Feeding the Monster: Why horror has a hold on us? Anna Bogutskaya (Faber & Faber, 2024), £12.99, ISBN: 9780571385775 In her 2024 book, Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya begins her foray into contemporary horror by asking, like a genre therapist, ‘How do these films make us feel?’ (p. 17). What unfolds in the following pages…

Henry James’ 1898 ghost story, The Turn of the Screw is famous for the ambiguity of its haunting. Ever since Edmund Wilson outlined his psychoanalytic reading of the text in the 1945 essay ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’, the central questions surrounding the novella have been, are the ghosts really there? Or are they inventions…

Over the last month we’ve been watching lots of horror films from the 1960s and 70s, a period in which psychologised themes took centre stage in British genre cinema. One particularly offbeat example is Alan Birkinshaw’s Killer’s Moon (1978) which depicts the escape and murderous rampage of four inmates of a ‘cottage’ psychiatric hospital in…

Last month I interviewed horror writers Dave Jeffery [DJ] and Lee Murray [LM] for The Psychologist, the publication of the British Psychological Society. We chatted about their anthology This Way Lies Madness, which brings together a variety of horror stories all focussed on mental illness. Dave and Lee spoke about the background to the book,…

In his English language debut, The Good Boy (2025), Jan Komasa follows in the footsteps of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) with a story of re-education and social conditioning for the twenty-first century. Released in UK cinemas last week, the film provides a deeply ironic look at nurturing, holistic modes of parenting. Nineteen-year-old Tommy…

As we move into the second stage of the project, which focusses on the ways in which British horror has engaged with psychologised discourse, we have been looking into the filmmaker, Freddie Francis. Active in the film industry from the late 1930s to the early 2000s, Francis was both witness to and participant in the…

In the early 1950s there was a certain amount of anxiety in the Britain about the influx of American imported ‘horror comics’ such as The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear, both published by EC comics. Fuelled by the arguments of American psychiatrist Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and critic Geoffrey…