News: March 31, 2020

In the spirit of all of the panic that has been going around about COVID-19, I wrote a short horror story as if it were the daily diary of someone who was just starting to realize the gravity of what we’re going through on a global level. It’s pure fiction with only one Fairbanks name drop, my favorite watering hole; hopefully, they’re not terribly upset by it. I carried on that theme with an article about the origins of Pandora’s Box and a retelling of the Greek myth that made Pandora famous. The rest of the week I finish up with something we’re all kind of feeling right now, existential dread as well as grave robbing. Interested in seeing more horror related content? Check out Puzzle Box Horror for more great articles!

March 25, 2020

I woke up to the unsettling caw of a raven sitting in a tree near my window. I could feel the sweat that had built up on my forehead overnight and I was feeling greasy, but the prospect of what I had to do this morning made me slightly angry. I rolled over and decided that it wasn’t worth being in public yet. I’d give it a few more hours before I subjected other people to my unique perspective on the day. The moment I closed my eyes I fell back into the dreary embrace of blackness. [Read More…]

March 28, 2020

Well, it’s something of an origin story–much like the origin story of Christianity, with Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge. It is said in Christianity that all of the evil that arose in the world of humans only came about after Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. In the older, ancient Grecian mythologies, there was Pandora’s Box which was an attempt to explain the beginning of how the world came to be as it is today. This attempt at an explanation comes from the naturally curious nature of all people who want to know why things happen the way they do and before any scientific explanation, these myths and legends were their way of coping with what they could never hope to understand. [Read More…]

March 31, 2020

Cosmic Horror Movies that Perfectly Capture Existential Dread

Clinical and consulting psychotherapist, Dr. Paul Hokemeyer tells us that, “existential dread is the terror we experience in our awareness that we are transient beings acting out life on a precarious stage. It’s a phenomenon that’s universal among humans, but that varies in its intensity.” Essentially, existential dread is the result of hyperawareness of our own minuscule nature within our universe. Cosmic horror capitalizes on this hard-to-navigate realm of insecurity and inner turmoil. When we look too closely or are too aware of something we don’t understand it can cause a break in reality and ultimately thwart our attempts to handle our own mental health. This leads us to a better understanding of why cosmic horror is such a tricky thing to tackle within the horror film industry and why it is inevitably an unqualified success or a laughable failure. [Read More…]

The culture of robbing graves isn’t as big of a topic these days as it probably should be, but there is something about the entire topic that is just strangely unsettling. Robbing graves has been and is still a problem that plagues every culture–from the Pharaohs who attempted to take their earthly possessions with them into the next life, to ghost marriages in Chinese culture, there always seems to be a reason why certain people want to disturb the dead, but are there any common themes? [Read More…]