Words & Wonders: Beyond the Screen

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Words & Wonders is that it occasionally gives me the freedom to wander off the well-traveled road. With tomorrow’s Thursday movie review just around the corner, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to pull back the curtain and share why I write these reviews, the philosophy behind them, and the method I use to evaluate films. It also seems like a good time to properly introduce myself. I began my writing career in 2000, producing front matter and city guide features for Coastal Directories in Savannah, Georgia, before serving as Content Editor and Creative Director for a small press in North Carolina. In 2007, I founded Scaldcrow Games, writing and publishing tabletop roleplaying games, adventures, and articles—a journey that has now entered its twentieth year. Whether I’m reviewing a forgotten film or designing a new game world, my goal has always been the same: to look beyond simple entertainment and explore the craftsmanship, imagination, and storytelling that inspire us to create. I hope you’ll join me tomorrow—and every Thursday thereafter—as we revisit forgotten classics, overlooked gems, and the occasional cinematic curiosity to discover what they still have to teach us.

52 Weeks of Halloween: A Welcome, and a Confession

Come in. Sit where the light is warm, and let me tell you a little about myself before we begin this long, delicious walk together.

I have loved horror for as long as I can remember. Some folks find that strange in a grown man who builds games for a living, but I have always felt the opposite. To me, horror is the most honest room in the whole house of storytelling. Its rules are the freest we have. A tale can bend time, break the body, whisper from a coal mine, or crawl out from under a child’s bed, and the genre simply nods and says, go on. Yet for all that freedom, the feeling underneath stays rooted in something deeply human. Fear, grief, love, the ache of the unknown. That tension, wild rules wrapped around a beating human heart, is what keeps me coming back.

Why I Count in Stars

Over the past five years, I have reviewed hundreds of films. That is a fair pile of late nights, and I owe it to each picture to judge it honestly. So I use a checklist. A set of categories I run every film through, one at a time, the same way each time. It keeps me fair. It keeps me from loving a movie into a higher grade than it earned, or punishing a bold one for stumbling.

Here is my confession, though, and I share it early so you know the sort of company you keep. Some of my very favorite films do not score the highest. My comfortable place tends to sit between six and seven stars. That is the neighborhood where the bigger risks live, where a filmmaker reaches past the safe thing and leaves the comfort zone in question.

The higher scores are earned, make no mistake. Those polished pictures deserve their marks. But polish has a way of sanding off the rough edges, and it is precisely those rough edges that invite you, the viewer, to lean in. To imagine. To fill the dark corner yourself. A film that leaves you a little room grants you a little agency, and that, to my mind, is a gift worth celebrating.

Where My Tastes Come From

If you want to understand a reviewer, look at what he builds. My own horror games say plenty about where I stand.

My Worlds of Pulp™ titles wear my tastes openly. Dark Evolution leans into small town horror, conspiracy, abomination, monster movies, reckless and invasive science and psychic dread, the sort of parapsychology gilded in corporate and governmental hubris that the great horror writers of the seventies loved so well. Haxanburg pulls from another vein I hold dear, the historic, folk, and supernatural where ancient evil waits in the dark recesses and dangerous cults keep their quiet pacts.

Stir those together and you have the shape of my heart: historic horror, small-town horror, conspiracy, and the psychic. Then I toss in a healthy measure of campfire tale, mountain legend, and good old nursery boogeyman to, ahem, liven the mix. Those are the flavors I chase on the screen just as surely as I bake them into a game.

An Invitation

I would dearly love to watch every one of these films right beside you, the tinfoil rabbit ears bent just so. This column is the closest I can get, and I mean to make it good company.

So pull up your chair each week. New reviews arrive every Thursday, here on 52 Weeks of Halloween. Bring your own imagination. You will need it.

Until Thursday,
T. Glenn Bane
Scaldcrow Games™ • Worlds of Pulp™

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