Shawn Van Horn
Shawn Van Horn connects music history with screen culture, writing features that treat songs, albums, movies, and TV shows as part of the same 1990s‑and‑horror‑centric canon. He uses list‑driven pieces and long‑form features to trace how rock music, genre cinema, and television intersect, giving readers both rankings and narrative context rather than standalone reviews.
Features and lists on music and the 1990s
Shawn writes music‑focused features that frame rock records inside their era, such as his ranking of the best rock album from every year of the 1990s. He moves beyond capsule blurbs to explain why particular albums matter, anchoring them in broader trends in rock and popular culture. Across this work he leans on the 1990s as a core lens, treating the decade’s music as a defined ecosystem of bands, breakout records, and shifting sounds rather than a loose nostalgia topic.
His lists are structured to be accessible reference pieces for readers who want a guided way into a style or era. Headline‑level topics stay broad — best albums, standout years, defining records — but inside the articles he gives concrete detail about how specific songs, production choices, or band trajectories distinguish each album. The tone is explanatory and authoritative rather than conversational, mirroring the way he handles 1990s film and television when those subjects overlap with music culture.
Horror and genre storytelling on screen
Alongside music coverage, Shawn is a senior features author at Collider with a focus on horror and 1990s TV and movies. He writes features, lists, recaps, and reviews that break down how genre stories work, often highlighting overlooked or under‑discussed titles. In pieces like his analysis of a sci‑fi horror film that combines elements of “The Thing” and “Alien,” he shows a clear interest in how different influences are woven together to create a specific mood or structure.
His horror coverage often emphasizes atmosphere, pacing, and character dynamics, picking out craft details that explain why a movie succeeds or falls short. When he writes about 1990s television and film, he treats that decade as a coherent period with recurring aesthetic and narrative patterns, similar to the way he approaches 1990s rock. This gives his body of work a through‑line: genre storytelling, whether in music or on screen, is examined as part of a larger cultural moment rather than in isolation.
Film and TV criticism across outlets
Shawn’s role at Collider extends beyond features into regular criticism of movies and TV series. He writes reviews that balance plot description with judgment about performances, direction, and emotional impact, and contributes list pieces that organize films or episodes around themes, rankings, or historical significance. His reviews also appear on aggregate platforms like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, where he continues to focus on the storytelling and tonal choices that define a project.
Outside of Collider he writes and edits features and news for wrestling and sports‑focused outlets, and has contributed to Static Media’s entertainment properties, which keeps him closely tied to mainstream pop culture as well as niche fandoms. This cross‑outlet work reinforces his pattern of covering narrative entertainment — from WWE storylines to scripted television — with the same structural focus he brings to albums and genre films.
Professional focus and format
Professionally, Shawn positions himself as a senior author and critic for movies and TV, while maintaining an active footprint in music‑adjacent and wrestling coverage. He works primarily in feature and list formats, with recaps and reviews as a secondary strand, which makes his work useful both as evergreen reference and as timely reaction to new releases. His regular output since 2022 shows a consistent interest in horror, 1990s culture, and the overlap between music scenes and screen narratives, rather than chasing one‑off viral topics.
Across all of these subjects, Shawn writes in a straightforward, descriptive style that privileges clarity over personality. He explains context, traces influence, and organizes information so that readers can see where a particular album, film, or episode sits within a wider landscape. For stories that touch music, horror, or 1990s entertainment, he tends to be most engaged when there is a strong genre framework or historical angle to unpack.
4 more music journalists.
Aisling Murphy
Aisling Murphy is the theatre reporter and critic at The Globe and Mail. She stands out for writing about theatre as both art and infrastructure, with coverage that links new Canadian stage work, awards culture, and pop-inflected criticism. She covers theatre, music, and pop culture in a detailed, conversational style, moving between reviews, reported features, and analysis of the systems that shape what gets produced. Her beat includes the Dora Awards, Toronto stages, new writing, intimate productions, and smaller venues, as well as controversy where artistic decisions meet politics and community response. Before The Globe, she was senior editor of Intermission Magazine, and her bylines include The New York Times, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, and the Baltimore Sun.
Alex Hudson
Alex Hudson is Editor-in-Chief of Exclaim! and leads coverage of music’s links to sports, literature, and technology, with a strong focus on Canadian artists. Hudson reports on how music intersects with other fields, not as a separate industry. Recent coverage has included Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer on how playing piano saved his career, Ottawa Bluesfest’s Canada-wide soccer watch party, Lakes of Canada’s Margaret Atwood-inspired album Transgressions, Hannah Mary McKinnon on The Beaches influencing her rock-themed novel, and Alexander Nilsson’s 1001 Albums Generator as a tool for broadening music discovery beyond algorithmic recommendations.
Alexis Mikulski Ruiz
Alexis Mikulski Ruiz is a commerce writer whose distinct focus is the buying and streaming side of music, entertainment and lifestyle, helping readers decide how to watch major events and what to purchase around them. She is an e-commerce specialist at Rolling Stone, covering products, platforms and deals tied to award shows, festivals, sports and everyday culture. Her beat blends music streaming guides with shopping and product recommendations across fashion, beauty, tech, food, wellness and drinks. She reports through experience-focused service journalism, using lists, comparison roundups and step-by-step guides to answer concrete questions about how to stream major cultural moments, where to shop and which products to choose. Her background includes commerce and lifestyle writing for consumer publications such as Esquire, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping, Oprah Daily, Women’s Wear Daily and Billboard.
Allie Gregory
Allie Gregory maps how audiences encounter new music by tracking the practical pathways of releases, tours, festivals, platforms and projects. She is a managing editor and news writer at Exclaim!, where she is a primary editorial contact for forthcoming releases and news tips and helps shape the outlet’s daily agenda around new music and its broader entertainment context. Her reporting centres on timely album and tour announcements, live logistics and festival programming across indie, metal, country, pop and adjacent film and streaming news. She writes direct, information-heavy pieces that foreground calendars, support acts, set times and programming structures, while also producing longer-form interviews, cultural stories and staff-pick recommendations that connect artists’ work, controversy and creative campaigns to how audiences encounter music and entertainment on the road, at festivals and on screens.