Film
Groovy: The Bonkers Brilliance of Evil Dead II
The 1987 horror sequel that turned a cabin in the woods into a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon drenched in blood, and changed horror comedy forever.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 19, 2026
Column
Beyond the Riff
Books, films, television and philosophy that share a frequency with heavy music. Not metal — but adjacent to everything metal cares about: darkness, power, mortality, transcendence and the refusal to look away.
Sports
The Tragedy of the SuperSonics: A Seattle Tale in Six Acts
Nearly two decades have passed since the Seattle SuperSonics disappeared from the Pacific Northwest, yet the wound remains remarkably fresh. A Shakespearean examination of how a city lost its team.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 18, 2026
Culture & Sport
How College Football Lost Its Soul — and How It Can Still Be Saved
For more than a century, college football was about identity, loyalty, and shared tradition. Today those foundations are being dismantled by television money, donor arms races, and a free-agency system with no framework to sustain it.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 17, 2026
Music & Vision
The Holy Trinity: Miles Davis and the Three Albums That Reinvented Music
Kind of Blue. In a Silent Way. Bitches Brew. Three masterpieces so entirely unlike each other — and unlike anything that came before — that no other artist in any popular genre has matched the feat.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 16, 2026
Film & Music
Turn It Up to 11 Forever
Four decades after its release, Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap is no longer simply one of the funniest films ever made. It has become one of the most important films ever made about music itself.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 16, 2026
Music & Culture
Quadrophenia: When Rock Music Became Great Art
More than half a century after its release, The Who's Quadrophenia remains one of the most extraordinary achievements in the history of popular music — a coming-of-age novel, a psychological character study, and a monumental work of rock composition.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 16, 2026
Essay
Deep Time: Heavy Music, Geology, and the Weight of the Earth
Heavy music has always borrowed its language from the ground beneath our feet: metal, stone, iron, lead, mountains, magma. An essay on the strange kinship between a crushing riff and a shifting continent.
By Nicholas Pietsch · October 15, 2026
Film
Strings Attached: Control, Free Will and the Horror Renaissance
From Get Out to Hereditary, The Substance to Backrooms — the defining theme of the horror renaissance is not death. It is the loss of control. Twenty-one films, one argument.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 14, 2026
Fiction & Music
The Resonance Beneath Megadon: A 2112 / Lovecraft Homage
In the two thousand one hundred and twelfth year, beneath the city of Megadon, something older than the Priests of Syrinx stirs in the dark. A homage to Rush’s 2112 rendered in the cosmic-horror register of H.P. Lovecraft.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 13, 2026
Music & Culture
Roots, Rhythms, and Recontextualization: Sepultura's Unacknowledged Role in the American Appetite for Brazilian Sound
Histories of Brazilian music's reception in the United States omit a significant intermediary: Sepultura, whose Roots (1996) introduced Brazilian rhythmic vocabularies, Afro-Brazilian percussion and Indigenous Xavante music to a large American audience that had little prior exposure to Brazilian musics.
By Michael Borden · October 13, 2026
Literature
The Inhabited Void: Space, Remediation, and Collaborative Dread in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves
House of Leaves is best understood as a novel about the inhabitation of absence. Ryan Montgomery on the inhabited void — and why the Backrooms is its internet-scale realization.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 13, 2026
Film
Careful What You Wish For: Obsession and the Horror of Being Loved Without Consent
Curry Barker's $750,000 horror phenomenon grossed $520 million worldwide and earned it. A deeply uncanny meditation on agency, consent and manipulation, anchored by Inde Navarrette's shattering performance.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 13, 2026
Film
The Power of Folk Horror: How Cinema Turned Folklore Into Nightmare
From The Wicker Man to The Witch, Midsommar, The Wailing, and Hereditary — a journey through twelve of the greatest folk horror films ever made and the genre that continues to haunt modern cinema.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 12, 2026
Film
Mad Max and the Modern Myth: How George Miller Created One of Cinema's Greatest Film Sagas
Across five films spanning more than four decades, George Miller transformed Max Rockatansky from a grieving highway patrol officer into a wandering archetype. A modern myth, examined.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 12, 2026
Literature
At the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraft's Greatest Achievement and the Horror of Cosmic Insignificance
Lovecraft's 1931 Antarctic novella — the Elder Things, the shoggoths, Danforth's final vision, and the del Toro adaptation that never was. A deep read of the work that turned horror into a meditation on humanity's place in the cosmos.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 12, 2026
Television
Carcosa in the Bayou: The Cosmic Horror of True Detective, Season One
A murder case in the Louisiana bayou turned out to be a doorway into one of the oldest traditions in weird fiction. How a nineteenth-century book of stories, H.P. Lovecraft and a reclusive modern philosopher of horror shaped the most influential crime drama of the 2010s.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 11, 2026
Fiction
Crimson: A Chronicle of the Last Age
A tribute to Dan Swanö and Edge of Sanity’s Crimson — a retelling of the saga in the manner of an ancient chronicle, drawing inspiration from the mythic histories of Tolkien. The capture, blinding, and sealing of the Princess within the Crimson Sleep.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 21, 2026
Fiction
Crimson II: A Chronicle of the Covenant
An unofficial fan-made chronicle of the age between the sealing of the Princess and the events of Crimson II — the Long Peace, the forbidden words, and the return of the dreams.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 21, 2026
Fiction
Crimson III: The Harvest
An unofficial fan-made continuation of the story told on Edge of Sanity’s Crimson (1996) and Crimson II (2003). Not affiliated with or endorsed by Dan Swanö or Edge of Sanity.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 11, 2026
Fiction
Crimson III: The Harvest — Lovecraft Homage Edition
The same story rendered in the archaic, cosmic-horror register of H.P. Lovecraft. Cicatrices, membranes, and the patient regard of something immeasurably old.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 11, 2026
Literature & Music
The Black Sword Sings: Elric, the Eternal Champion and Heavy Music
A sickly albino emperor, a sword that drinks souls, and a hero doomed to fight across every universe forever. How Michael Moorcock’s creations became one of heavy music’s great mythologies.
By Ryan Montgomery · October 11, 2026