I've got to admit - after "The Day the World Went Away" I spent over two hours looking at Root/Shaw fanart, and getting emotional - and I never, ever do stuff like that. Despite what one might assume, the vast, vast majority of it is centered around love and happiness. Those two together really meant something to…

Bless this episode if only for the two long shots - you might call them "no reaction shots" - where the camera just sits still on her face, trying to read the unreadable.

And who can challenge - certainly no hacker - a perfect, immortal Machine?

And now, I think for lunch I'll have a pastrami sandwich with spicy yellow mustard, a shitton of pepperoncinis, and absolutely NO MAYO.

Nope - "Alethia" is definitely one of my very favorite episodes of the whole show, and it features some of the best writing in any of them.

In the end, it is The Machine that really stuck inside me, echoed with me, and brought up things that I'll think about even years from now. And that TFS still managed to surprise me with Her, one last time - I can feel it working inside me still.
I've had problems with some of the choices regarding The Machine over…

Yeah, I always really liked the way they interacted - their respective energies were so different, yet somehow they teased out an odd chemistry that Iris was able to use to finally penetrate the armor and dig into Reese a bit. I do feel like they were rushed into a romantic relationship, though - I would have vastly…

It's a beautifully recursive end for The Machine that perfectly mirrors Her birth.

Me, I'd like to know what happened to Stacy512.

What both Cabin and Behind the Mask do is take the "rules" and recontextualize them within an outside schema for there being rules at all. Cabin does it by making audiences' very need for the thrill and catharsis of not just slashers, but all scary movies, amd the ritualised nature of the rules, into something…

Oooh, that wasn't on the list I looked at. That's as deserving of inclusion as several of the above.

Totally. It's an extremely satisfying inversion of the Final Girl - "what if she was the most dangerous person in the movie?" - to the point where one could argue that she's not a FG at all, as while frightened and desperate, never experiences the abject terror that transforms a Final Girl into someone with the…

Yeah, there's no way they don't include one of the best films of the entire genre.

Best of 1988:
Lair of the White Worm
Pumpkinhead
The Serpent and the Rainbow
Brain Damage

The image of a skinless woman looking around in serene wonder at the material world alone would justify its inclusion, in my opinion - but I did note that this list stayed away from sequels (other than Bride).

That was goddamn magnificent. I actually kinda teared up a few times.

Let's put Return of the Living Dead in there too - still one of the best at skating on the thin line between laughs and chills. And of course we had Troma, who I still consider as much a comedy studio as anything else.

Unfriended is a good flick, but it's no slasher. It's a ghost story, told with a novel technique with its closest parallels in found footage. For good slashers over the past decade or so, You're Next stands out for me as being genre-savvy without sacrificing an iota of impact. There's lots of good stuff lately that…

Knife to my throat, I'd say the real successor to what Scream was trying to do is Behind The Mask. It's a metacommentary surveying the entire history of the slasher genre while recontextualizing its tropes for dramatic purposes, and just like Scream it tries to have its cake and eat it too. (And, in my opinion, more…

I'm always stunned by how rarely Night of the Creeps comes up when discussing the influences in Slither. The whole fifties BEM vibe mashed with Romero and all played as much for laughs as for creepiness - even beyond the fact that both films have virtually the exact same monster, there's so much linking the two.