The 1955 horror thriller Diabolique (known as Les Diaboliques outside the US, which translates as The Devils or The Fiends) is one of those movies that all horror fans should see at least once, and preferably twice, since the famous twist at the end of the story recontextualizes everything you’ve seen up until that point. … More Movies: Diabolique (1955)
Look on almost any substantial list of “best horror novels of the 2000s,” and the odds are fairly good that Scott Smith’s 2006 book The Ruins will be on it. It’s a grim, ever-escalating survival nightmare of cruel and heightened nature, and it’s pretty damn gross, to boot. It was made into a decent film … More Books: The Ruins by Scott Smith
Not too long ago, I chose Grady Hendrix’s 2016 novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism as one of my favorite horror novels of the 21st century so far, so it was with some measure of…trepidation? cautious excitement?…that I took the news that Amazon Studios was producing a film adaptation of it. I was pretty sure that … More Movies: My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2022)
Children are often frightened by inexplicable things. When I was but a wee gothlet, for example, I was sent into paroxysms of terror by the bubbling cauldron sound effect at the beginning of the song “The Monster Mash,” and to this day I still have no idea why. Without fail, whenever the song came on … More Let’s Talk About the Weird 1974 Jack and the Beanstalk Anime
There’s kind of a funny story behind how I ended up reading and reviewing this book, a story that illustrates pretty clearly the fact that I have read so many books over the course of my life that I’ve forgotten which books I’ve read and which ones I haven’t. So a while back, I was … More Books: Mrs. God by Peter Straub
Award-winning author Bryan Smith is largely known for his splatterpunk works, and although his 2021 novella The Unseen definitely has some slasher-type gore, it’s actually more character-focused, and has an absolutely great premise that I had a lot of fun with. I also have to give a shout-out to Scott Cole, who did the cover … More Books: The Unseen by Bryan Smith
Initially slated to premiere at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival (which was cancelled due to COVID), Jonathan Cuartas’s feature-length debut My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To was instead picked up by Dark Sky Films, and in the autumn of that year appeared on several streaming services simultaneously, including Shudder, Amazon Prime, and … More Movies: My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (2020)
The year of 1976 has provided my biggest challenge yet, as far as winnowing my favorites down to just five; seriously, just a cursory glance of the horror films released that year produced an easy eight, and several more that might also make the cut if I was in a particular mood that day. But … More My Favorite Horror Movies from Every Year Since I Was Born: 1976
The 1967 classic Wait Until Dark was yet another film that I sought out as a kid in the 1980s because of its tense third act being mentioned favorably in Stephen King’s nonfiction magnum opus Danse Macabre. I remembered really loving the movie back then, so I was very excited to revisit it, since I … More Movies: Wait Until Dark (1967)
Pennsylvania-based author and poet Oliver C. Seneca recently contacted me by email and offered to send along an ebook of his latest novel, Faces in a Window, for me to review. Of course I agreed, because hey, who am I to turn down free horror books? Faces in a Window, published by Sunbury Press in … More Books: Faces in a Window by Oliver C. Seneca
The Scare Salon 