Yet each of these weird iterations, while maintaining the genre’s key attributes, also look to resolve its faults. On the small screen, series including Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018 to 2020) and True Detective(three series since 2014) have brought weird fiction and its contributors well and truly into the realm of pop culture. He is joined by other “new weird” authors such as Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, Thomas Ligotti and KJ Bishop, as well as filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro, Jordan Peele and Leigh Janak. China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station (2000), is one of the key figures of the aptly named, “ new weird”. I work at a library and rarely buy books, but I leaf through the new arrivals all the same. It’s a rainy day in Ann Arbor, Michigan and I just ducked inside the downtown Borders. Today, a new generation of authors and filmmakers have sought to exhume the weird once again. Interview with Matt Ruff, Author of Lovecraft Country Interviews Romona Williams ApLet’s time warp back to 2007. Ultimately, these films attempted to recreate the cosmic existential terror beloved by Weird authors like Lovecraft. This signalled a trend of “Weird” films – which include Hell Raiser (1983) and Videodrome (1987) among others – that would peak with Event Horizon three years later. In 1994, famed horror director John Carpenter offered a nod to Lovecraft in In the Mouth of Madness (referencing Lovecraft’s novel In the Mountains of Madness). In television series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955 to 1965) and the famously uncanny Twilight Zone (1959 to 1964), Weird Tales found its way onto the silver screen and into the homes of a new generation. The magazine’s closure in 1954 did not signal the end of weird fiction for long. Popular audiences who had tired of Gothic literature’s well-worn formulas found a home in this new, decidedly weirder, method of inciting horror. Their monsters were older, slimier, more cosmic in scope than the Victorian era’s Dracula or Frankenstein. While shocking, these stories prioritised elements of existential fear and an intangible sense of dread. Clearly, the fear sought after by Weird Tales – and the authors who wrote for it – was of a different sort to the established norms of the Gothic tradition.

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