My real nose is not that big.

I’m James Melville, owner and creator of the site. Greetings, to our twelve dedicated readers! For those of you who don’t have the history of this blog memorized, a quick recap:

Once upon a time, Rooster Illusion was a weekly review column in the Hill News, St. Lawrence University’s student newspaper. The title is a reference to the film Tropic Thunder, which freshman me had just seen when he was trying to think of a column title back in 2008. I didn’t know what I was doing when I started, but if you write something once a week for four years, you either get a lot better or learn to live with the disappointment of your friends and peers.

Shortly after I graduated, Rooster Illusion was reborn as a blog. I added a roster of talented writers. You can find their work under the “Columns” tab on the navigation bar. We had a good run, but over time, people moved on. I’m not saying that Rooster Illusion deserves credit for any of the ensuing PhDs, marriages, or babies, but “Film Blog” does work for a boy or a girl…

Nowadays, I mostly just dust off the ol’ blog for the annual Octoberween, a month of horror (and horror-adjacent) film criticism.

All of the site art was created by Sarah Lawrence, who also wrote the columns SciFridays and /horror.