Halloween Hangover 2026

This Halloween was a blur. On top of my aggressive posting schedule, I was working a lot, too.So let's see what I accomplished this past month.October Horror Movie Marathon My theme this month was "Small town horror," focusing on movies between 1985 and 1986. I expanded it to 1983 to 1987 to cover my high school years, and again to cover 1980 to 1989. The theme I discovered was "Horror Comes Home." I dealt with movies where the horror was largely local. You no longer went to some strange land to see horror; it came home to you, or, more often, it was already there waiting for you.The main takeaway for me is that small towns make good horror settings because they feel familiar and safe, yet that same familiarity carries a history of secrets and old grudges, stories everyone knows but few take seriously. Jackson, Sunny Valley, and Carbon Vale for NIGHT SHIFT are set in just such territory. The supernatural is at its most effective when it is paired with the everyday, where one can have…