Horror Joy

Brian and Jeff welcome director/writer/producer BT Meza to discuss his new film Affection, released in theaters May 8 and on video on demand June 5.
Meza connects horror and joy through his love of watching horror, recounts early influences like reading Pet Sematary and Jaws and watching The Exorcist, and explains how he began making work by constantly photographing and filming, including music videos.
He describes getting Affection made through supporter collaboration, producer Austin Walk’s advocacy, and persistence through pandemic delays.
The conversation highlights filmmaking’s collaborative demands, Affection’s blend of sci‑fi and horror rooted in plausible technology, and its commitment to practical effects created by Slither effects artist Dan Rebert with no CGI.
Meza discusses the three-character cast (Ellie, Bruce, Alice), themes of memory, identity, grief, and a tension driven by Bruce’s need for certainty.
Affection

On this episode of Horror Joy, we discuss Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves on Horror Joy, framing it as a dense, meta haunted-house text built from layered narratives: Johnny Truant, an unreliable LA tattoo artist, edits the manuscript of the blind academic Zampanò about the possibly nonexistent documentary The Navidson Record, whose house contains impossible, expanding interior spaces.
We explore the book’s paradoxes, footnotes, shifting typography, and the Minotaur motif (including red strikethroughs like track changes), arguing it satirizes academic monographs and demands active “detective work” from readers.
We connect the novel to internet-era hyperlink logic (blue “house”), liminality and Backrooms, and themes of trauma, memory, remediation, and community, while noting student reactions and ending with joys found in the Navidson explorations, playfulness, and characters like Tom.
The book is an almost impossible labyrinth of references and self-references. But we manage to find some joy.

Brian and Jeff are joined by award winning author Keith Rosson to talk about his most recent book, Coffin Moon.
They explore the role the Vietnam plays in the novel, how the nature of the vampire changes the requirements for the story, and how it acts as a model for bad parenting.
Keith also talks through his understanding of genre, including his own reading habits and how he came to write horror.
Keith offers his take on the role of joy in horror and recommends reading the short fiction of Gordon B. White.
You can find Keith's work and more information here: KeithRosson.com

This is a special, Fresh Cuts version of Horror Joy. Brian and Jeff are joined by long time friend, Jamie to offer immediate thoughts about the recent A24 film, Backrooms.
This recording occurred just minutes after the movie ended outside of a rural movie theater. Please excuse the buzzing and the audio.
We talk about the jump from internet shorts to full length movie, the possible downfalls of trying to collapse the collective imagination into a single entity, the liminal horror, and the incredible sound design.
This is a spoiler free conversation, so listen even if you haven't watched the movie.
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Brian Onishi and Jeff Stoyanoff discuss Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved as a haunted house and ghost story that forces readers to reckon with the historical traumas of chattel slavery, racism, and the “smooth operation” of a world that treats people like property.
They outline the novel’s core cast—Sethe, Baby Suggs, Denver, Paul D, and the embodied apparition Beloved—alongside figures like Schoolteacher, noting the book’s basis in the real story of Margaret Garner and its depiction of lynching, abuse, and infanticide.
Drawing on scholarship and concepts such as rememory, spectrality, and Gothic tradition, they argue Morrison rejects easy “Scooby-Doo” reveals or exorcism in favor of communal acknowledgement and reintegration, supporting their broader claim that America itself is haunted while asking how, and whether, joy can be found in such horror.