The Cat Creeps Out of the Bag

Tonight, Tyler Unsell and I will be at the Stray Cat Film Center hosting a FREE screening of the 1939 Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard version of The Cat and the Canary. The show starts at 7pm and will be followed, as always, by our usual semi-academic discussion where we’ll talk about horror comedy, old dark house pictures, and the (possibly tenuous) link between this film and Scooby-Doo, all part of our spring programming linked with Tyler’s Drinkaway Camp 2 project, which is kicking off in just a few days’ time!

Partially in preparation for tonight’s show and partially just because I got the Blu-ray and was excited, I watched the new Eureka Blu of Paul Leni’s original Cat and the Canary from 1927 and wrote about it for Signal Horizon. Technically, I had seen the film once before, on the world’s shittiest transfer, but seeing it fully restored like this it is possibly my new favorite silent film of all time.

If you enjoy me writing and jabbering about movies as I do in that review and at these Horror Pod Class shows at the Stray Cat, you’ll be pleased to learn that my next book is actually going to be a collection of some of the best of my writing on horror films collected from across the last decade.

Due out this October from Word Horde, Glowing in the Dark will collect essays and reviews spanning dozens of movies and across a variety of different eras and topics, albeit all of them contained within the hazy bounds of “horror cinema.” From my now-classic 2011 essay on cosmic horror in John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy” to a contemporary review for James Wan’s 2021 film Malignant, I cover a lot of ground in this book, and I really hope that readers will love it.

Many of these essays and reviews first appeared online or in print in places like Unwinnable, Signal Horizon, Weird Horror, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, and this very blog, to name a few. I cover topics from silent films to the present day, as well as films from Japan, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and others. From the use of insects in the films of Guillermo del Toro to the unlikely (and unexplored) futurism of Universal’s early Mummy sequels from the 1940s, there’s a little bit of everything in these pages.

There are also two entirely new pieces in the book, just in case you’re the kind of weirdo who has somehow read everything I’ve written on the subject up to this point. One is an obligatory list of movie recommendations while another tackles a subject that is near and dear to my heart: the link between midnight spook shows and the gimmick films of William Castle.

To the surprise of no one, you’ll be hearing a lot more about Glowing in the Dark as we get closer to publication, including a cover reveal in the coming weeks or months. However, the official announcement dropped last night, so I figured it was high time to make it official on here, as well.