Words Seem Out Of Place

It's that time of year again, my little ghouls and goblins. The time when I feel most alive, when the leaves start to change colors, the air turns crisp and comfortably cool, and my free time is consumed with thoughts of deliciously horrific imagery. My desire to start celebrating the Halloween season begins in earnest early in August. I don't care about the summer fanatics who complain that it's "too early" to talk about Halloween. Bite your tongue, heathen! It's never too early to begin celebrating the most wonderful time of year (sorry, Christmas). Now's the time of year when my already powerful obsession with horror kicks into even higher gear. I'm reading Carrie at the moment—one of the Stephen King blind spots in my reading through his ouevre over the years—after having just finished Grady Hendrix's wonderful new book of heavy metal horror, We Sold Our Souls . I'm trying to schedule as many horror films as possible into my fr...

I always understand and try not to judge people who don't do horror. Usually they avoid the genre because it just doesn't appeal to them, or it does but they're so deeply affected by it that they can barely function after. What I have no tolerance for is people who simply refuse, out of stubborn snobbery, to grasp the importance of horror and how it can help us process trauma and grief. Those people usually turn their noses up at Stephen King's work, often after reading only a book or two of his, or in certain cases, none at all. I immediately distrust those people. Like many kids, King was my gateway into reading—and also writing—horror, just like Elvira turned me on to horror movies (and turned me on to her, but that's a whole other story). Then, like a lot of adults, I stopped reading King for one reason or another, mostly just because I drifted towards other influences and various genres, but also because I believed I'd outgrown him. About ten year...

Ranking my top five Catwoman performances in film and television. Click here  for the previous entry in the Catwomen rankings. 1. Michelle Pfeiffer,  Batman Returns  (1992) As a young girl, I was completely obsessed with Catwoman. When I heard that Tim was making the film and Catwoman had already been cast, I was devastated," says Pfeiffer. “At the time, it was Annette Bening. Then she became pregnant. The rest is history. I remember telling Tim halfway through the script that I'd do the film, that's how excited I was. That's Michelle Pfeiffer, discussing her momentous turn as Catwoman in Tim Burton's Batman Returns (1992), from a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. It's important to remember, we were this close to never having Michelle’s transcendent performance .  Annette Benning was cast and about to begin filming when she found out she was pregnant. After she dropped out, Pfeiffer squeezed into the black latex  and the ...