Horror is having its moment.

It’s dominating the film industry, with ‘Sinners’ recieving a record 16 nominations and four wins at this year’s Oscars – Frankenstein and Weapons getting their nods as well.

And a man who will forever be synonymous with horror is Robert Englund – the original Freddy Krueger.

Even though he’s long since hung up his fedora, striped sweater, and razor-fingered gloves, he’s still involved in highly influential thriller projects, including Netflix’s Stranger Things.

“I’m so proud of Sinners for, for kind of being one of the first horror films since ‘Silence of the Lambs’, then before that, perhaps ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, to really kind of be taken seriously at its time by the academy,” he told Jack Tame.

“I think Sinners has really begun another kind of renaissance,” Englund said.

“I sort of thought for a minute there that maybe all the zombie projects had sort of exhausted the audience, you know, for a while, but you know, Sinners was so fresh and so wonderful.”

Some may take a view that horror is a lower form of art, that the actors just turn up and snarl, unaware of the training many horror actors have. Englund for example, was classically trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

“What it does is it gives you a technique if you need it,” he explained.

“I sometimes get parts, I can’t believe they want me for these roles ... so then you have this technique to rely on. It’s an opening.”

Performing for stage is also quite different than performing for screen – on stage you have to exaggerate things, perform to the back of the room, whereas screen acting requires a more naturalistic performance.

But for Freddy, he brought those elements of stage acting into his performance.

“I didn't worry about my thinning hair, and I didn't worry about my good side or my bad side, and I was able to change my voice and I was able to move differently than Robert Englund would normally move on film because Freddy occupies this sort of surreal imagination,” Englund told Tame.

“I don’t like to use the word dance, but I was able to physicalize him more, kind of paint him into the frame of the imagination of whoever was having a nightmare about him, and that was really liberating.”

“Playing Freddy for all those years was actually a very liberating thing for me, and it kind of gave me a career on the other side that I know I wouldn’t normally have had because I had been established as a genre star.”

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One of the most well-known music festivals in the world is currently taking place.

Coachella is a ten-day festival that takes place in the California desert, with dozens of the biggest musical acts performing on its stages. The festival is also livestreamed, free to watch on YouTube.

Chris Schulz isn’t at the festival physically, but in his opinion, watching the streams is the TV event of the year. He joined Jack Tame for a chat about Coachella.

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The Keeper by Tana French

On a cold night in the remote Irish village of Ardnakelty, a girl goes missing. Sweet, loving Rachel Holohan was about to be engaged to the son of the local big shot. Instead, she’s dead in the river.

In a close-knit small town, a death like this isn’t simple. It comes wrapped in generations-old grudges and power struggles, and it splits the townland in two. Retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper has friends here now, and he owes them loyalty, but his fiancée Lena wants nothing to do with Ardnakelty’s tangles. As the feud becomes more vicious, their settled peace starts to crack apart. And when they uncover a scheme that casts a new light on Rachel’s death and threatens the whole village, they find themselves in the firing line.

The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon

In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.

But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow sentient appliances discover that there are sinister forces in their midst. The omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, seeks to remove Harold from his home, a place he’s lived in for fifty years.

With the help of Adrian, a neighborhood boy who grows close to Scout and Harold, as well as Kate, Harold and Edie’s formerly estranged daughter, the humans and the appliances must come together to outwit the all-controlling Grid lest they risk losing everything they hold dear.

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