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Author / Johnny Compton
April 2, 2020
by Johnny Compton

Donate to Art House America

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO ART HOUSE AMERICA

I love movies. Convenient though it may be to have movies come to me, I still and forever will love going to the movies. When we finally, finally climb out of this mire I might go to the movies everyday for a month, provided they (and I) still exist.

In the meantime, I’ve donated to Art House America to try to help keep smaller cinemas alive. I generally don’t share anything about my donation proclivities because everybody has their own thing(s) that they support, if they can, and I hate to intrude on theirs with mine. But on my site where I write about the forms of entertainment I love, I figured it would fit here. If you can, and are so inclined, consider a donation. READ MORE

Category: Uncategorized
March 27, 2020
by Johnny Compton

Today’s Short Story: Michael Montoure’s “Counting From Ten”

Pseudopod has been good to me over the years. But before I was ever one of their authors, I was one of their listeners, and one of their earlier stories is still one of my favorites. Michael Montoure’s “Counting From Ten” is a pretty direct tale centered around a gruesomely, cruelly injurious series of “accidents” that are, of course, not actually accidents at all.

To an extent, it has a bit of the old EC horror or Golden Age of Radio “supernatural poetic vengeance” vibe going for it, except it has a lot more heart–and therefore heartbreak–than the similarly styled Vault of Horror or The Witch’s Tale stories had. Its secondary protagonist and primary victim, Tommy, isn’t the total bastard that so many Tales From the Crypt villainous agonists were. Yes, he’s brought the misfortune that maims him onto himself, but he’s more of a hapless shlub, albeit a criminal. READ MORE

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Category: Stories
March 22, 2020
by Johnny Compton

Movie Review: DON’T KNOCK TWICE

When you get right down to it, Don’t Knock Twice is a “Stuff Just Happens” type of horror movie.

Why does the Baba Yaga move so efficiently to snatch up one kid on the night that he knocked twice, but takes its time to toy with the other kid for days, even though she knocked on the same night? Well, because in this movie, stuff just happens.

Why does the girl jump to the conclusion that she’s being pursued specifically by the Baba Yaga (complete with bastardized mythology), of all the many malevolent entities that could be coming after her? Well, because stuff just happens. READ MORE

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Category: Movies
March 6, 2020
by Johnny Compton

Movie Review: Robert Altman’s IMAGES

I wish every great director would have at least one go at horror, preferably before exiting their best years, but I’d settle for an early or late-stage effort. Robert Altman gained fame and acclaim for movies like M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player and Gosford Park. Ensemble satires that sometimes have a dramatic tinge. Not even a cousin to an intimate psychological horror film that dives early and deep into paranoia, simple hallucination and madness.

Altman tried his hand at various types of films, not just the one he won most of his plaudits for. He made a very good neo-noir film in The Long Goodbye, a very different but interesting take on a classic Chandler novel. He made the western McCabe & Mrs. Miller. He made Popeye presumably to get the worst movie and decision he could possibly make out of the way. In summary, he was not afraid to step outside his ostensible comfort zone, even though he brought his usual heavy interest in characters to the genres he ventured into. READ MORE

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Category: Movies
January 29, 2020
by Johnny Compton

Movie Review: SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL

There’s a brand of horror I’ve grown fond of lately; a throwback, smoldering gothic type of tale that feels like it’s about 90% build and 10% payoff. Sometimes that payoff makes a pretty big swing for the fences (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), but more often it just reveals some simple, fundamental horror (The Innkeepers, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House). If reading any one of those titles made you roll your eyes it might be likely that reading all three made you groan. If you found any or all of them boring, I can’t blame you, though I don’t share that opinion of those movies. Still, I get it. These movies might not be your speed; paced as they are to (deliberately?) test one’s patience. If they manage to draw you in, however, they can reward your patience pretty well. READ MORE

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Category: Movies
January 11, 2020
by Johnny Compton

My Most Anticipated Horror Books of 2020

Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

World War Z inspired multiple, similar efforts through the years, trading zombies for some other brand of monster or threat. Robopocalypse and its sequel took the “oral history of humanity’s brush with genre-inspired Armageddon” approach into the realm of science-fiction horror. 2018’s A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising is essentially World War V. At least the pretty cleverly named Sleep Over (I’m a sucker for a quality pun) did something different with the format and made the immediate threat something passive that can’t be shot, hacked up, bombed out or set aflame: mass insomnia. READ MORE

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Category: Books
January 2, 2020
by Johnny Compton

A QUIET PLACE II Impressed and Underwhelmed Me in One Trailer

Beginning with the positive, that opening scene from inside the car is very good, maybe even terrific. Cutting the moment just after the shot of the alien’s long arm clawing through the bus’s front windshield is such a great touch. In less than a minute, I was ready to amend my Most Anticipated Horror Movies of 2020 list to include this sequel, which I had previously felt somewhat apathetic towards. I though the first film was good, but didn’t see how the second film could do anything all that interesting with it. Somehow, the prospect of it revisiting the initial chaos brought about by the arrival of the alien attackers never occurred to me. Even if confined to occasional flashbacks, this idea intrigued me. Unfortunately, 90 seconds later, the trailer had once again rendered me less enthused about A Quiet Place II than I could be. READ MORE

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Category: Movies
December 29, 2019
by Johnny Compton

My Most Anticipated Horror Movies of 2020

Antlers

The Wendigo myth has long intrigued me, and the lack of a really great Wendigo horror movie has long pained me. The closest we have to one is Ravenous, which is a good movie, but I’d say it’s more “Wendigo-inspired.” It does not embrace the mythology, while Antlers at least alludes to it in its unbelievably good, almost wordless first trailer.

Peninsula (Train to Busan 2)

The premiere date for Peninsula, the sequel to Train to Busan, is apparently set for August 12th of 2020. Whether that means it will reach a worldwide audience in 2020 isn’t yet known, but I presume we’ll all get our chance to see this movie sooner rather than later. Considering how little seems to be known about this sequel at present, that’s a fairly significant presumption on my part, but chalk that up to how excited I am to see this one. I can’t really account for that excitement. The first film used a fairly unique conceit (zombies on a train) to breathe life into a sub-genre that I don’t particularly care for. Take away the train, actors Gong Doo and Ma Dong-seok, and any hint of measured expectations and what’s left is a product I should feel more skepticism about. Yet here I am, eager to see this one come my way before the year is through, preferably on the big screen. READ MORE

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Category: Movies
December 27, 2019
by Johnny Compton

Movie Review: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)

In many genre movies, there is a skeptical character who is made out to be foolish, callous or even antagonistic simply because they don’t believe in something commonly held not to exist. They don’t believe in whatever otherworldly thing plagues the protagonist, be it vampire, zombie, ghost, alien or something else. Often times their disbelief descends into denial when directly confronted by incontrovertible evidence of the preternatural, at which point it’s understandable for that character to be portrayed as an idiot at best, and a hindrance our hero’s survival at worst. But before that moment, when they simply don’t accept an unsubstantiated assertion that there is a Fortean foe about? Why are they often presented as such an obnoxious nuisance then? Isn’t it reasonable for them not to believe, particularly when they’re seeking other, more conventional solutions–giving some credence to notion of the threat, if failing to understand the specific nature of it? READ MORE

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Category: Movies
December 14, 2019
by Johnny Compton

Confessions of a Fearphile: Ringu / The Ring

I’d heard of Ringu shortly after it came out in Japan, well before it was made properly available in the United States, before the American remake had been publicly announced, and long before any kind of reliable internet film streaming option. I remember futilely hunting for it in stores ranging from Blockbuster to small indie video stores whose names I can no longer remember. For about a year or so I wasted time doing this before finally gathering the nerve to make an online purchase on this site I’d only used once before called ebay. This would be different from when I purchased a used copy of the novel Simon’s Soul through the site, however. I was going to be buying a bootleg copy of a film, presumably with unofficial English subtitling. Scandalous! READ MORE

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Category: Confessions of a Fearphile
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“People say things like, ‘The rule is that you never show the devil.’ But if you have a good-looking devil, and it looks convincing—well, yes, you show it! It’ll scare the shit out of the audience. If you have a stupid devil, then you don’t show it.”

– John Carpenter

 

“If fighting will clear us out of this trouble, I am willing to fight or do anything else… I will get all I can back alive, and the rest I will kill.”

– William Tillman