Let me get an embarrassing admission out of the way right up front. Back when I was in college, I ran a Godzilla Film Club. Yes, that's right, while other students were practicing with their rock bands or rehearsing plays or making out with their significant others, once a month on Thursday nights I reserved one of the school's AV rooms -- which back in the late 1980s/early '90s was little more than a small room with a big TV and a VCR -- and made use of my own private stash of VHS tapes to show all the classic Godzilla movies from the 1950s through 1985. Sometimes the screenings were devoid of anyone but me and the student who was earning extra credit for her theater curriculum by ... (more…)

In the letters column of the April 2009 issue of Rue Morgue magazine, a reader named Jerry Diego writes, "As a gay man who loves horror, I've rarely felt like the horror community embraces anything about us (other than killing us horribly in movies)...[yet] I know that not every horror fan is a single white male, testosterone-fuelled, T&A-loving homo-basher like every single forum of every horror site seems to suggest."

As someone who used to frequent horror message boards before I realized life was too short to spend that much time wading through nonsense, I've seen firsthand the macho, anti-gay attitude that can be prevalent in the horror community. And I'm not the only one. A friend of ... (more…)

THE STATE OF THE GENRE: Who Wants to Sit Through a 13-Hour Slasher Movie? I Do.


I have a tricky relationship with horror on television. In my youth, I ate up everything the small screen had to offer that featured weird creatures or a frisson of terror: TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE, MONSTERS, THE HITCHER, SWAMP THING, WEREWOLF, whatever cheesy, bizarre horror flicks they would show on COMMANDER USA'S GROOVIE MOVIES -- you name it, I probably watched it. Now, with my tastes more discerning and my time more valuable, there are only a handful of horror series that keep my attention. I loved TWIN PEAKS, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, THE X-FILES, MILLENNIUM, and CARNIVALE, for instance, and more ... (more…)

With Passover, one of the holiest of the Jewish holidays, right around the corner, my thoughts turn to another, lesser known kind of J-horror: Jewish horror. Religion has played a strong role in horror for as long as horror has existed, but religious horror really came into its own as a subgenre in the 1970s with the release of films like THE EXORCIST and THE OMEN. More recently, religious horror has seen something of a resurgence with books like the Left Behind series and movies like THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE and THE REAPING. Because most mainstream religious horror tends to view the world through a Catholic lens, or at least a Christian one, it's easy to forget there are plenty of ... (more…)

THE STATE OF THE GENRE

When I first heard about the forthcoming British horror-comedy LESBIAN VAMPIRE KILLERS, starring Paul McGann from DOCTOR WHO and James Corden and Mathew Horne from the outstanding Britcom GAVIN & STACEY, I was very excited. Not just because I love DOCTOR WHO and GAVIN & STACEY, and not just because I love British horror-comedies like SHAUN OF THE DEAD. No, I was excited because I love lesbian vampire movies.

Perhaps I should explain. In the real world, gender identity and sexual orientation tend to be life-defining. Being gay or bisexual can make you a part of a particular culture that others don't have access to. It's a life that comes with its own set of ... (more…)

I was excited to see Christopher Moore has a new novel, Fool, coming out this month. Moore is a fine writer who routinely mixes genre tropes -- demons, vampires, angels and murderers -- with a lot of humor in novels like Practical Demonkeeping, Bloodsucking Fiends, The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror and Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. With each new novel he releases, Moore's readership of horror, science fiction and literary fiction fans grows. Which got me thinking. I know an awful lot of horror fans who strongly believe humor and horror don't mix. I don't get that.

I suppose I can understand where the sentiment comes from. ... (more…)

Happy New Year, horror fans! As 2009 dawns and 2008 lies moldering in its grave with the corpses of THE EYE and PROM NIGHT, now is the perfect time to look ahead to the new year, a time when everything feels fresh and rejuvenated. When everything old is new again.

Now there's an adage Hollywood certainly knows how to live by, particularly when we're talking about horror movies. In Hollywood, the name of the game has long been Ride the Bandwagon -- keep making movies just like the ones that made money before until they stop making money -- and too often for us fans of the creepy and the kooky, that bandwagon's license plate spells "remake." Admittedly, the remake is hardly a recent ... (more…)

December is a month for giving. Whether you're celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or the Winter Solstice, odds are you'll be giving and receiving gifts, the current economic recession notwithstanding. And odds are even better that, as a horror buff, some of those gifts will be DVDs. Yet for all the thousands of horror titles available on DVD today, there are, shockingly, still quite a few good ones that aren't. My wish for this holiday season is to see some of these neglected movies get the DVD releases they deserve.

Rather than gifting us with a new, completely unnecessary, three-disc reissue of Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN remake (Zombie should instead gift us with a new album!), why ... (more…)

Murder. Mayhem. Mystery. Magic. There are a lot of M words associated with the horror genre. With this installment of my monthly column, though, I'd like to bring attention to another M word that fans of horror, and even its practitioners, may not want to talk about, but unfortunately it's something that I feel has become inexplicably, inexcusably prevalent in this weird, dark entertainment of ours.

That word is misogyny.

To be clear, I'm not talking about the victimization of female characters. Women make up the majority of the world's population; it's only logical, then, that there would be female victims of whatever dark force haunts a horror movie or novel. Indeed, the genre has a ... (more…)

Ah, October. Every horror fan's favorite month. For most people, Halloween -- that ancient Celtic festival of Samhain magically transformed over two thousand years into an occasion for hordes of children in Yu-Gi-Oh masks and inappropriately muscled superhero costumes to beg for candy -- is the one day of the year when horror movies reign supreme. Back when I managed a small, neighborhood video store, our measly horror selection, which spanned all of two shelves, would spend most of the year gathering dust. Until Halloween, that is. Then we couldn't keep them in stock. Even after the good scary movies were taken -- the original HALLOWEEN, THE THING, GINGER SNAPS, FRANKENSTEIN, ALIEN, ... (more…)