Like last year, I wanted to do a wrap-up ranking my favorite horror movies of the year just past. Unlike last year, I didn’t have as much time to see quite as many new horror films as I would have liked, though I still managed to get my list to twenty films that I really … More My Twenty Favorite Horror Films of 2025
Author Shirley Jackson should of course be no stranger to horror fans, as she’s responsible for what is arguably the greatest haunted house novel of the 20th century, 1959’s The Haunting of Hill House, which has been adapted into an excellent 1963 film directed by Robert Wise, a shitty 1999 film directed by Jan de … More Book vs Movie: We Have Always Lived in the Castle
I was in the mood recently for a good old-fashioned gothic horror story, and lo and behold, my Kindle Unlimited recommendations seemed to read my mind once again, offering for my literary pleasure the gothic novel The Haunting of Whitehall Manor by L.V. Pires. I had never read anything by this author before, but she’s … More Books: The Haunting of Whitehall Manor by L.V. Pires
Every once in a while, to get ideas for these reviews, I’ll idly browse through internet lists of underrated and underseen horror films, looking for an older movie I haven’t seen before. And it was during one of these browsing sessions that I stumbled across a 1977 flick that I had not only never seen, … More Movies: Scalpel (aka False Face) (1977)
The book I’m discussing today was one that I was seeing everywhere when the hardback first came out in the summer of 2020; it appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, and a bunch of horror book reviewers I follow, as well as pretty much all the “mainstream” book reviewing channels, were covering it. … More Books: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Published in 1983, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black has become a modern classic of old-school British gothic ghost stories. Not only has it had two film adaptations (a made-for-TV English production from 1989 with a screenplay by Nigel Kneale; and a financially successful 2012 adaptation starring Daniel Radcliffe and produced by a revamped Hammer … More Books: The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Welcome to the latest installment of Silent Movie Watchalong! I’m doing a short one this time, but really, it shouldn’t matter much because this one is just excellent, and I’m sort of baffled at how it doesn’t get as much attention as some of the other films of the period. Clocking in at a little … More Silent Movie Watchalong: The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
1997’s Asylum by Patrick McGrath was a novel that was recommended to me by a viewer of my book review videos on YouTube, and though I had heard the author’s name before, this was the first novel of his that I read. McGrath is a British writer, and Asylum is essentially a bleak, gothic thriller … More Books: Asylum by Patrick McGrath
Time for another silent movie watchalong! Our film today is a classic one, the 1924 Austrian film The Hands of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene, starring Conrad Veidt (who also starred in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Man Who Laughs, incidentally), and based on a book by Maurice Renard. Not only is it wonderful and properly eerie, … More Silent Movie Watchalong: The Hands of Orlac (1924)
In the case of Anne River Siddons’s 1978 novel The House Next Door, I was actually first turned on to it through Stephen King’s nonfiction classic Danse Macabre, in which he chose it as one of his ten best “modern” horror novels (as of 1980) and devoted an entire chapter to discussing its themes. I’ve … More Book vs Movie: The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons
The Scare Salon 