Stephen King exists in a world apart. His writings, numerous and infinite in their influence beg to be adapted to visual medium. Yet time and again they have been with varying degrees of success, more oft than not falling to the lesser end of the scale, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. Is it the amount of character work that King painstakingly layers into his stories, characters that require room and therefore time to breathe? Is it that so often the elements of terror lay more within than without, making them vaporous and difficult to convey?...

The Buried Alive Film Festival has announced their full lineup for next week, and if you're in the Atlanta area, you won't want to miss this one...

Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale, her sophomore feature following 2015’s The Babadook, is not a fun film. It is brutal, heavy, and uncomfortable; a long film steeped in relentless gloom. It’s designed to make the viewer angry, even rageful. This won’t sit well with everyone, and has been the source of much controversy since making the rounds on the festival circuit, not to mention stories of audiences walking out or people fainting at screenings...

Blood Myth is a UK mystery/horror film by writer/director team Sean Brown and Luke Gosling and is about a small town myth where every thirty years someone disappears. The circumstance is known by the locals as "30". While not clever in name, it aptly describes the situation…

"Back then, we were just kids, playing a kid’s game, and somehow... It all went wrong."...

I can be honest. When Shudder announced that they would be bringing Creepshow back as an anthology series, I may have squealed. Okay, I totally squealed. Loaded with talent like Joe Hill, Stephen King, Greg Nicotero, Tom Savini, Roxanne Benjamin and so many others contributing, I knew there was no way the show could fail, and Creepshow ​did not let me down...

Sometimes, a morbid and trashy but witty story can be a liberating experience, letting your political correct defenses down and reveling in well-written dark, offensive humor. There are plenty of writers and filmmakers who do it well, somehow able to balance bad taste with a beating heart at the center, even if that heart is a murmuring, stint occupied death forecast. Those are the most successful, because they teeter delicately on the edge of simple offensive nonsense, yet never fall off that edge, retaining a balance of some dignity...

Few things in this world spark more fear and anxiety in an audience than a woman’s body turned in some way beastly. It can be overt, like Trick ‘r Treat’s werewolf plot, or more subtle, like 2009’s Grace. Recently I’ve been thinking more on the idea that it isn’t the creatures we turn into that scare us, but the deception of something ordinary and beautiful turning out to be deadly...

When you pass by your neighbor, do you ever get a stinging urge to break their face in with a mallet? Do they have pretentious mannerisms, bad waste management, and constantly crowd up their lawn (or hallway, for us apartment dwelling folk) with boxes and bags that literally have another four feet to go before being in the proper disposal container? If you answered “yes” to most of these questions, you’d be correct and justified in thinking so, and you’d also probably be a big fan Red Letter Day...

An interesting concept can go a long way with just a little propulsion. I can think of several films with mediocre writing, acting and production but that also have an engaging or fun premise, that render the mediocre aspects forgivable. Take a film like Cube (1997,) for example. Does anyone remember the characters or specific lines? I sure as Hell don’t. Did Cube blow us away with a tight script, bulletproof to plot holes? No...