My status as a die-hard horror fan was cemented in the summer of 1986 when I was 12-years-old. Sure, I’d seen horror movies before, but my love for the genre exploded after I saw The Fly (and Aliens, also in 1986, but that’s another story). I’m amazed and somewhat overwhelmed …

May 29th is Danny Elfman’s 63rd Birthday. Before he was known as a premier composer of film scores, he fronted the genre-mocking rock outfit Oingo Boingo; the band mixed punk, ska, and art-house sounds around a macabre aesthetic that borrowed imagery from Dia de los Muertos. They had a huge …

May 16th, 2016 was the 180th Anniversary of the marriage of Edgar Allan Poe and Virginia Eliza Clemm. Although they were only married for 11 years, their union is one of the most celebrated, tragic, and controversial ever chronicled. Poe’s unrequited love for Virginia has been immortalized in the writer’s …

Sometimes, a single line of movie dialog is so powerful, so perfect in its context, it singlehandedly immortalizes the entire film. Many of these quotes become part of our popular vernacular, like “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” and, “I’m ready for my close-up,” or, “I’ll have …

Friggatriskaidekaphobics, take note: Statisticians at the Dutch Centre for Insurance (CVS) have established that Friday the 13th is actually safer than an average Friday. They claim that rates of accidents, fires, and thefts all decrease when the 13th of a month falls on a Friday. This fact comes as little …

Wolf Creek is the latest horror film franchise getting a TV series treatment; the exemplar of “Ozsploitation” will be premier this Thursday, May 12th as a 6-part series on the Australian streaming service Stan. Like the films Wolf Creek and Wolf Creek 2, director Greg McLean is helming the series, …

It was 58 years ago this weekend that Hammer Films released one of their earliest successes: The Horror of Dracula. The film would go on to inspire more than just a few sequels and helped establish Hammer as premier creators of top-notch cinematic terror. Hammer Films is a British production …

Everything’s bigger in Texas: Steak dinners, belt buckles, cowboy hats… horror. The Lone Star State produced a some of America’s most deranged serial killers, including: Angel Maturino Reséndiz (The Railroad Killer), Dean Corll (The Candy Man), Kenneth McDuff (The Broomstick Killer), Charles Albright (The Eyeball Killer), David Berkowitz (Son of …

There’s a reason so many horror movies take place in high schools and/or focus on teenagers; as a colleague of mine is fond of saying: “High school is a horror movie!” Indeed, it’s a metaphor made in Hell. For adolescents charting the dangerous territory between childhood and adulthood, potentially catastrophic …

Most horror fans got a good chuckle over an item that circulated last week: Apparently, a teacher at Jackson Central-Merry High School in Tennessee showed his students the infamous “torture porn” film, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence). But I can think of at least one person who isn’t laughing: …