Two years ago, but it seems closer to ten, a nice deputy editor for a new publication approached me to write a piece. He had been reading me forever and was working for this company with a bunch of money invested in it, could pay pretty well and expose me to some new readers not only on the web but a print magazine he compared to Rolling Stone. I said yes and we were going back and forth about what my first piece should be, and then my mom died.
Freelance gigs are usually a little stressful and all-consuming for me, but for some reason I still wanted to do it. Looking back at my emails, I was literally trying to schedule around the days off I had other than the one for the funeral. I agreed to write about the Halloween series, in conjunction with the upcoming David Gordon Green sequel. I watched all ten existing movies (including remakes) and came up with this piece that ties them all together thematically, in places addressing the grief and fears I was dealing with at the time. I took longer than I was supposed to and ended up with twice the agreed upon word count and I was so unsure anybody else would be interested that in my email I said, “If you don’t want it I understand, just let me know and I’ll use it on outlawvern.com and we’ll come up with something else for me to work on for you.”
Then the magazine (you will never see this coming) ran out of money, all the editors resigned, I don’t believe I ever got paid and the article could only be seen on the Wayback Machine. But I got no regrets because working on this helped me in a tough period of my life and gave me a better understanding of my relationship with the genre. So I’m proud to repost it here.
(I’ve kept their edits, so you’ll notice some British spellings in here.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Happy October, everyone! I’ll be celebrating the impending pandemic Halloween with my usual flurry of horror movie reviews, hopefully including at least a little slasher searching (though I don’t know how many undiscovered gems could possibly be left on earth). I’m also happy to say that I’m in the process of finally publishing my action-horror novel WORM ON A HOOK – I will of course post incessantly about it as soon as it’s available.
Back in 2016 I wrote a John Hyams chapter for what would’ve been a really cool critical anthology book. Unfortunately the publisher went under and it never found a new home. So, in honor of 
Hello! I’m periodically rolling out these Profiles in Badass columns from earlier this year that I’m sure many of you didn’t see in their original presentation behind a pay (and arguably ethics) wall on Rebeller. They’re written for a more general audience than outlawvern.com, so they might be pretty basic to some of you, but I think I did a good job putting a finger on the greatness of my various subjects. 
As September 1985 began, summer movies were still in the public consciousness. Turn on the radio and you were likely to hear Pat Benetar’s “Invincible (Theme From The Legend of Billie Jean)” (#12 on the Biilboard charts), Tina Turner’s “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” (#4), John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” (#2) or Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love” (#1). August 30th had seen the release of AMERICAN NINJA, a culturally important b-movie and perfect bookend to a season that had started with GYMKATA. Unfortunately I really can’t get away with doing another review of it, because I’ve a
lready done it twice; for my definitive take, read 
God damn, another incredible bummer. An incomparable actor who only a few years ago exploded into a 
