About

Alright, let's skip the formalities.

I'm Herm. I run The Longbox of Darkness — a blog and podcast dedicated to horror, weird fiction, cult films, and comics. If you stumbled in here by accident, congratulations. You've just found your new favorite corner of the internet. Pull up a chair. Mind the shadows.

How It All Started

I didn't choose horror or the weird. They kinda chose me. Early on — embarrassingly early, if I'm being honest — I was already bypassing the stuff other kids were into and gravitating toward the dark, the strange, and the deeply unsettling. EC Comics. H.P. Lovecraft. Classic Universal Monster movies. Whatever was creepy, weird, or just slightly wrong...that's what I wanted. And that appetite has never gone away. If anything, it's gotten worse. Or better, depending on how you look at it.

The Longbox of Darkness started in 2017 as a podcast with an accompanying blog - a place to put all of my obsessive energy to some kind of productive use. It began small. It grew. And here we are.

What You'll Find Here

Horror is the beating heart of this place, but I've never been the type to draw rigid lines around my obsessions. Weird fiction sits right alongside horror for me — the two are practically siblings. Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson...these writers haunt the same psychological territory as the best horror, and they deserve just as much attention. I cover them all.

Comics are another obsession I refuse to apologize for. Marvel, DC, underground titles, horror anthologies, manga — I've been collecting and reading since I was old enough to reach the spinner rack. The comic work of Bernie Wrightson alone could sustain years of posts. And yeah, I'll go deep on Bronze Age continuity if the mood strikes me, without a single shred of remorse.

Cult films get plenty of love here too. Not just the obvious stuff — though I'll defend The Omen to my last breath — but the genuinely obscure, the criminally underrated, the movies that got buried on VHS and deserve resurrection. Italian giallo. J-horror. Hammer. American International Pictures. If it's strange and brilliant and most people haven't heard of it, I'm probably interested.

A Displaced Horror Obsessive in Asia

I've been living as an expat in Asia for a while now, which has done exactly nothing to curb my enthusiasm for all this. If anything, living outside my home culture has sharpened it. Exposure to Japanese horror manga — Kazuo Umezu, Junji Ito — alongside Thai ghost story traditions and the particular strangeness of Asian cult cinema has only widened an already sprawling set of interests. Fear, it turns out, is genuinely universal. The specific textures of it just differ from place to place. I find that endlessly compelling.

The Podcast

The LOD podcast runs alongside the blog. I get into even deeper territory there — unpacking individual issues, films, and books with the kind of obsessive detail that would probably alarm a therapist. If you love the darkness, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

You, Reading This

Whether you've been lurking in these particular shadows for years or you just found this place today — welcome. I write for the people who love this stuff the way I love it. I'm talking about the person who stayed up too late finishing At the Mountains of Madness and felt the heady thrill of the Cosmic afterwards. The person who owns three different cuts of Suspiria. The collector who haunts used bookshops hoping to find a Jack Vance paperback with a good cover. You know who you are.

There's always room for one more here. Comments are open. Arguments are welcome. Recommendations are actively encouraged — I'll read or watch almost anything if you make a convincing enough case.

So. Let's get into it.

— Herm

Coffee... horror... life is good.