Evil kid movies have a long history going back to “The Bad Seed,” first shown on screens in 1956. That lineage runs straight through 1976’s “The Omen,” where the trope goes biblical. I fondly recall…

You might be familiar with director Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 film “Straw Dogs“ in which a nebbish character played by Dustin Hoffman faces off with thugs in rural England who want to invade his house and…

About 20 minutes into 2025’s “Bring Her Back“ I was worried it was one of these modern movies where nothing is ever explained, and the mystery just kind of festers until the end. And I…

1981’s “Delusion” (also known as “The House Where Death Lives” and boy does it ever) is an absolute gem of a movie. If you’re a fan of slow-burn psychological horror with sexual tension and psychological…

I should watch more sci-fi horror. The genre has so many great films: “Forbidden Planet”, the “Aliens” franchise, “Blade Runner”, “Event Horizon”, “Strange Days”. And the genre isn’t overdone the way a lot of supernatural…

There’s a particular kind of horror that is excessively bleak. “Last House on the Left” comes to mind, as do “Deliverance” and many of the Texas Chainsaw films. The horror in these films is man-made;…

A little known fact about me is that I did some work for a film production company in the 2000s, mostly trying and failing to get horror films made. I did get the chance to…

I’d never heard of “The Black Room” until I saw it on a list of Amazon recommendations. I figured, “Why the hell not?” and gave it a try. The film starts with an attractive couple…

I never finished the screenwriting advice book “Save the Cat,“ but what I did read contained a useful insight. The author advised that all great stories contain an element of irony. For instance, the Bruce…

I have a love-hate thing with the work of Wes Craven. I think “Nightmare on Elm Street” is the greatest horror film ever made, and I came around on the “Scream” series after disliking it…

I’ve mentioned “apartment horror” recently, the sub-genre where a protagonist tackles the strange modern isolation that comes with living in what are basically cells stacked upon each other. Usually, a mystery connected to the building…

I loved the 2021 horror film “Malignant” so much that I noted the name of the screenwriter who’d written such a terrific and twisty script. Thus, when I found out Akela Cooper had written the…

Well, this is a little weird. I recently watched the film “House of Darkness“ which I’d berated for being an hour of people talking about modern sexual mores, followed by a big reveal and then…

Sometimes it seems the main beneficiaries of #metoo in Hollywood were white male actors. Why? Because the villain is always the best role, and since 2015 or so, there have been numerous films that flip…

The 1980s was a period of some great Armageddon films—tales where much of society was destroyed by nuclear warfare or some kind of strange calamity. Think of the Mad Max sequels or “Night of the…