The Cherry Hill Chainsaw Massacre

Did you hear about Mike Flanagan? He's taking Carrie White to the prom... for her fourth time! In general, I'm not particularly fond of horror TV. Film is the name of my game. It's what I grew up on, and there's something about a self-contained story conveyed in a single sitting that simply can't be replicated when it's stretched out across multiple episodes or seasons. Nonetheless, there are two upcoming horror series that I'm salivating for. Both will serve as contributions to an iconic long-lasting horror franchise, and take place over the course of eight episodes. For horror fans who have been living under a rock for the past several months, these series are Brad Caleb Kane's  Crystal Lake , which will function as a prequel to Sean Cunningham and Victor Miller's prototypical 1980 slasher, Friday the 13th , and premiere on Peacock sometime in 2025/26, and Mike Flanagan's adaptation of Stephen King's classic coming-of-age supernatural drama...

If only Jim had listened to his mother! By 1986, the slasher subgenre was in full swing. Michael Myers had already infiltrated the deceptively safe space of American suburbia. Jason Voorhees had emerged from his watery grave to wreak havoc on the naughty, unsuspecting teenagers of Camp Crystal Lake. Freddy Krueger had gained entrance into the subconscious of the offspring of his vigilante murderers to attack them at their most helpless and vulnerable. And the Sawyer family, the ones who kicked off the subgenre craze in artfully macabre fashion, was still busy picking off random travelers to fill their starving stomachs. Scattered among this crop of horror classics, however, existed a horde of cheaply produced, B-grade (as in bottom of the barrel) schlock fests and knockoffs that emphasized excessive bloodshed and gratuitous nudity (of the female variety, of course) at the expense of the creative plot and character development that elevated the best entries. Thanks to the staff at Rotte...

Before I begin this review, allow me to address the gargantuan, corpulent elephant in the room: despite ironically materializing from the mind of Stephen King, quite inarguably the most renowned horror author in the universe, Stand by Me , a cinematic adaptation of a 1982 coming-of-age novella ominously titled The Body , is for all intents and purposes not a horror movie. Rather, it's one of the horror legend's relatively few horror-free excursions into the darker dimensions of the human mind and experience. Make no mistake, however, there are elements in Stand by Me that expose the DNA of King's affection for the genre that has defined him since he first composed the tragic story of a teenaged girl who used her telekinetic ability to exact vengeance on the town that belittled her her entire life: wandering out alone into the wilderness and coming face to face with an oncoming train, facing the wrath of bullies seemingly too large and in control to stand up to, coming to te...