Why have I not yet talked about David Cronenberg? Cronenberg is one of the few directors working in our out of horror that regularly visits the theme of body horror, which is exactly what it sounds like: stories finding horror within the body, often serving as a metaphor for anything…

A number of writers have shaped no only my aesthetic taste but also my own desire to write fiction, but few have had the impact of Harlan Ellison. It’s hard to look at any genre and not see Ellison’s footprint: from mystery to science fiction, he has written masterpieces of…

I was a teenager when George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead appeared on MTV one Halloween. To say it was life-changing is an understatement. Night of the Living Dead’s reputation precedes it. It is the first zombie movie to feature what we think of as zombies today: the flesh-eaters…

Summer is behind us, which means I probably shouldn’t include Jaws among this series’ entries. And yet, if we’re talking about why I am the horror writer and fan I am, we have to talk about it. The real brilliance of Jaws is in how many genres it touches. Of…

Shockingly, I have not discussed Ray Bradbury at all during this series. So let’s talk about him. Readers tend to associate Bradbury with science fiction, and it’s easy to see why. It’s hard to divorce Bradbury’s name from either The Martian Chronicles or Fahrenheit 451, his story collection The Illustrated…

Today is September 21. Stephen King’s birthday. So we are perhaps obligated to talk about our favorite King work, or in this case, our first King work. I wrote about both the book and movie versions of The Shining in an earlier post. At the time I read the book…

A few quick words about my favorite werewolf movie, An American Werewolf in London. I tend to like werewolf stories enormously. Their core idea — the beast and darkness living within us all — is captivating. …

There are a lot of great alien invasion movies, but few match the paranoia of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Based on Jack Finney’s novel, this adaptation was released in 1978, but I didn’t see it until 1980 or 1981, when I caught it on a cable channel…

If you’ve followed this series up to this point, you probably understand that I tend to like a sense of the otherworldly in my horror. I love the fantasy elements, which means I tend to gravitate to horror infused with surrealism. This can include anything in David Lynch’s filmography, works…