The Gist The human body has to reach a temperature of about 3,000 degrees in order to be reduced to ashes. Spontaneous Human Combustion (or SHC as I shall be referring to it today to reduce finger fatigue) is when a human being catches on fire without a detectable ignition point or fuel source. In …
I am besotted with the creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky. I find things some would consider weird, wacky, or “way out” to be wonderful and whimsical, which is more in line with how I like to see the world anyway (you’re welcome for all that alliteration). I’m not sure if I can attribute my admiration …
I don’t remember all too much about life before the age of 5 or 6 (I think people who do are an anomaly and should be studied). A fleeting memory of sitting on a blanket chewing on a rubber gummy bear, my first time playing with a Nintendo Zapper, the remarkable feeling I got when …
As we head deeper and deeper into the world of The Walking Dead, the lines between “good” and “evil” are blurring so much that they’re becoming hard to see. It’s something that has been happening over the course of the last several seasons, as countless episodes have documented individual struggles characters have had with embracing …
Every once in a while, an independent horror film garners such rave reviews on the festival circuit that future backlash is inevitable, as many fans build up impossibly high expectations in their own heads and then toss around meaningless terms like “over-hyped” when those expectations are not met – essentially, as silly as it sounds, …
The one-two punch of Halloween and Friday the 13th, released just two years apart, is credited for kick-starting the American slasher movement, though the sub-genre’s roots date back even further than 1978. Post-Friday the 13th, Wes Craven reinvented slasher cinema with A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, and he did much the same thing …
When it comes to the re-animation of the big slasher franchises, a pattern has recently begun to develop. New Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween films have been on-again, off-again more times than I can count, and it seems that the studios who own those properties just can’t seem to figure out …
On the night of September 18th, 2014, I watched veteran actor Michael Parks (at his scenery-chewing best) turn Justin Long, quite literally, into a human walrus. As Long, housed inside of a rubbery creature suit that will forever be etched into my brain, waddled across the screen, I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes. Going into …
It was on this day in 2008 that I sat down in my local theater to watch Cloverfield, a movie that I knew very little about at the time. In fact, I knew almost nothing about it, and that was certainly by design. The marketing for the J.J. Abrams-produced monster movie was so brilliant and …
There are few labels that have done more damage to the horror genre than “torture porn,” a term that has been applied to films like Hostel and the Saw franchise. What the term essentially implies is that the films labeled with it are bereft of substance, making them the horror genre’s version of, well, pornography. …
