Enter the House of Horrors and transform fear into growth
Horror as a genre, has always given shape to what we fear, survive, and transcend. In this two-part event, writer, and researcher Alex Herod joins artist George Grace Gibson to explore how horror can become a creative language for recovery: a way to meet difficult experiences, reimagine the self and create new forms from the things that haunt us.
Expect an evening of conversation, making and shared enquiry, moving between research, lived experience and hands-on creative practice. Together, we askwhat horror can teach us about survival, imagination, and the peculiar work of becoming whole.
Part One: Making Friends with Your Monsters
1pm-1.45pm
Drawing on her PhD research paper, Survival and Recovery: Addiction and the Therapeutic Potential of Horror Writing, Alex Herod will explore how horror can offer a visceral space for meeting difficulty, digging into darkness, making friends with our monsters and surviving. Bringing together lived experience, creative practice and research into forms of genre based self-therapy, Alex asks how horror might support recovery processes.
Part Two: Recoverist House of Horrors
2 – 4 pm
Step inside the Recoverist House of Horrors: a creative workshop led by artist George Grace Gibson, where you will make your very own sculptural, horror house-shaped artist book.
Inspired by Alex Herod’s research, this workshop will explore themes of recovery, self-care, survival, and transformation, by reimagining the house: a place of shelter, memory, haunting, and possibility. Working with book making techniques you will reimagine the house as a container of stories, fragmented memories, and future possibilities that unexpectedly unfold.
Places for this workshop are limited, so advance booking is recommended. Come ready to listen, share and learn by entering our collective Recoverist House of Horror.
Through exhibitions, performances and creative events, Recoverist Month places the arts at the centre of conversations on substance use and recovery. Held every September to mark International Recovery Month, this annual programme brings artists, communities and audiences together across venues around the UK, making a vibrant contribution to the contemporary cultural landscape.
About the contributors
Alex Herod is a writer, researcher, and therapist whose work explores the intersections of creativity, horror, and recovery. Drawing on lived experience, their PhD research investigates the therapeutic potential of horror writing as a tool for survival, recovery, trauma processing, identity rebuilding, and imagining hope. Their first academic paper, Survival and Recovery, was published after receiving the inaugural Peter Hutchings Award for Outstanding Contribution to Horror Studies from Northumbria University in 2024. In 2025, the research also received the Improving Lives panel prize at the University of Salford’s SPARC Postgraduate Research Festival.
George Grace Gibson is an artist working between research and craft using fictioning, zine-making, lo-fi print processes, and book arts to document niche communities and unofficial histories. Collaboration is central to their practice, often bringing together artists, writers and researchers with shared interests in cultural memory, fandom and informal knowledge making. Their work has explored subjects anging from queer retelling of Godzilla and the history of bootleg Pokémon to the psychological impact of early-2000s TV phenomena LOST, tracing how people record, interpret, and circulate knowledge outside formal institutions.
