The Washington Post should face legal consequences for sending this email the morning after axing one-third of their staff

Intrusive thought: Peter Jackson and the Olympians.

This is nothing. ICE and DHS need to be outright abolished. Call Schumer's offices and make it known.

After FilmQuest, I was interviewed on Horror Happens Radio about writing, filmmaking, and the genre in general! Listen to part 1 here: soundcloud.com/astrangemani...

Heard someone on a podcast describe the state of the internet by saying "the truth is paywalled by the lies are free" and I think that saying is living rent free in my head now

It’s an awards season sandwich, with a random documentary I watched for work in the middle!

Jack Lemmon photographed by Gjon Mili on the set of The Apartment

Celebrating the end of 2025 with a $6.95 royalty check from an indie film I helped cut almost 2 years ago

Every holiday season for the last half-decade, I’ve been on a quest to convince my friends who don’t regularly watch movies to watch TOKYO GODFATHERS They love PAPRIKA, so this should be a slam dunk And yet

Make a Bond Film Casual The Man with the Golden Gum

The #1 movie when you were 10 years old is how your 2026 is going to go

Rob Reiner is so much more than just a director, but I am struck at his ability to be so versatile during that great span of movies he made. Rather than dwell on the constant, horrible conversations, I want to celebrate someone who I hope will be remembered as an artist for real human emotions 🧵

Season's Greasons

While writing a list of Christmas specials, I wound up abbreviating "A Charlie Brown Christmas" as "Charlie B Christ" No I will not be changing it

Is A NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS a Halloween Movie or a Christmas Movie? As someone who didn’t grow up with the movie, I was familiar with this question from afar, but now having seen it, I’m a little surprised with my answer. … it’s a Christmas movie, y’all.

As an independent filmmaker, there’s no greater compliment than hearing via word of mouth that a queer punk venue is doing a screening of your short film from 5 years ago WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE

No Other Choice No Other Choice No Other Choice Avatar

It’s raining in LA and my author copies for DRACULA BEYOND STOKER #7 have arrived! Seeing your words in print is a wonderful feeling. 10/10 would recommend.

Go celebrate Zohran’s win by watching Mississippi Masala on @criterion.bsky.social

“The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood.” Happy Halloween, Bluesky folk.

In an attempt to sell tickets to gamers, the musical Hadestown will rebrand itself Hades2n

To celebrate this Halloween season, I wrote a piece for the Horror Writers Association about the one time I spent a fall working at Halloween Horror Nights! Read at the link below! horror.org/halloween-ha...

For work I'm reading about a New York Socialite who disappeared forever after two of her short stories were rejected for publication, and y'know what? Not to make light of an over 100 year old tragedy, but that's kind of a mood.

“May be”

Messing with the heads of my LA friends by calling it “blunch” instead of “brunch”

My (so far) yearly "did an immersive horror show + low key could've handled it being scarier" post, @timestar.bsky.social is a true pal for having the "oh shit I just remembered I'm SCARED" moment in perfect unison with me about 10 minutes before we went to hell or whatever

Whichever marketing person came up with the tagline “Only Monsters play God” for the GDT Frankenstein movie *really* isn’t getting paid enough, cuz godDAMN.

This fall, a short story I wrote will be appearing in DRACULA BEYOND STOKER, Issue 7: MINA HARKER! I’m honored to be included alongside 12 other authors in continuing the legacy of Bram Stoker. Pre-order below: www.dbspress.com/shop-1/p/iss...

The Truman Show

Attention LA! This weekend, we have a pair of encore screenings on Saturday for NO SLASHER HERE, a short film I wrote & directed. 10 AM -- Night Frights LA @ LA Convention Center 1:30 PM -- Hollywood Horrorfest @ Eastwood Performing Arts Center www.nightfrightsla.com hollywoodhorrorfest.com

Whoever came up with the DIES IRAE music gag in Silksong deserves a hearty pat on the back. Makes me smile every time.

This 8-episode TV miniseries could have been an email

Today in 'unexpectedly confusing scenarios': Being a film nerd and trying to schedule a flight to Wilmington, NC. "What do you mean I'm flying to ILM? I didn't know Industrial Light & Magic HAD an airport!"

I have no way of testing this, but I strongly suspect that if you gave a cursed Japanese videotape to the Beatles back in the day, you'd create Ringu Starr

*You open Disney Plus, put on the new season of The Mandalorian...* *Suddenly you notice that the main character is regularly questioning the existence of God* I call this scenario "Pedro Pascal's Wager"

Sometimes we’re unsatisfied with a thing we made because when it only existed in our head, we saw all the things it could have been and when it’s done we know all the things that it isn’t, but we can’t see the way it expands into a million new things when someone else unpacks it in their head. 🖊️🦑

At a queer wedding last weekend, I encountered a worrying number of transmasc folks who don’t know how to tie a bow tie or even a standard tie. AMAB folks clearly haven’t been doing a good enough job demonstrating that ties can be fun and expressive.

Apropos of nothing, a friend and I were talking about the film HUGO, and how under-appreciated it is in Scorsese’s body of work. I was in high school when it came out and even non-cinephile adults were talking about how it’s the best cinematography they’d ever seen, 3D *or* 2D. And they were RIGHT

Articles written about what tech bros say ai will do are not reporting, they are advertising.

All other issues aside, I wonder what kind of person looks at the painstakingly painted backdrops of the original Wizard of Oz and thinks “what if we made it look like unimpressive cloud photography you took on an iPhone?”

No real through line to this week’s viewing, besides it being a series of bangers! STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT - I may have liked this more than the first one, though for wildly different reasons. POISON - A Rosetta Stone for the entire Todd Haynes oeuvre. Not my favorite of his, but essential.

We need to start calling federal agents “spooks” again. If for no other reason than it’s more amusing to imagine a bedsheet ghost listening into your phone calls rather than some overworked NSA office schmuck

Rest in Peace, Tom Lehrer. A brilliant satirist whose music is still a delight to listen to even more than a half-century later. Also, he may or may not have invented the Jello shot. variety.com/2025/music/o...

My #LastFourWatched are rarely so contemporary — a dizzying run of 2025 films, interrupted by a true crime documentary I put on for work

It took me way too many NAKED GUN advertisements for me to realize that ‘Liam Neeson’ and ‘Leslie Nielsen’ have basically the same name.

I’m 6 short stories, 51 podcast scripts and 1 poem into 2025… … yet my best writing of the year so far is probably my Letterboxd review of eXistenZ, David Cronenberg’s VR gaming movie. Go figure. boxd.it/9eWtHH

The idea that Zohran Mamdani is unqualified because he lacks "experience" falls completely flat when you have a government full of people who's only prior experience was being on FOX news.

I spent way too much time this morning agonizing over my best films of the 21st-century ballot. Here it is! Lotta painful omissions but I’m happy with the group I landed on.

My dad read me The Hobbit and Edgar Allen Poe when we were kids, inadvertently forming the bedrock for my whole vibe as an adult.

Within the span of a couple of months, I scared Aaron Paul at Halloween Horror Nights and held the door open for Bob Odenkirk at Tender Greens. It was a Breaking Bad kinda year for me in LA…