You don’t have to squint too hard to see horror in the South. It’s stitched into the landscape, layered into the culture, and hidden in plain sight. Drive through any Alabama town and you’ll find it: crumbling storefronts with more ghosts than customers, peeling paint on houses no one bothers to sell because everyone already knows what’s inside, the unspoken rot of places that once felt permanent.

And yet, just a short drive from those ruins, you’ll stumble across beauty so rich it feels eternal. The quiet overlooks of Mentone on Lookout Mountain, where the fog rolls through the valleys like it’s alive. The prehistoric hush of Cathedral Caverns near Woodville, where the earth itself feels like it’s holding its breath. The cool, pure waters of Blue Springs State Park outside Clio. A place that feels like it should wash everything clean — but feeds waterways so muddy you’ll never see what’s waiting for you underneath. Or Moundville, where the earthworks whisper of civilizations far older than our modern traditions. And its ghosts lingering to remind us we are as invasive as the kudzu that wraps so many decaying buildings.

That tension — between beauty and decay, memory and denial — is the South’s heartbeat. For every neighbor who waves when you pass, there’s another watching from behind a curtain, waiting until they feel safe enough to let their real opinions slip. Sometimes, they’re the same person. We have nearly as many churches as people, and wonder why they’re so hard to fill. We love to praise tradition, but we’ll sell off family farmland for another shopping center without blinking. The contradictions are endless. The South is beautiful, but it is also rotting, and Gothic horror has always thrived in that contradiction.

But here’s the thing: I believe Southern Gothic is ready for new stories. The old staples — witches, voodoo curses, vampires, zombies — have been done, pardon the pun, to death. The South is more than a graveyard of borrowed monsters. It’s a crossroads, a melting pot where pieces of the Old World never died when they crossed the ocean. They survived. They adapted. They hid in plain sight. And in those shadows are ghosts, legends, and monsters most people don’t even realize exist—waiting for someone to give them a voice.

That’s where my storytelling begins. I want to explore those places, those hidden traditions, those contradictions. Because horror isn’t just about scaring people — it’s about revealing what we’d rather not see. And here in the South, when the bonds of family and community weaken, when isolation takes root, that’s when the evil of the world gets closest. That’s when it reaches out from the dark to say hello.

The South is already Gothic, but it’s also something else. A living contradiction with many stories still waiting to be told.