protean depravity

In line with my previous statement that it is inherent to Stephen King's short work that the endings be utterly unhappy, with lingering pessimism, dreadful twists and erasure of all hope for better days, I've assembled his stories from Night Shift that end on a particularly negatively striking, evil, or pessimist note, giving you the chills even long after you close the book. Everything will not be OK in the end, and the worst is yet to come. And film adaptations should stop changing that to make King's horror more palatable for the mainstream audience.   It would be generally good if you read along the stories I'm discussing in this column, even more so for this particular blog post since I'm talking about some of the best endings in all of King's work and spoilers are inevitable.

The first batch of 2025 movies behind us, now comes the fun part of raising hopes for upcoming horror movies that are in line for this year. There's even a concrete reason I'm posting this right now, because this Saturday is Sneak Preview time at the Creepy Crypt and since I have to stick around in Kreuzberg for hours after work until the Creepy Crypt showings begin, I choose my movies carefully. Well, Sneak Preview means that I have no idea what will be shown, only that it's an upcoming movie, so I took a look at movies that I think might be on this Saturday and I'm going to pitch their trailers here (the titles are linked to the teasers or trailers). So this post will be something like an exciting guesswork for the next Sneak Preview. Edit throughout time: They ended up showing the horror comedy Y2K , which really wasn't mine, so I left after the first 15 minutes. But it wasn't all lost, in order to pass the time between Hammett and Creepy Crypt I watched an...

Ugh, I really didn't read a lot this past month, too often was I at the cinema watching movies, so unfortunately the short reviews are a little meager. In fact, I hope that will change since I received a TON of new reads which look amazing, so much that it will need some organizing and planing, but I'll get through, I guess. There are quite some amazing events coming up too, like the upcoming Thomas Olde Heuvelt reading at the Otherland on March 31st, and there's rumors (it's a little more than rumors, but there's no date yet) that Brian Evenson is here in Berlin and might join some discussions, and Caro wants to revive the Otherland Horror Book Club, and I have an interview in progress... Lots of things to anticipate there. Before, though, enjoy the short reviews, I did not love every book I've read recently, but they were mostly okay.

With February gone, a wonderful film time lies behind me and I'm glad I was able to achieve most of my film goals, but also thrilled to be able to do so in smashingly crunchy, sunny weather and I can't imagine closing the winter time in a better way. The last station of Film February 2025 was The Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, which took place quite late this year, in March, but considering the Fantasy Filmfest White Nights and Berlinale both took place in succession in February, this was a good choice. I missed/passed all feature film screenings due to a combination of lack of time and lack of interest/already having seen most, but apart from the last two showings on Sunday, I watched all short films, which were divided into following blocks; Hostile Environments, Capitalist Horror, Het Horror, Cults, Midnight, Life Cycles, Pop Horror/Carnevalesque, Sensory Overload, Queer Horror, Revenge, Grief and Nightmares. As each year, I'm super happy with the Final Girls' sel...

First off: I was initially going to follow the order of short stories in Night Shift for this my column "The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King" : with The Mangler , The Boogeyman and Gray Matter  up next. But considering that the latter two are both in an island position between many stories which deal with the horror of inanimate objects coming to life, I decided to go rather thematically just for this once. So, in this post we'll take a look at The Mangler , Battleground , Trucks and Sometimes They Come Back which all deal with lifeless things who have no business being alive and moving around. The fear of the inanimate animate, moving objects, the unexplainable, the unscientific is, as is well-known, a big fear of mine. Taking this fear beyond the initial "boo!" moment, King shows how to turn that shock into dread and terror, or even dystopia, and there's arguably no other book of his with a wider range of short stories about objects comi...

Enjoy thriller time!

These past two weeks Berlin wasn't only blessed with icy cold and incredibly sunny weather, there were also film lovers running all around the city because it was Berlinale time again! For the 75th time this year! Although the film selection wasn't necessarily the best of all time, it was decent enough and I had the chance to finally satisfy my hunger for lots of movies from around the world despite financial concerns (the tickets get more expensive by the year and it's going off my vacation budget), frustration over sold out showings, and lots of other personal stuff I had to take care of. I'm happy that I was able to join three screenings followed by director interviews, I think two of them were even premieres, and that despite the unsettling collective cacophony of coughing and sneezing and sniffling I made it out halfway healthy. Let's take a look at the films now, here's my festival in a nut shell!

Enjoy the new short reviews!