Paul Watson’s notes, replies, likes &c.

This essay started life as a paper for the Manchester Gothic Festival and was adapted for the Supernatural Cities Conference in Limerick 2017. It is now destined for a special OGOM edition of Gothic Studies, 'Wolves, Werewolves and Wilderness' to be published in the spring of 2018.

An analysis of Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's audio-essay 'On Vanishing Land' (2013), taking up the notion of the "eerie" in it and contrasting it to melancholy. Originally delivered at 'Five Centuries of Melancholia' conference, University of Queensland Art Museum, 4 September 2014.

The first mention of folk horror on this weblog was in 2018, where I talked about it in relation to Brexit.

For some time now I’ve been trying to put together the reasons why I don’t want to go back to “how the web used to be”. It’s because I want to go forward to how (I think) it should be. And we can’t go back to how the web used to be because we live in a very different world now.
About the web in 2024

It begins with a simple, profound realisation — to quit capitalism, we have to liberate ourselves from its entrenched mindset, a transformation that calls for more than economic reform; it demands a fundamental shift in how we perceive success, value community, and envision our role in the tapestry of humanity.

Writers and artists have long been fascinated by the idea of an English eerie – ‘the skull beneath the skin of the countryside’. But for a new generation this has nothing to do with hokey supernaturalism – it’s a cultural and political response to contemporary crises and fears

White Lady, written by David Rudkin, the writer of wyrd touchstone Penda’s Fen (1974) is described on his website as being “A parable on the agro-chemical destruction of nature”.