My Bloody Love Letter

We're at the halfway point, and Dario Argento just walked through the door. Tenebrae is the film that made me realize horror could be angry — not at you, but at itself, at the people who consume it, at the whole beautiful, ugly machine. It's a giallo that dissects giallo. A murder mystery that turns the camera around. This episode, I'm getting into why Argento made this one after a decade of being...

Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 solo feature debut is a vampire-Western-noir hybrid that deliberately strips the glamour from the vampire mythos. This episode breaks down why Near Dark treats immortality as a form of addiction, the undead clan as a "using circle," and the climactic blood transfusion as a detox and recovery narrative. The discussion examines the film's cast, its American outlaw mythology, a...

This week, I revisit one of the most important films on my list — An American Werewolf in London (1981). We talk transformation horror, doomed heroes, Rick Baker’s groundbreaking effects, and why this film changed werewolf cinema forever.

In 1985, at the height of the Satanic Panic and PMRC hearings, Italian horror masters Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento delivered the ultimate middle finger to media censorship: a film where watching a horror movie literally transforms you into a demon. Shot in nine weeks in Cold War-era West Berlin, "Demons" is part meta-cinema commentary, part gore-soaked thrill ride, and entirely unapologetic. Wi...

Dave explores Ken Russell's Altered States (1980) as #14 on his top-20 1980s horror countdown, summarizing the plot, key performances, and the tumultuous creative team behind the film. He examines the movie's central themes — sensory deprivation, psychedelic experiments, evolutionary regression, and the inward search for meaning — ties them to real-world science and personal experience, and closes...

The 1982 horror blockbuster that made America afraid of its own homes. We explore Spielberg's (or was it Hooper's?) masterpiece of suburban terror, the tragic deaths that haunted the production, and why the ghost story moved from Gothic castles to tract housing. From white flight to TV static, from swimming pool graves to the bodies buried under the American Dream—this is Poltergeist, the film tha...

In this episode Dave explores Halloween III: Season of the Witch — John Carpenter and Deborah Hill’s controversial attempt to turn the franchise into an anthology and the film’s dark fusion of Celtic myth and corporate control. He summarizes the plot (Dr. Dan Chalice and Ellie Grimbridge uncover Silver Shamrock’s plan to use Stonehenge-embedded chips in Halloween masks), explains why audiences rej...

Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of graphic body horror, sexual violence, and disturbing imagery. In 1983, David Cronenberg released a film that seemed like pure science fiction. Today, we're living in it. When sleazy cable TV programmer Max Renn discovers a pirate broadcast featuring real torture and murder, his investigation leads him into a world of corporate conspiracy, body h...

A deeply personal dive into "Trick or Treat" (1986) and my teenage metalhead years during the Satanic Panic. From Marc Price's heartfelt performance to Tony Fields' mesmerizing Sammi Curr, this film understood what it meant to be an outsider finding identity through heavy metal.

Dave continues the countdown with Dead and Buried — a chilling small-town nightmare at #19 on his Top 20 Horror Movies of the 1980s.

Dave kicks off My Bloody Love Letter with Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond — the first step into his Top 20 Horror Movies of the 1980s.