Immortality, Haunted Films & Labyrinth Hearts

Turritopsis life cycle.

Sure, we’d like to think life follows a straight line. But the truth is the universe is full of loops. A tiny jellyfish can literally rewind to its beginning. An artist cross‑hatches endless lines until they become surreal visions. A singer rewrites Greek myths to salvage a broken heart. Forever is just a perspective, another turn down a dark hallway.

Nightmare fuel

• Immortal Jellyfish: the secret to cheating death (National History Museum, UK)

  Meet Turritopsis dohrnii, a 4.5‑mm hydrozoan that refuses to die. When it’s injured or starving, it collapses into a blob, becomes a polyp and grows a new, genetically identical medusa through a rare process called transdifferentiation. Ok yes technically predators may still get it but nature’s “immortal” jellyfish is a biological horror story in miniature. » Read now

• New Horror Books for August 2025 (Jump Scares)

  Jump Scares always serves up the best new horror, and the August lineup doesn’t disappoint. Haunted Weimar‑era film? Check. Possession horror like you’ve never seen? Yup. A sexy commune with a glitching shadow monster, killer infants, demon‑infested mines, plus an anthology revisiting The Stand? Your TBR pile just groaned. » Read more

• Bring Her Back (The Guardian)

  A foster teen tries to rescue his stepsister from a grieving, manipulative caregiver played with ferocious intensity by Sally Hawkins. I love a horror movie that makes you wonder what you would do and how far you would go — in this case, to bring back someone you loved. » Read more

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This week, we’re tracing my favorite horror loop: the self you can’t escape.

Writer’s brew

David Agranoff’s essay on Severance Season Two for Reactor Magazine traces how the show follows Philip K. Dick’s narrative formula. Employees at Lumon undergo “severance,” splitting their lives into “innies” and “outies”, a neat device to explore how our identity and in fact, reality, can be manipulated. For horror writers, it’s a masterclass in framing bigger themes through the lens of character. » Read more

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Don’t look behind you

• Laurie Lipton’s Dark Pencil Dreams

  Los Angeles artist Laurie Lipton makes huge, hyper-detailed black-and-white drawings that skewer our love affair with technology. Using thousands of fine cross‑hatched lines, she produces images that are dark, funny, unsettling, and thought-provoking. » See her work » Cool video by @microdoseofart

• Asaf Avidan – “The Labyrinth Song”

  A haunting reframing of the myth of Ariadne (who gave Theseus a thread to escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth) into a confession about being trapped in your own maze. » Listen in

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