It’s Halloween month! A time to celebrate all things spooky, frightening, and ghastly. I thought a nice, fitting way to ease into the haunting mood this year would be with a healthy dose of America’s favorite talking dog and meddling kids. In Octoberweens past, I’ve delved deep into what I (perhaps overconfidently) called a “Comprehensive…
Webster’s Dictionary defines “sequel” as: We did this already, but now we’re doing it again. Like so many Draculas before us, Rooster Illusion has risen from the dead for a second time. Did you ask for this? We don’t know. Did we ask for this? Our number-crunchers are crunching numbers as we speak. What we…
Friends, we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of Rooster Illusion, which I am killing again. October 31st, 2019: “Friends, we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of Rooster Illusion, which I am killing again.” —Octoberween: Treehouse of Horror V: Time and Punishment, written by me, just now, announcing the re-deadening…
The formula for the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books was simple and effective: author and folklorist Alvin Schwartz collected ghost stories, urban myths, and legends from around the world and pared them down to language that would be easily understood by a readership of children. And if some of the stories were perhaps a…
When I was a wee sprog, more than any other kind of movie, I loved classic Universal Studios monster movies. Frankenstein, Bride Of, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Dracula, Phantom of the Opera, these guys were my buds. Despite the fact that they all enjoyed many sequels,…
Slasher movies have been around for a while, depending on how you want to define the term. From a certain point of view, they were making slashers in the ‘20s. Film scholars traditionally point to the simultaneous releases of Psycho and Peeping Tom as getting the ball rolling, and then in the following decade grungy blood-and-guts extravaganzas…
While my last review may have stretched the definition of a “Halloween movie” to its breaking point, this one will also do that. I aim only for consistency. But hey, maybe by the end of the month I’ll review something that meets the most basic definition of a horror film*. Shin Gojira (2016): When a…
Rooster Illusion 