I thank the universe pretty much every day that I was born at the time I was. My formative years corresponded almost exactly with the explosion of punk and post-punk, the birth of MTV, the home video boom, and the expansion of cable television into more and more homes. Yes, despite my dewy youthfulness, I … More Movies: Time After Time (1979)
Jeremy Ray is an author I hadn’t encountered before; according to his bio, he’s found success as a playwright and with a few of his screenplays, but his first love is short prose. He’s not exclusively a horror writer, as he likes to hop genres, but his 2021 novella Petrified Women is undoubtedly a horror … More Books: Petrified Women by Jeremy Ray
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)
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
As you guys might remember, I read, enjoyed, and reviewed a 2019 scifi/horror novel called Intercepts by T.J. Payne not too long ago, so when the same author’s follow-up book—The Venue: A Wedding Novel, from 2020—popped up in my Kindle Unlimited recommendations, I was immediately intrigued. The cover was stark and eye-catching, and the brief … More Books: The Venue by T.J. Payne
As should be apparent from some of my other posts and videos, I’m a big fan of slow-burn, psychological horror, so when I started hearing that this particular film—which premiered at Sundance in January of this year and drew a bit of buzz—had arrived on Shudder, I brewed myself a cup of peppermint tea and … More Movies: Watcher (2022)
Back in 2020, it seemed like Samantha Kolesnik’s debut novella True Crime was everywhere; it got a massive amount of buzz in the horror community, and even though I successfully avoided any synopses or reviews of it prior to reading it for myself, it was hard to miss seeing its (awesome) cover popping up in … More Books: True Crime by Samantha Kolesnik
Duncan Birmingham, who according to his IMDB bio wrote for the Weekly World News in high school and has gone on to write for TV and direct several short films, has made his feature film debut with the 2022 Shudder original, Who Invited Them. It’s a well-paced and decent psychological thriller with a large dollop … More Movies: Who Invited Them (2022)
In terms of horror movies, the 1980s was the decade of the slashers: they were relatively cheap to make, could go direct to video, and had a built-in audience of fans who would rent anything that promised creative, grisly kills (and maybe some nudity). By the latter part of the 80s, though, slashers were on … More Movies: Edge of the Axe (1988)
The so-called “rape-revenge” subgenre reached its peak in the 1970s and early 1980s, and the two films I want to talk about are probably the most cited and controversial examples of this type of cinema. I have to say right out of the gate that rape is one of the most stomach-turning things for me … More Rape-Revenge Double Feature: I Spit On Your Grave (1978) and Ms .45 (1981)
The Scare Salon 