BRYAN W. ALASPA

Some houses don’t just shelter the living. They remember the dead. In horror, the scariest places aren’t those filled with monsters, they’re the ones that remember . They hum with echoes, holding onto pain long after its owners are gone. The walls breathe. The floors whisper. The air feels heavy with stories that refuse to fade. These haunted places aren’t just backdrops for terror, they’re archives of trauma, physical embodiments of memory itself. They absorb every scream, e

A smile should be safe. It’s warmth, empathy, connection, the universal signal of comfort. But in horror, that same expression curdles into something grotesque. The human smile, stretched too wide or held too long, becomes unnatural, a rictus mask that hides everything we fear about being seen. From Midsommar  to Smile  to American Psycho , the horror genre has learned how to turn joy into something poisonous. The grin becomes a weapon, a disguise, a symptom of inner decay. A

Horror has always belonged to the dark. Shadows are its natural habitat, the flickering candle, the whisper in the hallway, the thing just out of sight. But what happens when the terror refuses to hide? When the brightest daylight becomes the most horrifying thing of all? Welcome to daylight horror, a subgenre that dares to expose what most horror conceals. In stories like Midsommar , The Wicker Man , and The Autopsy of Jane Doe , light doesn’t save the characters. It betrays

We used to fear haunted houses. Now, we fear haunted hard drives. In a world where memories live in the cloud, voices echo through phones, and dead loved ones linger in old text threads, the supernatural has gone digital. Horror has evolved accordingly. The ghosts that once rattled chains now hum through speakers, flicker in webcams, and whisper through corrupted data. Welcome to the era of haunted technology, where memory, grief, and machinery blur into something uncanny. Th

There’s something deeply unsettling about the idea that our bodies can move without us. That, while we lie unconscious, something wearing our face can walk, act, even kill; and we’ll wake up with no memory of it. This is the essence of sleepwalking horror, stories where the line between dream and waking life collapses, and our own flesh becomes a stranger. While horror has long been fascinated by possession and mind control, sleepwalking horror is subtler and more intimate. I

In horror, the scariest moments don’t always happen in the darkness or in the monster’s lair. Sometimes, they occur in the space between, the moment before stepping across a doorway, before lifting the cellar hatch, before touching the mirror that might not reflect you back. Thresholds, doorways, tunnels, staircases, and mirrors, are where the boundaries between safety and nightmare blur. They’re physical spaces that symbolize psychological and spiritual liminality, moments w

Horror is a genre of the senses. We see blood. We hear screams. We feel the cold breath on the back of our necks. But one sense rarely gets its due: taste . And yet, when horror does reach for it, the results are some of the most unforgettable, stomach-churning experiences in film and fiction. The horror of taste taps into the primal disgust at what enters our mouths and bodies, what we consume, and what consumes us. Whether it’s cannibalism, decadence, or body horror served

With the release of my sea-faring horror tale, The Witch of November (out now), I thought I'd explore some maritime horror. The ocean is older than fear itself. It predates civilization, myth, and even memory. It is vast, alien, and merciless, an endless expanse of shifting darkness that hides things we were never meant to see. For horror storytellers, the sea has always been more than a setting; it’s a sentient force, a graveyard, and sometimes, a god. From ghost ships and

A city without people feels wrong. The architecture still stands. The traffic lights still change. The wind still moves through the streets. But when the crowds vanish and the hum of life goes silent, something inside us recoils. Empty cities, deserted malls, and forgotten highways don’t just evoke sadness, they radiate horror. In fiction and film, abandoned city horror  has become a subgenre of its own. From Silent Hill  to The Last of Us , from 28 Days Later  to urban explo

Horror movies are more than just unsettling visuals and jump scares. They have a unique ability to touch on our most profound fears and anxieties, allowing us to experience a thrilling rush of emotions. But what makes these films so effective at evoking such strong reactions? In this post, we will take a closer look at the psychology of fear and how horror movies skillfully manipulate our emotions to create lasting memories. Understanding how fear works on a psychological lev

For as long as humans have looked to the skies, we’ve filled the void with gods. Some were benevolent, some were wrathful, and some demanded sacrifice just to keep the sun rising. But what happens when those gods are abandoned when the temples fall, the prayers stop, and their names fade into myth? Horror has long suggested that forgotten gods don’t simply vanish. They linger, festering, angry at being ignored. Forgotten gods horror is one of the most unsettling corners of th

Horror has always been obsessed with family. Not just the comforting warmth of kinship, but the shadows that stretch across generations. From Gothic castles to modern suburban homes, horror stories remind us that sometimes the greatest monsters are the ones we inherit. Family curses, doomed bloodlines, and inherited sins haunt the genre, showing us a terrifying truth: some destinies can’t be escaped. Gothic Roots: The Fall of the House The Gothic tradition laid the foundation

For most of us, sleep is supposed to be the safest time of the day. The lights go out, the doors are locked, and we surrender ourselves to rest. But horror knows better. In countless stories, sleep isn’t peace ... it’s peril. The hours we spend unconscious are fertile ground for nightmares, sleep paralysis demons, and shadowy intruders who prey on our vulnerability. Sleep horror works because it weaponizes something unavoidable. You can run from monsters. You can stay out of

Few horror tropes cut as deeply as the doppelgänger, the uncanny double, the mirror-self that shouldn’t exist. Unlike vampires or ghosts, the doppelgänger isn’t some external monster. It’s you.  Or at least, a version of you that shouldn’t be standing there in the hallway, smiling with your face but not your soul. From Gothic literature to modern cinema, doppelgängers have haunted stories for centuries. They’re symbols of duality, fractured identity, and the terrifying possib

So, as you can tell from the number of blog posts I did and have done about pulp heroes, I am in my pulp phase. I have often said I felt like I was born in the wrong time. There was a time when writers were paid by the word to crank out novel length stories for magazines like The Shadow and The Spider (my two favorites). And, thankfully, a lot of those stories still exist and you can still read them and I highly recommend it. So, of course, I had to create my own. Yes, this i

We expect reality to behave itself. Doors should lead somewhere. Hallways should get you closer to a destination, not farther away. Angles should add up. When space refuses to cooperate, the human brain panics; and horror pounces. This is spatial horror : stories that weaponize architecture, geometry, and orientation to make you feel lost in places that should  be familiar. From H.P. Lovecraft’s “non-Euclidean” cities to modern labyrinths that rearrange themselves when you bl

In the golden age of pulp magazines, heroes were larger than life. The Shadow was cunning, The Spider was ruthless, and The Avenger was eerie. But one figure towered over them all— Clark “Doc” Savage, Jr.  Billed as “The Man of Bronze,” he wasn’t just a pulp hero. He was pulp’s answer to the superhero long before comic books took over. With his genius mind, immense physical prowess, and fortress-like headquarters, Doc Savage became one of the most influential characters in po

If Frankenstein  (1931) is about the thrill and terror of creation, The Bride of Frankenstein  is about what comes after: responsibility, loneliness, and the cost of being alive. Director James Whale  returns four years later with a sequel that’s funnier, stranger, and far more humane. The result isn’t just the better of the two Karloff/Whale films; it’s one of the best movies of the 1930s...full stop. A Sequel That Outgrows Its Parent Most sequels double down on spectacle. W

When we think of classic pulp heroes, names like The Shadow  and Doc Savage  immediately come to mind. But tucked within the golden age of the 1930s and 40s was another creation who burned brightly, if only for a short time. The Avenger , with his pale, corpse-like face and relentless pursuit of justice, embodied the fusion of crime-fighting pulp action and eerie, horror-tinged atmosphere. His exploits, though brief in pulp magazines, carried him into radio and eventually com

When you wake up from a nightmare, your heart pounding, the images often don’t make sense. The hallway in your dream was both your childhood home and a place you’ve never been. A faceless figure chased you, but somehow you also knew it was someone you loved. This is the strange, shifting logic of dreams, and horror has been mining it for decades. Nightmares are effective in horror fiction because they unsettle us in ways ordinary scares cannot. Unlike a masked killer or a hau