Inherited Hauntings: Horror at Home

The monsters we fear most often live behind closed doors. In this chilling and deeply human conversation, Eirinie Carson, Victor Manibo, and Tamika Thompson reveal how horror seeps into family ties, domestic spaces, and generational legacies, where the home becomes both refuge and ruin. Eirinie Carson’s Bloodfire, Baby reimagines the maternal gothic through the eyes of a new mother unraveling in isolation, haunted by postpartum dread and a centuries-old specter that mirrors her buried fears. In The Villa, Once Beloved, Victor Manibo conjures a decaying ancestral estate in the Philippines, where grief, folklore, and a fractured family collide and the curse of inheritance refuses to stay buried. Tamika Thompson’s The Curse of Hester Gardens brings the haunted house to public housing, reworking the genre into a fierce meditation on systemic violence and maternal sacrifice, where every hallway hums with ghosts, both social and supernatural. Moderated by Allison Mick, whose debut novel Humboldt Cutblends eco-horror with ancestral reckoning, this panel examines how horror exposes what families hide, asking what it means to protect those we love when the true terror lives within the walls we’ve built.