Welcome back to the Sunday Scaries. How many years long is 2026 already? And how many more extraordinary people will be taken from us? This has been ridiculous. Our latest unbearable loss, of course, is the great Catherine O’Hara who, in all the many videos and photos that have crossed my feed in the last few days, never seemed to grasp how truly great she was and how dearly she was loved. (I mean, I don’t know how she can’t know, I have now seen her at countless awards shows and press conferences and interviews in her post-Schitt’s Creek era, she can’t have thought she was added in as a seat-filler or brought along as a plus-one.) She was self-effacing to a fault, and if she allowed herself one luxury other than amazing fashions, it was the ability to work with people who she genuinely cared for, trusted and felt comfortable with, and who clearly had her back. But I do hope sometime in the last few weeks she had a moment where she sat with a glass of wine in her hand, looked around her world and thought ‘I am a superstar.’ Because she was, and will always be.

Her great gift, of course, was for comedy. And she is rightly remembered as a master of improv and sketch comedy with impeccable timing, a knack for mimicry, and great generosity towards whomever shared her scenes. While some of her characters were perky to a fault, she brought in a certain desperation, or frantic insecurity, or world-weary resignation that shaded her portrayals and made them fully human. Unlike frequent co-star Andrea Martin, she never fully embraced horror as a genre, but she also didn’t shy away from darkness. I am dismayed that her episode in the second season of the all-but-forgotten Canadian horror/suspense series The Hidden Room appears to have vanished, but we have a few other treasures to which we can turn for the shadow side of this marvellous performer.

In season three of the reboot of The Outer Limits, for example, O’Hara played the title character in the Stephen King adaptation The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson. An oddball black comedy that is more disconcerting than disturbing, it gives us O’Hara as a frustrated housewife who accidentally shoots herself in the head while cleaning out a closet. Surprisingly, the wound seems to give her new awareness, a new sense of purpose, and a new friend in the “8×10 man” in a photo on her TV who now speaks to her and encourages her to take control of her life in one particular way. Firm in the knowledge of what she must do, she slaps on a bandage and gets to work.

This episode was produced during O’Hara’s Home Alone era, and pointedly shows another side to viewers than what we saw in Kevin’s mom. While somewhat different from the short story it’s based on, it definitely has its charms.

Likewise her appearance as a snarky snooty lawyer, described in a tabloid as a ‘class action queen’, trapped in a tiny upstate town on a traffic charge in the 1989 Tales From the Crypt episode Let the Punishment Fit the Crime. Directed by music video and genre gay Russell Mulcahy, the suitably lurid episode adopts an amusing noirish tone as O’Hara tries to argue her way out of a shockingly extreme sentence and finds that there’s something even worse than the 100 lashes originally proposed.

Like many Canadian actors, O’Hara had a thriving career as a voice actor in a number of children’s animated shows, including such gateway horror treats as Witch’s Night Out (1978) and Really Weird Tales (1986). We also got to hear her in Rock & Rule (1983), Monster House (2006), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), A Monster in Paris (2011), the Addams Family animated film (2019) and The Wild Robot (2024). She was also featured in both the film and TV series adaptations of the children’s sensation novels A Series of Unfortunate Events. However she is best remembered by budding horror fans for her work with Tim Burton on Beetlejuice (1988) and sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Frankenweenie (2012).

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Genre-friendly adults found her hilarious and terrifying by turns in such films as After Hours (1985) and Dick Tracy (1990), and in prestige series Six Feet Under (2003) where she played the monstrously self-centred and unstable actress Carol Ward, the second season of The Last of Us (2025) where she played therapist-at-the-end-of-the-world Gail Lynden with uncommon intensity, The Studio (2025) where howled with rage as ousted studio head Patty Leigh, and of course Schitt’s Creek (2015) where she fully embodied the indelible goth-inflected Moira Rose. Moira’s spectacular screen appearance in The Crow’s Have Eyes III: The Crowening was a particular highlight. Watch the trailer again and again and again.

There is nothing else to say that hasn’t been said elsewhere and better. I thought we’d have so many more years with her, but I am glad that she was appreciated and celebrated within her lifetime and she received all the accolades that she earned over her long and illustrious career. We miss her already. We will cherish her always.

This Week in Horror: The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans. No. Absolutely not.

Currently listening: Out of nowhere, by way of Brighton, we now have Meek. And she is fucking fabulous with a delightfully profane music video to match. Just maybe don’t play it around your mother.

Currently reading: I am slowly savouring an advance copy of Carnalis by Tiffany Morris which brings a bold new twist to the cannibal genre. It’s darkly funny, dread-filled and faintly nauseating but somehow also whets your appetite? Out in March from Nictitating Books.

Cool Story, Bro: Jack Klausner’s exceptionally unsettling story The Abandoned, published in 2024 in The Dark Magazine. “I tell her she shouldn’t pick up things that don’t belong to her. She says the box doesn’t belong to anyone. It was abandoned, she says, like I’m stupid, and maybe I am.”

That’s it for this week. Until we meet again, remember: "The live crows on set welcomed me as one of their own. One even tried to mate."