A Curated List of Exorcism Movies

There are more movies about exorcisms that any one person could ever possibly see; I know, because I’ve watched a lot of them during the years I worked on my upcoming novel Dandelion (pre-order here). This is a modern genre, too; it started in 1973, with the release of the grandaddy of them all, The Exorcist, so there are no … Read More

Retrieving Zeder from the K-Zone

This is a story of a cinema treasure hunt, and as such, may be a bit tedious to those outside the rather narrow confines of “Lost Italian horror films of the 1980s” fandom. But I suspect everyone loves a mystery, and I’ll do my best to make this one interesting. Right around the turn of the last century, I recall … Read More

The Vampires Want to Wear My Mud Shoes

One of my personal traditions is that, every October, I re-read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s such a rich novel that I usually find at least one detail I’d never noticed before. This year, though, in addition to reading the actual novel, I’ve been reading a children’s version to my daughter (after all, what else can follow Frankenstein?). It’s easy to … Read More

Tobe Hooper: the Kids and the Chainsaw

The recent death of director Tobe Hooper has me, and millions of others, thinking about his landmark third film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In 1974, Massacre presented three major innovations. One, it was both set and made in Texas, and wore its non-Hollywood pedigree on its bloody, tattered sleeve. Two, it was (or seemed to be, which I’ll get to) gratuitously … Read More

Found! The Scariest Sound of My Childhood

I love the idea of Bigfoot. Who doesn’t wish that a huge, mostly-human monster lived at the edges of our civilization, only occasionally glimpsed and even less often photographed? I’ve read tons of books on the subject, and even wrote a draft of a novel about them back in the 90s. But my interest in them goes back even further, … Read More

Some Halloween thoughts on NotLD

We had a breakthrough this past weekend: I finally convinced someone in my family to watch a zombie movie with me. My elder son, age twelve, joined me for the original Night of the Living Dead. It’s hard to imagine, in 2016, seeing it with no preconceptions, and since I’m his father, the boy certainly didn’t. I’ve sung its praises … Read More

Interview: the writers of Carmilla

  Carmilla, J. Sheridan LeFanu’s 1871 novella that predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is a seminal work of genre fiction.  It introduces the idea of the lesbian vampire, something that later writers would expand into its own genre (check out Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers for a fairly faithful, if overtly sexed-up, version).  It’s also surprisingly contemporary in its writing style.  So … Read More

Interview with Lee Karr, author of The Making of Day of the Dead

In 1986, George A. Romero–one of my heroes–released the third film in his original “Living Dead” trilogy, Day of the Dead (following Night and Dawn). The previous two films were both classics, and popular successes. They were also about as different from each other as two films could be. So I, like every other horror fan, was eager to see what … Read More

High Hopes: is talent finite?

This weekend, I finally listened to High Hopes, the most recent Bruce Springsteen album. Yes, it came out on January 14, and I bought it then, but I hadn’t listened to it. There  were many times when I listened to a new Springsteen album multiple times on its release day, and almost exclusively for days after that. But something’s happened to … Read More

Rant: Back Cover Text Peeves

  I think it’s important for a writer to read outside his or her own genre, so that their work doesn’t sound like everyone else’s. So I’m always on the lookout for something, which means I read a lot of back cover text, searching for that elusive spark of interest. I understand the purpose of those descriptive blurbs: to tell … Read More