Features
Back to ‘Graveyard School’ With Nola Thacker: Series Creator Discusses How ‘Buffy’ Served as Inspiration for the Series
The 1990s saw a wave of horror titles aimed at young adult readers being released in the wake of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps. One of the most versatile and endearing was Graveyard School. Written by Nola ...
How Alien Raised the Bar for Visuals in Horror
Throughout most of the 1970s, horror was very focused on realism. There was a transition period in the previous decade that moved the genre away from the Gothic Hammer films, truly cementing horror in...
Why All Directors Doing Genre Throwbacks Need to Study The Guest
I’ve been a fan of Adam Wingard since I first saw A Horrible Way to Die. I had no idea what to expect from that film, but the character work really impressed me. The buzz for You’re Next had me really...
Why Werner Herzog’s ‘Nosferatu’ is Actually the Better Movie
F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is a masterpiece of silent cinema. It’s one of the all-time great horror films. While it did not get the rights to the characters of the novel Dracula from the Stoker family, i...
Truth and Fiction Aren’t Identical in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers
In Death: On July 19th, 1975 Stewart and Cyril Marcus—the twin gynecologists who inspired Bari Woods and Jackie Gleasand’s novel Twins, which in turned inspired David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers — were ...
In the Mouth of Madness is a Tragically Underrated Meta Horror
Scream and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare are widely regarded as the two movies that kicked off meta-horror in the 1990s. Both were, in their own way, deconstructions of the genre. But despite having the ...
How ‘Poltergeist’ Destroyed the American Dream (And Why That’s Great)
Filmmakers in the 1980s had a serious obsession with the American dream. Part of it, I think, was due to the fetish-like obsession with ‘50s Americana. People wanted a very Norman Rockwell view of mid...
The Boy Who Lived: What Makes Tommy Jarvis a Fan-Favorite Horror Hero
Michael Myers has Doctor Loomis. Freddy Krueger has Nancy Thompson. And Jason Voorhees has Tommy Jarvis. The difference here is that while most heroes originate in the same film as the villain, we don...
The Strange Matter That Time Forgot – A Retrospective On The Lost and Unpublished Aspects of the YA Horror Franchise
While I was working on my interview with Marty Engle and Johnny Ray Barnes Jr. on their book series, Strange Matter, they shared information on several titles which were advertised but never drafted. ...
