KEEP CALM. WATCH HORROR.

Greetings everyone,

It’s been a while since I last wrote, and usually if I’d say “a lot has happened since…”, it would be true to a degree, but not to the degree it is right now!

I want to start by saying these are the craziest of times for sure, and I hope everyone is doing OK and staying safe. I’m trying to keep busy, and I might even have a new post up before the month is over!

Like it has been for most of us, movies and TV have been a loyal friend to me during everything going on, and I have to say there’s been an amazing amount of great horror stuff on all the cable stations, which suits me fine. What I am not doing is watching pandemic movies, like Contagion.

Why would I want to watch a movie about a pandemic when we’re living it? That doesn’t make sense to me. Besides, there’s such a backlog of things for me to watch so I’ve started working through that pile, and re-visiting a few old favorites. So allow me to share a few of them with you!

First up, The Lodge. A great psychological horror film that seriously messed with me into the next day.

There’s another great one, A Dark Song, which is a really good take on the occult. A great film and one which had been on my list for a while.

I re-visited Death Proof, the grindhouse film from a decade or so ago which was a lot of fun, and then I had to watch An American Werewolf in London both for nostalgia and because it’s a fucking great film! I also re-visited Blue Velvet, which is not only great but reminded me that in Frank Booth we had a man who practiced mask wearing and social distancing by the fact he was such a dick you wouldn’t have wanted to get close to him.

Color Out Of Space with Nicolas Cage was great, a Lovecraft story, and I love HP Lovecraft! It seems like Nic Cage has come full circle from being a “cult” actor to a major blockbuster star back to being a cult actor. And that’s, I think, where he’s at his very best.

Dr.Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, was one I liked a lot because it was very faithful to the book, and I loved the way they used elements of the old score to link the first movie with this one. There’s another great one called The Shed, starring a kid who has a vampire living in his shed! Pretty great, right?

If you like funny horror Satanic Panic hits the mark, and I found The Witch In The Window as creepy as all heck. There’s a moment in there where technology meets folklore as a kid tried to take a picture of the witch with his iPhone but the witch isn’t visible in the display of his camera, and that was a moment.

I also need to mention something on Netflix which is, for me, the best TV show going. I’ve been binge-watching and am so surprised to say that it fulfils every one of my horror cravings and each season is consistently well written…The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. My friend Shelley told me to check it out as it was the best thing on television, and guess what, it is the best thing on television! It is SO satanic! The first episode is all about whether Sabrina should sleep with The Dark Lord on her 16^th birthday? How satanic is that?! There is a little humor, it isn’t all serious, and in terms of content it has everything.

In these strange times, for me, it kind of feels like we’re living in a combination of three very classic movies; Night of The Living Dead, The Stand and The Masque of The Red Death. The Stand for obvious reasons, a virus killing people wantonly and the way people are divided, so the comparisons and similarities are creepy to me. Night of the Living Dead reminds me of people walking around without any regard for the living or the dead, no masks, like zombies. Masque of The Red Death is also about division, the rich and the poor, social inequality, it’s about a ruler who brings the elite inside the castle wall and burns the village below to get rid of the plague, but of course death comes and infects everyone anyway. Between the three of them, it feels like you have the story of our current situation … I probably shouldn’t forget to add The Dead Zone in there, for obvious reasons. Between The Stand and The Dead Zone, maybe Stephen King should be in charge of something right now!