These are works which were either foundational to my interest in the hobby, or that I return to time and again to replenish the wellspring of inspiration for my campaigns. Which is, I guess, an extremely pretentious way of saying that this is media that I love.

Books/Short Stories:

• The Slithering Shadow (Howard, 1933)
• The Tower of the Elephant (Howard, 1933)
• Rogues in the House (Howard, 1934)
• At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft, 1936)
• Red Nails (Howard, 1936)
• The Hobbit (Tolkien, 1937)
• The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954)
• Dune (Herbert, 1965)
• Blood Meridian (McCarthy, 1985)
• House of Leaves (Danielewski, 2000)
• Southern Reach Trilogy (VanderMeer, 2014)

Movies/Shows:

• Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
• The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa, 1958)
• Yojimbo (Kurosawa, 1961)
• Sanjuro (Kurosawa, 1962)
• Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey, 1963)
• Lord of the Flies (Brook, 1963)
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone, 1966)
• The Hourglass Sanitorium (Has, 1973)
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
• Sorcerer (Friedkin, 1977)
• Phantasm (Coscarelli, 1978)
• Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)
• Clash of the Titans (Davis, 1981)
• Dragonslayer (Robbins, 1981)
• Heavy Metal (Potterton, 1981)
• The Keep (Mann, 1983)
• Conan the Destroyer (Fleischer, 1984)
• The Black Cauldron (Rich, Berman, 1985)
• The Goonies (Donner, 1985)
• Red Sonja (Fleischer, 1985)
• Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
• Big Trouble in Little China (Carpenter, 1986)
• Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988)
• Willow (Howard, 1988)
• Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992)
• Captain Ron (Eberhardt, 1992)
• Cabin Boy (Resnick, 1994)
• The Descent (Marshall, 2005)
• Old Joy (Reichardt, 2007)
• House of the Devil (West, 2009)
• Valhalla Rising (Refn, 2010)
• A Field in England (Wheatley, 2013)
• As Above, So Below (Dowdle, 2014)
• The Hateful Eight (Tarantino, 2015)
• Don’t Breathe (Álvarez, 2016)
• The Void (Gillespie, Kostanski, 2017)
• Annihilation (Garland, 2018)
• The Terror (Multiple, 2018)
• Us (Peele, 2019)
• Green Knight (Lowery, 2021)
• Barbarian (Cregger, 2022)
• The Northman (Eggers, 2022)
• Scavengers Reign (Bennett, Huettner, 2023)
• Delicious in Dungeon (Miyajima, 2024)

Videogames/Games:

• Zork Trilogy (Infocom, 1980-82)
• Enchanter Trilogy (Infocom, 1983-85)
• Wishbringer (Infocom, 1985)
• Beyond Zork (Infocom, 1987)
• The Lurking Horror (Infocom, 1987)
• Quake (id Software, 1996)
• Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996)
• Everquest (Verant Interactive, 1999)
• Silent Hill (Konami, 1999)