RICHARD E. ROCK

Check out the above poster. See that mean-looking human dude in the middle brandishing a blaster? I have absolutely no idea who that is, and I only watched this film last night. He is literally NOT IN THIS MOVIE, and yet he has pride of place on the poster. But why? One possible explanation for…

Warning: this review has more spoilers than a boy racer convention! The story of Appius and Virginia is as interesting as the story in Appius and Virginia. It was the first novel by Gertrude Trevelyan, already an award-winning writer, and was published in 1932 to (mostly) stunning reviews. It’s about a woman who buys a…

Think the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi are cute? I don’t. They were going to burn Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Chewbacca alive and eat them. That scene is seared into my memory. All the subsequent scenes of them falling over and hitting themselves in the head with slingshots I saw through that prism.…

A SHORT STORY BY RICHARD E. ROCK It’s a fact of life that dead bodies are pretty much always found by either joggers or dog walkers. I was doing both and yet I’d never found a single one. I was starting to wonder if I was doing something wrong.             Every morning I’d harness up…

Here’s the scene: I travel back in time and pay my younger self a visit. He’s 12 years old, his religion is Star Wars, he’s into Marvel Comics and he reads pretty much nothing but sci-fi. I tell him that one day, in his late 40s in fact, he’ll discover the joys of Russian prison…

Hi. I’m Rhydderch Wilson, the mortal counterpart of the immortal horror author Richard E. Rock. I was born in Newcastle in January 1971. By complete coincidence, Richard was born on the same day, in the same place and to the same parents. Incredible. We are both writers. By day, I work as a commercial scriptwriter…

Greetings, friends. Below you will find an excerpt from my debut horror novel DEEP LEVEL, which was published by darkstroke books 1st October 2020. It is the story of four friends who stumble upon a secret Victorian underground network beneath the streets of London. They set out to explore it, only to discover that some…

Watch this film twice and you’ll get two very different experiences. See it the first time as a casual viewer and you’ll behold a low-budget movie with wobbly sets, cheap costumes, dodgy FX and hammy performances. Watch it a second time having read up on it – or, better still, having seen Marty Langford and…

By the end of the 1930s, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, in his ever blackening state of paranoia, had imprisoned over twelve million people in his notorious “corrective-labour camps”. A vast majority of these people were, of course, completely innocent. When the war ended, these numbers were swollen further when he imprisoned all returning Soviet POWs.…

I don’t usually put horror movies in my basket when shopping in my local Sainsburys, but on this particular occasion I felt compelled to make an exception. The reason for this is that Margam Castle is just a few miles up the road from where I live. I’ve been there many times and I know…