FEATURED ARTICLES
Aug. 10, 2024
Head Spinning - An Interview W/ C. Rommial Butler
MAD: Rommi, thanks for taking some time today to catch up! Please allow me to set the stage. We first met about 10 years ago, through a mutual friend, and aside from music I think we connected due to our love of horror. In particular, we are both in…
July 30, 2024
Shine On You Crazy Diamond
“In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.”
-Terry Pratchett
We’re going to diverge a bit on today’s essay, and explore some topics and ideas that are not horror related. This piece would probably be more…
July 27, 2024
Horror in the High Desert 3: Firewatch - Review
WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the newly released HORROR IN THE HIGH DESERT 3: FIREWATCH (2024 / Amazon Prime).
On November 10th, 2014, amateur hiker Kenny Lee Veach was on a mission to re-discover a cave he’d pr…
July 20, 2024
The Vampyre and the God
The Vampyre thinks herself a god in her own right, and she isn’t wrong. She stalks the earth from the shadows, determining the fates of mortals, virtually undetected, a presence nevertheless felt, as a monotheistic god is often purported to do…
July 20, 2024
Trust the Séance
“These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into con…
July 16, 2024
Which One Is It?
I was always naturally attracted to the macabre. The dark side of human nature fascinates me. However, as I have said elsewhere at Horror to Culture, I seek not to live in or promote darkness, but to bring to light that which lurks in the shadows.
…
July 7, 2024
A Quiet Kitty in New York City
A Review of A Quiet Place: Day One
I only recently watched the first two A Quiet Place films. The concept of alien predators that hunt solely by sound but somehow navigate the void of space (where, as we learned in Alien, no one can hear you scream…
July 5, 2024
Pursuing Art in the Age of Hawk Tuah
“I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation.”
-David Cronenberg
Like many people, I have dozes of different ideas at any given period, the bulk of which are never accomplished due to time and/or financial constra…
June 29, 2024
Curses, Foiled Again!
There’s a subgenre of horror that deals with cursed films. My favorite is John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns, one of his contributions to the Masters of Horror anthology. In Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made, I found something which did…
June 26, 2024
Inheritors of the Fire
“The danger in bringing the light to a dark place, is that you might find out what lives in the darkness”.
-OUT OF DARKNESS (2022)
The nature of horror is ancient. It resides in the flickering shadows of our earliest ancestral …
June 23, 2024
Apocalypse Cow
Kyle, a young man of little means with a serious addiction, walked up to the food truck hiding a gun in his jacket pocket. He knew this dude made a lot of money because people lined up around the block to get a burger around lunch and in the evening…
June 1, 2024
Barker's Brilliance and the Future of Literature
By C. Rommial Butler
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Stephen King helped catapult Clive Barker into worldwide fame with this line:
“I have seen the future of horror… and his name is Clive Barker.”
He was right.
Where King helped make …
May 11, 2024
Doctor Gramma
By C. Rommial Butler
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When mirror regards mirror which is the reflection?
This question popped into my mind when I stumbled onto the doctor’s experiment.
But I cannot go into that without some background.
I’ve …
April 24, 2024
Pulling at Threads...
“Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches, the other seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger.”
-Ca…
April 23, 2024
Ape-Mania: A Discussion W/ Hunter Goatley
“YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP. DAMN YOU. GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!”
-Captain George Taylor
*****
MAD: Hunter, it’s great to speak with you again today and thanks for agreeing to this short discussion! There’…
April 13, 2024
The Crow and the Winter Soldier
By C. Rommial Butler
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Here’s a tough thing for us to admit:
We are not responsible for every bad thing that happens to us.
Here’s another tough thing for us to admit:
We are responsible for the way we deal wit…
April 10, 2024
MAD GOD - A Review
If you’re a massive horror aficionado such as myself, you likely have a huge stockpile of films waiting in your watch list, across multiple streaming platforms. With so many movies to view, and so little time, it’s often difficult to gau…
April 5, 2024
FESTIVAL OF THE LIVING DEAD - A Review
When I first saw the news that a “spiritual sequel” to George A. Romero’s classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was about to be released, it immediately jumped to the front of my “to do list”. Romero’s original DEAD tr…
April 3, 2024
Magnetic Hypnosis and Ethereal Forms
It’s always a pleasant surprise when you stumble upon a hidden gem which manages to break through all the buzzing static of mainstream horror and presents an original story. Even better if that film delivers unique supernatural themes, merged …
March 28, 2024
Interview W/ Eskeletosart
MAD: Jaime, it’s good to talk to you again! We had some correspondence a couple of years ago in regards to a zine I was working on, and I’ve always dug your style and subject matter (primarily comic books and horror art). It has been ver…
March 27, 2024
Talking Schop with Slenderman
By C. Rommial Butler
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As I was picking my way slowly through Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, I happened upon a point of view relevant to horror fiction.
Discussing how dogma tends to fail to align wit…
March 14, 2024
Quoth The Raven: Don't Be A--
By C. Rommial Butler
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At a local bookstore, I nabbed a reprint of Cotton Mathers’ On Witchcraft. He was one of the judges who presided over the Salem Witch Trials, and the book is his justification for the proceedings. …
March 1, 2024
Be Careful What You Wish For...
By C. Rommial Butler
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First off, let me say that Talk to Me was an immensely enjoyable film. I urge you to watch this 2023 Australian affair if you haven’t already, and especially before you read the following essay, as…
Feb. 22, 2024
Secrets Best Kept
There’s a certain inevitability for any avid reader, of which we meet various books that simply don’t hold our interest for one reason or another, and we’ll regretfully put them down, perhaps never to pick up again. There’s n…