This deep into a franchise—really, I’ve lost count of the Texas Chainsaw Massacres—most horror series are limping along, putting a movie out just to keep the brand in-house, that kind of stuff. Not here. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D is every single thing I want from a horror movie. And the story actually surprises me.
Worse, I almost missed the whole thing. Because I accidentally read a review or two, and it’s so easy to pan the sequel to a remake, or however this one’s stacked. Re…
ten in the morning, just after comic book class:
and. the close-up:
and, will be something different tonight, I suspect. Jason Voorhees, Ghostface, a horse-head dude, I don’t know. I do know this night’s never long enough.…
This was the easiest list to make. These are the images and jump-scares I think of first thing each night at two or three in the morning when I wake up. Take last night for example: I’m gonesville when I hear something crash downstairs. Or, I hear the end of it. So of course I have to investigate. By degrees. And, instead of anything understandable, what it is that fell is this skeleton hand we keep perched on an antique typewriter. Why it would fall at three in the morning, I hav…
When Katie from Paranormal Activity moves in across the street, it’s a pretty sure bet things are going to get demon-y, and fast. And, we’ve seen the other three, so we know all the rules:
- demons love to move furniture
- adults never notice anything
- there’s always some reason to have a camera rolling 24/7
- something in the background will move, if you watch long enough
- witches aren’t scary.
What this fourth installment adds is:
- nobody closes laptops
- a c
We all live in Stephen King’s house. I mean, all of us who hope to write the scary stuff. Case in point: Sinister. Is there any way to move a writer into a new house and not conjure Jack Torrance? And, going back a touch farther—as King, I assume (going by Danse Macabre) would do himself—what’s Jack Torrance if not a more dangerous Eleanor, from The Haunting of Hill House? I mean, what you’ve got is somebody made vulnerable by their character flaws and/or past, and you’re plugging th…
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Life in a slasher film is easy. You just have to know when to die.
Aerial View: A suburban town in Texas. Everyone’s got an automatic garage door opener. All the kids jump off a perilous cliff into a shallow river as a rite of passage. The sheriff is a local celebrity. You know this town. You’re from this town.
Zoom In: Homecoming princess, Lindsay. She’s just barely escaped death at the hands of a brutal, sadistic murderer in a Michael Jackson mask. Up on the cliff, she …
Some movies give me hope. Just, generally. I mean, that you can still mix a movie up from just fast, bad cars and a bunch of happy-go-lucky characters who can’t really ever die. But maybe I should preface this by saying I’m much more of a Cannonball Run/Smokey and the Bandit/Deathproof kind of fan than I am of all the Fast and the Furiouses. Just because those cute little cars in F&tF, I’m sure they’re fast and somehow desirable, but they’re just not bad. Want to know one …
I’ve usually got my tongue di-rectly on the pulse of anything slasher, but somehow — two months of book tour? — Detention slipped past. In April, yes, when Growing Up Dead in Texas was just advance copies. And just a couple of days ago I was having a big talk with a good friend about slashers that are probing the edges of the genre, feeling out the limits, poking the necessary fun: Cabin Fever, Leslie Vernon, Tucker & Dale, Scream, Severance. The Killage. T…
I knew from the first time I saw the title of this book that I was going to have to consume it, and then I lucked onto an ARC, meaning all I had to do was steal some time from myself. Which, I can be particularly unwatchful when the reading’s good enough. And, here, it is, it was, it would be again. And, like me, I’d guess a lot of you are getting Amazon emails with Lydia Netzer’s Shine Shine Shine at the top of their lists. Deservedly so. There’s a wit here, a ligh…
Man, I know: last week I hit Prometheus, and just did a status update somewhere saying it was decent, it was cool, and now here I am with a non-review of a movie fourteen years old already. Still. This one I want to talk about it for a short bit: 1998. Dan Rosen’s Dead Man’s Curve (on Netflix Instant as The Curve). This is two years after Scream changed the horror scene once and forever. One year after Scream 2 made the sequel legit again. One year after I Know What You Did L…
is the NYT bestselling author of 30 or so books, +350 stories, some comic books, and all this stuff here. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots. More