Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, I’m sharing a handful of horror stories that strike a chord in my OCD-addled brain.

I’m going to be so honest: For the first time in nearly a year of writing Scare Me! I struggled to choose this week’s topic.

I’m currently in the midst of an increasingly annoying OCD flare up, brought on by completely mundane stressors. My brain detours anxious feelings through some decidedly strange routes—like forcing me to wash my hands incessantly, making me fearful of touching Outside Things, and fanning the suspicion that all of my food has somehow been poisoned. It’s the worst flare up I’ve had in years, and it’s left me feeling exhausted.

But on Tuesday night, after a much-needed nap and takeout (and, let’s be honest, some extra anxiety meds), my recent conversation with Yah Yah Scholfield got me thinking about OCD-coded horror.

As Yah Yah mentioned, there are so many different varieties of OCD—from pure O[bsession] that manifests in persistent, intrusive thoughts to the intricate compulsive rituals my OCD sometimes demands.

This spectrum of symptoms can make OCD incredibly subtle or internalized, and therefore hard to diagnose. I didn’t get a formal diagnosis until I was around 28 or 29, when my first psychiatrist started putting the pieces together.

The horror stories on today’s list either feature characters or scenarios that embody facets of OCD I’ve experienced. To my OCD readers: The good thing about flare ups is that they will eventually pass. I’m going to be just fine soon, and you are, too!

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It’s strange to think about now, but I was reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle when I received my diagnosis—and I recognized so many of my symptoms in Merricat. Jackson flips the classic horror trope in which townspeople fear their local dilapidated / haunted mansion, instead illustrating the circumstances that create such a place.

Throughout the novel, Merricat completes odd and hyper-specific private rituals she believes will keep her sister and their isolated home safe. As the outside world threatens the sisters’ cloistered lifestyle, Merricat’s rituals become increasingly desperate and distressed. I love that Jackson wrote Merricat in the twilight where witchiness meets obsession and compulsion.

If you love Castle, you’ll also probably enjoy Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, which reimagines Merricat’s story in completely novel ways.

Who else is psyched for Hokum? Damien McCarthy has directed some of my favorite movies in recent years, and when I think of Caveat, it feels like a strangely apt embodiment of OCD.

The movie places an amnesiac drifter on an isolated island, where he’s tasked with looking after a young woman in exchange for a sizable payment. The bizarre catch is that he must remain shackled on a long, heavy chain, restricting his movements throughout the cold and inhospitable house.

When my OCD is particularly noisy, I feel unable to touch certain objects, or I obsessively track the touchpoints that daisy-chain contamination from one surface to the next. My compulsions feel stifling and restrictive, all the worse because they’re so irrational and absurd. I’m not literally chained to any wall, but sometimes I think I can almost hear that rusted rattle…

Many people view Lake Mungo as one of the scariest faux documentaries ever created, and I completely understand why. The Australian horror film paints an intimate portrait of the Palmer family as they grieve the recent loss of their daughter, Alice.

Like Twin Peaks’ Laura, Alice was a popular girl next door who harbored unexpectedly dark secrets. The documentary brings some of these to light, eventually zeroing in on a cell phone containing footage from a traumatic—and possibly supernatural—event Alice experienced while on a school trip shortly before her accidental death.

Until I got my diagnosis, I didn’t realize that my persistent preoccupations with death and illness were actually OCD symptoms that could be treated. Alice’s sense of mortality and impending doom in the weeks before her death deeply resonates with this aspect of OCD for me.

I loved Inigo Mort’s recent Horror Legends interview with author Kylie Lee Baker—and I was amazed to discover that she was also diagnosed with OCD during the pandemic.

Baker’s novel follows Cora Zeng, a crime scene cleaner whose job increasingly confronts her with the aftermath of anti-Asian hate during the height of the pandemic. As Cora struggles with contamination anxieties and her own trauma—and the Hungry Ghost festival fast approaches—she becomes increasingly suspicious that these crimes are linked.

I picked this book up after listening to Inigo’s interview, and I’m so looking forward to learning more about Cora’s story. I’m also gearing up to read Baker’s new novel, Japanese Gothic, which I’ll be reviewing over on Macabre Daily.

I hadn’t thought about Jade Daniels as an OCD-coded character until I started poking around online—but it fits. Stephen Graham Jones’ final girl maintains a relentless internal monologue of slasher facts, putting a protective layer of disassociation between herself and a world that’s sometimes too painful to bear.

I’m not really sure what causes OCD—I’ll leave that to the professionals—but I do know that it’s often linked to traumatic experiences. Chainsaw’s slow, gradual reveal of Jade’s trauma is one of the most patient, deliberate, and masterful feats of characterization I’ve ever read.

To all those who write Jade off as being annoying or insufferable—imagine how exhausting it must be for her to live inside her head. If compulsions weren’t so compulsive, who would want to do them in the first place?

Piercing has an incredibly provocative premise: What would you do if you felt a compulsion to stab your newborn baby with an ice pick?

But instead of a nasty, shallow, edgelord type of horror, Murakami’s novel offers a surprisingly deep and complex examination of the long shadow trauma casts over our lives. The key to Piercing is that Masayuki doesn’t want to stab his beloved daughter. He’s terrified by his own intrusive thoughts, and all the absurd, violent plans he hatches are motivated by his desperation to keep his daughter safe.

As Masayuki seeks out a stranger to murder, his potential victim harbors past trauma of her own. The novel becomes a subversive dance between these two characters as they struggle to survive the psychic wounds they carry—and each other.

As one Redditer put it, “The plot's about a kid who doesn't do a compulsion and it causes the obsession to happen.” Pretty much, yeah.

I’ve been flying through Uketsu’s latest novel, Strange Buildings, this week, and later today I’ll be hopping on a call with English translator Jim Rion! I enjoyed the first two Strange novels very much, but Buildings is my favorite so far. It’s weirder, bigger, and more sprawling than the others, spanning a century of bizarre architecture, cults, arson, murder, and much more.

If you’ve enjoyed this twisty, metafictional series as much as I have, we have Jim to thank for pitching Pushkin Vertigo—and later translating the novels into English. I’m looking forward to learning more about this very specific niche world within horror and mystery publishing!

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.