When I was twelve years old, on a Friday in late October, my mother sat me down after school and informed me that The Shining would be on television that night. She knew she couldn’t stop me from watching The Shining if I wanted to; all she could do was advise against it, to intervene as per her parental duties. I’d been raised on age-inappropriate horror movies up until this point, read every true-life-ghost-stories book the library would loan to me until they refused to do so on “ethical grounds,” but The Shining, so mum tried to warn me, was something else. The Shining had the potential to do some real damage.

I watched The Shining, obviously, and in the morning when I emerged from my bedroom a changed boy — even, perhaps, a changed man — my mum just gave me a look that said “I told you so,” and I’ve been chasing that high ever since. In the twenty-odd years since, I’ve read books, watched TV shows, played video games, read a thousand short stories and reddit threads, listened to every “high strangeness” podcast recommended to me, &c. &c., and only a handful of those have offered it to me.

I’m going to list some of them here today as a public service. You’re welcome. I’ll probably remember a few more the moment I publish this thing. If YOU, dear reader, have any recommendations, pop them in the comments. I’m not just a spooky season fair-weather spooky guy; I’m constantly searching for something to do some more damage. Fuck me up, would you?

These things are free:

Let’s start with Curve, a short film recommended on the podcast Outside of a Dream, which released eleven episodes between 2017 and 2019 on a production budget of approximately 75¢ (Canadian) and which I miss every day. This is a fucked-up little short film, shot on location (!!) at a weird structure somewhere in Australia. It’s unclear whether it makes those noises in real life, but I wouldn’t put it past Australia to evolve something like that.

I am in love with Nadia Bulkin’s short stories as a whole, and Live Through This may be my favourite. This is the Good Stuff. This is what I want.

My tolerance for Creepypasta is low, but Search and Rescue Woods is haunting. Just enough detail to be horrible; just vague enough to get your imagination running.

With apologies for linking twice to Reddit, have a gander at this (real!) post to r/legaladvice asking for what to do about all these post-it notes that were appearing out of nowhere.

Doki Doki Literature Club. This is also available on consoles but the original version (for PC, Mac, and Linux) is free and it’s the same thing, minus some additional stuff if you want to see it. (I did want to see it, so I saw it. It’s fine.) As a heads-up: the content warning is not fucking around. Pay attention to it and shut the thing down if you have to. Truly one of the most upsetting things I’ve ever experienced (this is an endorsement).

More recent is Alan Resnick’s short film Unedited Footage of a Bear. This House Has People In It is also incredible, but maybe too reliant on an ARG to be 100% effective as a self-contained piece.

The Onion: the film standard Fifty Shades review (flashing lights warning) is a beautiful little piece of surreal horror with a huge Welcome To Night Vale energy¹ , and also: You Got Too High And Everyone Knows It, which I don’t think works any more.

Carmen Maria Machado’s 272 Views of Law & Order SVU gets under your skin with the occasional line dropped into an ostensible recap of a show you’ve already known.

At the start of the COVID pandemic, The Incident at the Seabrook Residence, a little browser game by a handsome genius, unsettled upwards of twenty-five players. That single one-star review isn’t kidding around, folks.

(The Incident… was inspired heavily by Michael Lutz’s The Uncle Who Works At Nintendo, which is much better.)

The original Archive 81 podcast — I haven’t seen the Netflix show that bears little resemblance to the podcast — I hear that it was underrated and cancelled before its time — certainly has its moments in the first couple of seasons, particularly in its weird and barely comphrensible second, but the third season is something else, strange and self-contained and funny and horrible, often all at once.

Limetown “dropped off” in its second season, as the kids say, “imho,” but the first remains one of my favourite audio-drama podcasts not written by someone who lives in my house.

Back at the start of the 20th century, Robert W. Chambers wrote Lovecraft stories before Lovecraft was using his alphabet blocks to spell out his first racial slurs. You can read the The King in Yellow, a collection of fucked-up little stories, for free basically anywhere. Project Gutenberg has it in a variety of formats.²

And from the end of the century of my birth, Ghostwatch (1992) is free to watch on the Internet Archive. I’ll do you the same favour mum tried to do for me: Ghostwatch is legitimately terrifying. From years of hearsay I thought it would be one of those things that British people love to remember, something folksy and a little silly. It’s not.

These things are not:

When Evil Lurks (streaming on Shudder) may be our first great post-COVID movie. The rules that make no sense; the guilt that you might have brought something awful to your family’s door; the way everything goes to hell in a too-human way, the ineffectiveness of our natural impulses in the face of something we don’t fully understand.

Signalis (a video game on computers and consoles) starts with cosmic horror and becomes more surreal and fleshy as time goes on. It’s a throwback to the Resident Evils of the world, which means bizarro puzzles and a inventory limit so small it almost qualifies as “cruel and unusual.”

Gou Tanabe’s adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories translate the author’s most maddening images into stark, silhouetted black and white. At the Mountains of Madness is one of the most beautiful books I own.

I’ve been reading The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez, a selection of stories that feel like a punch to the face. Of course, it could all drop off a cliff by the time this goes out. Who knows?

I saw Possession at the BFI with my friend last year and I still don’t know how I feel about it. When the film ended, we both exited the building and went our separate ways without speaking a word to one another. Some things make me go “I don’t know, man. There’s something wrong with it.” There’s something wrong with some things, something undefineable, and they’re often my favourite things.

Vampire Survivors also, surprisingly, has something wrong with it that becomes clear when you finish the Moongolow stage, some hours into the experience. It’s nothing textual — it’s not a horror game, per se — but there’s a feeling of wrongness that I believe/hope is intentional, because it’s the part that sticks with me.

The Blackwater saga by Michael McDowell, better-known for co-writing Beetlejuice, is currently being re-released in a very nice set of editions, but you can probably pick it up for your ereader in its entirety. It’s a sequence of five novellas tracing a logging family in the American South at the start of the 20th Century, and it’s mostly about logging except sometimes it isn’t.

Soma is short and — especially on the combat-free “Safe Mode” setting — terrifying on a level I didn’t think video games could be.

Monster Prom is a competitive dating sim in which you and your friends inhabit the new students at Spooky High and must secure a date to the titular prom. It isn’t scary either, at least not until you follow some narrative pathways in its sequel, Monster Roadtrip, but great for a Hallowe’en night party (of four people or less).

Also not scary but beautiful: One Cut of the Dead, about which I will say no more.

1  the disclaimer here is that Janina is the co-creator of Within the Wires, a Night Vale Presents audio drama series which also scratches many of these itches.

2  if you have a £5million lying around, The King in Yellow is one of my dream film adaptations.