Show notes
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PGttCM Season 22.5
The Empty House – Algernon Blackwood
Haunted architecture as organism. Blackwood’s house breathes dread rather than cartoon malice, but the living-house motif is beautifully weird.
Monster House (2006) – Childhood-scale weirdness. The house is alive. Contained, playful dread.
The Yellow Sign – Robert W. Chambers
Royal decay, masked figures, surreal instability. Oz with the brightness sandblasted off.
Return to Oz (1985) – Fairy tale gone feral. Surreal but still mythic in structure.
For the Blood Is the Life – F. Marion Crawford
Rural vampire lore before the sparkles. Brooding, tragic undead menace.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) – Campy supernatural with clear rules and heroes.
Lair of the White Worm – Bram Stoker
A beautiful woman animated by something inhuman, romantic obsession, bodily transformation, and grotesque courtship rituals. It’s pulpy, melodramatic, and gleefully macabre.
Lisa Frankenstein (2024) – Gothic romance and stitched-together identity.
The Mummy's Foot – Théophile Gautier
Playful Egyptological weirdness, romanticized undead, cultural past intruding into the present.
Bubba Ho-Tep – Aging, absurdity, and pulp undead intruding on the mundane.
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar — Poe
Scientific hubris, reshaped bodies, moral ambiguity. Wells leans philosophical rather than romantic, but the ethical unease about making life and remaking identity hums in both works.
Poor Things (2023) – Reconstructed identity and moral experimentation.
The Willows – Algernon Blackwood
Alien presence observing humanity. Nature as a membrane between worlds. The dread is quiet and cosmic
Under the Skin (2013) – Alien observation and human estrangement.
The Damned Thing – Ambrose Bierce
Unseen predation, rural dread, something ancient and animalistic watching from beyond perception.
X (2022) – Flesh, mortality, decay, performance.
The Jolly Corner – Henry James
Meeting the ghost of your unlived life. Urban haunting tied to identity and time.
MaXXXine (2024) – Ambition curdling into occult menace.
The Horla – Guy de Maupassant
A double. Or something that lives alongside you. The terror of self-divis
Us (2019) – The self divided.
The Repairer of Reputations – Robert W. Chambers
Identity manipulation, hidden social orders, creeping paranoia in polite society. The horror is systemic and intimate.
Get Out (2017) – Social identity as surgical horror.
Old Crompton’s Secret” — Harl Vincent, Astounding Stories, February 1930 —
A strange old recluse, alchemical obsession, identity/body weirdness, old knowledge pressing into the present.
Last Night in Soho (2021) – Time bleed and haunted ambition.
The Rat Racket” — David H. Keller, Astounding Stories, April 1930 —
The story has racketeers using rat terror as systemic control, and the “Old Man” behind it becomes a nearly mythic hidden ruler.
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) – Conspiracy as metaphysical force.
The Man Who Was Dead — Thomas H. Knight, Astounding Stories, April 1930 —
A weird resurrection/reincarnation premise that starts in folksy argument and slides into uncanny rule-breaking.
Nothing But Trouble (1991) – Bureaucratic nightmare logic.
The Man Who Was Thursday – G. K. Chesterton
Infiltration, surreal pursuit, shifting identities, bureaucratic nightmare energy. It’s metaphysical weirdness dressed as adventure.
Monsters (2010) – Borders, otherness, creeping vastness.
The Voice in the Night – William Hope Hodgson
Sea horror. Isolation. Transformation. Hodgson makes the ocean feel biologically alien.
Underwater (2020) – Ancient things below human scale.
The Monster Maker” — Ray Bradbury, Planet Stories, Spring 1944 —
Fear and perception generate monsters; the real threat is partly an intelligence manipulating what people think they see.
The Mothman Prophecies (2002) – Omen, pattern, unseen intelligence.
The Raven - Edgar Allen Poe Obsession and mortality tightening inward.
The Raven (2012) – Obsession and mortality tightening inward.
The Plattner Story – H. G. Wells
A man slips into a flipped, alternate dimension and comes back geometrically wrong. Multiverse dislocation before Marvel made it fashionable.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) – Multiversal fracture of meaning.
The White People – Arthur Machen
Youth, ritual, secret worlds behind glamour. Machen’s fae horror undercuts innocence with something ancient and hungry.
K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025) – Pop mythology as open cosmology; spectacle swallowing structure.