further to backrooms chat, emilie wrote a piece abt the relation of horror to the commons (in the form of dubious copyright friendly huggy wuggy merch et al):
https://hotelpaintings.neocities.org/posts/2023-09-01-Brief_thoughts_on_Horror__for_the_first_day_of_Halloween_
my feeling on why horror stuff in particular seems to spread this way is that imo horror is less a genre than a setting, the setting of "the main aspect of the world is mystery and that mystery can turn into terrifying violence at any time" (so maybe not "unrealistic" in a sense, but still a kind of charged and visionary form of realism). i think for this reason horror stuff less resembles a collection of discrete parts and more like one of those old MUD maps where you can see ok over here is lord pookie's medieval manor and over there is jennie's crime zeppelin - the different pieces don't have to be directly continuous in theme or rules for there to be a sense of their occupying a shared space. and it's loose enough to always allow for the possibility that new spaces could be added on, reshuffling and changing what's already there. thinking also of the similarly copyright-filed-off ways junji ito stories were extrapolated into a "world of horror", lovecraft into lovecraft country etc.
i dont think it's impossible for one body to "own" a world like this but it's sort of nice to think that one reason it's remained so slippery here is that there's still a sense, among people who make and like this stuff rather than The Owners at least, that partitioning everything to strict copyrighted contours would make it mean less for everyone as a result.. imagine instead if you will, a kind of, "monster mash".
