Now, More Than Ever

As you saw in my last post, a lot has been going on lately. I mentioned a few things, all of them adjacent to the movies, and now it’s time to talk about them a little more…

First off, Panic Fest starts next week. For those who aren’t local to the Kansas City area, Panic Fest is our own homegrown film festival celebrating horror, sci-fi, and thrillers, and it’s grown up a lot in the half-dozen or so years I’ve been attending. This year, I’ll be covering the fest for another Kansas City institution – our very own dirtbag newspaper, The Pitch.

I’m not sure yet which movies I’ll be seeing when, but there’s a number that I want to catch, including Allegoria, Dashcam, Malibu Horror Story, and Midnight, to name a few. If you’re going to be at the fest, drop me a line and maybe we can catch up sometime.

Or, if you’re in the area and can’t wait for Panic Fest to kick off, you could always come by the Stray Cat Film Center as Tyler Unsell and I host another live episode of the Horror Pod Class on Wednesday, April 27, where we’ll be watching a made-for-TV movie from very early in John Carpenter’s career – that just happens to also be one of my very favorite Carpenter flicks.

As far as news relating to movies goes, I saved the biggest for last. Recently, I became the movies editor for Exploits, an Unwinnable publication. At Exploits, what we basically do is provide short blurbs about movies, books, music, games, and so on that we’ve been enjoying lately. They can be new, they can be old, they can be mainstream, they can be weird.

As movies editor, my primary job is to source a 350-word essay each month about a film. It can be any film, from any era. With me in the catbird seat, the odds are it’ll usually be monster movies. But that’s far from a requirement.

The news got announced on social media a while back, so I’ve already received a number of pitches and, indeed, filled out my first few months worth of essays. But, if you haven’t already and you have any interest in writing a little about a movie, feel free to send me a pitch. The 350-word cap is firm and we pay $10 per essay and beyond that, just about everything is fair game. Send me a pitch before you write, though, in case someone else is already writing about Attack of the Crab Monsters, or whatever.

I’ve also been helping with the film programming for this year’s NecronomiCon in Providence, which probably means I will also be in attendance there. That’s a few months away yet, though, and there’s a lot that can change between now and then. Regardless, the film programming is very much still a work in progress, but hopefully there’ll be some news on that front soon, too…