I’ve always had a special place in my heart for fairy tales. For as long as I can remember I’ve been reading and adapting them into my own work, and they have served as my gateway introduction into many of my now most beloved creative interests. So, when I discovered the anthology Upon A Twice Time, which asks its diverse array of authors to choose two fairy tales and a genre to meld into a new story of their own creation, I knew I was in for a treat.

The anthology, edited by Todd Sanders and out now from Air…

I have been wondering lately on the tendency of teenage girls to interrogate the meanings of death. Slumber parties dipped in explorations of the supernatural by way of daring such superstitions as Bloody Mary in bathroom mirrors. Paper folded into predictions for the future. Emulations of media’s greatest tragic heroines in games of make believe that teeter on the edge of reality. All of these are fairly commonplace occurrences at some stage of a girl’s life no matter how hard the narrative of “sugar, spice, and everything nice” gets pushed. …

To call Charlotte Perkins Gilman a complex woman would be an understatement…

…An amalgam of progressive and incredibly regressive beliefs, she’s a difficult artist to make peace with. And yet, at least when it comes to her best-known short story, flying in the face of society’s comfortably held ideas is the point. While her most regressive beliefs are impossible to reconcile today, The Yellow Wallpaper did unquestionable good for shifting the way women’s mental health and the common practice of sending them out to the country to “rest” were understood. Fun fact: sending someone with a mental illness away to…

There’s nothing like a girl’s weekend among friends to help truly unwind from a busy or stressful experience. A little peace, a little quiet, a little dancing in a pagan ritual on the solstice…you know, girl stuff…

…Writer-director David Creed’s newest offering, Sacrilege, is a tense, strange tale of a group of friends who escape to a secluded house deep in the woods of Mabon Village for a weekend of bonding and relaxation. Kayla ( Tamaryn Payne) has just found out-from her ex-girlfriend Trish ( Emily Wyatt)-that the man who assaulted her is free from prison. In a moment of…

There are a few cardinal rules for the unfamiliar to follow when it comes to magical objects…

…Don’t mess with Ouija boards. Don’t let a virgin light the black flame candle on Halloween night. Don’t summon mystical beings of ambivalent nature from a Book of Shadows hidden in the closet of your new house to grant your deepest desire. Simple stuff. But humans are fallible and impressionable creatures, often unable to resist the temptation of curiosity if there is even the slightest chance we might get something out of it, no matter how great the risk.

Writer-directors’ David Charbonier and…

Every once in a while, you come across a film that is so tonally unusual it borders on indescribable…

…For better or worse, writer-director Caleb Michael Johnson’s The Carnivores, written with Jeff Bay Smith and making its regional premiere at this year’s Panic Fest, lands firmly in this territory. Whether this vague sense of unreality is intentional or not, one thing is certain: to watch The Carnivores is to feel the deep sinking dread and last helpless gasps of a relationship on the verge of implosion.

We get the sense almost immediately that Bret ( Lindsay Burdge) and Alice (…

I’ve always been fascinated by the disparate ways people view certain locations and situations…

…For my part, I have a constant ability to turn even the most innocuous scenarios into anxiety-inducers almost immediately, as if my brain splits every situation into a spidering number of possibilities and tries to follow each of them to fruition. I imagine this is some sort of sideways defense mechanism and more than a little symptom of anxiety, but it’s also a pretty great writing tool if harnessed well enough.

Watching Katherine’s Lullaby feels a little like watching the product of one of my brain’s…

There’s something ethereal about folk horror…

…It’s one of the only threads of horror film whose seeds are planted so firmly in reality and whose tendrils reach beyond genre, curling just as much around drama and children’s media as horror. Not quite classifiable as a subgenre, folk horror is more the deployment of a set of tools and symbols to unsettle and challenge the dominant, established beliefs. It is also, for me, one of the only forms of storytelling able to immediately create a sense of dreamlike unreality. Folk horror is, at least in part, a feeling just as much…