GAMMA from Factory Fifteen on Vimeo. (Be sure to expand the frame and watch this film in full-screen mode. It looks simply amazing. Many thanks to JesĂșs Olmo for bringing it to my attention. -Matt) SYNOPSIS: In a post-nuclear future, when the earth is riddled with radiation, a new urban developer proposes to regenerate the…
Category: Arts & Entertainment
Published: Ebook edition of ‘Divinations of the Deep’
During the past couple of years, I’ve been receiving requests for an ebook edition of Divinations of the Deep with increasing frequency, and today I’m pleased to announce that the wait is over. Divinations, the ebook, is now available in both Kindle and ePub formats (the latter for Nook, Kobo, and other ereaders). You can…
“The Vampire Is Always within Us”: My SF Signal interview with Ian Holt
My interview with Dracula-and-vampire expert Ian Holt is now available at SF Signal: “The Vampire Is Always within Us: A Conversation with Ian Holt.” Ian is the man who co-wrote Dracula: The-Undead with Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew. As you probably already know, the book is the official, Stoker-family-sanctioned sequel to Bram’s classic novel. Ian’s…
“Accepting the Monster into Your Heart”: Horror as a spiritual path
Recently, I was telling some of my college students about a shift in mass entertainment culture. A few years ago, I told them, I began to feel as if “my time,” and also that of my generation — namely, Generation X — had finally arrived. Somewhere around the turn of millennium, the appearance of things…
William Peter Blatty on rewriting ‘The Exorcist’ for its 40th anniversary
This month, the second annual installment of The Dark Mirror, the horror film festival that I created in Waco, Texas, will culminate with a screening of The Exorcist. (See the article I published about it just two days ago at the festival’s blog: “‘The Exorcist’ and the modern Western zeitgeist.”) So it’s entirely appropriate that…
My interview in WACO TODAY magazine: “Tapping into darkness”
The just-released October 2011 issue of Waco Today magazine features an interview with me titled “Tapping into darkness: MCC instructor finds niche in horror fiction.”
Heaven of the Mind
Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship. Each star passes but once in the night through the meridian over our…
The new gothic horror: Madness and mystery in celebrity tabloid culture
It wasn’t one of my subscribed RSS feeds, Google alerts, or Twitter streams that alerted me to a recent and really interesting essay at The New York Times about the uncanny parallels between classic gothic literature and modern tabloid culture. Rather, it was my sister, who, appropriately enough, is a journalist based out of witch-haunted…
My interview for the Genre Traveler podcast
A few weeks ago I was interviewed for the Genre Traveler podcast, created and hosted by Carma Spence. It’s now live and available, and Carma has created a cool page full of notes to go with the audio. Here’s the episode description: This week I chat with Matt Cardin about religion and horror. Along the…
Guillermo del Toro on art, religion, and the primal power of darkness
With the recent round of interviews he’s given in support of the newly released horror film (August 26) Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, which he co-wrote and produced, Guillermo del Toro has reinforced my already-established impression that of all the “major” horror and fantasy filmmakers working today, he’s easily the most reflective and vocally…