Monthly Archives: March 2009

Darryl Jones on Thematic Horror

Darryl Jones teaches at the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (A. Hodder Arnold, 2003). After several weeks of trying to connect we were finally able to get together to explore some of the topics covered in this fine book. TheoFantastique: […]

Monsters vs. Aliens: DreamWorks Hits a Home Run

Yesterday my family forced me to take a much-needed half-day off, and a part of my relaxation involved taking in a showing of Monster vs. Aliens. I must admit that when I saw the commercials for the film they looked promising but I had my doubts about the ability of the film to live up to […]

LOTTD Unity Post: Roger Ebert and Horror Fans

My fellow members of LOTTD are participating in a unity post focused around some recent comments by film critic Roger Ebert. In a film review for The Last House on the Left earlier this month, Ebert made this comment: “Other scenes, while violent, fell within the range of contemporary horror films, which strive to invent […]

Jim Benson – Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour

One of the great experiences associated with this blog is finding people who share my interests in the fantastic. One of the people I discovered was Jim Benson, host of the radio show TV Time Machine, and co-author with Scott Skelton of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour (Syracuse University Press, 1998). I was pleased […]

Long History and Many Forms: Chaos Monsters Then and Today

For as long as human beings have been trying to explain their place in the cosmos they have been creating monsters. We are familiar with many of the contemporary versions of these creatures, but what we might not readily recognize is that one monster in particular seems to be dominant throughout history and across cultures. […]

Rue Morgue – Divinity in Darkness: The Rise of Christian Horror

The cover of the current issue of Rue Morgue magazine, Issue #87 highlights a double referent in its contents which dovetail with an emphasis of this blog in its analysis of the religious and social aspects of horror and the fantastic. The cover points toward an article on “Pascal Laugier’s religious-themed torture porn,” but of real […]

Heather Duda: The Monster Hunter in Modern Popular Culture

McFarland is one of my favorite publishers and a recent title caught my attention with the publication in 2008 of Heather Duda’s The Monster Hunter in Popular Culture. Duda is an assistant professor of English at the University of Rio Grande in Rio Grande, Ohio. With this volume she addresses a deficit in the academic literature […]

Diary of the Dead: Romero’s Continued Commentary Through the Flesh-Eating Dead

Last weekend my teenage son bought me a copy of Diary of the Dead (2008), George Romero’s latest installment in his infamous zombie series of films. I realize that the movie has been out for a while and that a number of reviews and commentary have been posted, but given the focus of this blog I […]

John Stanley: Story of a Television Horror Host

As regular readers of this blog may recall, I grew up in northern California in the 1970s, and part of my formative experiences with the fantastic involved Creature Features originally hosted by the late Bob Wilkins, and later by John Stanley. John recently contacted me to let me know about a new feature-length documentary on […]

Joshua Bellin: A Tale of Two Kongs

Previously I interviewed Joshua Bellin, author of Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), where he interacted critically with various fantasy films. While horror and science fiction films have received a lot of critical analysis, this has not been the case with fantasy films. Thankfully, Bellin moves beyond this in order […]

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