“Gory Santa Horror Is a ‘Christmas Bloody Christmas’ Miracle”

If you’re still in the post-holiday doldrums, here, have a Santa Claus slasher movie to wash away your depression. Continue reading →

“‘The Last Matinee’s Seedy Slasher Spills Guts and Is Sharper than It Seems”

A good movie that reminds us maybe the movies aren’t always the safest place to be, especially when a killer is killing people in the audience dead. Continue reading →

“America, the Land of ‘Random Acts of Violence'”

A slasher, but a slasher about *America*. Continue reading →

Review: Happy Death Day 2U, 2019, dir. Christopher Landon

Alternative tagline for this movie’s poster: “U Look Like A Monkey / And U Die Like 1 2.” You can have that for free. Wait, no: Royalties. Continue reading →

“Would ‘Halloween’ Be Revered If It Were Released Today?”

Upfront: Questions like these, at face value, don’t have good answers, because we can never know with 100% certainty what those answers might be. That said, I think horror, at least “horror” that does not satisfy the genre’s growing prestige among critics and check respectability boxes, is on a sort of decline among tastemakers, and … Continue reading →

“The 50 Best Slasher Movies of All Time”

It’s been so long since I put together my big blurb contribution for Paste Magazine‘s list of the 50 best slasher movies of all time (of all time!) that I actually…forgot we hadn’t yet published it. But we hadn’t! And now we have! I wrote about Tenebrae, the Dario Argento meta classic, and you’ll also see re-ups … Continue reading →

Review: Tragedy Girls, 2017, dir. Tyler MacIntyre

I hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated Tragedy Girls. If it had any balls, I would kick them for a whole day, except that if it had any balls it’d be a much better movie, and so … Continue reading →

Is the Slasher Movie Dying?

Friday the 13th only rolls around so often; in the case of 2017, “so often” means “twice,” and we’ll stick to that pattern until Donald Trump (or, who knows, maybe Mike Pence) gets voted the fuck out of office. But how cool is it that our second Friday the 13th this year happens to fall … Continue reading →

Go, See, Talk! Review: Detention, 2012, dir. Joseph Kahn

You may remember some weeks back that I happened into an opportunity to participate in a round table interview the effervescent Joseph Kahn regarding his second feature film, the multi-genre mind-bending slasher-time travel-teen drama-comedy-kung fu-cultural commentary bonanza, Detention. Well, it’s Friday the 13th– and that means that not only am I barring my doors to keep … Continue reading →

Review: Scream 4, 2011, dir. Wes Craven

Ready for another trip to Woodsboro? I can’t quite pin down why anyone thought that the world needed a fourth entry in Wes Craven’s Scream franchise, but here we are with Scream 4 repeating the same conceit as the first three films. Certainly slasher series are known to possess impressive life spans that carry them … Continue reading →

Review: Punisher Warzone, 2008, dir. Lexi Alexander

As a fan of slasher movies, I occasionally wrestle with a moral dilemma that I find to be central to the psycho-killer-makes-teens-more-dead dynamic (and I’m sure– at least I hope– that I’m not the only one). The slasher, serving as the real star attraction of the movies that they feature in, becomes the figure that … Continue reading →