. Adam Serwer titled an Atlantic article, The Cruelty Is the Point, arguing that the first Trump administration and its supporters were more interested in inflicting harm on their enemies than in any ...

. From ages 10 through 19 I lived in the hot, humid, mosquito-infested state of Florida. During those nine years, I experienced one hurricane, David, that passed directly over my town. The eye passed ...

. Before I can get to the song and its lying lyricist, I have to take you on a little side trip down the genre of adult contemporary music of the 1970s. In 1977 Debby Boone daughter, of Pat Boone, (ki...

. Friday night, with a hankering to see something in the theaters to kick off this year's spooky season, I did something I have not done in a very long time: I saw a movie knowing so little about it I...

. They Live (1988) was the 11th feature film from celebrated writer/director John Carpenter, and, in my contested opinion, halfway through the movie it becomes evident that Carpenter's talent had fled...

Last Friday I made the drive from San Diego to Los Angeles to visit the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The trip up took about two hours and a little change, frankly faster than I had expected, and...

. September is drawing to a close with October coming later this week, bringing with it spooky season and the busiest period for the next several months at my day job, a perfect time to reflect on my ...

. Nikki says this to Bear in the short window during the film Obsession when we, the audience, get to meet Nikki before she is replaced by the power of the wish by Freaky Nikki. Bear responds that he ...

. Tomorrow, September 25, 2026, I will take the day off from my full-time job, bundle myself into my Kia Soul in the morning, and embark on the two-to-three-hour drive from home to the dream place, Ho...

. With the release and scathing reviews of Run Hide Fight: Infidels and the expanding slate of productions from Angel Studios, explicitly conservative entertainment is once again in the air. As with p...

. Anyone who suffers from migraines knows that they have a set of stimuli that can, but not always, ignite a dreaded migraine. These triggers can be visual, flashing lights or patterns, taste, consumi...

. America has a number of Federal Holidays: the 4th of July, where we celebrate the American arrogance to tell the greatest empire at the time in the world to stuff it, and the only time we slip back ...

. For the writing community in general, the debate over prologues is a bit of low-intensity warfare that never ends. In my writers group, I am the person who often tells another writer that their prologue isn't working and that they should delete it from their manuscript. So, it is a bit of an ironic

. It is September and therefore time for another horror movie marathon hosted by Film Geeks San Diego with their annual Secret Morgue. I have attended all of the Secret Morgues except for 2023, when t...

. A one-night-stand in a motel leads to a prolonged chase between predator and victim culminating with numerous deaths of both the guilty and the innocent in 2023's Strange Darling. JT Mollner's scrip...

. Forgive me for not giving a day report for World Con Day 4, but when the evening rolled around and I settled into my quiet corner of the hotel lobby to write it and brainstorm the next novel, I just...

. This report will be decidedly shorter and less comprehensive than the previous two. I have spent some time brainstorming for a potential new horror novel, actually a sequel to the one I am currently shopping, and that has taken quite a few CPU cycles from the old wet computer haunting my skull. So, I

. This was a much more full day at the convention than Thursday. Started off with breakfast in my hotel room, a pre-packaged Caesar salad that I had brought with the plan to stay within my diet for th...

. The World Science Fiction Convention, a 5-day gathering of writers, artists, scientists, and fans, this year is being held in Anaheim California and being so close the sweetie-wife and me drove from...

. For many people, this is a terribly sad week with the passing of Dolly Parton and Tim Curry, a pair of performers who helped define a generation, each in their own unique manner and talent. As someo...

. The third feature film from celebrated indie filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, (henceforth referred to as At Camp Miasma) is her most mainstream project but even then ...

. July 9th of this year, President Trump returning from an overseas trip secretly switched aircraft due to what the Secret Service believed to be a credible threat against the vehicle. Utilizing a cat...

. Recently I have watched the Twitter discourse rise up over the character of Syril Karn from the series Andor with a number of people debating if the show had been disrespectful of the character prom...

. In 2010 I was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. The severe part of that diagnosis really surprised me. To treat the condition where you stop breathing due to obstructions in your airway while you s...

. Spoilers for Obsession I recently rewatched the entirety of Obsession, my favorite horror film of the last few years and possibly my favorite film of 2026. Dune part 3 and Avengers: Doomsday will ha...

. Spoilers for Obsession, Longlegs, & Immaculate When a movie ends, the credits roll, I often find myself wondering about the characters and their lives that follow. For the vast majority of the movie...

. It is a commonly held assumption that a movie adaptation is always inferior to the novel from which it was adapted. Setting aside the rather obvious and massively important aspect that these are rad...

. When Obsession played earlier this year it was one of my best times watching a horror film in the theater in quite a while. Oh, there have been enjoyable horror movies this year and in recent years ...

. A friend left a lengthy comment on my post about The Griffin Incident over on Twitter. Since over there I am restricted to 280 characters, I will respond here. First off, I want to say it was not my...

. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds boldly left the confines of its genre of science fiction with the third episode of its fourth season, The Griffin Incident. While some have used the episode's horror ge...

. A common metaphor used in the writing community for those of us on the hunt for representation by a literary agent is that we are 'in the trenches.' I can see the appeal of this device and have even...

. We were flipping through the thumbnails on the ad-supported streaming service Tubi when my sweetie-wife, a lover of birds, noticed the title The Day of the Owl, and we stopped to investigate. An Ita...

. Next month, August 27-31, is the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, in Anaheim, California. As it went down last year, I will be attending but this time with a twist. A regular smaller conventio...

. When writers are in the process of submitting materials to agents, who are swarmed with submissions seeking representation, the writers will attempt to glean any hint at all of what was hidden in th...

Amazon/MGM . Earlier this summer my sweetie-wife and I ventured to the local cinema and caught a screening of The Sheep Detectives, the latest feature film from Craig Mazin, the showrunner for both Ch...

. I had hoped to have another novel completed by the end of this month, August, but instead I have absolutely nothing finished and nothing even started. I started out with an idea for another folk hor...

. In storytelling, whether that be in prose or cinema, one of the trickiest and yet most vital elements of the structure is the denouement. It is the part of the story where the plot, the character de...

. It's been a year since the Star Wars franchise spin-off of a spin-off Andor completed its second and final season with the last episode flowing seamlessly into Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and for ...

. Sunday morning, after finally shaking off the effects of a two-day migraine attack that lasted from Thursday through Friday, my sweetie-wife and I caught an early morning screening of Christopher No...

. Bruce Wayne, AKA The Batman, is an enduring character that first emerged in 1939 from the pages of Detective Comics and has been with us in some form ever since. Recently, I have been noticing a num...

Let me make this clear with upper case characters in bold: I WOULD NEVER USE AN A.I. GENERATED BOOK COVER. What I will do is use A.I. to mock up an idea for a cover, one I would use as an example of m...

So, next weekend, July 17th, is the release of Nolan's next film, his adaptation of The Odyssey. A Universal Picture movie that has already drawn fire from idiots online who believe that true beauty c...

. It would seem that, with the horrid and credible allegations surfacing about Platner, fate has bestowed upon Susan Collins, the GOP senator that promised to serve only two terms, a successful electi...

. Producer Val Lewton working for RKO pictures in the 1940s was tasked to create a number of horror films but without the money to hire established stars or productions of any real scale. His solution...

. Almost two weeks ago I wrote about the horror/comedy series Widow's Bay produced by and streaming on AppleTV, at that time I had just about caught up with the episodes in their weekly release schedu...

. Generative 'Artificial Intelligence' or A.I. has been quite the controversy of late rearing its head in everything from environmental issues to space flight and theoretical orbital data centers. For...

. It is Monday morning, and this past weekend failed to be executed as I had hoped it might. Still, it was not a disaster of a weekend and there were many fine elements and several routine errands com...

. Two of the great cultural fictional kingdoms of recent times, kingdoms that have been taken to heart and have occupied the minds of millions, are Westeros and Wakanda. Westeros, from the mind of aut...

. Last week my sweetie-wife and I watched a Giallo that we streamed on the ad-supported service Tubi; the film in question was titled Ring of Death, a 1969 Italian crime/thriller, and not to be confus...