The aim of this article is to examine the influence of the contemporary speculative philosophy on the neo-fantastic fiction (Le monde enfin by J.-P. Andrevon). The speculative philosophy presents the modern world as the source of cosmological horror for the human being. In my analysis, I focus on two anxiety-provoking motifs present both in speculative philosophy and Andrevon’s novel: the end of the anthropocentric world and the beginning of a new, inhuman world, dominated by nature.

Recent research into complementation has targeted not only semantic or syntactic factors, but also extra features, one of which is the horror aequi principle. With the support of the British National Corpus, the present study investigates three pairs of adjectives: in each case one ends in -ed, and the other in -ing. The analysis has shown that horror aequi has little influence on the complement choice following an adjective, whereas the sentence subject governs that choice in a pronounced manner.

In his book, Ajuar funerario (2004), Fernando Iwasaki presents a range of scary stories. In some cases, the horror results from the gap between the terrible story told or suggested and the tone of the narrator. Although the presence of intertextual references to canonical authors of the genre often leads to parody, laughter, or smile never last long in Iwasaki’s literature. The reader soon realizes that even if horror has ceased to be embodied in the traditional motifs of the genre, it is still there, alive and kicking, ready to put our certainties in crisis and give us new chills.

The film art of the Russian Empire, in the light of the current state of research, may not be completely terra incognita, and yet a number of issues on this topic still need to be elaborated and saved from oblivion. The subject of the present research are the lost or only partially preserved horror movies filmed in the country of the last tsar of Russia – Nicholas II. The author recalls the circumstances of the creation of specific films, as well as the critical reception of such productions as Vasily Goncharov’s Viy (1909), At Midnight in the Graveyard (1909/1910) by the same director, The Vampire Woman (1915) by Viatcheslav (Victor) Tourjansky or two films by Ladislas Starevich: The Portrait (1915) and another screen adaptation of Viy (1916?).

The horror fiction of the Romantic Age differs considerably from its contemporary descendants. While generally associated with scary entertainment (‘playing with fear’), the Romantic Gothic often enough crossed the line to explore the depths of genuine epistemological, existential or political fears. This would not have been possible without developing its own poetics which drew its strength from a variety of sources. One of them was the speculative philosophy of history in its pessimistic and optimistic variants. They both fed the sense of horror and its literary transpositions. Moreover, they formed a positive feedback loop: anxiety over the course of history led to the use of the devices and registers of the poetics of horror, which in turn led to the amplification of the effects of the historical vision on the reader.

This article is an attempt to identify the main themes in the literary work of Zygmunt Haupt, a Polish writer, journalist and painter, who emigrated to the United States in the aftermath of World War II. His writings show a keen awareness of the issue of absence/presence and the related problems of memory traits, identity and literary representation. Drawing on the psychoanalytical criticism of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, this reading of Haupt’s fi ction, especially his short stories (whose collected edition was published in 2007 under the title The Basque Devil), is a critical reassessment of his work. As a storyteller he excels in the depiction of scenes of terror, desire and the uncanny. The article argues Haupt’s work represents not only a remarkable literary achievement but also offers an interesting study case for critics whose approach is founded on literary theory, psychoanalysis and anthropology.

This article discusses Grzegorz Uzdański’s verse novel Wypiór (2021, the title is a pun on the word ‘upiór’, Pol. spectre) which is multifaceted commentary on the Romantic tradition and the ‘Romantic paradigm’, epitomized in the figure of Adam Mickiewicz transformed into a vampire. The pop-cultural frame invites the reader to pursue all kinds of links between Wypiór and the gallery of the living dead, ghosts and spectres in Mickiewicz’s stories (conceived both as characters from the past and a metaphoric projections of the Romantic poet). The article compares the references and allusions in Uzdański’s novel to Mickiewicz’s own text as well as the text of another contemporary comic horror novel, Ale razem z naszymi umarłymi ( But Not Without Our Dead) by Jacek Dehnel. The analyses, which rely on a methodological toolkit inspired by Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, offer a more accurate reading of Wypiór and highlight its place in the contemporary reception of Romanticism with its predilection for haunting, ghosts or persistent spectral presence.