To celebrate the season, I decided to put together a list of my fifty favorite horror stories as well as my fifty favorite horror films. The lists are ranked alphabetically by author or director’s last name. Each list only has one per author/director. I’ll disagree with these tomorrow. Happy Halloween!

STORIES:

Angerhuber, Monika – The Anankastic Syndrome
Barker, Clive – The Book of Blood
Basso, Eric – The Beak Doctor
Blackwood, Algernon – The Man Whom the Trees Loved
Bloch, Robert – The Man Who Collected Poe
Borges, Jorge Luis – The Book of Sand
Brennen, Joseph Payne – Levitation
Brion, Marcel – The Glass Organ
Brite, Poppy Z. – His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood
Buzzati, Dino – The 7th Floor
Chambers, Robert W. – In the Court of the Dragon
Crisp, Quentin S. – Yns-y-Plag
Csáth, Géza – The Magician’s Garden
Cobb, Irvin S. – Fishhead
Conway, David – Manta Red
De Ghelderode, Michel – The Sick Garden
Ellison, Harlan – I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Evenson, Brian – Windeye
Ewers, Hanns Heinz – The Spider
Ferry, Jean – The Fashionable Tiger
Gavin, Richard – Chapel in the Reeds
Grabinski, Stefan – The Area
Grudova, Camilla – Agata’s Machine
Hedayat, Sadeq – Three Drops of Blood
Heym, Georg – The Thief
Hoffman, ETA – The Sandman
Ito, Junji – The Town Without Roads
Jahnn, Hans Henny – Night of Lead
James, M.R. – Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance
Kafka, Franz – A Country Doctor
Landolfi, Tommaso – Pastoral
Lewis, L.A. – The Tower of Moab
Ligotti, Thomas – The Bungalow House
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips – The Music of Erich Zann
Machen, Arthur – The White People
Motojiro, Kajii – Picture Scroll of Darkness
Noyes, Alfred – Midnight Express
Padgett, Jon – Origami Dreams
Peak, David – Strange Signals from the Center of the Earth
Poe, Edgar A – The Fall of the House of Usher
Rampo, Edogawa – The Mysterious Crimes of Doctor Mera
Reamy, Tom – Under the Hollywood Sign
Samuels, Mark – The Vanishing Point
Slatsky, Christopher – The Figurine
Smith, Clark Ashton – The Gardens of Adompha
Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro – The Face
Tuttle, Lisa – Closet Dreams
Veres, Attila – The Time Remaining
Wagner, Karl Edward – Sticks
Wiloch, Thomas – Mr. Templeton’s Toyshop

FILMS:

Argento, Dario – Deep Red
Avati, Pupi – The House with Laughing Windows
Barker, Clive – Hellraiser
Bergman, Ingmar – Hour of the Wolf
Browning, Tod – The Unknown
Carpenter, John – In the Mouth of Madness
Cassini, Alexander – Star Time
Cronenberg, David – Videodrome
Deodato, Ruggero – Cannibal Holocaust
Dreyer, Carl Theodor – Vampyr
Florey, Robert – Murders in the Rue Morgue
Franju, George – Eyes Without a Face
Frankenheimer, John – Seconds
Friedkin, William – Bug
Fuest, Robert – The Abominable Dr. Phibes
Fulci, Lucio – The House by the Cemetery
Giovinazzo, Buddy – Combat Shock
Guy – Difficulty Breathing
Halperin, Victor – White Zombie
Harada, Hiroshi – Midori
Harrington, Curtis – Night Tide
Harron, Mary – American Psycho
Harvey, Herk – Carnival of Souls
Hino, Hideshi – Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole
Hooper, Tobe – The Texas Chain Saw MassacreIto, Takashi – Grim
Kargl, Gerald – Angst
Kinugasa, Teinosuke – A Page of Madness
Kurosaka, Keita – Sea Roar
Kurosawa, Kiyoshi – Pulse
Lustig, William – Maniac
Mann, Michael – Manhunter
Matsumura, Katsuya – All Night Long 2: Atrocity
Merhige, E. Elias – Begotten
Miike, Takashi – Audition
Mizoguchi, Kenji – Ugetsu
Murnau, F.W. – Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
PiroPito – My house walk-through
Robson, Mark – The Seventh Victim
Rollin, Jean – The Iron Rose
Satô, Hisayasu – Secret Garden
Shindō, Kaneto – Onibaba
Shiraishi, Koji – Noroi
Tourneur, Jacques – I Walked With a Zombie
Tsukamoto, Shin’ya – Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Ulmer, Edgar G. – The Black Cat
Watkins, Roger – The Last House on Dead End Street
Wiene, Robert – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Williams, Rozz – Pig
Wisbar, Frank – Strangler of the Swamp

I’m very excited to say that my story ‘Long Scissors, Black Candles’ will be published in issue 8 of Michael Kelly’s Weird Horror magazine with an accompanying illustration by James Hutton (https://www.instagram.com/stitching_a_laugh_to_darkness/). The issue will be out via Undertow Books in Spring 2024.

My new story ‘Nocturn’ is out now on Ergot.press. An exploration into dark spaces, and my take on analog horror. 📼📺
https://www.ergot.press/authors/Perry_Ruhland/Nocturn

I’m very excited to say my Super 8 cosmic horror film SUNGAZER is included as the bonus film on this limited VHS release of Louise Weard’s amazing cyberpunk body horror featurette COMPUTER HEARTS!

Copies are available via the distributor here: https://lunchmeatvhs.com/collections/featured-products/products/computer-hearts-vhs

I generally enjoy assembling these sorts of lists more than I do explaining them, so I’ll keep it brief. This year I read a good amount of books and watched an excessive amount of movies. These are the best new to me reads and watches of each. I had a great time diving deeper into the works of some favorite artists such as Hisayasu Satô, Edogawa Rampo, David Peak, Takashi Ito, and Akira Kurosawa. My favorite artists I ‘discovered’ this year were Marcel Brion, Yokomitsu Riichi, John Hawkes, Jacques Rivette, Deborah Stratman, Kobo Abe, Hans Henny Jahnn, Henri Michaux, George Trakl, J.G. Ballard, and Thomas Wiloch.

It’s hard to overstate how happy I have been to read Monika Angerhuber’s Nocturnal Products this year, and how often I plan on revisiting it next year.

Not applicable to this list, but certainly worth mentioning, were frequent and refreshing revisits to the works of established favorite artists Takeshi Kitano, Thomas Ligotti, Bruno Schulz, Shinya Tsukamoto, Dario Argento, the Quay Brothers, David Cronenberg, Mamoru Oshii, and Apitchapong Weerasthakul.

BOOKS

Strange Tale of Panorama Island (Rampo, 1926)

The Complete Stories (Kafka, 1946)

Catastrophe: And Other Stories (Buzzati, 1966)

Insect Literature (Hearn, 1921)

All God’s Angels, Beware! (Crisp, 2009)

Piano Stories (Hernández, 1993)

You With Your Memory Are Dead (Shipley, 2016)

Waystations of the Deep Night (Brion, 1942)

Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan 1913 – 1938 (Ed. Tyler, 2008)

Paris Spleen (Baudelaire, 1869)

Hangsaman (Jackson, 1951)

Adventures in Immediate Irreality (Blecher, 1936)

Corpsepaint (Peak, 2018)

The Exalted and the Abased (Murphy, 2021)

The Box Man (Abe, 1973)

The Lime Twig (Hawkes, 1961)

Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984 (Michaux, 1994)

Aiaigasa (Crisp, 2018)

The Living Are Few, the Dead Many: Selected Works of Hans Henny Jahnn (Jahnn, 2012)

The Tunnel: Selected Poems (Edson, 1994)

The Unyielding (Shipley, 2017)

Altmann’s Tongue: Stories and a Novella (Evenson, 1994)

The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Ballard, 1978)

The Trouble With Being Born (Cioran, 1973)

American Stories (Kafū, 1908)

Sea Shells (Valéry, 1937)

Dreams Like Enigmatic Paintings (Michaux, 1972)

The Walking Man (Taniguchi, 1990)

The Thief and Other Stories (Heym, 1913)

Arthur Machen (Valentine, 1996)

The Hill of Dreams (Machen, 1907)

The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (Buchan, 2011)

Coma Crossing: Collected Poems (Gilbert-Lecomte, 2019)

The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Eisner, 1952)

Autumn Sonata: Selected Poems (Trakl, 1998)

Screaming in Code (Wiloch, 2006)

The Ship (Jahnn, 1949)

A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (Krasznahorkai,, 2003)

House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories (Kawabata, 1961)

Nocturnal Products (Angerhuber, 2002)

FILMS

Memoria (Weerasethakul, 2021)

Himiko (Shinoda, 1974)

The Bad Sleep Well (Kurosawa, 1960)

Night on the Galactic Railroad (Sugii, 1985)

Profound Desires of the Gods (Shinoda, 1968)

The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals (Takahata, 1987)

Gauche the Cellist (Takahata, 1982)

Duelle (Rivette, 1976)

Whisper of the Heart (Kondō, 1995)

Bruges-La-Morte (Chase, 1978)

Stray Dogs (Tsai, 2013)

How High (Dylan, 2001)

Kummatty (Aravindan, 1979)

Ludwig (Visconti, 1973)

Kotoko (Tsukamoto, 2011)

Mr. Klein, (Losey, 1976)

The Moon (Ito, 1994)

The Servant (Losey, 1963)

Zone (Ito, 1995)

Dizziness (Ito, 2001)

The Four Times (Frammartino, 2010)

Army of Shadows (Melville, 1969)

Howl’s Moving Castle (Miyazaki, 2004)

Malcolm X (Lee, 1992)

Mirrored Mind (Ishii, 2005)

Rhapsody in August (Kurosawa, 1991)

August in the Water (Ishii, 1995)

Crimes of the Future (Cronenberg, 2022)

Turtle Vision (Satô, 1991)

Tongues Untied (Riggs, 1989)

Not I (Page/Beckett, 1973)

Nocturne (Solomon, 1980)

Belle De Jour (Buñuel, 1967)

Maps to the Stars (Cronenberg, 2014)

Secret Garden (Satô, 1987)

Celluloid Nightmares (Satô, 1988)

The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980)

In Order Not to Be Here (Stratman, 2002)

Céline and Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 1974)

Charisma (Kurosawa, 1999)

Bringing Out the Dead (Scorsese, 1999)

The Mystery of Picasso (Clouzout, 1956)

Harakiri (Kobayashi, 1963)

Hedgehog in the Fog (Norstein, 1975)

The Unchanging Sea (Griffith, 1910)

Whispering Pages (Sokurov, 1994)

Everything Visible is Empty (Matsumoto, 1975)

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (Sharits, 1969)

Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 1953)

Take the X Train (Rintaro, 1987)

I’m very excited to say that my story ‘Brighter Than Stars’, first published in Baffling Magazine No. 6, has been nominated for Tenebrous Press’ first annual Brave New Weird Awards. The winners, announced next week, will be included in an anthology of the year’s best New Weird Horror of 2022. Fingers crossed!

Brighter Than Stars is available to read at Baffling here: https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-six/bright-than-stars