No Spoilers: Only see THE CONJURING if you want to get the %$%& scared out of you.

Seriously-- I caught THE CONJURING at a preview screening in Denver and I am so thrilled about it. My arms are still tingling from this movie-- that's the frisson that good horror gives you, the shiver on the back of your neck and for me all up and down my arms. I haven't actually jumped in a movie in years, but I did in this one. The trailer is below-- it's really all you need.

THE CONJURING felt like a genuinely scary piece to sit beside the greats of ghost tales. In fact that's part of its charm, this movie both works as a scary movie and also as a sort of love letter to supernatural thrillers like LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH, GHOST STORY, POLTERGEIST, even HALLOWEEN. This is a movie that loves American Gothic. It may be the best ghost story I've seen since THE CHANGELING. I know that's high praise, but I mean it-- check out THE CONJURING when it opens July 18, but only if you want to spend the night jumping.

Horror Fandom has changed since 1983...

-- and it's changed for the better. I was thinking of what it was like to be a horror fan in 1983. When I was a kid, it was very hard to see a movie like Plan 9 from Outer Space. I knew about it because it was written about in Michael Medved's Golden Turkey Awards, a snarky book from before the Internet invented snark. Maybe the movie would show up on TV around Halloween, and if so, you might see it, if you were lucky. We got our first VCR in 1983, but generally watched rented movies on it.

But Plan 9, awful as it is, was famous in a way. All fans knew about it because we'd all read the same books. Books was all there was. And think about this-- the books were the only way to know about or even come close to some of these movies. It's not like Werewolf of London came on TV all the time.

Today I can go to the Internet and watch a 1928 silent film version of House of Usher. The very idea is inconceivable to a horror fan in 1983. Danny Peary's Cult Movies was a great boon because it described movies like Black Sunday in depth, but where on earth were you going to see these things? In a sense, in 1983, all old movies were practically lost, or like astronomical phenomena, barely observable directly.