Writer of things that go bump in the night
We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you this breaking sociopolitical rant. This past winter, in the immediate wake of an inspiring, hopeful, historically unprecedented act of political esprit de corps, untold thousands of New Yorkers made the dispiriting conscious choice to literally treat their city like shit. When the snow stubbornly carpeting New […] The post The City That…
At last month’s StokerCon, I was invited to participate on a panel about the subject of ecohorror—that is, horror fiction with environmental themes—titled “Eco-Horror: Is Nature Trying to Kill Us?” As it was proposed to me, the panel would “discuss some of the early examples of ecohorror in literature, like Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, and […] The post Ecohorror: Is Nature Trying to Kill Us?…
Let’s play Ten for Ten! To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which launched on June 26, 2014, here’s an appreciation for ten of my formative cinematic influences—an examination of why these movies resonated with me when I first saw them, and how they permanently informed my aesthetic tastes and creative sensibilities. This post […] The post Under the Influence, Part 2: The Top…
Let’s play Ten for Ten! To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which launched on June 26, 2014, here’s an appreciation for ten of my formative cinematic influences—an examination of why these movies resonated with me when I first saw them, and how they permanently informed my aesthetic tastes and creative sensibilities. This post […] The post Under the Influence, Part 1: On Artistic…
Ah, it’s that magical time of year! When the Hudson hawk nips at the nose, and the skyline over the New Jersey Palisades bruises by midafternoon. When chimney smoke from private houses spices the air, and strings of colored lights adorn windows and fire escapes. And, of course, when the Internet engages in its annual […] The post No, Virginia, “Die Hard” Is Not a Christmas Movie appeared first on…
My first novel, The Dogcatcher, is now available from DarkWinter Press. It’s an occult horror/dark comedy about a municipal animal-control officer whose Upstate New York community is being terrorized by a creature in the woods. Here’s a (spoiler-free) behind-the-scenes account of the project’s creative inception and development; how it’s responsible for my being blackballed in […] The post “The…
With road-trip season upon us once again, here’s an examination of how American car culture has been romanticized by the entertainment industry; how automobiles, far from enablers of freedom and individuality, are in fact “turbo-boosted engines of inequality”; and how Hollywood can help remedy an ecocultural crisis it’s played no small role in propagating. In […] The post Highway to Hell: Car…
A cultural blip, disowned and dismissed. A cultural phenomenon, nurtured and celebrated. Is there any doubt Kristy Swanson’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an Xer, and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s a Millennial? Joss Whedon famously dislikes the movie made from his original screenplay for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui and starring […] The post Into Each Generation a Slayer…
This article discusses plot details and scene specifics from Michael Mann’s film Heat (1995) and his novel Heat 2 (2022). John Carpenter’s dystopian classic Escape from New York (1981), set in 1997, opens with an expository intertitle: “1988—The Crime Rate in the United States Rises Four Hundred Percent.” Though that grim prognostication amounted to an […] The post Book Review: “Heat 2” by Michael…
Since launching this blog eight years ago, I have maintained a consistent publishing schedule of one new post per month. However, given the ways in which this ongoing project has evolved, that level of output is no longer sustainable. Here’s a brief chronicle of the blog’s creative progression—and a statement on what comes next. From […] The post A History of the Blog (So Far)—and a Programming…