Blog
-
Review: Homecoming by Micah Castle
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…
-
Review: Hitchcock
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…
-
Review: Mystic River
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…
-
How does artificial intelligence view the world?
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…
-
Review: “The Terror of Willow Falls” by Jay Bower
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…
-
The Woods
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…
-
Review: Predestination
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…
-
The evolutionary impetus of stories (and storytelling)
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…
-
Review: Joe
Certain films just don’t quite know what to do with themselves. 1970’s “Joe,” starring Peter Boyle (the monster in “Young Frankenstein” and dad character in the sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond”) as a hippy hating working…
-
Review: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Dario Argento is a well-known Italian filmmaker who did a string of terrific slasher films from the 70s into the 2000s. (He’s also known as the father of the actress/director, Asia Argento.) I went through…
-
Wittgenstein for Writers
So I’m currently reading a rather dense introduction to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Or maybe I’m the dense one. I’m not sure.) I’ve known about him for years, and have always been interested in…
-
Smile 2
Horror sequels can be tough to pull off. Often the original lays out a series of perplexing events (teenagers dying in their dreams, for example) and then provides an explanation (Freddy Krueger was killed by…
-
Book review: “Shallow Depths” by Suzi Wieland
You’ve encountered killer weed, but killer weeds? Cat and her husband take residence in a summer cabin on a lake. Various tensions start to flare (her husband’s a real dbag) and Cat finds herself drawn…
-
New blog series: Did they Deserve to Die?
So, just for funsies, I’m kicking off a new series of posts called—as you can see—“Did They Deserve to Die?” Each post will take a horror movie and ask the question about the doomed characters.…
-
Review: Angst
Gather round, young ones, and let me tell you about a mysterious bygone era known as the eighties. This was before all your newfangled internet and AI chatbots. Movies were a trip back then. If…