Archive for the ‘mystery movies’ Category

Book cover reveal for my new thriller novel STOPPING POWER, now available for pre-order.

Monday, September 27th, 2021

Excited to unveil the cover for my brand new thriller novel STOPPING POWER! The artwork is by the amazing John Gallagher. The book will be published in trade paperback and Kindle editions on December 3rd by Seidelman & Company. It is available for pre-order from the publisher or on Amazon at https://amzn.to/2XVuvzn

The publisher’s description is “Devoted mother Stephanie Power is on a road trip in Houston, Texas with her teenage daughter, Libby. They stop at a gas station to refuel, and when Stephanie comes back from paying, she finds her daughter and their RV have suddenly vanished. Ilsa Bakke, a dangerous female bank robber on the run, just pulled an armored car heist that netted 60 million dollars in bearer bonds. She murdered her own gang, escaping in a getaway car with the Texas cops hot on her tail. She switched out her car with the mother’s at the gas station and kidnapped Libby, leaving her getaway car with the keys in it. Stephanie gets a call from Ilsa on her cell, ordering her to get into the bank robber’s getaway car and drive on the highway at high speed and keep driving or Ilsa will kill Libby – if Stephanie stops or gets caught by the cops, her daughter is dead – if she stays alive and uncaptured for one hour, Ilsa promises to release Libby safely. The desperate mother has no choice, jumping in the getaway car and leading police on a high-speed chase, the female bank robber using her as a decoy for the cops while she makes her escape in the opposite direction with Libby and the stolen loot. The game of automative cat-and-mouse shifts into high gear as Stephanie Power drives for her daughter’s life, struggling to stay alive and elude the cops, knowing she must somehow catch up to the RV with Libby and Ilsa so she can rescue her kid and take down the real perpetrator the police are after.”

My novel WHITE KNUCKLE soon to be a major motion picture starring Gina Carano is back in print.

Saturday, September 4th, 2021

By popular demand, my road-thriller novel WHITE KNUCKLE currently being made as a movie starring Gina Carano is finally back in print in new trade paperback and Kindle Editions from Seidelman & Company.  Read the book that started it all that William Friedkin director of The Exorcist and The French Connection calls “Terrific stuff. Great suspense!”
Available in bookstores or on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/2WNcC5e

My novel WHITE KNUCKLE is soon to be a major motion picture.

Thursday, August 12th, 2021

My novel WHITE KNUCKLE is now a movie starring Gina Carano produced by Dallas Sonnier that begins filming soon. I wrote the screenplay and am executive producing with Tony Timpone. This is the first novel of mine to make the book-to-film leap. Production starts this fall filming across the USA. I’m incredibly excited to be working with such an amazing team!
For further details about the film go to Deadline Hollywood at: https://bit.ly/3iElX7d

Book trailer release for my coming-of-age thriller novel, DON’T STAND SO CLOSE.

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021

It’s publication day for my novel DON’T STAND SO CLOSE from Seidelman & Company.  The brand new book trailer drops today exclusively on JoBlo Movie Trailers!

https://bit.ly/3fna6Zp

The novel is available in trade paperback and Kindle editions at your favorite bookstore or on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3xlVOOP

New edition of my first novel DON’T STAND SO CLOSE will be published in August.

Tuesday, July 20th, 2021

Proud to unveil the jacket cover art for the brand new edition of my novel DON’T STAND SO CLOSE from Seidelman & Company. The gorgeous wraparound artwork is by my friend the brilliant illustrator John Gallagher, one of my favorite collaborators who I’ve been lucky to have create the covers for most of my novels. Here John’s cover perfectly evokes the atmosphere of the novel with a classic image infused with nostalgia and mystery.
“It was 1998. The three young people Matthew Poe, Grace McCormack and Rusty Shaw were friends, high school seniors in a small Iowa town about to graduate and go out in the world. On the edge of adulthood, it was a time of awakening where everything felt fresh and new. Confused, carefree, they shared their doubts and their joys, trying to find out who they were and where they fit in. Their teacher Ms. Hayden helped make it all make sense for them, a friend who understood what it was like to be their age. Linda Hayden touched Matthew, Grace and Rusty in different ways and two of them would never forget her as long as they lived. But discovering everything for the first time, it is what you don’t know that can hurt you. The three teenagers would come face-to-face with true evil. The choice would be growing up fast or not growing up all. But what did not destroy them would make them stronger for in the darkest depths of the human heart they will find a light that shows them the way. Coming-of-age has never been so fraught with wonder and peril in this unforgettable novel of what it means to be young.”
DON’T STAND SO CLOSE will be published on August 2nd in trade paperback and on August 23rd in Kindle editions.
Trade paperback edition is available for pre-order from: https://bit.ly/3hqjfBI Kindle edition is available for pre-order from: https://amzn.to/3yGZDiw

More to come!

I’m very honored to be inducted into the Arrow in the Head at JoBlo.com Horror Hall of Fame!

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2020

Watch the YouTube video at: https://bit.ly/3po8uAX

Subscribe to the Official Eric Red YouTube channel.

Thursday, November 5th, 2020

Watch  selected scenes from my movies, original uncut sequences, exclusive making of behind-the-scenes documentaries, book trailers, and lots more fun stuff!  Check it out at: https://youtube.com/user/johnryder12000

The Ultimate Genre

Friday, September 25th, 2020

The Western, I believe, is the ultimate genre.

The epic nomenclature of tough, strong cowboys in big hats with guns and horses pitted in physical and psychological contests of good versus evil fought on rugged frontier landscapes that externally mirror their own jagged internal natures is mythic and timeless. But while the entire world loves westerns, the U.S. owns the brand, and westerns remain our own uniquely American mythology and true contribution to pop culture. Westerns are the American Arthurian Legend.

Born from the harsh realities of the Old West, bred through a century of thrilling popular culture in novels and film that fired the public imagination, imprinted by books and movies that cross-pollinated each other to create a grand mythology that remains popular as ever today; it’s hard to tell now where the reality ends and myth begins with westerns, but cowboy good guys and bad guys are baked into our collective consciousness.

While there is a certain mystery to the mystique of the western, some things are certain: it’s a heroic genre, full of honor and nobility with bigger-than-life heroes and villains; it’s a physical genre, action-packed on the purest level with riding and fistfights and shooting; and it’s a cathartic genre, where morality tales about good versus evil end in a decisive, satisfying showdown at the climax that gives us a vicarious sense of triumph we rarely achieve in our complicated real world where right and wrong is not always clear.

Some part of us needs this as human beings on the deepest level, which is the appeal of all heroic mythologies going back forever. Reading or watching a western, however briefly, we experience the wish fulfillment of becoming the cowboys we played at being as kids and heroes we want to be as adults if only real life were as simple as saddling your horse, grabbing your guns, and riding to the rescue.

One of the things as a screenwriter and novelist I appreciate most about westerns is the genre can absorb every other genre into the storytelling; elements of other genres like thriller, mystery, crime, even horror, all can be injected into a western story. There is even a thriving genre of romance westerns! The classic template of cowboys and guns and horses and landscapes is a canvas that can be painted with many brushes; this very adaptability makes it such an exciting genre for a writer to explore.

While many folks know me for my horror and thriller films and books, in actuality westerns are my favorite genre and the genre I’ve worked the most in, having written and produced western movies, written western novels and even created a western comic book. The movie was an HBO film called The Last Outlaw starring Mickey Rourke, a gritty, bloody adventure about a gang of outlaws pursued by a posse led by their leader who they had left for dead.

Mixing the horror and western literary genres became the inspiration for my novels The Guns Of Santa Sangre and its sequel The Wolves Of El Diablo from SST Publications, about three tough American gunfighters battling several generations of werewolves who are bandits by day in Old Mexico.

My bestselling current western book series, the Joe Noose Westerns from Pinnacle Books & Kensington Books, revolves around the adventures of a tough and complex bounty hunter in 1800s Wyoming. With Noose, Hanging Fire, Branded and The Crimson Trail, the Noose series is on its fourth book with more to come.

My lifelong love of the Western genre continues to inspire me endlessly as a creative open range of possibilities always offering new frontiers in storytelling.

Saddle up.

My ghost movie 100 FEET with Famke Janssen gets a tribute article on Arrow In The Head at JoBlo.Com.

Monday, July 6th, 2020

Huge thanks to Arrow in the Head at JoBlo.com for a terrific tribute video article on my ghost movie 100 FEET. This is the best piece anybody has ever done on the film. Informative, fast-paced and full of great stuff about the flick, it is must viewing for fans of my work and horror fans in general.

https://bit.ly/3f6JucO

During this period of everybody locked down in our homes sharing anxieties of isolation and dread, audiences can personally relate to 100 FEET in a way they couldn’t before, making the movie more frightening than ever. We’re all in lockdown inside our homes just like the movie’s heroine Marnie played by Famke Janssen but her problems are worse than yours since she’s shut in with the violent ghost of her dead husband who doesn’t believe in social distancing. The suffocating claustrophobia of Famke’s situation in the movie is so identifiable to us these days, viewing 100 FEET now may be unbearably intense for some of you, get in your head and give you nightmares. You have been warned.

100 FEET is my personal favorite of the films I’ve made and my best job as a director. It’s easy to frighten people with gore and jump scares but true skill in suspense lies in the creation of tension without any of that. It’s about manipulating audience expectations so just when they think something is about to happen, it doesn’t and when they least expect it, it does. 100 FEET is basically an entire movie with a woman alone in a house with a ghost. The ghost is almost never seen, and when ghost attacks are always terrifying and unexpected. This is a very Hitchcockian film of elevated suspense.

This movie got made during the trend of torture porn horror films so I wanted to go completely in the other direction and scare the hell of the audience without relying on kills or gory violence like everyone else was doing. And it worked. 100 FEET keeps you on the edge of your seat for ninety minutes and there is only one kill in the entire movie! What interested me making 100 FEET was using classic techniques of point of view and visual subliminal suggestion to generate tension and lead you around by the nose rather than hit you in the face.

As a director, it was a wonderful challenge. If you’ve seen 100 FEET before watch it again because you’ll get more out of seeing the film now than you did then. If you haven’t seen it, I would definitely not recommend watching it alone locked down in your house late at night.

Or maybe I would.

Cover artwork revealed for the Blu Ray of my horror/thriller BODY PARTS from Shout! Factory and Scream Factory!

Monday, October 7th, 2019

Street date 1/28/19.