By Mo Moshaty

Few writers can look at a swimming pool and see a whole century of terror rippling beneath the surface, but that strange, shimmering lens is exactly where Cullen Wade does his best work. Today marks the publication of S(p)lasher Flicks: The Swimming Pool in Horror Cinema (McFarland Books), a 99,000-word deep dive into how an everyday recreational space became one of the genre’s most quietly potent nightmares. And honestly? It feels like celebrating one of our own.

For longtime NightTide readers, Cullen’s voice is unmistakable. His essays wander with purpose; drifting from the last light on an empty beach (Carnival of Souls), to the ethics of looking at century-old cinema through contemporary eyes (The Lost World at 100), to the long shadow cast by police in the slasher canon (Axes, Cleavers, and Badges), to the strange domestic unravelings of Tobe Hooper’s apartment trilogy. He brings warmth to analysis, curiosity to scholarship, and a subtle humor that turns even the bleakest celluloid into something lit from within.

What Makes S(p)lasher Flicks Special

Horror fans know that a pool scene can be playful, sexy, liminal, or downright lethal, but Cullen treats these waters with an interdisciplinary joy. Blending swimming-pool history, aquatics research, psychology, sexuality studies, film theory, and good old genre obsession, he traces how pools became stages for fear, longing, power, and transformation across nine decades of cinema.

Instead of walking readers through a chronological museum, Cullen groups his films thematically:

• Haunted pools and domestic hauntologies
• Vengeful women and the back-stroke of rage
• Suburbia’s manicured perfections and Stepford shimmer

It’s cerebral but never stiff, playful without losing its depth, the kind of writing that makes you say, “Oh, I’ll just read one chapter,” and suddenly you’ve burned through forty pages, and now you gotta heat up your cocoa for the third time.

Cullen’s Work Through the NightTide Lens

What we love most about Cullen’s writing, and what S(p)lasher Flicks captures in long form, is his instinct to trace the emotional topography beneath horror’s visuals. He writes about a deserted shoreline like it’s an open wound. He handles early genre cinema with both critique and care. He examines institutional violence without romanticizing it. And he has a gift for locating where a film’s atmosphere, not its plot points, leaves its bruise.

His NightTide pieces have taught our readers how to listen when emptiness speaks, how to recontextualize the old without flattening it, and how to recognize the systems that ghost their way through our favorite movies.

This book feels like the natural evolution.

Why This Matters for the Genre

Horror scholarship is expanding in all directions, but what Cullen is doing here feels almost architectural — he’s mapping an overlooked space with the seriousness (and delight) of someone drawing blueprints for a house built on dread.

Swimming pools are liminal by design: contained yet exposed, communal yet deeply private, familiar yet uncanny. By treating them as cultural and psychological mirrors, Cullen opens up a new way to understand horror’s relationship to bodies, desire, danger, and the spaces we pretend are safe. It’s the kind of book that makes you rethink a trope you thought you already understood.

A Final Word for Pub Day

Cullen, thank you for being part of NightTide’s beating heart: for every eerie coastline, every theoretical rabbit hole, every film you’ve illuminated with tenderness and insight. S(p)lasher Flicks is a triumph, and we’re honored to celebrate you today.

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