A lot of writers come up with playlists for their fiction. Sometimes these are the songs they listen to while writing or world-building. Sometimes they’re the songs that the main character listens to. Me, I’ve never been able to write … Continue reading →
Over the weekend, my wife and I saw Deliver Us from Evil. As a horror film it’s well worth seeing, but today I want to focus on one element of it: the priest. In many horror films, a priest is … Continue reading →
I was just a kid back in the mid-1970s, when my brother and I were first getting into Blue Öyster Cult. Now BÖC has some … eccentric lyrics, which meant that I would often ask my brother what various lines … Continue reading →
It’s that time of year again, when Halloween approaches and even normal people find themselves thinking about ghosts and goblins and maybe even watching a horror movie. (This is as opposed to people like me – and if you’re reading … Continue reading →
I feel sorry for the new Evil Dead movie. It’s hard to remake a much-beloved film, a cult classic enjoyed as thoroughly for its B-movie sensibilities and shoestring budget as for its horror. And people sometimes forget that the original … Continue reading →
Zombies from modern zombie movies represent just about the nastiest threat out there. They come in after you waves, in mobs. Some are fast. They never stop. A plague, an army that converts as it kills. Even if they don’t … Continue reading →
I’m irritated with Marion Zimmer Bradley. I’m reading a collection of essays about writing called How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction (edited by J.N. Williamson), and I just finished MZB’s essay, “World Building in Horror, Occult, … Continue reading →
When I was a child, if you mentioned vampires most people thought only of Dracula. Heck, to the kids at my grade school, Dracula wasn’t a name, it was a type of monster. They didn’t even know the word ‘vampire.’ … Continue reading →
I have a fondness for obscure books and games. In these posts I’ll talk about some of them. What the Hell Is That? It Came from the Late, Late, Late Show, published way back in 1989, is a roleplaying game … Continue reading →
The first time I saw that introduction, I was thirteen. My brother was off at U.C. Santa Cruz, and I had gone to his room to watch the spare television. I sat alone, isolated from my parents by space and … Continue reading →