No, It’s NOT Cool...
“No, it’s NOT cool that the scene in your new movie is exactly like that one scene from your favorite film when you were a kid... “
school of fear
100 Pounds of Horror in a 3 Pound Bag
I get asked all the time how I’ve managed to put more horror in 2-4 minutes than many features manage in 90 minutes or more. I think, because I started out in long form (features and TV) and then created horror shorts, I felt the need to concentrate more storytelling into less time. It’s like a distillation process. I hook up a feature to a few tubes, put it over a Bunsen burner, and distill the bare essence of the thing into a tiny little decanter. That’s the short film. That’s how I think about it.
You Can’t Go Home Again
Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can’t go home again.
Dear Indie Filmmakers
As a writer and director, the single best reason to work in the horror genre is because it’s the only genre that can draw an audience without a star attached. That is, to say, you can put asses in seats based solely on the story or the concept alone.
L.A. Horror Finds a Home at the Jumpcut Cafe
Writers are like everyone else. Doesn’t matter what genre they write in. And when it comes to working styles, even within the same genre (Horror, in my case), we’ve all got our habits and our mannerisms and our quirks. And those things change over time. For instance, I used to love to write in total solitude with just the right music going.
The New Fear Paradigm
The fear paradigm. That’s what I call it.
Catharsis
With all the shooting tragedies that have occurred this past year, there’s been a lot of finger pointing going on in our culture. To a degree, that’s healthy. When something that horrible happens we should reflect on what the fuck is wrong with us. But we have to decide on a plan of action based on reason, not fear. Think equally with our hearts and minds, not just our lizard brain in a state of terrified survival mode.
What Happened To all the T&A?
An interesting thing happened to horror films over the past 10 years when no one was looking. They became more horrific.
Horror in Real Life
Time to talk about real life fear this week. I talk about fear all the time, but it’s almost always been in the context of entertainment and pop culture.
Grown-Ass Adults as Horror Movie Protagonists
The concept of the horror film is to convey as much terror in 90 minutes or so as humanly possible. And seeing as 90 minutes really isn’t a lot of time in the grand scheme of things.
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