Ed Grabianowski is an author and freelance writer. He’s worked as a contributing writer for io9, HowStuffWorks, and Sweethome. His fiction has appeared in Black Static, David Wellington’s Fear Project, and other publications and anthologies, including Fear After Fear, a…
Guillermo del Toro co-wrote and directed this 90s monster movie starring Mira Sorvino. Of course, del Toro has gone on to become a modern monster master, so it’s interesting to go back and see some of his earlier work. Mimic…
Nothing like a pair of excellent monster movies to keep the Halloween feeling flowing. One is from the director of Spiderman: Homecoming, the other from the great Guillermo del Toro (see next post). Clown [source: Netflix], directed by Jon Watts,…
Wait, am I reviewing the same movie twice? Well, yeah. The last two nights I watched Shutter, a 2004 Thai movie, and Shutter, the 2008 American remake. The original is a solid if unexceptional horror movie. It fits right in…
It’s a (nearly) yearly tradition, in which I watch a horror movie every night in October and review all of them. Most years things are pretty busy in October and I don’t get to all 31, but this year…well, this…
I was talking to a writer friend a little while ago, and said writer friend mentioned not having an organized way to track short stories and what publications they’d been submitted to. I was aghast. Here’s the solution I use,…
Hi SYSK fans! Just a few quick notes on Josh and Chuck’s podcast about Camp X, the top secret World War 2 secret agent training camp in Ontario, Canada. I just wanted to mention the discrepancy the guys found between…
It can be useful to analyze a movie that wasn’t so great not simply from the “worth watching/not worth watching” reviewer’s standpoint, but as a storyteller and film fan who wants to figure out what worked in a movie and…
Why are horror and fantasy themes so influential and powerful in rock and metal music? Why do fans love performers who act like zombies, vampires and witches? In 2013, I went to the traveling metal roadshow known the as the Mayhem Festival to find out.
In Dusk City Outlaws, players form a team of smooth criminals or outlaw vigilantes and pull off impossible capers in a complex fantasy city known as New Dunhaven. That sounds cool, but the real reason I’m so excited? Creator Rodney…
The second and final part of my exploration of The Silmarillion and the ways reading it will make The Lord of the Rings more interesting. Before we dive back into the list, two brief notes. First, some of the things…
I am a huge Tolkien fan. I read The Lord of the Rings every other year or so. I love the books and enjoy the movies. But in all these years I’d never read The Silmarillion. I was about to…
Listening to Josh and Chuck discuss astrology on a recent episode of Stuff You Should Know called up some memories of when I wrote that particular article, so I thought I’d write up a few notes about it for SYSK…
All of the major American sports leagues have had instances of teams “tanking” to reach last place and get a strong draft pick to rebuild the team in the last ten years. There’s an easy way to fix it. If…
I could not miss the limited American showing of Shin Godzilla. I realized this is the first time I’ve seen a proper Toho Godzilla movie in a theater since Godzilla 1985! It was an excellent, albeit very strange kaiju movie….
