|Chris Polley| Besides both of us being complete dorks, the venerable, legendary auteur Francis Ford Coppola (of Godfather and Apocalypse Now fame) and I have exactly one thing in common: We both forced a group of people to sit down and read Bram Stoker’s iconic gothic novel Dracula out loud together… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| My first encounter with George Sluizer’s The Vanishing was on a lazy evening in February of 2023. The Criterion Channel description promised a “truly unsettling” ending, which drew me in since I love being upset by fictional peoples’ problems… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| You might say The Vanishing (1988) tells the tale of two creepy men. One is a fretful, controlling boyfriend, the other a methodical murderer. With a different emphasis, the director George Sluizer might have smoothed out the boyfriend and signaled to the audience that we aren’t supposed to understand Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets) as a creep… Continue reading
|Velma Caty Rent| The Trylon All-Night Horrorthon is one of my all-time favorite events of the year! I’ve had the opportunity to attend and/or work at each one; including the Horrorthon-adjacent Friday the 13th marathon. I have found over the years… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| I was first introduced to Kiyoshi Kurosawa back in January, when attending a screening of Pulse (2001). During the film, I observed something you typically don’t see in a lot of modern horror media… Continue reading
|Chelli Riddiough| The first sound you hear in the 1996 horror film Scream is a ringing telephone. Not the Apple ringtone everyone has, not a tinny song emanating from a speaker. No: it’s a bold, loud ring… Continue reading
|Jake Rudegeair| What’s your favorite scary movie? I don’t have a favorite, really. More like a group of honorable mentions that rearranged my brain. Psycho made showers much less relaxing, for instance… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| I think about Wes Craven and his filmography a lot more than a stable person probably should. Craven was one of the first directors I followed when I began to study film. It’s partially because he’s… Continue reading
|Chris Ryba-Tures| “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.” Walter Benjamin Continue reading
|Matthew Lambert| There’s a quintessential moment of madness in the 1974 low-budget horror film The Cars That Ate Paris that is seared into my brain. It’s Charlie (played by the ultimate Australian character actor Bruce Spence) standing outside his fortress of wrecked cars, blood… Continue reading
|Alex Kies| World historian Herman Schumacher graduates from college into a shot-on-video split-level nightmare. His family won’t return his calls, his old friends don’t like him anymore. He works, dressed in a shirt and tie, digging holes in the forest. His girlfriend might be cheating… Continue reading
|Matt Levine| The turn of the millennium occasioned many films that lamented and/or celebrated the digitization of the world as we knew it. The Matrix and its sequels envisioned all of humanity living in a virtual reality while machines sucked out our lifeblood… Continue reading
