Horror story reviews, by someone who doesn’t like horror

I’m not a big fan of horror movies or TV shows, because I’m not a big fan of jump scares. I’m generally way more into fantasy, sci-fi and dystopian fiction than any other genre – except perhaps some of Anne Rice’s works/adaptations. But every once in a while, a horror movie or TV show comes along that I do actually enjoy. Hannibal was such a case. In more recent years, I’ve discovered the works of author/director Mike Flanagan, and after having watched 3 of his shows, I think what he does is absolutely brilliant. His works are not just horror […]

Seeing the present through the past: The Newsreader

If you’ve followed the news today, you’re probably just as depressed as me by the German election results, with actual fascists having gotten 20% of the votes, and the majority of Germans still having voted for the less fascist yet conservative party CDU. Don’t expect any progress in this country. And that’s just German politics, let’s not even mention the sheer insanity that is going on in other countries. Well, needless to say, I’m not a fan of reading the news anymore. I gave up on that years ago, because it’s just absolutely horrible for my mental health. Attention-grabbing social […]

Original Sin & New Blood: Dexter revisited

Back when Dexter first released, I was a big fan. I even wrote a review about the first season, which was phenomenal and probably one of the best seasons of television I’ve seen, thanks to its plot twists. That was 18 years ago! I continued to watch new seasons of Dexter as they aired, but as we probably all know, the show sadly experienced a massive decline in quality over the years. For me personally, S1 still remains the best and cannot be topped in the severity of its mind-blowing plot twists. Season 2-3 were also generally good, and while […]

6 Mindbending TV Shows

If you, like me, enjoy watching weird and mind-bending TV shows, often with a bit of a sci-fi twist, I have a few mini-reviews for you of shows that I have watched in the past couple of months or so, and that I greatly enjoyed: Station Eleven This is without a doubt one of the smartest, most brilliant TV shows I have watched in a long, long time. It’s been on my watchlist for probably over a year, and I really don’t know what took me so long. Perhaps the less-than-appealing posters? But trust me, this is 100% worth if […]

Fargo: A retrospective of five stories

With the new season having been on the horizon, I decided to (re)watch almost all of Fargo this January. Yesterday my journey culminated in the phenomenal finale of Season 5, and all I can say is: this TV show is absolutely brilliant (mostly). But let’s backtrack a little. Fargo is an anthology show in which every season tells an entirely different story (set in the same universe as the 1996 movie). Thus, each season feels vastly different, and there are very notable fluctuations in quality. What unites them are not only certain characters and cameos, but also the overall vibe […]

A novel development

It’s been a very long time since I read novels out of my own free will. Having been forced to read some pretty annoying stuff during my time studying literature made me lose interest in this medium. Even though some of the books I read for uni were undoubtedly good, I can’t say that they were really my style or my type of book. Margaret Atwood comes to mind. The Handmaid’s Tale is a brilliant dystopian novel, just my kind of stuff, but some of the other things I read from her – nice, but not really my thing. So […]

Mord mit Aussicht

Ich gucke ja viel Zeug (wie man sieht, wenn man sich mal durch meine Reviews klickt), aber etwas das ich sehr selten gucke, sind deutsche Produktionen. Es gibt ungefähr 2 deutsche Filme, die ich in den letzten ~30 Jahren wirklich gut fand, und ebenso ungefähr 2 deutsche Serien (Der Tatortreiniger und Dark). Als Fan vom Tatortreiniger habe ich schon vor längerer Zeit von der Serie Mord mit Aussicht gehört, da sie von denselben Produzenten ist und denselben Schauspieler hat (Bjarne Mädel). Ich weiß ehrlich gesagt nicht, warum ich so lange gebraucht habe, um mir die Serie endlich mal anzusehen. Und […]

Interview with the Vampire, re-told

One of the most famous vampire books of recent cultural history, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has received a new adaptation last year by American TV network AMC — producer of another bunch of shows full of undead, The Walking Dead and its numerous spin-offs that I lost track of. Interview with the Vampire was previously adapted as the 1994 movie with Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst, which I enjoyed back in its day. As this movie is almost 30 years old now, AMC seemed to believe it was time for something more modern, and IMHO they […]

Stone and Sky: Andor

I am by no means a Star Wars fangirl – at least not ever since George Lucas sold his soul to Disney. I do love the original trilogy, with Empire Strikes Back being my unrivaled favorite of the Star Wars saga. However, I stopped following most Star Wars content that Disney continues to throw at us after The Last Jedi. I actually enjoyed the latter—it was very funny, perhaps too funny—but I did not even watch The Rise of Skywalker after I heard that it basically retcons all of Last Jedi and seems to overall have made bad plot decisions. […]