Here’s an interesting biographical detail about me: as a kid, I lived in Iran for around six months. This was in the seventies, right before the Shah fell in the cultural revolution there. As such,…

This is a great, gothic creepy read. I would call it horror-lite, more in line with a Daphne du Maurier or Riley Sager story. Our protagonist, Cassie, arrives at an estate where her friend Emily…

This is a strange little horror film from 1935. I was first drawn to it because of a famous still in which Peter Lorre looks like some kind of techno-mutant out of a Mad Max…

Trashy and fun This book reminded me of the erotica-thriller straight to video movies that appeared in the 80s and 90s. Lots of sex, plot twists, and morally compromised characters. Our protagonist, Miranda, is stuck…

It’s probably no surprise why I would give “Copycat,” a serial killer movie from 1995, a review. Netflix has been putting it on blast and it’s in their top ten. I saw the movie when…

Here’s the link https://bibliophiliatemplum.wordpress.com/2025/06/30/the-mirror-man/

Ever finished a movie and have no idea what you just watched? That’s Kiyoshi Kurasawa’s Japanese 1997 film “Cure” in a nutshell. Here’s the shape of the plot. A police detective is assigned to investigate…

This is a tasty little novella about coming of age, family secrets, and learning that the people you grew up with are not what you thought. It reminded me of the great Jack Finney novel…

Despite being a great director, Alfred Hitchcock has never gotten the biographical film he deserves. I was about 20 minutes into 2012’s “Hitchcock” when I realized I’d already seen it. But so little of the…

I’m a bit hit or miss with the films Clint Eastwood has directed. I liked “Unforgiven,” his 1992 Oscar winner. But he’s made a string of movies that I find too obvious in their themes…

I recently learned about a concept in the world of philosophy, called the regression of interpretation. Essentially, it’s the idea that to define a word, you need to use other words, which themselves need to…

I’ve been looking forward to reading Jay Bower’s “The Terror of Willow Falls“ and finished it last night. The set up is as follows: Young Joey and his family move from Chicago to a small…

I’ve mentioned that a fertile ground for the kind of tension and conflict that permeates horror and thrillers is a setting where several women are forced to interact with each other. Hence, the various “women…

At some point in the recent past, I caught wind that the science fiction author Robert Heinlein had written a short story called “All You Zombies.” The story, I was told, featured one of the…

A few interesting thoughts related to storytelling hit me this morning. I did some research on it, and I’m far from the first to come up with this stuff, but it seems worth considering. Part…