Make Halloween analog again: Philly artist’s snail-mail newsletter features TV horror movie listings for antenna TVs

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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.”

Little Shop of Horrors

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.”

As a lifelong consumer of pop culture whose home is filled with foxed paperback novels of horror and sci-fi, Heimer has absorbed these films into his life and art. He said his sense of color was formed by the hyper-saturated technicolor of mid-century bloodbaths.

“There’s something specifically about regional horror films, where they’re nonactors or local theater actors, and there is this awkward, off-ness that is not dissimilar from vernacular design or folk art,” Heimer said. “Those are the things that form the visual aesthetic of what I do.”

Some of these movies exist more like dreams than memories. Heimer recalls catching a glimpse on television of an astronaut being attacked by an alien with an exposed brain who compulsively licked its own lips. The image stayed with him for years, but the title did not. An online search was futile.

He later discovered, by chance, the 1965 film “Space Probe Taurus” in a bin at Philadelphia’s bimonthly comic convention. The unmoored creature was finally discovered, even if it was the only memorable thing in a low-budget movie that had been cobbled together from parts of other low-budget movies.

“The matte paintings in it are so atrocious that everything looks like a collage. There’s no depth of field. It’s really strange,” Heimer said. “I trash-talk this movie, but I did enjoy watching it. It’s thrilling for the visual effect. But, overall, it’s barely a film.”

The final countdown

About 50 people pay a $30 annual fee to subscribe to The Matinee Idle, Heimer said, with some fans hailing as far as Portland, Oregon, despite Philadelphia TV listings being useless there. He says the revenue goes into production costs and to keep the newsletter free for his family and friends.

“I still take a bath on this. I don’t make any money off of it,” he said. “This is meant to be a little clandestine. I’m sure you remember hearing a song on the radio and having to chase it, having to work for it. We’re in this stage with media where everything’s right in our face all the time. It’s worth a little bit of labor to access these things.”

This year’s round of The Matinee Idle will be the last. After five years, Heimer will be nailing its coffin shut after Halloween. He said the growing trend of consumers turning away from cable TV has caused television programmers to pay more attention to over-the-air broadcasting to make it more appealing to more consumers. The really weird creatures that stalk Heimer’s dreams are becoming harder to find.

“There are less channels showing horror movies and sci-fi movies in October than there were when I started,” he said. “The ones that are still at it are showing a lot of the same things over and over.”

Heimer’s work will also be included in a group show at Paradigm Gallery in Philadelphia’s Old City, “A Bump in the Night,” a Halloween-oriented exhibition of works by artists who “consider the fantastical and the incomprehensible.”

The show is co-curated by Ginger Rudolph and Sam Heimer, James’ brother and fellow artist whose macabre work keeps a Halloween sensibility year-round.

“Despite my credentials, he’s Philly’s real king of Halloween,” James said.