TOM PHELAN,

a writer living outside Philadelphia, is currently working on a horror project set in western Pennsylvania. He co-wrote the movie Anamorph, starring Willem Dafoe.

Planet of the Vampires is a film you haven’t seen at all if you haven’t seen it in the wee hours, with the lights off, and its hypnotic sound turned way up.

April 5, 2024

Insects are the worst kind of people. With all the venom-pumping, eye-gouging, and cannibalism, it’s a wonder they get around to maintaining our delicate ecosystem.

February 26, 2024

Item 1 on my list of demands to be met before returning to regular Mass on Sundays is the canonization of Ken Russell. In The Lair of the White Worm (1988), the whisky priest of excess...

January 5, 2024

Andrzej Żuławski will be your guide through hell, giddy as Virgil his first day on the job. He conceived his second theatrical feature, 1972’s The Devil (aka Diabel), as a political allegory for...

December 30, 2023

Angel Dust (1994) is an energetically bleak film about the terrific ease with which we surrender our minds. Anyone who has been on the Yamanote loop service in Tokyo at 6 p.m....

November 23, 2023

Beware the autumn people. You know who you are. Curled up under a blanket each October rereading Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes It may as well be called...

October 31, 2023

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was: “What?” This syllable, spoken by Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), shock jock in decline, is in response to an encounter at a traffic light as he’s driving to work in the spiffy opening to...

January 3, 2023

Horror stories know something that other stories don’t. William S. Burroughs named his book Naked Lunch after that “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” That’s how I remember my first horror movies...

March 17, 2022

Horror stories know something that other stories don’t. William S. Burroughs named his book Naked Lunch after that “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” That’s how I remember my first horror movies...

March 17, 2022

Katie Small

is a writer, photographer, videographer, and cinephile living in Portland, Oregon.