Three Horrors for Halloween

Halloween season really is the best season.

It’s just inherently more awesome than any other season. It’s more fun, more spooky, more exciting, and more metal than all the rest combined.

It’s the perfect time to binge horror movies and – if you’re the type of person who still reads actual books – horror novels.

Remember novels?

 

We know it’s a pain to ask for money—but here are the facts.

Since January, The Wild Hunt’s readership has soared past 400,000 views a month. That’s humbling—but higher reach also means higher costs. Hosting, technology, and reporting all add up.

Our editors are unpaid, and some of our staff volunteer their time. But we believe everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

We tried advertising once, and readers were flooded with Christian ads. That’s not who we are. The Wild Hunt is dedicated to providing Pagan readers perspectives they won’t see anywhere else.

We’ll never hide our stories behind a paywall—our community deserves access, no matter their ability to pay. To keep Pagan news free, independent, and authentic, we rely on you.

A few hundred supporters pledging $10 a month — or more if you can — would keep The Wild Hunt secure for the year. If you’ve been thinking about supporting us, now is the time.

👉 This is how you can help:

Tax-Deductible Donation
PayPal
Patreon

As always, our deepest gratitude to everyone who has brought us this far.

When I was in high school in the late 1980s, there was definitely a large amount of overlap in the Venn diagram of those of us interested in – or, to be honest, obsessed with – horror, fantasy, science fiction, comic books, Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal, and/or Paganism.

In those long-ago days, before smartphones and social media, before even the common presence of home computers and email, we were all extremely bookish. Our rooms were full of comics, magazines, hardcovers, paperbacks, and D&D manuals.

I wonder when the last generation of bookish Pagans was, the last group who gained their understanding of practices and beliefs (ancient and modern) almost exclusively by reading books.

I get a very strong sense that we’ve passed some sort of cultural divide within contemporary Paganism and Heathenry having to do with how beginners and newcomers build their understanding of this thing of ours.

On one side of the chasm are the bookish folks who haunted tiny used bookstores, searching for anything that was remotely related to mythology and polytheism. These are the people who traded book lists printed on dot matrix printers, who learned to follow the Dewey Decimal System and search the card catalog to find answers to their questions.

On the other side are the post-smartphone folks who formed their concept of modern Pagan religions from podcasts, YouTube channels, Reddit forums, and Facebook groups. They may discuss books, but the vast majority of their learning hours are spent chatting with others online, not reading by themselves.

I noticed a while ago that I’m almost always the only person reading a book on airplanes, in waiting rooms, in any public space, really. It’s clear that folks aren’t reading books on their phones. You can easily tell that they’re swiping through social media feeds or watching videos.

I’m as addicted to the phone as anyone else, but I’m still a book guy.

For this Halloween, for those who still read books, I’d like to recommend three horror novels with elements of interest to Pagan readers – one from the late 1960s, one from the early 1980s, and one from last year.

The Face in the Frost (1969) by John Bellairs

You might not recognize the author’s name, but (if you’re of a certain age) you may have read his young adult fantasy novel The House with a Clock in Its Walls, first published in 1973. Appearing three years earlier, The Face in the Frost is an adult novel of somewhat uncertain genre.

Bellairs himself says the book is his “attempt to write in the Tolkien manner,” a work along the lines of The Lord of the Rings. The result does not, in fact, resemble Tolkien’s magnum opus in any way (other than a dearth of female characters).

The front cover of the 1978 Ace paperback edition I have quotes Lin Carter identifying the book as fantasy, but the spine categorizes it as science fiction. I call it horror.

 

The slim novel follows a terrifying adventure undertaken by two wizards. The first is “a tall, skinny, straggly-bearded old wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either.” The second is Roger Bacon, also not the one you know. Michael Scott hovers in the background, not quite the medieval occultist Michael Scot. There is also a friendly and powerful Jewish Kabbalist wizard and a villainous sorcerer who shares the name of a graspingly greedy servant of Nero who was denounced by Tacitus.

The world inhabited by all these not-quite-right characters is also very much like ours, but also not quite. The political geography and world history of the novel diverges from ours in a myriad of ways, not the least of which is that the figures who share the names of our historical scholars and alchemists are actual wizards whose spells have visible and tangible results. This is a world of powerful magic, but it’s also a world filled with terror for its inhabitants.

Like so many classic horror films, the plot doesn’t really matter as much as the mood evoked, the feelings engendered, and the imagery conjured. When preparing to write this column, I could recall nearly every scene in the book, exactly how I had pictured each one when I read the novel three years ago. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember anything at all about the plot.

It does have a plot! But, as I often tell readers and students of mythology and medieval literature, reading for plot is the most surface-level way to read.

What chilled me and stuck with me in this novel is the sudden horror that wells up between the scenes of whimsy and humor. A silly bit that seems almost Monty Pythonish suddenly shifts to absolutely serious creepiness of the kind that makes you tuck your feet under when reading alone and late at night.

The scenes that stick involve terrified wizards faced with phenomena they don’t understand and can’t defeat, disturbing visions that may be nightmares or actual threats to life, and – most chillingly – awakening within a magic circle around a dark wizard’s grave after a failed magical rite to find that some creeping and whispering thing had indeed been summoned.

Aiming for Tolkien, Bellairs hits closer to Lovecraft, but without the racism and with an actual sense of humor and a feeling for human nature. Although American, his writing is closer in style to Joan Aiken or Lloyd Alexander, but with a much deeper sense of fear.

Bookish Pagans will enjoy the brushes with magical history and medieval literature (including a seneschal who annoys Prospero by speaking in Anglo-Saxon verse forms) even as they get up to make sure all the doors are locked.

The Keep (1981) by F. Paul Wilson

This novel is far less well-known than the 1983 Michael Mann film based upon it. I’m here to tell you that, as always, the book is better and deeper than the film.

That’s not to say I don’t love the film, because I definitely adore it. I’m starting to think it may be in my all-time top ten favorite movie list.

The cast is amazing, with Gabriel Byrne, Scott Glenn, and both Jürgen Prochnow and Ian McKellen in their first Hollywood film. The soundtrack is brilliant, featuring Tangerine Dream in peak form. The cinematography is powerful, with a brilliant chiaroscuro method of lighting and a fluid type of slow motion that lies somewhere between 1980s music video and fever dream.

 

But the 96-minute movie throws away the key elements of the massive novel. At its core, the novel is a deconstruction of vampire legends and zombie lore that recontextualizes them within a Manichaean struggle between two mystical forces predating human history. The movie, butchered by Paramount Pictures as it demanded the original 210-minute running time be cut to less than half that length, has no vampires or zombies or explanation of the forces at work. It’s also somewhat incomprehensible, which adds to its dreamlike quality.

The book centers on an ancient fortress in Romania, where German soldiers are joined by members of the S.S. in an attempt to hold the strategic location during the early years of World War II. The problem they face is that their men keep turning up brutally and inexplicably killed while patrolling inside the keep.

The ancient mysteries of the edifice lead the Germans to summon an elderly Jewish scholar and his daughter in an attempt to understand what has been happening. Meanwhile, a mysterious and seemingly ageless man is drawn from Portugal to Romania by the dark power that the soldiers have awakened.

Even as the horror in the keep grows, the killings continue, and the dead begin to walk, the professor is visited by a figure whom he comes to believe is the historical original upon whom vampire lore was built upon over the centuries. This is where things become interesting for today’s Pagan readers.

Everyone deals with the horror in a different way, and it is the ways in which they cope that are the heart of the novel.

The Jewish scholar makes a deal with the demonic being, agreeing to become his willing servant when the creature promises to save him and his daughter from the Nazi extermination camps, kill Hitler himself, and destroy the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin.

The regular German army officer assigned to the keep cares only about saving the men under his command but becomes increasingly hopeless as he realizes his personal powerlessness in the face of overwhelming evil.

The S.S. officer sent to fix the situation is consumed with a personal ambition that sees the lives of others as meaningless in light of his selfishness and ideological monomania, while he himself becomes increasingly terrified, unhinged, and useless as the bodies stack up and the horror intensifies.

The mysterious traveler, the only one who understands the history of the situation and the deeply manipulative dishonesty of the vampiric power, is resolutely focused on defeating the evil despite knowing the immense personal cost it will have for him.

All of this presents the Pagan audience with some questions upon which to reflect.

When directly confronted with powerful and powerfully evil forces, what will you do?

Will you quietly stand by – or even help out – as long as the evil passes you by or its work redounds to your benefit?

Will you turn a blind eye to harmful deeds when promised power and status?

Will you give up in the face of overwhelming force?

Will you become paralyzed by fear?

Or will you stand up and stand firm, even if it means making a Thor- and Beowulf-like self-sacrifice?

Today, we are indeed in this situation, and we are being asked these questions. Whether it’s Pagan organizations promising positions of power in exchange for silencing victims or ICE disappearing our neighbors without charges or warrants, I’m not confident that we’re making the right choices.

Pay the Piper (2024) by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus

Last Halloween, I wrote about Romero’s theology of the living dead, including in the brilliant novel The Living Dead (2020), completed by Kraus from materials that were unfinished when Romero died in 2017.

Four years later, a second posthumous Romero-Kraus collaboration was published. Like the first book, Pay the Piper features a large cast of extremely varied characters whose stories intersect and diverge to form both singular stories and interactive narratives as the horror grows.

 

This newer novel is separate from Romero’s zombie mythos and focuses on increasingly horrific happenings in and around the bayou in which the 141 inhabitants of Alligator Point, Louisiana, desperately cling to life as the world falls apart around them.

Romero and Kraus lean into America’s slave-trading history, that history’s continuing consequences today, the relationships between the elderly and the young, how we process the loss of loved ones (even decades later), what local community means or doesn’t mean in this fractured age, and a host of other real issues while providing horrific scenes of inexplicable violence.

Of course, this mixture of serious social concerns with gut-wrenching horror is a hallmark of Romero’s film work. Kraus, working without the budgetary limitations that Romero faced throughout his career, expands and deepens the scope of the story, managing to make the novel both more epic and more intimate than the movies.

The evil force that moves through the bayou is gradually revealed to and understood by the characters. We experience the slow-burn growing awareness of the characters without narratorial interjections or explanations. There is no exposition-dumping in the mode of so many modern films (horror or other).

This slow peeling back of the nature of the creature haunting the swamp, its methods and motivations, its horror and history, makes this the type of novel that keeps the reader up all night, unwilling to put the book down and obsessing over what the next chapter may reveal.

It’s also the type of novel that brings you to fall in love with the characters, to deeply empathize with their loves and losses, their pain and perseverance. As with The Living Dead, I was deeply saddened when it was time to say farewell to the characters and truly wished I could continue reading about their lives and learn what happens next.

Like The Keep, this book asks questions that are meaningful to modern Pagan readers.

What if the nature spirits we venerate in our rites and celebrations physically manifested in a very real way but were absolutely and solely harmful?

What if the divine powers we honor actually showed up – not in dreams, not in visions, but in solidly real way – but were bent upon our destruction?

What if the harmful beings of our mythologies are real but the helpful ones are not?

And, on a more human and more pressing scale, how should Pagans deal with the development of personal sexuality in the young people of their community?

There are some deeply disturbing scenes in the novel in which the harmful force attempts to manipulate the newly arising sexual thoughts and feelings of a young female character for its own gross benefit. It’s uncomfortable to read, and it’s horrifying in a very visceral way.

And yet, the Pagan community has historically had deep problems with predatory adults taking sexual advantage of young people, whether under the guise of mentorship, ritual, or initiation. All too often, these predators are allowed to continue on, especially if they hold positions of power or are prominent “elders.”

When these manipulators have ties to Pagan organizations, Pagan institutions, and Pagan media, they are sometimes allowed to continue their dirty deeds as a public secret until – sometimes many years later – the weight of public attention becomes too heavy for their protectors, and action is finally taken to expel them.

Even then, Pagans seem loath to take the next step and aid the authorities in legal prosecution and punishment of the perpetrators.

Fighting the very real monsters around us is a serious task. Like myth, the metaphorical world of horror can help us to ask the right questions and maybe even find the right answers.

Look, I know you’re afraid. I’m afraid, too, but we have to try to board the house up, together. Now, I’m going to board up the windows and the doors. Do you understand?

We’ll be all right here. We’ll be all right here until someone comes to rescue us, but we’ll have to work together. You’ll have to help me.

Now, I want you to go in and get some wood so I can board the place up. Do you understand?

-Ben, Night of the Living Dead (1968)

The hard truth of real horror is that no one is coming to rescue us. We save ourselves, or we don’t. That’s all there is.

---

The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.

---

To join a conversation on this post:

Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.