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As spooky season opens for 2026, horror can be found in many forms. Philadelphia artist James Heimer is guiding people to the sometimes cheap and tawdry variety on television.
“Horror movies are thought of as junk culture, but I think the craft of stuntmen in a rubber suit, tramping through miniatures, stop motion animation, it’s art,” he said.
To celebrate that art, Heimer has relaunched his annual October newsletter called The Matinee Idle. It lists horror and science fiction movies broadcast on Philadelphia regional TV. The weekly snail-mail folio only exists during the four weeks of October and only lists movies that can be seen for free on terrestrial broadcast, i.e. antenna television.
As someone who has joined the roughly 22 million Americans who have cut cable and watch over-the-air broadcasts, Heimer is not interested in streaming or cable TV horror.
“I haven’t had cable in five years and I’m perfectly content with what I’ve got,” he said.
Heimer is an editorial artist who has illustrated for The New York Times, NPR, Philadelphia’s Grid Magazine, Harvard Magazine and the Portland Monthly. He also teaches illustration at Arcadia University.
The Matinee Idle occasionally breaks its own rules by listing movies that are streamed online, but Heimer makes sure there are no paywalls for viewing them or that the movies can be accessed for free through the Free Library of Philadelphia.
“It is as culturally significant as anything in any museum, but these things are not held in the public trust. They’re owned by media conglomerates,” he said. “This is my way of showing people how to access these things for free because I do think they’re culturally significant.”
Some of the films listed in The Matinee Idle have titles that sound like costume ideas: “The Crawling Eye,” “Twins of Evil,” “Fiend without a Face,” “Alligator People” and “The Green Slime.” It also lists seasonal favorites such as “Halloween” — AMC is kicking off October with a marathon of the first five films — “Night of the Living Dead” and “An American Werewolf in London.”
Heimer composes the newsletter from a corner of his Mt. Airy bedroom. It’s filled with original art and brief encapsulations of selected films, typically snarky one-liners. The movies listed start broadcasting at dawn. For instance, you can catch “The Bad Seed” at 6 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 4. That’s if you wouldn’t rather watch “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare,” which airs at 6:15 a.m.
“Murderous child or child murdered?” Heimer wrote. “You have some choices this morning.”
The films continue into the dead of night and before dawn. David Cronenberg’s “Rabid,” about reconstructive surgery gone horribly wrong, is showing at 4 a.m. on Oct. 10.
“Had David Cronenberg continued on this trajectory he might have become a kind of revisionist George Romero,” Heimer wrote, comparing Cronenberg, known for movies like “The Fly” and “Scanners,” to Romero, the late filmmaker behind “Night of the Living Dead” and “Dawn of the Dead.”
“I’m glad he didn’t,” he added.
“I write reviews from memory,” he said. “Some of these movies I haven’t seen in 10 or 15 years. Sometimes I get things wrong and people call me out for it, but I think it’s more interesting that way.”
