I am raising funds to attend the academic conference Haunted Landscapes: Nature, Super-Nature and Global Environments at Falmouth University in the UK this July. I will be speaking on Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies — one of the most underrated and misunderstood horror films of the last 20 years. My…

Brandon Cronenberg is back with his third picture Infinity Pool, and if it tells us anything it’s that just because a film is loaded with extreme violence, orgiastic sex, hallucinogenic drugs, human degradation, deformity and mayhem it doesn’t magically transform what’s presented on screen into something worth watching. The film…

Today, everyone is a critic and virtually everyone writes reviews. I am all for democratization, but that doesn’t at all mean that the popular opinion will be a “good” opinion. All you have to do is see who gets elected to the presidency every four years to start to have…

Picture this: You are walking in a spottily wooded area just within sight of a neighbor’s backyard porch. It is a bright, completely unthreatening day when you hear a bizarre sound like a man pantomiming what a monster’s growl should sound like, but it’s recorded too close to a cheap…

Every two years or so I watch Oliver Stone’s 1995 political masterpiece Nixon. Stone is one of the few directors who’s director’s cuts are arguably better than his theatrical releases — which are also damn good. The DC of Natural Born Killers includes an extended sequence of the prison…

AMC’s Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is not Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire. There is a Louis and a Lestat, sure. But something is missing. Something as vital as the undead’s need for living human blood. The problem is not that AMC’s Vampire is almost completely unconnected fan…

In a clip from a talk by Slavoj Žižek called Black Lives Matter & Identity Politics (uploaded in 2020), he states, “The problem of identity politics is that it presupposes that identities exist. I don’t think they exist.” Similarly, Mark Fisher wrote in his 2013 piece, Exiting The Vampire Castle…

Hulu’s much anticipated new Hellraiser reboot is as boring as it is gross. Going into it I was hoping for some fresh hell indeed, but ended up getting more of a dull purgatory instead. Sadder still, its the kind of movie you can fast forward through and still not miss…

Bedelia Du Maurier, Alana Bloom & The Wendigo: Three New Convex Mirrors to Analyze the Unanalyzable Cannibal The impenetrability of the mind of Hannibal Lecter is a theme within the Lecterverse as central as cannibalism, gothic horror, and fine art. Clarice Starling famously remarks in the 1991 film, “They don’t have a name for what he is,” which spawned decades of literary and critical examination of…