Strangeland's writer Mark Yohalem and artist Victor Pflug were recently interviewed in the magazine Monstrum about their influences and their interest in horror. (The interview was conduct by the prolific Jeffrey Klaehn.)
Here's a taste:
There is the Lovecraft cliché that fear is the oldest and strongest emotion. I don’t know if that’s true, but I think horror will always be with us. The Greeks taught that our very efforts to impose control over the things we fear simply hastens us toward our doom. All of human history is an effort to control primordial horrors, but our “war to end all wars” yielded a hecatomb like no other, our green revolution against famine created the specter of an unnaturally brittle food supply, and our miracle cures have bred prodigiously resistant diseases. I truly believe our striving is noble and has generally made the world a better place, but the lesson here is that we cannot conquer the things we fear; they are protean and eternal; hubris summons nemesis. So we will never be free of these terrors. That means we need horror. Horror is a way of manifesting our primordial dreads (including the fear of powerlessness and loss of control) in forms that we can wrestle with. Just as nightmares help us process fears while we’re asleep, horror helps us process those fears while we’re awake. As long as life is a chaotic mess that resolves only in death, we will turn to horror to help us survive.
You can read the whole article, and the rest of the excellent fourth issue of Monstrum, here.