (2012)

Synopsis: The story follows a young lawyer, Arthur Kipps, who is ordered to travel to a remote village and sort out a recently deceased client’s papers. As he works alone in the client’s isolated house, Kipps begins to uncover tragic secrets, his unease growing when he glimpses a mysterious woman dressed only in black. Receiving only silence from the locals, Kipps is forced to uncover the true identity of the Woman in Black on his own, leading to a desperate race against time when he discovers her true identity.

Why I Chose This Film: I chose this for a couple of reasons. First is that I really love the atmosphere of this film. It's dark, gloomy, atmospheric, and oh so melancholy. Everything you'd want from a Gothic horror film. I also selected it because Alessandra had some great things to say about its source material in her book, A Gothic Cookbook. In it she writes, "Food, with its inherent nurturing and comforting qualities and, conversely, its ability to be weaponized or used as a trap, is key here, helping to tell Arthur's sad tale in the most subtle and Gothic of ways."

Pairing Idea: For this week's pairing, you'll have to go grab Alessandra's book! The first recipe shared inspired by The Woman in Black is for baked eggs and cream. There is a note that says, "Early on, food in framed as a cure for ill health and troubled minds, as Mr. Bently suggests that Arthur fill himself up 'with fresh air and good eggs and cream.'" I love the idea of food being used to nurture the mind. The recipe also sounded delicious! Honestly, I've referenced the book in past issues and will likely do so again because all of the recipes sound fantastic!

Horror often begins with an intrusion. But some of the most unsettling stories are not about something entering from the outside but about something already present, waiting to be activated.

This list brings together films where ritual opens a threshold, where possession is not always violent but gradual and where inheritance carries more than blood. These are narratives shaped by repetition, by systems of belief and by the quiet persistence of forces that refuse to disappear.

To participate is to risk becoming part of the pattern.

Check out the list on Letterboxd.

Candi Norwood | Bluesky | Instagram | Letterboxd | StoryGraph | Website

Who among us hasn’t dreamt of wandering around a dark castle while wearing a long, gauzy white gown, the only light from the candle you’re carrying?

Though I have long discarded that dream, I still love reading the books that engender that feeling again. You know the ones: creepy manor homes, foggy moors, the supernatural, feelings of dread, fear, etc.

Some of my recent favorite gothic reads:

The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own by Gwendolyn Kiste – I finished reading this about two weeks ago, and I’m still thinking about it. It’s a collection of stories about mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and lovers and what the world does to these women, literally and satirically. Check out my full review here for highlights of my favorite stories: https://candikathorror.com/reads/the-haunted-houses-she-calls-her-own

Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker – Another new release (it’s a good time to be a horror fan), in my review, I said “Japanese Gothic is like The Lake House, but instead of a romance with two people living in the house 2 years apart exchanging letters, it’s an eerie gothic about people or ghosts or both 150 years apart so it’s not really like The Lake House, but isn’t it time Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock did another movie together?” See my full review here: https://candikathorror.com/reads/japanese-gothic

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher – Did you think there would be a list of gothic works from me that doesn’t mention Ursula Vernon, aka T. Kingfisher? Wolf Worm has a strong, funny female hero, science doing unexpected things, and Gothic elements including eerie atmosphere and the supernatural. Full review: https://candikathorror.com/reads/wolf-worm

What are some of your favorite Gothic reads?

For this takeover, I wanted to choose a film that sits exactly in that space between ritual, inheritance, and unease. If you like slow-burning horror rooted in folklore, ritual, and the uneasy persistence of the past, The Skeleton Key is an ideal choice.

Set in Louisiana, the film follows a hospice nurse who takes a job in a decaying plantation house where something’s not quite right. What begins as curiosity turns into something far more unsettling, as belief, ritual practice, and the architecture of the house itself begin to reshape reality.

What makes this film so compelling is not simply its twist, but its deep engagement with hoodoo, inheritance, and embodied memory. Knowledge is passed down not just through words, but through practice. Through gestures. Through objects. Through belief. At the same time, the plantation setting carries the weight of racial violence, complicating its engagement with these practices and raising difficult questions about power, history, and appropriation.

It is a film about what happens when you step into someone else’s system of meaning and realise, too late, that you are already inside it.

Check out the list on Letterboxd.

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