Happy Spooky Season everyone! The days are getting darker, there’s skeletons on the lawn, and you can buy candy corn on every corner – it’s the best time of year. It’s also the one year anniversary of my debut poetry chapbook, In The Night, In The Dark, my poetic love letter to 20th century horror movies. I was so proud to get this book made and out into the world, and a special thank you to everyone who has purchased a copy, told a friend, or gave a like on Instagram. Writing these poems felt like a conversation with the horror community, and it’s been wonderful connecting with other horror fans over the films that shaped us.
Every fall, Kaleb and I pick a horror franchise and try to spend a few weeks re-watching every movie in the collection, from start to finish. We’ve revisited most of the big ones at this point – Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser…and this year we chose Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I had seen the original movie decades ago, but none of the sequels or reboots. Watching all 9 movies over the course of 2 weeks really highlighted how extraordinary and terrifying the first movie is while stunning cinematic. Framing shots between hanging bones, the sickly, sunbaked lighting, the manic camera cuts to Sally’s insanely green eyes – it’s arthouse horror that doesn’t trade style for scares, it just serves both the entire time. Watching the sequels and reboots included a lot of fun scares and over the top gore, but also underscored just how difficult it is to recapture the strange magic of that first production.
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of In The Night, In The Dark, and give dancing Leatherface his flowers, I’m happy to share a new horror movie poem for 2026, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Leatherface twirls his chainsaw
in a ballet of dust and disappointment
as Sally’s half-broken body spills
into the back of a pickup truck,
her blood-soaked face
an eruption of laughter
echoing off the saw’s
metal teeth, turned gold
in the last licks of sunset
the chainsaw wailing like a lost child
as the highway unravels between them
until the ecstatic cavern of her mouth
swallows the black horizon
– Allison Goldstein, 2026
Happy Halloween ghouls!
