A gothic lamp casts light onto Sarah Bolton, casting a lime green hue from the fitting room walls onto her homemade ghost earrings and her split-dyed hair. Think Cruella de Vil meets “Hocus Pocus, minus the puppy- and children-killing.

“You asked for a spooky place,” she said. “This is the only one that came to mind.”

We are at Rebel Rebel, a market vendor turned brick-and-mortar shop near the Avenue in Hampden. Dangly bloody butcher knife earrings and a Venus flytrap necklace hang on a display on one side of the store. There are also graphic tees, with an enamored Ghostface on the phone and “NO YOU HANG UP” and a babydoll dress with, well, creepy baby dolls.

It is spooky, though more so in an artsy, if not campy, way. As we talked about the horror-loving community, including the Bmore Horror Club, a group Bolton founded that hosts events fitted for Halloween throughout the seasons, I realized — rather than having a spooky subculture, Baltimore might be a horror city.

A few days later, I emailed Count Gore De Vol, a popular regional television horror host in the ’70s and ’80s.

Is Baltimore a horror city?

“Of course Baltimore is a horror city,” he said. More specifically, he said, a horror movie city. A good number of horror movies have ties to the Baltimore area, including “The Alien Factor,” “Night Beast,” “Vampire Sisters” and “Crawler.” The city is the second most popular filming location for horror movies, based on IMDb data. And while John Waters’ movies are not horror, some of his signature elements — the filthiness, campiness and tackiness — are.

Oli Turner, a Baltimore-based artist, said horror is ingrained in the city’s history. She mentions Edgar Allan Poe and the Great Baltimore Fire, which destroyed about 140 acres of the city — an area almost as big as Disneyland in California. Its legacy as an industrial port city, the birthplace of the Ouija board and its regular ghost tours all add to the spooky lore.

The city was also built on racial segregation and racism and continues to experience collective horror to date, Turner said.

“To be a horror artist, you also have to be a historian in a lot of ways,” Turner said, “And understand the history and the rhythm and the beat of what you’re doing.”

A relationship breakup, compounded by years of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, led Bolton to float the idea on social media about starting a club where she could find horror fans, particularly queer fans, and get together. After a first outing with some of her friends at R. House in Hampden, she began organizing movie nights at her house, posting about it on a new Instagram for the club and on her artist’s account.

As attendance and interest grew, she began to look for public places for screenings.

Instead, Old Major bar owner Candice Bruno found her. Bruno offered her space above the bar at South Carey Street in Pigtown. An end-of-the-world horror fan, she has a second floor with seating, a projector and audio equipment, where she regularly hosts movie screenings at no charge. People could buy food and drinks in the first floor.

Bolton thought the dive bar was perfect. The second floor is tucked away, so no one who isn’t aware can randomly walk in on a jump scare scene.

The movie nights have even birthed an artistry-in-residence at Old Major, Bruno said. She met Turner, a puppeteer turned filmmaker, through the horror club. Turner has now renamed her production to S. Carey Street Filmmaking Collective, where she teaches people how to make their own short horror films, stemming from a festival she started during the pandemic.

Horror filmmaking, she said, is “really about coming together to share in your collective fears, what scares you and to talk about it. It can really be very heartwarming to tell people what you’re afraid of and have them receive it and honor it.”

And watching horror, Bolton said at Rebel Rebel, is about escapism, bonding with friends and strangers and trading takes on character’s decisions and what they should do instead. She also thinks a lot of queer people, like herself, relate to the otherness of horror. She thinks the club, with its screenings, trivia nights and potlucks, builds on the sense of safety the genre can provide and creates community.

Growing up, Bolton could not watch horror movies.

“Now nothing scares me,” she said.

She paused. Well, in media form, at least.

“Real life is terrifying,” she said.

I see now Old Major, the Bmore Horror Club and the S. Carey Street Collective are all one of the same: They all see horror as an outlet for building community.

And there’s nothing more Baltimore than that.