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I’ve always felt that horror can be truly great and effective when there is an element of believability to it. We don’t get scared of Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger because they exist in realms so far out of reality that we find it easy to cheer them on as opposed to their victims. Something like Jaws, on the other hand, was so effective – and still is – because shark attacks are very real. Whereas the likelihood of most of us ever encountering a shark as big as good ol’ B

Huh, I thought when I saw the first trailers for Black Phone 2. The “Grabber” is back, even though he died in the previous film. Now, as any long time horror fan knows, the Monster can always come back, and yet, the return of the Grabber as a sort of supernatural entity, at least to me, is the inverse of what made the first Black Phone so good: it was a thriller about a demented serial killer that, in the way the King family is so good at doing, with just enough supernatural

The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley, is a well-written science fiction novel with well-developed characters and an interesting concept, a concept, however, that tends to get muddled throughout the book. A story that seems to start out like a humorous satire takes turns being an everyday Sci-Fi time travel book, a romance, and a spy story. Some of these elements don’t come as a surprise – it is a Sci-Fi story after all, and you can see the romance coming from a mile away,

The premise of Divine Rivals draws you right in: in a fictionalized yet still familiar version of England, two ancient gods, Dacre and Enva, wage war on each other with mythical creatures but also vast armies of humans in a conflict much like one of our World Wars. The war provides the backdrop for Iris and Roman, two rival journalists seeking the same promotion while Iris desperately tries to reach her brother, who is on the front. The novel is well-written, but if you're p

Inventive, woefully short, well-written (though perhaps with a somewhat gratuitous usage of big, fancy words), The Salt Grows Heavy is a horror-fantasy novella that takes familiar fairy tale tropes and twists them and turns them on their head. It follows a mermaid and her plague doctor companion (neither character ever given a proper name) as they traverse through a tortured landscape, encountering a brutal tribe of murderous children and their horrific “saints.”            

Over the last few years, the idea of the “alternate universe,” that is, a parallel universe (or millions of them) that exists alongside ours with changes in our lives or the people we know, sometimes small, sometimes large, has become ubiquitous. This has become the Go-To for a lot of superhero movies lately, as Hollywood has decided it is the ultimate way to reboot (codeword for “recast with younger people) a franchise. When I heard that The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig, r

For my money, Jordan Peele is one of the biggest and best names in horror out there today. His unique sense of style, mood, and timing, combined with his fresh take on long-established tropes and social commentary, makes him one of today’s greatest voices in horror. When I saw his name attached, at least as a producer, to Him, I was intrigued.             Him follows Cameron “Cam” Cade (Tyriq Withers), a number one draft pick fresh out of college who some are already saying h

Horror for Christmas? Why not? If you are a Halloween and horror movie fiend like me, you often look for ways to inject monsters into your other favorite holidays. What follows is by no means a comprehensive list, but rather represents the scary pictures I have watched (so far) this season. It’s a Wonderful Knife The title alone on this one makes it worth a watch. As you would expect, It's a Wonderful Knife roughly follows the basic idea of the perennial classic It's a Wonde

Five Survive, by New York Times best-selling young adult author Holly Jackson, starts off with a simple, tried and true premise familiar to fans of thrillers, true crime, and teen horror everywhere: six teenage friends embark on a What Can Go Wrong Road Spring Break road trip, a fun getaway with no adults, no responsibilities, no problems. Driving through a rural part of Philadelphia on their way to Gulf Shores, they blow a tire, realizing very quickly that the tire is no acc

In The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones’ writes a veritable masterclass in how to take an ancient (and sometimes exhausted) plot device such as the literary vampire and both turn it on its head while also remaining true and faithful to the kinds of tropes that fans have come to expect. With its narrative structure, an epistolary-style novel told mostly in journal entries and flashbacks, recalling everything from Stoker’s Dracula to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Va

I have heard it said on more than one occasion that Halloween III: Season of the Witch, is the "worst" Halloween movie, because it does not have Michael Myers. This of course was often said when there were only two or three Michael Myers movies, not the original plus five sequels and two reboots, and I suppose people at the time wanted more of good ol' Michael. (Who, let's be frank ... after all these iterations ... is he even that interesting of a character anymore?) The re

It has been almost 18 years since 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to the wildly successful, popular, and generally well-regarded 28 Days Later, the British post-apocalyptic franchise that updated the zombie movie motif while remaining true to fan-favorite tropes. This film, filmed back-to-back with another sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, takes viewers back to Britain, where, surprise, things aren’t much better. Turns out that while most of the world managed to beat back t

A phrase that is often tossed around these days is “superhero fatigue,” which refers to the fact that the movie-going public has grown weary of a market oversaturated by costumed crime fighters and superpowered adventurers. Since roughly 2008 (though the superhero movie was a thing many decades before that), ever since the release of Iron Man , Hollywood has churned out one superhero story after another, and let’s be frank, whether you’re a comic book fan or not, some of thes

Beholder, by Ryan La Sala, is a YA horror story that checks a lot of boxes and taps into a lot of creepy fears, including giant spiders,...

To say that The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of 1951’s The Thing From Another World, is an ahead-of-its-time masterpiece would be...

It is a rare thing, after a lifetime of reading, watching, and writing horror, that I encounter something that is a unique, original take...

The Night Circus starts off mysteriously and pulls you in right away as the enigmatic Prospero the Enchanter and the Man in Gray (aka Mr....

Demons, or Demoni, if you want to use the original Italian title, Dario Argento's 1985 cult classic about a movie theater overrun by...

Hello, Kiddies, as part of my Spooky Season celebrations, I will be sharing reviews of films and books I devour in preparation for All...

In the early scenes of Weapons, from the child-like narration reminiscent of the opening scene in Children of the Corn to the fact that...