I had some trepidation about watching “Graduation Day.” I had it in my head that it was a super-cheeseball horror film with terrible acting and unconvincing gore. That it announced it was a Troma Entertainment…

In my twenties, I discovered the work of comic creator Dan Clowes and became a big fan. He specialized in quirky, esoteric slice of life stories that often exposed the hidden ironies of existence and…

A while back, I went through a phase of reading a lot of contemporary British thrillers. They tended to share several qualities: there was usually a sympathetic young woman who found herself in a moral…

There was a certain over-the-topness to horror films made in the 90s-2000s. They reveled in disgusting images, like fingernails being peeled back from fingers, verminous rats, or bodies completely shorn of skin.  This was the…

When I learned the concept of “Pretty Lethal”, in which a group of ballerinas face off against gun-wielding thugs, I had to admit it was ingenious. Ballet is a physically intensive practice, and why wouldn’t…

Years ago, as a teenager, I saw what I think is one of the great horror films, “The Stepfather.” (I’m talking about the original, though the sequels and remake aren’t bad.) I definitely crushed out…

This novel starts off with a sentence you will not easily get out of your brain. (Whether you want to says a lot about who you are as a person. I was happy to let…

I’m the first to admit that horror movies pre-1960 lack something compared to the modern era. You want teenage virgins being slowly bisected by a power saw? (Of course you do!) Or gore-dripping skeletons climbing…

I know what you’re thinking: didn’t you just review this movie, Wil Forbis? Incorrect, mein Freund. I recently reviewed “Initiation,” a 2020 slasher with heavy themes. This is “The Initiation,” a 1984 slasher featuring Vera…

This was a strange one, but in a good way. The film starts at a frequent event in slasher films: the college fraternity party. Beautiful, barely clothed young people are acting stupid, getting wasted, and…

I have a difficult relationship with the work of Sigmund Freud. On the one hand, I think he offered a lot of insight into the working of the human mind, particularly popularizing the somewhat ethereal…

I watched 2001’s “The Pledge“ starring Jack Nicholson and directed by Sean Penn a few years after it came out. At the time, I proclaimed the neo-noir the greatest film ever made. (The world, committed…

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…