A friend of mine swears she has the same unwanted gift as Cole Sear, and that it's been everpresent since she was little. She also suffers from severe anxiety. I suspect the two might be related.

I'm convinced that the only reason that movie attained the status that it did was that people honestly thought it was real. It exploited our cultural blind spot at the very dawn of the Internet, when people still believed things they saw online, before social media and Snopes ruined it for everyone. I was knocked out…

Read Gunnar Hansen's book Chain Saw Confidential. The experience of shooting that film was fucking brutal; Edwin Neal said that the dinner scene alone was worse than his entire stint in Vietnam.

Unlike The Conjuring 2, which is apparently the scariest movie of the year.

They're two completely different movies aiming for different ends. Alien is a languorous haunted house film that relies on atmosphere and mood to achieve its effects, whereas Aliens is a hyperkinetic action thriller that sort of browbeats you into submission. Both great movies, but not really comparable beyond that.

I fucking wish.

If you really wanna split hairs, the film that really knocked horror effects into the stratosphere was Alien, which came out the year before. There were hardly any effects in The Shining, save for a little foam latex and blood; it was just immaculately shot, which set it apart from most of its peers. There's no…

I do not understand the cult of The Shining. It's a fine enough film, an elegant misfire (Jack and Shelley are both painfully miscast and you know it), but to reflexively herald it as the greatest horror movie ever made is just baffling to me. Is it the centerpieces? The scope? The score? Yes, it's lovely to look at,…

Tell that to YouTube.

Everyone saying they can't bear to read it: read it. It's wonderful. Yes, it's heartbreaking, but it's also lightened by Patton's trademark tendency to filter everything through the lens of pop culture. Absolutely brilliant piece. Bravo, NYT.

Many of the most legendary comics have been able to spin tragedy into comedic gold as a survival technique: Pryor, Notaro, etc. This is shaping up to be a classic example.

The first one wouldn't have been as insufferably, excruciatingly boring if they'd just trimmed it down to nothing but the night vision footage. Cut out all the bullshit and keep only the scares, and you've got a great twenty-minute short that you can watch one night to distract you from finals and then never think of…

Hate to break it to ya.

Yeah, Miller's best work, still. It's also my favorite segment ever associated with the series.

Nothing tops When a Stranger Calls. Perfect utilization of screen space and suggestion, delivering everything while showing nothing, it plays up one's fears of the dark and of being alone better than almost any other film, and remains absolutely gut-wrenchingly terrifying.

I'm glad I grew up loving monsters the way I did, and equally glad that we live in the age of eBay, in which I can find every lost piece of my childhood at a relatively affordable price. My latest cherished acquisition is a first edition of Terry Oakes's Classic Tales of Horror pop-up book, which is a goddamn work of…

Maybe it's just the Midwest (well, St. Louis), but Queen is universally recognized as one of the absolute pinnacle bands around here. No one questions their brilliance or relevance.

Let's not go to that Poop Café; let's go to the good one.

That's the Edge's favorite part, too.

"Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" is at once the emotional apex of The Soft Bulletin and my contender for the most gorgeous song ever written. The moment that kills me to this day is the drum break that signals the switch from the wistful longing of the verses to the lilting drift of the coda, in which Wayne repeats the…