Editorial

Yay or Nay: What’s Good and Bad in Horror This Week: 5/6 to 5/10

Published

2 years ago

May 11, 2024

Welcome to Yay or Nay a weekly mini post about what I think is good and bad news in the horror community written in bite-sized chunks. This is for the week of May 5 through May 10.

Yay:

In a Violent Nature made someone puke at the Chicago Critics Film Fest screening. It’s the first time this year that a critic got sick at a movie that wasn’t a Blumhouse film.

Nay:

Radio Silence pulls out of remake of Escape From New York. Darn, we wanted to see Snake try to escape a remote locked-down mansion full of distopean New York City “crazies.”

Yay:

A new Twisters trailer dropped, focusing on the powerful forces of nature that tear through rural towns. It’s a great alternative to watching candidates do the same thing on local news during this year’s presidential press cycle.

Nay:

Producer Bryan Fuller walks away from A24’s Friday the 13th series Camp Crystal Lake saying the studio wanted to go a “different way.” After two years of development for a horror series it seems that way doesn’t include ideas from people who actually know what their talking about: fans in a subreddit.

Yay:

Finally, The Tall Man from Phantasm is getting his own Funko Pop! Too bad the toy company is failing. This gives new meaning to Angus Scrimm’s famous line from the movie: “You play a good game…but the game is finished. Now you die!”

Nay:

Football king Travis Kelce joins new Ryan Murphy horror project as a supporting actor. He got more press than the announcement of Dahmer’s Emmy winner Niecy Nash-Betts actually getting the lead.

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Editorial

Everyone Is Talking About Buffet Infinity. Yes, You Should Watch It.

Published

3 days ago

May 15, 2026

Luna Gray

Buffet Infinity has been circulating for a couple of weeks now and the people who have found it are having a hard time shutting up about it. That is where I am coming in. Consider this me adding to the noise, enthusiastically.

The First Thing to Know

Simon Glassman’s film is built entirely out of fake local commercials from Westridge County, Alberta, Canada. That is the whole format. You are watching what appears to be a stack of recordings off a local cable channel from the early 1990s: low-budget spots for businesses that feel one bad month away from closing, public service announcements with a little too much sincerity, news bumpers, the occasional weird interstitial that does not quite make sense. The lighting is wrong in exactly the right ways. The jingle choices are correct and devastating. Every single spot feels like someone cashed in their retirement savings to buy thirty seconds on cable access, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

If you grew up anywhere near a television in the 1990s, something in this film is going to reach you in a place you were not expecting to be reached. Glassman has done his homework. He has also, more impressively, done something beyond the homework.

Two Restaurants Enter

The central conflict involves two businesses sharing a shopping center in Westridge County. On one side is Jenny’s Sandwich Shop, a local staple that has been feeding the community for years and has a very clear sense of its own identity. On the other side is the new arrival, Buffet Infinity, an all-you-can-eat operation that is aggressively, cheerfully wrong in ways that are initially hard to name.

The Jenny’s Sandwich Shop arc is the funniest sustained bit of horror-adjacent filmmaking I have sat through in a long time. The commercials for Jenny’s start completely normal and go somewhere I absolutely did not see coming, and then they go somewhere else, and then somewhere else after that.

There is also a sinkhole downtown that keeps getting mentioned in the news bumpers, and a cult leader who has opinions about it, and all of these threads are running simultaneously through a format that does not pause to explain itself. Scene to scene I had no idea what was coming. Not in the chaotic way, not in the shock-for-shock’s-sake way. In the way where someone is so committed to their own internal logic that you just have to stop predicting and start watching. I gave up guessing about twenty minutes in. It was better after that.

The Cast Has No Business Being This Good

The cast is small and every one of them is working at a level this film does not technically require them to reach. Kevin Singh, Claire Theobald, Donovan Workun, Ahmed Ahmed, and Brandon Vanderwall are all playing characters who exist inside a very specific heightened reality, the kind of reality where everyone in a commercial is about fifteen percent too earnest about their product, and none of them blink.

That is harder than it sounds. The temptation in this format is to wink at the audience. These performers understand that the winking would ruin it. They play it straight all the way down, and the film is funnier and stranger and more unsettling because of it.

The WNUF Comparison You Are Going to Make

If you know your analog horror, the comparison that is coming to your mind right now is WNUF Halloween Special. That is the right comparison and I want to address it directly. WNUF, directed by Chris LaMartina, is presented as a VHS recording of a 1987 Halloween news broadcast, commercials included, following a live investigation into a haunted house. It is a specific, loving reproduction of late-80s local television, and its fake commercial breaks are some of the most carefully constructed things in the format. It earned its cult status.

Buffet Infinity is doing something different with similar materials. WNUF is a film about watching television. Buffet Infinity is a film that exists as television, and the distinction matters. Where WNUF uses the format as a frame for a ghost story, Glassman uses it as the story itself. The commercials are not the wrapper. They are the content. The horror and the comedy both live entirely inside the advertising, which means there is no moment where the film steps outside the conceit to remind you something bigger is happening. You have to find it yourself. That is a harder trick to pull and Glassman pulls it.

The other thing worth noting is tone. WNUF is primarily creepy with comedy in the margins. Buffet Infinity is primarily funny with dread in the margins, and the dread is more effective for it. By the time the film earns its unsettling turns, you are already too fond of these characters and this town to find any distance from what is happening to them.

Watch It

Buffet Infinity is on VOD now. Watch it with someone who has not been spoiled. Let them experience the Jenny’s Sandwich Shop arc in real time. Watch their face.

If you have seen everything analog horror has to offer, and you think you know what you are walking into, I am telling you that you do not. This one is different.

Editorial

Jonathan Tiersten’s Greatest Role, and it isn’t Sleepaway Camp

Published

5 days ago

May 13, 2026

Piper St. James

Horror actor and musician Jonathan Tiersten passed away May 4, 2026 at 60 years old. To many in the horror community, Tiersten will forever be Ricky Thomas from 1983’s Sleepaway Camp. The actor later reprised his role in 2008’s Return to Sleepaway Camp. In the summer camp slashers, Tiersten plays Angel Baker’s (Felissa Rose) protective older cousin; and boy does he have a mouth that would make a sailor blush!

While Sleepaway Camp is certainly the most popular horror movie Jonathan Tiersten is known for, it is arguably not the best.

The Perfect House

In 2011 Tiersten participated in a horror anthology titled The Perfect House. The movie was written and directed by Kris Hulbert, and co-directed by Randy Kent. While they did not share the screentime together on this project, Felissa Rose also participated in this anthology.

The premise of The Perfect House consists of a young couple who think they have found their dream house. Little do they know the foundation holds many secrets from the prior inhabitants who once resided within the walls. As the real estate agent takes them from room to room, stories of the past resident’s atrocities unfold.

Tiersten Gives of Killer Vibes

Tiersten’s short story in the anthology is entitled Chic-ken. His portrayal of a serial killer in collaboration with Hulbert’s script is pure horror gold. Known as Angela Baker’s savior time and time again in Sleepaway Camp, serial killer John Doesy in The Perfect House is anything but sympathetic to the men and women who are unfortunate enough to cross his path.

In this segment he plays a killer who keeps a female victim permanently imprisoned in his basement. Every week he brings new victims to torture and kill in front of her. In his twisted mind he affectionately calls her his muse. As he tortures and kills his new victims from week to week, he also tortures, rapes, and taunts his “muse”. He forces her to watch his “performance” and is fueled by her witnessing the pain he inflicts on those he deems as useless members of society.

Tiersten’s effortless delivery as a self righteous maniac surpasses many others who have tried to conquer similar roles both before and since. The fact Tiersten does all of this without hiding behind a mask adds an extra level of fear. Let’s face it, Tiersten is very easy on the eyes with his blonde hair, blue eyes, and muscular arms, which would initially lower anyone’s guard. To know someone who not only appears “normal,” but attractive, is capable of such atrocities is extra unnerving.

The confidence Tiersten exudes in his voice and postures, as well as how he carries himself throughout the scenes, sells his character’s excessive ego. He completely sells the fact his character full heartedly believes in the demented behaviors and murders he is carrying out.

Where to Watch

While The Perfect House did not have a theater release, it was the first feature film to premiere on Facebook. The creators released the movie on the social networking site with a seven day rental period. In 2014 the movie was released for home distribution on DVD.

Unfortunately, many horror fans still do not know of this movie’s existence. Hopefully now they will search for it on Amazon, Ebay, and streaming services such as Roku, Tubi, and Google Play, and Plex to continue Jonathan Tiersten’s legacy.

Editorial

Sleepaway Camp Knew Before I Did: The Legacy Johnathan Tiersten Left on Queer Media

Published

1 week ago

May 9, 2026

Luna Gray

Jonathan Tiersten died May 5 at his home in New Jersey. He was 60. He played Ricky Thomas in Sleepaway Camp, and I want to explain why a very specific group of people is taking this one harder than a 1983 summer camp slasher would usually warrant.

What The Film Means To Me

I am trans. That goes on the table first because nothing else I am about to say makes any sense without it.

I have been showing Sleepaway Camp to people since I was eleven years old. Everyone who mattered to me has sat through it. Friends who thought slashers were beneath them, partners who loved me enough to watch things they would never have chosen, my teenagers.

I give the same speech before every single viewing. Something is going to happen in the last few minutes, I tell them, and whatever your first reaction is, please sit with it for a moment before you say it out loud. Not because the reaction is wrong. Because there is almost always a second reaction underneath it and that is the one I am actually interested in.

What The Film Actually Is

Robert Hiltzik made a low-budget slasher set at a summer camp. Angela Baker is strange and barely verbal and is tormented by basically everyone around her while her cousin Ricky tries to run interference. The ending reveals that Angela was born Peter, that her father died when she was small, and that the aunt who took her in had always wanted a girl and simply decided Peter would become one.

Angela did not choose any of this. Not her name, not her clothes, not the gender she was made to perform in front of every single person she encountered every single day. And after years of living inside something she never chose, the pressure found somewhere to go.

That Ending

The transness is framed as the horror, as the explanation for the violence, and there is nothing there any trans person would hold up as a victory for representation. I understand all of that.

But I was eleven when I first watched it, and what I heard underneath everything it was trying to do was something nobody was trying to say. If you force someone to live as the wrong thing long enough, they will eventually stop being able to contain what that costs them. The film turned that into a monster story. I recognized it as a thing I had been trying to explain to myself without having the words for it yet.

Trans Representation In Pop Culture

For context, consider what came the year after. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective came out in 1994 and its treatment of a trans character is a two-minute sequence of Jim Carrey vomiting, using a plunger on his own face, burning his clothes, and sobbing under running water upon learning he had kissed her. The joke is that she is contamination.

My classmates quoted this film back at me for years. That was what mainstream culture had decided trans people were good for, and it went more or less unchallenged for a long time. Angela Baker, for all of Sleepaway Camp’s genuine limitations, is the protagonist of her entire film. Her history is the engine of the whole story. She is not a punchline. She is why the movie exists.

Trans representation in horror has never been particularly good, and I am not about to argue Sleepaway Camp is the exception. What I will say is that it accidentally told the truth in the middle of trying to do something else entirely, and horror films that stumble into the truth are still telling the truth. I have built twenty-five years of love for this movie on that.

Ricky

Ricky is most of the reason I keep coming back, which brings us to Jonathan Tiersten. He played Ricky as someone who never needed to understand Angela in order to be fully in her corner. He does not study her. He does not puzzle her out, he just shows up every time with the kind of furious loyalty that does not require an explanation because the explanation is right there. He loves his cousin, and he is not going to stand there while the world is unkind to her. That is not a complicated thing to put on screen. It is also rarer on screen than it should be.

Tiersten reprised the role in Return to Sleepaway Camp in 2008 and kept working in independent horror until the end. His most famous performance is forty-five minutes of a teenager planting himself between his cousin and everything the world wanted to do to her, and for some of us who grew up watching this film, that was the first time we saw someone treat that as simply the obvious right thing to do.

It was an answer to a question I had not yet figured out how to ask.