My love of Atom Age sci-fi horror — specifically, flicks where radiation makes shit turn BIG — comes from my late mother, who adored the stuff and would tune into Channel 56’s Creature Double Feature whenever those movies were aired. The Deadly Mantis was her favorite, though she also gave high marks to The Amazing […]

From the letters page of The Witching Hour #53 (April 1975) comes a fascinating glimpse into the cinematic fantastic during the Gerald Ford era. “You don’t understand what things were like before Star Wars” has become the stuff of cliche when oldsters (such as myself) deploy it in discussions about how utterly that film changed […]

If you’ve wondered what I’ve been up to during my long hiatus from this site, the answer is “trying to enjoy and reconnect with things without feeling like I have to mine them for content.” What kinds of things? A lot of shit from first three decades on earth, where imperfect memories and rosy nostalgia […]

During the pandemic years, I took a very holistic and intensive approach to Spooky Month. Having a surfeit of time to kill, I filled with with a robust roster of appropriately themed movies, TV shows, videogames, comics, prose, and old time radio shows. It was a glorious time to discover, re-discover, revisit, and generally wallow […]

I didn’t set foot into a proper movie theater until I was eight years old, when my aunt took my brother and I to see The Black Stallion at the multiplex across the highway from the North Woburn shopping plaza. Up until (and even for a few years after) then, the entirety of my big […]