Halloween

With simultaneously mournful and irreverent works, ‘F’ at Empty Gallery is haunted by our inability to process grief in the internet age

From her studio in Brooklyn, Pels talks to us about dogs, death and driving the streets at night in search of materials

At Grimm, New York, the Peruvian artist presents a body of work that asks us to defang our baleful understandings of ghosts

At Kunsthall Charlottenborg, a group exhibition aims to draw connections between witch trials and colonialism but fails to grapple with their continuities 

On what would have been Kelley’s 66th Birthday, Gabriella Pounds explores the impact of the antic French poem ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’ on the artist and his predecessors, from Hans Bellmer to John Balance 

From The Walking Dead to Stranger Things, frightening revivals ‘captured a bit of lost magic in a disenchanted world’ 

Why is female fear often conflated with desire?

Nina Leger, Jenny Hval, Elvia Wilk and Sophie Mackintosh offer an eerie counterpoint to the traditionally male-dominated genre of weird literature

Contemporary art’s resurgence of interest in magic has a powerful art-historical precedent

From Miss Havisham’s wedding dress to Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Red Shoes’, why we’re so obsessed with murderous clothes

Scheming dealers, demonic sculptures and filthy lucre: in Dan Gilroy’s Faustian tale, art takes murderous revenge

‘These works render the real, estranged personalities of our present perturbing, alluring; exquisite’

Why is the figure of the witch and magical practice making a 21st-century comeback in the arts?

In further art world silliness: drug dealers disguised as art dealers; and Takashi Murakami pays homage to Kanye

‘Spellbound’ at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, traces magic and ritual from the Middle Ages to today

Author George Pendle on his biography of Jack Parsons, the scientist, mysticist and follower of Aleister Crowley, now dramatized on CBS

Charlie Fox traces the recurring appearance of the mask in art

What can this term teach us about absurdity in life and art?

An exclusive excerpt from Charlie Fox's new book, This Young Monster, published today by Fitzcarraldo Editions