Haunted houses & chainsaws

Revisiting House of Leaves, Halloween plans with Leatherface + more House of 1000 Corpses

This week in IF YOU GO AWAY, hauntings, haunts and cannibals. Read on for my review and reappraisal of Mark Z. Danielewski’s seminal House of Leaves, 25 years after its initial release, along with news of the UK’s first Texas Chainsaw Massacre-themed scare maze and the announcement of Rob Zombie unearthing his original screenplay to House of 1000 Corpses.

I’m P M Buchan, a former comic-book writer and lover of horror and dark art. I’ve written monthly columns and comic strips for Starburst and SCREAM: The Horror Magazine. I’ve collaborated with award-winning artists including John Pearson, Martin Simmonds and Ben Templesmith, and have been interviewed by Kerrang! and Rue Morgue. My work has been reviewed by Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fortean Times and Times Literary Supplement. I’ve collaborated with bands including Megadeth and Harley Poe, and written for clients including Lionsgate and Heavy Metal Magazine.

Let’s dive in!

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House of Leaves

Published on 5 March 2000, House of Leaves is the debut novel of Mark Z. Danielewski, a Yale graduate with an MFA from USC and son of Polish film director Tad Danielewski. The novel quickly garnered a cult following, celebrated for its unconventional narrative structure and typographical experimentation.

Although literally published in 2000, House of Leaves is very much an alternative novel of the 1990s, leaning heavily into elements that I now retrospectively recognise as tropes of that period – drug addiction, unreliable narrators, tattoo studios, and a generally nocturnal life that seems to exist like oil and water with the real world, rarely intersecting with anything recognisably happening in the daytime.

Mirroring the metafictional blurred lines that helped drive the stratospheric success of The Blair Witch Project, portions of the manuscript for House of Leaves circulated online and through underground channels in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco before it was officially released. This cross-media approach also plays out in Danielewski's collaboration with his sister, the musician Poe, on her album Haunted, which intertwines thematically with House of Leaves and features tracks that reference the novel, including Danielewski's readings.

The novel’s narrative is a complex tapestry, built around a blind man's academic critique of a documentary (The Navidson Record), annotated by tattoo apprentice Johnny Truant, whose own descent into madness unfolds through increasingly chaotic footnotes. The book’s layout mirrors its content, with text spiralling, flipping and fragmenting across pages. You can’t engage with the story without immersing yourself in the physicality of the object itself – a landmark in transgressive, postmodern literature that I’m not sure has been, or ever will be, equalled.

The closest comparison I can call to mind is Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, which borrows some of Danielewski's typographic play and uses it to bring to life a romance about the fragmented psyche of an unreliable narrator whose memories are being eaten by a conceptual shark. There’s the kind of playful magical realism here that Neil Gaiman pulls off at his best, plus a section that nods directly to Jaws. Despite all that, The Raw Shark Texts remains infinitely more accessible than House of Leaves, and I’d 100% recommend it if you haven’t read it yet.

We’re now more than 25 years on from the release of House of Leaves, with no meaningful adaptation in sight, which might explain why it seems to have made less of a dent on pop culture than so many of Danielewski's peers did with far inferior works.

Image of House of Leaves borrowed from Ted Gioia’s Honest Broker substack

In many ways, the whole backrooms aesthetic of liminal, abandoned spaces owes everything to the haunted house at the heart of House of Leaves. Ostensibly an internet-birthed horror concept that first gained traction on creepypasta forums and imageboards around 2019, the spatial dread and creeping horror of the backrooms was anticipated and preceded in every way by Danielewski's novel. Whatever legacy House of Leaves may hold in terms of formal innovation or literary technique, at its core it remains one of the most powerful haunted house novels ever written.

All that said, I re-read House of Leaves recently, for the first time in at least 15 years, and found myself less enamoured with it than I remembered. For a first read, I still believe everybody would benefit from experiencing this novel and going on the very dark journey it offers. Ironically, for a format that so lends itself to multiple readings and hunts for what we’d now call easter eggs, I felt like some of the characterisation and relationships fell a little flat.

For years, I’ve described House of Leaves as this dense, maddening story about a labyrinth that appears inside a family home, a story that touches on so many different themes but is, at its heart, about the dissolution and fragmentation of a family. An intimate tale hidden inside a Russian doll of wider stories, each told by narrators who can’t help but drag their own identity (much like Hunter S. Thompson) into the analysis. But on this second reading, I felt like the relationships between Navidson, one of the central characters, and his wife and children had no more secrets to reveal.

Fatherhood has changed me fundamentally. I found myself fixating on how little insight House of Leaves offers into the relationship between a father and his children, and how much it reveals about the author that the children in the novel feel like afterthoughts, never fully realised. This is my problem as a reader more than Danielewski's as an author. Where I remembered richness and depth in the characterisation, what I found this time was an intricate, beautiful plot, carried by characters who couldn’t quite convince me they had lives outside the pages of the book.

So, if you’ve never read House of Leaves and love dark art, transgressive fiction or the late-90s grime of tattoo parlours, addicts and unreliable narrators, you owe it to yourself to read this massive odyssey of a novel. If you’ve read it before, though, send me a message. I’d love to talk and share my new appraisal.

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Who wants to be chased by Leatherface?

It’s never too early to make plans for Halloween. Halloween Haunt Fest in Hertfordshire has made an early bid to become this year’s mandatory scare event by announcing the UK’s first licensed Texas Chainsaw Massacre experience, based on Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic.

Running from 17 October to 1 November 2025, tickets are now on sale and I am 100% sold. Who wants to come to Hertfordshire with me to be chased by a man in a Leatherface mask? The Chop Shop maze at Tulley’s Shocktober last year was one of the weakest scare attractions they had on offer, with so many chainsaws that you became desensitised just waiting in the queue. There’s always a possibility that Halloween Haunt Fest will fall flat too, but with such an iconic property to play with, my hopes are high.

The first time I watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was in 1999, when the BBFC finally deigned to give it a certificate for official release in the UK. The Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle hosted a double bill of Texas Chainsaw, with an appearance from original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen, and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (at that time still officially banned in the UK) with star David Hess.

Despite having an indelible impact on my adolescent brain, I remember very little of the screening or of meeting Gunnar Hansen. What I do remember is my friend Peter insisting that we buy a couple of litres of rot-gut vodka and pour them into a half-emptied two-litre bottle of Coca-Cola to sneak into the first screening. I’d recently finished my GCSEs and was in the first week or two of my A-Levels, on a school night, and got absolutely trashed, drinking myself into incoherence.

During one of the two films I made such a scene that an usher came to take our drinks away, and I responded by trying to hide under the chair in front, a futile endeavour, as I was several magnitudes too big to fit into the space. The night after that is a blur, other than waving off a group of school friends when they left to catch the last bus home, before realising that I too needed a way to get home and had spent all of my money.

The moral of the story is that I’m overdue being chased in the dark by a man wearing a mask made of human skin. Get in touch if you’d like to meet up at Halloween Haunt Fest (or if you can explain why every Halloween event in the UK has such similar-sounding names, none of which explain a thing about their locations…). Hertfordshire is an ungodly distance to drive from Plymouth, but I’m equal to the challenge.

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This is the House built on sin

Just when you feel like reading one deep dive into the making of Rob Zombie's Firefly trilogy had revealed everything you could want to know about what goes on behind the scenes of a cannibalistic haunted house, along comes the news that Zombie is opening his personal vaults to publish his original annotated script to the film that started it all.

House of 1000 Corpses: The Making of a Cult Classic is out 16 September 2025 via Insight Editions, in a 304-page hardcover stacked with production notes, concept art, rare behind-the-scenes photos, and the full shooting script – defaced throughout with Zombie’s handwritten edits and sketches, which, based on his consistently brilliant musical liner notes, will be worth their weight in gold. Obviously I’ve already preordered my copy.

As an aside, Rob Zombie is on a roll at the minute, after picking up faux moral outrage from the UK’s Daily Mail recently.

Zombie told People magazine:

“The book takes the fans from early notes and sketches right up to the premiere of the film. Along the way, you see every twist and turn the film took… not through me telling the story but through my script which is covered in all my notes.”

If you caught my recent interview with Dustin McNeill about House of Rejects (and my own take on why The Devil’s Rejects deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), you’ll know why I’m so excited about this. House of 1000 Corpses was the opening salvo in a career that took a passion for horror to the next level.

Now, we’ll get to see the guts of it.

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– P M Buchan

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