Tag Archives: crime

Ranking the Horror Movies I Watched in 2025

With Halloween approaching, I have compiled a list of all the horror movies I watched this past year, old and new, good and bad, and everything in between. They are sorted into tiers based on quality and listed alphabetically within each tier. As streaming rights are always changing, check JustWatch.com to see where the films may currently be available to watch.

Tier 1: Cinematic Masterpieces

Oddity (2024) directed by Damian Mc Carthy
Oddity is about twin women, one of whom was murdered, and the other is a psychic medium who owns an antique shop that sells occult oddities. She comes to suspect that her sister was killed by someone other than the man who was arrested, so she goes to the house where the murder took place (which is possibly haunted), bringing some occult items from her shop to get revenge. Trying to explain the premise doesn’t do the film justice. It is so well done, like a horror Pulp Fiction because of the way the story is told nonlinearly via flashbacks. Rather than relying on jump scares and gore (though there is some of each), the film instead uses dread, suspense, and tension to expertly build to those moments of horror.

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True Detective Redux

Season one of True Detective was one of my favorite television shows of all time. I was disappointed by the second season but thought the third was a return to form—not quite as good as the original, but a worthy successor. The fourth season, True Detective: Night Country was no longer being run by the original creator Nic Pizzolatto, so my expectations lowered, though I was still optimistic it could be good. I love the general format of True Detective, with each season being a self-contained miniseries following new detectives who investigate a murder case. I hate TV shows that go on forever, so the best thing about True Detective is you are guaranteed an ending

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True Crime vs. Fictional Crime or Zodiac vs. Se7en

The genre of “true crime” is growing in popularity in the form of documentaries and podcasts that cover real crimes pulled from news headlines in detail. There are also fictionalized movies and television series about true crimes. I am not especially interested in true crime, but it is the fictionalized narratives about real crimes that interest me least. Fictional crime stories are better—or have the potential to be better—than true crime stories. The difference between them can best be seen in two of director David Fincher’s films about serial killers: Se7en (1995) and Zodiac (2007).

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Story Addict: A Collection of 27 Short Stories

StoryAddict-TZBarry-ebook1

Hi, my name is TZ Barry, and I’m a story addict…

Story Addict is a collection of 27 short stories written between 2010 and 2018, spanning a variety of genres including science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, thriller, literary, magical realism, dark humor, and satire. There’s time travel, telepathy, parallel universes, aliens, robots, artificial intelligence, hackers, spies, invisibility, dinosaurs, wizards, talking jellyfish, and more. The lengths of the stories vary from 300 words to over 6,000 (60,000 words in total). Eight of the stories have been previously published while nineteen are new to this collection. The stories are not connected and can be read in any order. Continue reading