The tale of the Amityville murders is one known by just about anyone. Whether you’re a horror-movie fan, a history buff, intrigued by outlandish and sensational cases of murder and mayhem or just someone who read the newspaper that day, you know the story: On a November night in 1974, Ronnie DeFeo woke up one night, went for a shotgun he had in his house and systematically killed off his parents, two brothers and two sisters.

When constructed properly, there’s something very magical about the anthology horror format, whether it’s boiling the genre down to its essentials or simply using of a clever hook. These collections of bite-sized terrors can be ingested at any time or place when you have a few minutes to spare. Good or bad, I love ’em all, and thankfully, Joe Bannerman’s self-published IT FOLLOWS sides with the former.

Another day, another derivative novel of the zombie apocalypse from an indie publisher. Still, overexposure aside, this reviewer doesn’t see the crowded subgenre as something to automatically revile; the odds of cool-to-crap are at least as favorable with the written word as with films. There are plenty of examples of successful literary zombie tales, from the indefatigable WALKING DEAD comics to the pioneering BOOK OF THE DEAD anthologies. Two more rotting romps to rear their decomposing heads recently are Genius Publishing’s THE HUNGRY and THE HUNGRY 2: THE WRATH OF GOD, both by Steven W. Booth and Harry Shannon.

The need to contemporize the horror/fantasy genres through juxtaposition with real-life modern-day tropes is by no means a new trend in fantasy fiction.

Merely a few years ago, film festivals were rampant with home invasion. As escalation is the natural order of things, it makes an odd sense we’re now living in the year of the high-rise siege (quite possibly kicked into gear by 2011’s outstanding ATTACK THE BLOCK). THE RAID, CITADEL, this month’s DREDD and the UK’s TOWER BLOCK all share themes centered around these concrete monoliths that increasingly populate cities internationally. Fortunately, each of the aforementioned counts real moments of intensity amongst their running times, making this contemporary revival of a classic storytelling device one worth keeping an eye on.

It’s surprising to realize how much of the iconic Tim Burton’s career has been spent shepherding established properties to his own unique universe. It’s especially curious, as his greats EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, BEETLEJUICE and ED WOOD account for a filmmaker whose style we recognize but we haven’t truly seen operate since those titles. How fortunate then, for kids today and audiences alike, that a Burton with a personal, reignited passion has seemingly returned to the tale of the young, ambitious and darkly tinged outsider, hitting many notes we’ve so longed to hear in the process.

HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET is one of those movies that seems to have been written backwards—it plays like its creators came up with their Big Plot Twist first, then struggled to fill the hour beforehand.