Hungarian Horror is Amazing

Ajouté : 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]The beautiful thing about horror is that there is always something new to discover. The terrible thing about horror is how many of those discoveries turn out to be offensively mediocre. I spend a lot of time scrolling through Goodreads and IMDb searching for something that stands out from the rest.

[00:00:16]And it was during one of those scrolls that I stumbled upon an anthology called the black maybe. The antlord figure and the apartment complex on the cover were already enough to spark my interest. I have never heard of Atela Veres before, but to be fair, my experience with Hungarian horror is limited to a single movie. A pretty mediocre movie, that is.

[00:00:37]Don't get me wrong, Hungarian is a beautiful language. But unfortunately, I'm unable to decode the emoji alphabet and 18 noun cases. So, it's a real blessing that this book got a translation because Ves writes some of the most creative and emotionally dense horror I've ever read. Take Folktown for example. probably the most popular story from the black maybe and for good reason. It's about a band that is so niche and so underground that no one can be really sure if it exists in material reality. The story mainly follows a man called Balash who decides to write a book about Hungarian underground bands from his city. He was a sheltered kid with strict parents who effectively robbed him of his high school years.

[00:01:18]Instead of doing what he wanted, he had to sit at home and study, missing out on teenage life. So he decides to compensate by writing a book about his city's underground music scene, which is now long gone with all the band members, club owners, and fans moving on. But there is a spectre haunting the memories of those who were around at the time. A band that influenced many of the local musical projects. Yet, as it turns out, there is no one that ever heard them play a single show. There were no tours, no announcements when and where the band would play. The only advertisements being blank white posters. Yet Folktown managed to build a cult following, a literal cult following. Those who heard them play became different. They seem to know where the next show will take place. And hearing Faulktown play again, well, it became the only thing that mattered. And Balash enters the same rabbit hole, dragging those around with him. It's these esoteric themes where the book shines the brightest. But what I found handled especially well here are the stories about birth, parenthood, and childhood trauma. The time remaining and the black maybe are my favorite pieces of the bond, and I decided to summarize the plot of both here, so be aware of heavy spoilers. Starting with the time remaining, this is a story written from the perspective of a therapy patient struggling to comprehend what was done to him when he was a small child. His grandmother passed away, but in his mind, she was still a living person.

[00:02:44]this because his mom made up a lie about how the grandmother moved to Australia and that eventually they will visit her.

[00:02:50]In reality, the grandmother is long dead, but it was decided that the boy shouldn't know. He was too young to come to terms with death. The last gift from his grandmother is a plush toy named Willie. For context, Willie may or may not be a reference to a cult classic Hungarian movie called Willie the Sparrow about a kid who shoots birds from his apartment for fun and then gets turned into an absolute abomination of a human sparrow hybrid. The boy treasures Willie more than any other toy. For him, Willie is a companion with his own thoughts and own problems. Willie is sensient, speaks to the boy, and always guides him to do the right thing. The mother notices her son's attachment to the plushie. It doesn't fit her parenting style. Her son needs to grow up to be strong, and there is simply no space for plush toys. She sits him down and tells him with the utmost seriousness that Willie is sick. He was examined by doctors and they don't precisely know what it is. Maybe it's genetic. Maybe it's because he was manufactured in China and got some foreign disease in a factory. What's sure is that Willie will die. There is nothing that can be done. The plushy has two months to live, so the boy better take good care of him for that period.

[00:04:03]The boy's world breaks down. Normally, he would seek guidance with his mother as any child would, but she just told him that there is no way to cure Willie.

[00:04:12]He examines the toy, and sure enough, there is a tear in the fabric. Death is coming for Willie. The boy hears the plushy cry during the night and soon finds out that he's not the only one with the issue. Three other kids in the school have a similar problem.

[00:04:27]Coincidentally, their parents tend to discuss parenting with the boy's mother.

[00:04:31]The reader gets the impression early on that she is working behind the scenes.

[00:04:36]Overwhelmed by the situation, her son starts wetting his bed, which she's obviously displeased with. The next day, when he comes home from school, he finds Willie on the ground with even more damage, the filling leaking out of him.

[00:04:49]The boy tells Willie that everything will be all right. Fully knowing that it's a lie. The four classmates discuss their struggles at school and figure out that all their plushies took a turn for the worse. Some of them lost limbs while others went into paralysis and vomited up their own guts. The children need to act fast. When the boy comes home, he collects all his other plush toys, those that he didn't play with for a long time. Willie begs him not to sacrifice the healthy plushies for him, but the kid is determined. He starts cutting into his old toys with scissors, gathering their plush for transfusion.

[00:05:25]The toys scream. The boy who gave them life is now taking it away from them, but he doesn't kill them outright.

[00:05:31]Doesn't take out all the plush. After all, transfusions only work when they're fresh. So, the plushies are dying slowly for days even until there is no filling left in them. My mother asked me during dinner why I was shouting in my room. I told her I was performing surgeries, dissections in order to prolong Willy's life expectancy. My mother was drinking red wine. I recall this because her teeth were black when she smiled.

[00:05:57]"Good," she said. "I'm glad that you're taking responsibility." The kids at school start stealing plushies from thrift stores and mixing the transfusion plush with blood. To get the blood, they catch and kill lizards at the schoolyard. But even that doesn't work.

[00:06:11]Willy's eyes fall out and the boy replaces them with two X-shaped lines of tape. After losing his sight, Willie is not the same anymore. He was always proper, always good to everyone. But now the plush toy spends the nights crying and cursing the world that doomed him to his fate. The boy wakes up with Willy's dead blind eyes staring at him. Willie is starting to smell like death. Willie is starting to scare the boy. The others reported similar stories about their plush toys disturbed minds. Our rich friend claimed that his plushy had been whispering terrible things in his ear all night about the endless bleak darkness that swallows everyone like an insane father and about the black emperor who ruled in its guts. The boy soon had no choice but to tie Willie at night. Otherwise, the plushy would start threatening him. Willie hates him. him who brought him to life, who gave him consciousness just so it can be taken away from him again in a slow and painful manner. Willie begs the boy to end his suffering. He begs for death.

[00:07:14]And after many painful nights, the boy grants him his wish. Crying, he opens Willie surgically like he already did with so many other plushies at that point in time. For the last moment, Willie is again like he used to be, friendly and kind. But ultimately, the Willie that will return to haunt the boy is going to be something entirely different. It's not the first plushy to die. It already happened to the other kids in his class. One of the classmates watch as his parents threw his plushy into the trash. It didn't take long for him to start seeing the dead toy outside of his window, dragging a cat corpse behind him. After multiple dog disappearances in the area, the police are called to the scene, but find nothing. A girl had her plushy die too, but sprinkled some onion into its grave so it doesn't come back. Our plush toys crave death because it breaks the bond between them and humans so they don't have to serve as children anymore and they can roam the world equipped with the power of the grave, equipped with the power of the black emperor. We deduce that there must be more plush toys like Nene out there. there might be gathering in the canels and at the bottom of forgotten cardboard boxes, scheming viciously, planning their revenge on us who created them, gave them voice and life, only to eventually take it away from them. The boy tries to find comfort in his mother, but she's totally oblivious to his problems. For her, it was just a plush toy. She even forced him to assemble Willie back together so he can be buried in a dignified manner. Due to the boy's insistence, she chops a bit of red onion into the grave. So Willie doesn't come back, but came back he did. The next day, the boy finds a grave empty with the cross destroyed. What follows is the most terrible night of his life. Willie comes to the house while the boy is hiding in his bedroom. The dead plushy has changed. His presence radiates with hatred and cruelty. The boy hears Willie getting closer and closer to his room.

[00:09:14]He hears the sound of death coming out of Willie and underneath that, the voice of his deceased grandmother. Willie introduces the boy to the black lords, but not by words. Instead, transmitting images and dreams straight into his mind. So, the boy prays, prays to the black prince, and begs Willie to take anyone, anyone but him. The offer is accepted. He survives the night. The next day, he comes to school and doesn't talk to his friends. It's time to grow up. leave the plushies behind. When he comes home, his mother is sitting there waiting for him. Her hand rested on the muck, but she wouldn't say a word, wouldn't move, and I got furious since it was all her fault. Everything that I was there, that I was alive, that she killed my toy, killed my childhood, and now she couldn't even say good morning.

[00:10:04]He grabs her, shaking her violently. The first time in the story, he rebelss against his parent. And in that moment, her eyes and teeth fall out. Her body opens and what was once his mother collapses into a pile of blush. The reader never gets an explanation. From the beginning to the end, you're questioning how much of what the patient is describing is reality, and how much is the work of a child struggling to comprehend death. One way of looking at it is that the grandmother's spirit somehow got inside of Willie. But as I read it, it seemed more and more that everything was the work of the mother.

[00:10:40]She invented this as a parenting technique and then spread it to the parents of his friends. The reader gets reminded that this is written through the lens of a mentally disturbed individual. Every now and then, the audience gets informed about what the therapist thinks about this and that part of the story. It's only at the very end where both us and the protagonist cannot separate reality from dream. This story shares a theme with my other favorite piece from the collection. The title story, The Black maybe, is unlike anything I've ever read. The perspective fluently switches between the three protagonists, the father, Hugo, the mother Andrea, and the daughter Emisher.

[00:11:19]The family are city people, disconnected from the countryside. This frustrates the father who works as an accountant, spending his entire life typing numbers into a spreadsheet, never really seeing the results of his labor except in the numbers on his bank account. Modern life feels artificial, so he longs for something real. He longs for the countryside, working with his hands for something material, for tradition and purpose. That's why he takes his family to a vacation on a farm. As one would guess, the daughter is not happy with spending the last days of her summer break by helping with a harvest in the middle of nowhere. The farmer's son teaches her the basics. They are collecting snails. Not just any snails, only ones with a red stripe on their side. It's boring and kind of disgusting. The farmer's son enjoys the city girls confusion at the weird tradition of his village. The boy side deeply, his face reening. We should [ __ ] the boy said. You wouldn't regret it. I've been with a lot of girls already. Emisha turned and walked away without a word. The snails are used to make oil, which is then rubbed onto silver chains at night by the men. In the morning, the women crush shells of the collected snails and prepare bait for the harvest. The reader can feel that the harvest is going to be weird. I mean, why snails and silver chains? It really doesn't sound right. There is a funny dynamic between the father Hugo and the farmer. Hugo is angry that the current system is endangering the traditional way of life. The farmer is not concerned. He gets tax breaks from both the government and the EU. On top of that, tourists like Hugo and his family effectively pay to be free labor as the farmer way of life is exotic to the city people. During lunch, all of them eat schnitles. Huga compliments the food, stating that it's way healthier than the slob they get served in the city. The farmer's daughter is smiling, knowing that the oily sausage is about as terrible as food gets. She is about the same age as Amasha, and the two start hanging out. The local girl introduces her to cigarettes and eventually also to a strange drug. It's a bottle of palinga with a dead spider inside. This species of spider eats the snails and when put into alcohol, the liquor soaks in the snail oil from the spider. Both get high and the farmer's girl tells Misha that she should sleep with her brother, the farmer's son. Emma is not interested. It's really weird how this topic keeps coming back. As the night of the harvest finally arrives, relatives gather at the farm. Men greet each other with shots of palinka and women put the snails on hooks at the end of silver chains. Holes are duck across the property, 2 m wide and 2 m deep.

[00:13:58]After the men throw hooks and bait into the pits, they cover it with earth. And the women place mirrors right next to where the chains are now buried. Then everyone waits in anticipation. But don't get the wrong idea. The author isn't describing a grim ritual. This is a festive harvest. There is music coming from radio, beer, food, and laughs. U doesn't smoke, but seeing all the farmers with cigarettes in their mouth, he decides to join in. Now is now that they take the bait, he whispered to the farmer. In a way, yes, they bite on it, but not like fish do. I know, Hugger said, because in fact, they don't really exist until they take the bait, right?

[00:14:36]The farmer ruminated on the words.

[00:14:38]You're right, he said finally. They don't exist, but their elements, their pieces are already there. That's why we feed the land all year round. The bait only makes them come together. It lures them into life. Eventually, the music from the radio distorts into static and one of the mirrors breaks. Something in the ground took the bait. The men start pulling the chain, including Hugo, who deploys all of his strength. He almost has a heart attack from all the excitement. Finally, they pull out a thick, incredibly large lva, at least meter and a half in length, but there is no time to celebrate. Another mirror shatters, and the men rush to pull out another larvae from another pit. Mesha observes the women gathering around the catch. They drill a hole into the back of the creature, creating an anus.

[00:15:24]Apparently, the mouth is created when the larae take the bait. But the anus has to be created manually, so the creature doesn't die. It's now obvious to the reader that the family knows roughly what they signed up for. Hugo is happier than he ever was in his entire life. This is where he belongs, to the countryside, away from the filthy city.

[00:15:43]At dawn, the farmer's daughter wakes up and informs her that the farmer's son is waiting outside. She's told they should have sex. After all, Emma is a city girl. It probably doesn't matter to her.

[00:15:54]But Emisha is a virgin and not interested. So, she refuses for the final time. She's told that she's going to regret it. Hugo is sleeping on the ground floor along with the other men.

[00:16:05]Finally, after feeling like an outsider for so long, he now has a sense of kinship with the farmers. Andrea, the wife, is happy for her husband. She knows that eventually he will want to move out of the city. So, she needs to be a good wife and fit in. She goes upstairs to offer help to the farmer's wife, but can't enter the room where the final part of the harvest is taking place. Throughout the story, the word essence was casually thrown around a couple times. It's a thing harvested from boys and girls aged 7 to 25, but most get quote unquote spoiled long before that. So, realistically, only the young teens are usable. Andra as an outsider can't go in but sees that the room is empty apart from a bed with handcuffs and chains. All of the kids who enter scream, but Andrea is comforted by the fact that every child leaving the room doesn't have any signs of harm. This year's harvest was plentiful. Seven large larae and luckily the extended family has seven kids. It's when the farmer's daughter goes in that things take a turn for the worse. A conflict starts. The girl is unusable.

[00:17:12]That's because she is no longer a virgin. The farmer hits her. It's an embarrassment to find out like this on the day of the harvest. Who was it? He asked his daughter. "One of your classmates? That blonde one?" She wiped a tear from her face. "Does it matter, Dad?" she asked, her voice trembling with suppressed rage and exposed fear.

[00:17:31]"Yes, it does. And don't call me dad because the daughter I race isn't a slot and you had to do it now, right before the harvest with guests around to watch.

[00:17:39]She's sent away and the farmer vents in front of Hugo. It's a tragedy. They are one child short. One of the larae will go to waste. That's a seventh of their harvest. But for Hugo, this is a blessing. He has a daughter and therefore also a chance to get closer to the farmers, become a part of the community. So, it's decided that Emisha will act as a replacement. Andrea needs to be present for her daughter's harvest. She knows it's wrong, but justifies it by being in a marriage. She needs to consider her husband's wishes.

[00:18:11]So, in the end, Misha is dragged into the room by the farmer's wife.

[00:18:15]Resistance is futile, and there is no help coming from the mother either. In fact, it's going to be her who harvests essence. Emma regrets not rebelling sooner. Now that there is no escaping anymore, Andra gets instructed what to do. She's to reach into her daughter's mouth and pull out the essence of her youth. How she's to do it should be instinctive. It's her daughter after all. She tried to take no notice of the body, her own daughter's body, which kept writing beneath her, struggling with every ounce of its strength. But what right did that body have to fight her? Hadn't it been torn out of Andrea, the screaming infant pulled by expert hands from her own flesh, just like the larae were pulled from the ground by farmers? Didn't it make Andrea the owner of Emish's body? Doesn't the mother own her daughter's flesh and with that her spirit? At that thought, something clicked in her mind. Now she could feel that her hand had slipped beyond Emsh's flesh, beyond her throat, beyond her body. The snail oil had opened the gate, separating matter from the essence of life. When she finally grabs the essence and pulls it out, she realizes it doesn't have a shape or color. It's out of this world. Her daughter is lying strapped to the bed on the brink of death. But it matters not. Her real daughter is the slimelike substance she's holding in her hands. The farmer's wife cuts off a bit of the essence with scissors and the rest is put back into a mesher. The harvest is a success. The traumatized Amasha struggles to cope with what was taken from her. She cries until there are no more tears while her parents celebrate. Andrea is so happy.

[00:19:54]She feels like her daughter is pure again, as if she was a baby for a moment. Hugo is overwhelmed by the beauty of everything. They conclude that they have to move here. This is way better than rotting in the city. Amisha now knows why the farmer's boy was so insistent on having sex with her, but it's too late to turn back time. The essence is taken from the kids are put into the larae and left to take root in them overnight. In the morning, the men open them up with knives and the final part of the process begins. The larvae gives birth to a humanoid creature, muscular, covered in liquid, with long arms, no hair, and no eyes. The creature took a deep breath through the incision for the first time in its life. Its lungs filled with a cold morning care.

[00:20:40]Then it screamed. It was the most horrifying scream human ears could ever hear. A scream of pain, of grief, of terror. Emma feels pity for the newborn, but she's the only one who does. Her mother tells her that she also screamed when she was born to which Emma doesn't reply, but thinks that maybe it's because she didn't really want to be born into this world either. The men quickly repeat the process with other larae and get to celebrating upon finding out that all seven creatures are alive. Palinka is poured and the toast is made to yet another successful year.

[00:21:14]The creatures like eyeholes, so two holes are drilled into their heads.

[00:21:19]Three turn out to have blue eyes. Those are good for manual labor. They will be sold for good money and used in factories. If there is no more use for them, they can be killed and eaten.

[00:21:30]Their meat is a delicacy. Three of them have red eyes. Those bring luck. Banks use them to make sure that investments are profitable. Ema feels that Harris is the single creature that has black eyes.

[00:21:43]Word has it that those can do anything.

[00:21:46]I love this story because it creates such a strong narrative in a very short time span. The parents don't value their daughter as a person. They value her only as a child. Knowing that she is becoming an adult, they take a piece of her purity away from her, never to be returned. They only treasure the part of her that they can control. The farmer's daughter is in a similar boat. Her only choice to escape the ritual is to give up her virginity young, and that's what she does, only for her father to disown her. You can see that both stories I talked about have a lot in common. In both cases, the children blame their parents for giving birth to them due to the abuse they undergo. But the horror comes in when they themselves give life.

[00:22:29]Be it the boy who gives consciousness to his plush toy or the girl whose essence is used to make the creature. Their own quote unquote children suffer a terrible fate as well. One slowly dies while the other is literally made to be sold into slavery. These two stories fascinate me because usually in cosmic horror and weird fiction, it's religious themes that are the source of existential horror. The classic Lovecraftian gods, if you will. Here, it's the other way around really. If you have an atheist worldview, then the entities responsible for your consciousness are technically your parents, not a god, which is a really weird concept, at least to me.

[00:23:07]The quote unquote supernatural elements here make the protagonist also give life to something even though they're just children. The horror in both stories is the process of involuntarily receiving and giving consciousness. And it's interesting to see it be portrayed in two different ways within the same anthology. As for my thoughts on the book, one thing that's done exceptionally well here is how most of the stories are unapologetically set in Hungary. It's no secret that most of the world lives in a sort of American monoculture and partially it's self-inflicted. When I think about the horror and weird fiction books I grew up on, it was always American, English, and by the nature of me being Eastern European, also Russian, it creates an illusion that there is no market for horror set in, for example, Hungary.

[00:23:55]That people aren't interested in hell energy and whis, but that's just not true. A lot of people want to explore other regions of the world across genres, horror being no exception, and the author of this book seems to understand that quite well. He also doesn't fall into the other side of the trap, which is over relying on setting.

[00:24:15]I am currently working on a larger project in which I'd like to go over all Eastern European horror movies, and a lot of these have nothing going for them except being set somewhere where no horror movie ventured before them. Atila Veres made something that is original, well executed and good by international standards. And at the same time, he's not afraid to set these stories in the place he comes from. Of course, there are stories included which are set elsewhere. For example, my third favorite is called Multiplied by Zero, which takes place in a fictional country ruled by incomprehensible deities. By the way, if you have been sold on the book, I highly recommend trying this part. It's a sort of Lovecraftian love story which manages to be funny and very unsettling at the same time. Anyway, this book is something I heavily recommend. Warm thanks to everyone who supported me. I am planning a bit of a different format for the next video. So, until then, take care.