[page 3] Monsters have been extremely visible in U.S. popular culture this past year. In film, Ryan Coogler’s historical vampire epic Sinners (2025) received a record-breaking sixteen Academy Award nominations, and Guillermo Del Toro’s new cinematic version of Frankenstein (2025) did not lag far behind, with nine nominations of its own. In print, The New Yorker pondered “How Monsters Went from Menacing to Misunderstood” (Oct. 7, 2025); The New York Times Magazine noted that “’Frankenstein Has Always Held Up a Mirror” and wondered, “What Does It Show Us Now?” (Oct. 31, 2025); even Teen Vogue ran an article, one that extensively quoted Editorial Board member Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, examining the cultural traumas fueling the “Cannibal Girl Trend” (Dec. 29, 2025). Given that the monstrous becomes especially relevant at moments of cultural crisis, it only makes sense that the U.S., in its current uncanny state, is experiencing such an upsurge (it seems no coincidence that immigration and cultural identity play a large role in Sinners). And this same sort of cultural work can be seen in the objects of analysis that populate this issue of Supernatural Studies.
The articles in the current issue consider television, film, folklore, and even personal correspondence from a famed writer and editor of weird fiction. Timonthy Gitzen contemplates the concept of “synchronicity” using a case study of the paranormal docuseries Hellier, Joshua Adair examines a peculiar relationship to place in the film adaptation of Sarah Waters’s novel The Little Stranger, and Daniel P. Compora argues that the genre of the film Nightbreed and its misunderstood monsters has itself been misunderstood. Payton McCarty-Simas approaches 2010s witch horror films through their relationship to corresponding states of [page 4] feminist culture(s); and Christopher Rivera and Suleyman Bolukbas look at a character often given her own feminist attributes, the vampire Carmilla, and her transmutations across various texts and media, focusing particularly on her presentation in the animated Castlevania series. Katherine Cottle traces the Snallygaster, a Maryland cryptid, through its long history of shifting cultural context, and Katherine Kerestman sketches a more personal variety of such context in her survey of a collection of letters from Frank Belknap Long to August Derleth. Taking these varied and stimulating contributions together, we hope that you will find this issue to be, like Frankenstein’s creature, more than the sum of its parts.
As always, please visit our website (supernaturalstudies.com) for more information about submitting, becoming a peer reviewer, or being added to our list of potential book reviewers. Stay safe, stay angry, and stay spooky, friends!
Leah Richards, Ph.D.
John R. Ziegler, Ph.D.
Co-Editors
MLA citation (print):
Richards, Leah, and John R. Ziegler. "Editors' Note." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 2026, pp. 3-4.