:)

Horror/Psychological Thriller movies to get stressed out over while drinking your hot beverage of choice, in your pajamas, eyeing the closest door to make sure it doesn't creak open.

"Oh fuck I actually have to watch all of these." -Me

Crimson Peak

Two words: Jessica Chastain. What, did you think I was going to say Tom Hiddleston? Oh shit, you're right. Okay FOUR words. This movie features some truly gorgeous visuals, beautiful (historically accurate!!!) costumes, an incredibly macabre plot, and a wonderfully talented cast. Take a shot every time I use an adjective. Of water, of course.

Hush

A Netflix gem. Will make you eye that door warily.

Shutter Island

Leonardo DiCaprio is extremely confused until he's not, and in turn, I am confused. Still a good movie and psychological thriller.

I am the pretty thing that lives in the house

More drama than horror, but still good nonetheless. You should watch it purely because I had to type all of that out.

The Talented Mr. Ripley

One of my all-time favorite movies in general. Not so much a horror movie as it is Call Me By Your Name but with murder and more of a dark academic aesthetic, but still a very fun watch. (More of a psychological thriller I suppose.)

Nightcrawler

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Slimy rat bastard man >:(. This movie was somewhat stressful to watch but it gives an interesting look into the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles.

Freaky

For fans of Supernatural, it has Kathryn Newton. For fans of Bette Midler, she starred in Hocus Pocus with Sarah Jessica Parker, who starred in Sex and The City with Vince Vaughn, so there you go. You're welcome. Give me money. This movie is like Freaky Friday except they substituted the fact that it is Friday for the fact that there is a serial killer in a teenage girl's body. Yikes, I could've phrased that better.

Fargo

Based off of a true story, this is the perfect movie for true crime buffs and just Minnesota in general. Marge Gunderson is a sweet pregnant police officer who loves her husband dearly, and who (somewhat) singlehandedly solves a kidnapping and murder case. It's the most comforting thriller movie I've ever seen. Just... skip the woodchipper scene if you want to keep it that way.

Sweeney Todd

A Tim Burton classic, it stars _____ _____ and Helena Bonham Carter. I don't even need to put his name there, you already know who it is based purely off of the fact that it's a Tim Burton movie. This movie is crazy and macabre and has a sweet couple o' tunes.

Sleepy Hollow

Another Tim Burton classic. It also stars _____ _____. Oh my god I just realized that a lot of people who were in Harry Potter are in Tim Burton's movies. Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Richard Griffiths, and of course, _____ _____. This movie is another one of my all-time favorites. I would live in this movie if I could, I love the scenery so much.

Scream

One of the most iconic horror movies of all time, and for good reason. I laughed out loud at some of the jokes. This movie was a lot of fun to watch. When I was at work today all I could think about was that scene in the movie store. Oh Randy...

Scream 2

Courteney Cox's hair is its own character. Oh Randy...

Frankenstein

A classic Tinseltown Terrifier. A bit slow, but good if you just wanna chill out and accidentally fall asleep on the couch.

Dracula

Another Tinseltown Terrifier. I think Bauhaus said it best with their unnecessarily 9-minute song titled Bela Lugosi's Dead. Bela Lugosi is, in fact, dead. I think.

American Psycho

Learning that Christian Bale is a method actor is utterly terrifying considering just how scary his character is in this movie.

The Birds

Scary 60's Alfred Hitchcock. As someone who is somewhat terrified of birds, I give this movie a thumbs up because I'm scared of what will happen otherwise.

Dark Shadows

Another Tim Burton film starring _____ _____ and HBC. I'm too much of a douche to write out Helena Bonham Carter. It's funny and Chloe Grace Moretz is there too.

I like to leave little notes.

!!! 📌

Booklist for all the Dark Academics:

[Dark Academia book recs of all the different kinds I could think of. It's a long journey. Buckle up.]

The Classic Dark Academic :

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Anything by the Brontë sisters

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (this book birthed Dark Academia)

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Short stories by Edgar Allan Poe

Bram Stokers Dracula

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

Maurice by EM Forster

Madam Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Good Man is Hard to Find

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Macbeth by Shakespeare

Othello by Shakespeare

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

The Poetry-lover Academic:

Poetry of Baudelaire

Odes of Keats (ALL OF THEM ARE A MUST READ)

Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (especially The Raven)

Shelley's Alastor, Prometheus Unbound, Masque of Anarchy

Kubla Khan by Coleridge

T.S Elliott's Wasteland

all Emily Dickinson poetry but especially 'I felt a funeral in my brain', 'Because I could not stop for death' (read them a thousand times already)

Pablo Neruda's Nothing but Death

Langston Hughes Poems

Tennyson's Lotos eater (underrated gem)

Sylvia Plath poems but special mentions to Lady Lazarus and the Bell jar

Paradise Lost by Milton (if you want to include something about the Devil in your list)

Poems by Sappho

Poems of Charles Bukowski (especially Love Is a Dog from Hell)

The Contemporary Dark Academic:

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (the origin of Dark Academia)

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Ace of Spades by Amanda Foody (could recommend it a hundred times)

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

If We Were Villains by ML Rio

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

The Girls are all so nice here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

The Likeness by Tana French

Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro

One of us is lying by Karen Mcmanus

Bunny by Mona Awad

The Plot by Jean Hanff

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Conversion by Katherine Howe

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A Quaint and Curious Volume

We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The Lying Games by Ruth Ware

Black Chalk by Christopher J Yates

The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman

The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt

The Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Bad Habits by Charleigh Rose

Good Girls Lie by JT Ellison

Shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

If We were Villains by M.L. Rio

Queer Dark Academic:

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (yes, yes, yes it's the gay shit)

Notes on a Scandal (What was she thinking?) by Zoë Heller

Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (lesbian vampire, hell yeah!)

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Maurice by EM Forster

Christabel by Coleridge

Poems by Sappho

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

Ace of Spades by Amanda Foody

The Dark Romantic Academic:

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Likeness by Tana French

The Temple House by Rachel Donohue

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Mythological Dark Academic:

(pardon me for my cluelessness)

I have not really read much about mythology but if Norse mythology is the area of your interest, Neil Gaiman is the God of it. (aka not only Good Omens and American Gods, but also the book 'Norse Mythology')

The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Circe by Madeline Miller

Ovid's Metamorphoses for Greek mythology enthusiasts

[Remember: Some of these books have dark academia as their major aspect but most of them have dark academia as their minor aspect, and many of them have been put into the list because I got a dark academia kind of vibe from them. Moreover these books have a lot more to offer than just Dark Academia, even if we ignore that aspect, these books are just great pieces of literature. This list is entirely created out of my own reading researches, friendly recommendations, and book recs from reddit, pinterest and the internet in general. If I have gone wrong somewhere or if you want me to add something new, feel free to drop an ask.]

some things i wish i knew as a baby practitioner:

it’s perfectly okay to change your mind. sometimes the ritual doesn’t line up with how you feel anymore. sometimes you feel pulled in a new direction. it’s all normal.

there’s intense and powerful magic in research. in learning. that doesn’t always mean hours in the library, but it does often mean logging off and learning about your native environment.

let your grimoire be messy. let it contradict itself. add things that are interesting but don’t really have a place yet. it’s your book, and you can always keep going in another one once this book is full.

you will learn upsetting things about parts of your practice. this is mostly for white- and otherwise privileged- witches; it’s important to recognize that the modern witchcraft, occult, and new age movements have a long history of stealing from closed cultures, from marginalized practitioners, and creating synthetic histories to explain modern inventions. if a fellow practitioner presents information like this to you about one of your practices, i implore you to take it to heart. learning more about the origins of your ritual and altering them, removing them, and providing reparations where appropriate are important, vital parts of connecting with your practice.

you may work with deities, you may not. same with spirit, the fae, ancestors, and all other aspects of craft. other people may work with forces you aren’t familiar with or that you struggle to believe in, that’s normal. do more research, talk with other practitioners, accept “no” and “i don’t have the energy to educate you” for what they are: boundaries. trying to subvert them will only hurt you both.

discourse isn’t worth your time. it just isn’t.

not every practitioner is a witch, not every witch is a practitioner. the labels we use to describe our work are historically charged, as magic so often is. what feels good to you may hurt another person, and vice versa.

magic is often closer to jazz than to a well-rehearsed symphony. plan accordingly. learn to improv in each key. learn the core elements of your practice and build from there.

consent. consent. consent. all magic that may touch another being requires it, not just love or romantic magic. healing? get consent first. divination? consent. make sure your subject knows what they’re consenting to. check in often. (think of it like a tea party. you invite them, and they come or they don’t. you offer them tea, they may want it or not. if they aren’t able to respond when you ask, you don’t pour them tea. if they hurt you or something you love, you might throw tea in their face.)

self-care is more than baths and deep breathing. it can be therapy, medication, boundary-setting, any number of really hard things. you deserve that care, though. other people do, too.

☁︎

velvet, flowers and lace. what could be better?

Been reflecting a lot on romantic love

And on how it's quite literally sold to us in movies, tv shows, music, which in turn are made to sell us products that don't necessarily fit with entertainment or media. I thought about the feeling of lack that comes along only when I'm reminded that I'm "single", and started to reflect on what that means to me.

Truth is, I don't feel as incomplete as I'm apparently supposed to. I don't discard the idea of getting into a relationship, but it's also not something I see myself purposefully running towards, like I would any other wish of mine.

When I think of never dating, the only fear I'm faced with is the one of judgement; of what my family and peers will think. It's never "I have to find them". In fact, the possibility of not dating is quite freeing.

Maybe that's my brain giving me a breather and turning off that side of me so I can focus on one thing at a time. Therapy first, getting my life in order, university, keeping friendships, enjoying my own company, and after all of that, maybe in the future, I'll unlock the "Feeling ready for a relationship" achievement. But for now I'm just by myself, and I'm very glad that feels enough.

😔✊