We’re back and we’re keeping to ourselves. You really can’t be too careful. The outside world is full of dangerous ideas and strange people. Some of them don’t even play Call of Cthulhu. Sure, they might find our ways odd too, especially if they hear the singing in our early episodes. Still, the real small town horror is always other people.







Main Topic: Small Town Horror







This is a local episode for local people. We explore small town settings and why they work so well for horror. Isolated, insular communities are a mainstay of horror, usually populated by sinister locals who shun the outside world and treat strangers with suspicion, but there is much more to the subgenre than that. As well as digging into the major tropes of small town horror, we discuss ways to reinvent and subvert them, along with examples from media and our own gaming lives.







Our Guest Host







We are delighted to welcome Eleanor Hingley to the Good Friends! Eleanor is a lifelong horror fan, obsessed with Gothic and horror art since childhood. She has written for a bunch of tabletop roleplaying games, including Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game, Hollows, Aegean, Broken Weave, The Laundry, Heart, and many other game lines. She also writes interactive fiction for Choice of Games, and has had IF published in sub-Q magazine. Eleanor has released her own independent TTRPG zines, which you can find on her itch.io page: Ex Libris, Talking Thunder and Seed of an Idea. You can follow Eleanor on Bluesky.













Links







Things we mention in this episode include:









* An American Werewolf in London (1981)







* Hot Fuzz (2007)







* Folk horror







* In Cold Blood by Truman Capote







* “The Forbidden” by Clive Barker







* Candyman (1992)







* Archive 81







* Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin







* The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin







* <a href="https://en.