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 Willis film “Die Hard“ could be thought of with the following question: what if a man cop dreading a meeting…

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 at first, but he’s made some stinkers. It might seem weird that I would dig deep enough into his ouvre…

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 appears, and the protagonist asserts their autonomy and individuality by getting to the bottom of it. Examples would include Roman…

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 2022 killer doll movie “M3GAN” I eagerly anticipated it. However, I was disappointed. Compared to “Malignant”, it was relatively bloodless…

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 violence. Then, the next day, I watched “Bone Lake” (I’ve got a cold, so I’m watching a lot of movies)…

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 script of the previous 100 years. Instead of presenting a good lucking, charming white dude as the hero, he’s…

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 Comet,” or “Def-Con Four.“ One thing I’ve always noticed about these films: they make the apocalypse look like a hell…

There are movies that are basically two hours of plot to set up something that happens in the last ten seconds. “6 Souls” starring Julianne Moore is one of them. It’s not a bad thing to do, though one does feel a bit cheated at the conclusion. I was a bit surprised to see that…

I’m pleased as a vampire in a blood bank to announce I have a short story coming out in the new Books of Horror Anthology. It’s available for pre-order now and arrives shortly. There are lots of great talents here, some whom I’ve read, others whom I look forward to reading. In my tale, “The…

There are movies where you need the ending explained to you. Then there are movies where you need the whole damn thing explained to you. Then there are movies where you know there is no hope of finding an explanation (yet you fruitlessly search the internet anyway.) Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant” belongs in the third…

Director William Castle had a certain recipe for creating 1960s horror films that sold well but didn’t break the budget. It involved mixing… All this is on full display in “The Night Walker.” To point one, the FX are spare and the settings are drawn from the Universal back lot. To point two, he used…

I became aware of A.C. Hessenauer upon reading her gothic horror novel “Dread House” several months back.  “Manimal” is one or her more recent works. It swaps out the gothic vibe for something closer to the ambience of a Lovecraft tale (though without the ornamental Lovecraft prose—thank god). It’s Atlanta in the 1930s, in a…

“Synchronic” revolves around an interesting question. What if a drug that seems to warp reality actually warps reality? (I presume the idea was prompted by a Joe Rogan episode where the podcaster pontificated on the nature of psychedelic drugs like ayahuasca or DMT.) In the film, New Orleans EMTs Steve and Dennis observe an uptick…

There’s a trend in modern moviemaking that bugs me. This is the approach that a story doesn’t need to make literal sense if it is ultimately an allegory for something else: a theme, a human condition, an illness. For instance, there are various films I’ve seen where I say, “What exactly was that monster that…

No job defines the modern era more than that of the influencer, the nebulous vocation where individuals post pictures of themselves on social media while hawking products or engaging in other questionable means of monetization. We all hate them, so you might expect a movie where an influencer is tormented and punished to be satisfying.…