30 Days of Night is a graphic novel illustrated in an urban splatter-grunge style.

Relic is a well-plotted novel that straddles the thriller and horror genres.

The Blob is a slow-burn horror film with a sweetness that doesn't come entirely from nostalgia.

"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far," H.P. Lovecraft admonishes in The Call of Cthulhu. The implication that humankind is not the pre-eminent species of creation is enough to break one's mind.

I love the opening of this movie—the death of the doctor's wife, the breach of the plant, the fifteen-year time jump. Grown-up Ford Brody's son makes him a sign on his last day, just like Ford made for his dad just before catastrophe hit.

Snow is the only book I've read in recent memory where I can honestly say I detest the author and his protagonist. I ask for forgiveness in advance, but I'm going all-in with my complaints.

Most people like John Carpenter's The Thing, but I'm not one of them. I can imagine the early script meetings:

PRODUCER 1: "Everybody liked Alien. Make it more like Alien."

An American Werewolf in London is an endearing, funny, and gory film that has a dated feel, both visually and culturally. The movie feels like two different films. Lovable David Kessler, played by David Naughton, charms viewers, then goes off in wolf form to commit gratuitously violent attacks.

A heartbeat accents the first strains of music that open Alien: the steady throb of the ship's machinery that keeps the crew alive as they lay in suspended animation. The heartbeat states the theme of the film: confrontation with death.

In World War Z, the narrator is one step removed from the horror, unlike in Night of the Living Dead, which traps the viewer in a house surrounded by ghouls.

I enjoyed “Zombie Week” with two classics: World War Z and Night of the Living Dead. The contrast between them is one of openness versus claustrophobia, macro versus micro, process versus passion.

In visual art, there is a concept called "negative space." It is the space around the subject in a painting or around a graphic element (like text) in a design.

King's novella uses a contrivance to tell a werewolf story that is perfectly suited to the topic.

The best thing I can say about Breeding Ground is that it held my interest and kept me turning the pages.

The story begins with the argument that tourists have brought the village of Zeal to its knees.

The language of Funeral, by Richard Matheson, is gorgeous, and it has a witty prose style. Its overwrought quality seems almost perfumed by the scent of air freshener that one would expect to smell in a funeral parlor.

I Am Legend is a beautifully written short novel that could have been longer. As writers in the Seton Hill WPF program, we are cautioned to “show, not tell” and critiqued for information dumping—providing critical information as a narrative “dump” rather than showing it through action.

I watched the Ghostbusters reboot a few years ago. It had been maybe fifteen years since I watched the original. My impression was that the new film was not as funny. After watching both movies again, my opinion has changed…

The Exorcist is a case study in the successful weaving-together of narratives into a whole. Blatty presents his character's objectives and weaknesses to the reader, and then he sets each one in motion to find their way into battle against the demon Pazuzu.

The film opens with a shot of an old farmhouse that looks exactly like the house from M. Night Shyamalan's Signs.