I have been a bit indulgent this summer – not publishing nearly as much as I’d ordinarily like, and not exactly challenging myself with particularly heady, analytical projects. Rather, it is summer, and life can be quite hard enough, thank you very much The post The Lost Boys – eternal youth, actually youthful first appeared on Flinching with Delight ..read more

So it was June, “pride month,” (or at least it was when I sat down to start this post weeks ago – this is certainly coming late, but things last forever on the internet, so whenever you read this, imagine it’s still June), and I always try to mark that with some LGBTQ+ related content. Frequently that means checking out some good “Queer Horror” that I’ve not yet seen, but as alluded to in my last post, life is currently more than a little difficult (an understatement) and surveying a bunch of stuff I haven’t watched before in the desperate hope that some of it will be worth writing about is ho ..read more

I was on a roll there – I’d gotten two posts up in two weeks and I knew that a book I wanted to write about would be delivered soon – The Angel of Indian Lake, the third and final entry in Stephen Graham Jones’s “Indian Lake Trilogy,” the first two books of which I’ve already written about here and here. In preparation, I re-read the second book in one week, and then when “Angel” was delivered, I burned through it in about 5 days – I was ready to write and I would get a third post up within three weeks. Awesome. And then that never happened. I got hit with some difficult life stuff (which isn ..read more

I don’t know why I haven’t watched any of the films of Brandon Cronenberg yet. When I was first really getting into horror as a genre, his dad, David Cronenberg, was my absolute favorite director, making work so rich in concept, with gripping ideas that challenge and stretch the idea of the body, the mind, the self, and not in arsty, self-important packages, but in wild, fleshy, sexual, bloody weird rides (I also don’t know why I haven’t written about any of David Cronenberg’s films yet – one of these days). And when the younger Cronenberg hit the scene with his 2012 premiere, Antiviral, the b ..read more

I’ve previously made mention of how Clive Barker played a key role in bringing me into the horror genre. Though I’d always loved Halloween, monsters, and the gothic, I really wasn’t a horror kid. I enjoyed themes of supernatural otherness, of dark modern fantasy, of a reversal of expectations wherein what seemed bestial is actually noble and what seemed good and just is in fact cruel, but I wasn’t ready for horror per se – I had an active imagination, and I was just too easily scared. And so, it seems somewhat surprising that a “splatterpunk” author whom Stephen King had crowned the “future of ..read more

Certain films make such a strong impression that even if you love them, you are rarely drawn to re-watch. It just seems better to sit with the first feeling they gave you – you don’t want a subsequent viewing to rob you of the memory of how they affected you. And sometimes, on top of that, a given film is just hard to find on streaming, even if you wanted to check it out again, such that your remembered first viewing grows in stature over the years: it becomes something treasured, almost mythic, a half glimpsed moment of true magic from long, long ago. Such it was with today’s film, Michele So ..read more

I’ve been wanting to do this post for a long time – I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to finally make it happen. Dario Argento played a significant role in my early forays into the genre. I remember watching Suspiria (1977) for the first time and being so struck by it. I don’t think I’d yet seen such an aesthetic piece before – in horror or in film generally – and to be clear, I don’t mean simply an ‘aesthetically pleasing’ (read: beautiful) film, but rather a film so focused on aesthetics above all else, with all other elements in service to style, to color, light, composition, and sound ..read more

I like a bit of variety on this here blog, and after last post’s discussion of three classy, classic Dracula films, I thought it would be good to go in a completely different direction and take on something cheap, gory, and grotty. I’m no gore hound per se and I’m not the kind of horror fan who is constantly hunting for the roughest stuff I can handle, but I do really appreciate when something works – when the effect actually gets to me – when the horror of a piece can linger in my mind and my mood. Today’s film is clearly one of those. Filmed to the brim with top notch suspense sequences, vis ..read more

Is there a character in the horror landscape that looms as large as Dracula? My whole life, from long before I was at all into horror, I’ve known him. Simple plastic Halloween masks, Scooby Doo cartoons, funny characters that reference him (the Count on Sesame Street, Count Floyd on SCTV, Count Chocula on cereal boxes), The Monster Squad – he was everywhere. And he was one of the only characters so omnipresent as to warrant an indefinite article – you might see a little kid on Halloween with a widows peak, a medallion, and a cape, and if you ask who or what they are, there was a good chance th ..read more

I’m about two and a half years into this blogsperiment? Blogventure? Bloject? (Ugh – I think these are just getting worse and were never necessary to begin with) And in that time, I’ve had good runs (last January – April, I managed a new post every week) and I’ve had drier spells (lately, I’ve averaged a post every two weeks). The blog has given me opportunity and impetus to finally check out loads of work I’ve been meaning to get around to, but just never had, and it’s also given me the excuse to devote some regular time to thought – what am I going to discuss this week? What did I think abou ..read more