Agatha Christie was famously a founding member of The Detection Club, a group of mystery writers formed in 1930. They crafted ten commandments about writing detective fiction, composed by member Ronald Knox, of which the second very clearly stated: “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” Sometimes, though, Christie […]
Cullen Wade “Swimming isn’t a sport. Swimming is a way to keep from drowning.” —George Carlin, Playin’ with Your Head Springboard If, as it’s speculated, our prehistoric ancestors learned swimming to escape predators1, I doubt many of the millions of Americans who use swimming pools every year are consciously practicing how to avoid being […]
With this month’s release of Tarot (Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg), a horror-comedy supernatural slasher inspired by 2000s mid-budget American horror, I decided to count down nine other instances of tarot readings in horror, thriller and supernatural film.
While director Matt Reeves may have described the most recent Batman movie, The Batman (2022), as “almost a horror film,” horror as an aesthetic mood or idiom pervades representations of the character and his world across cinematic history. The stylistically and tonally diverse cinematic projects of Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher, and Christopher Nolan and now, […]
“Once upon a time, there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow.” -Red (Lupita Nyong’o), Us (2019) We live in a haunted house. The founding of the American nation began with a moment of sweeping amnesia about its defining structure—settler colonialism, a form of colonization that replaces the original population of the colonized […]
Seemingly normal, yet subtly menacing surroundings, anticipations of looming evil, the creeping notion of something or someone being not quite right – perhaps you … A new heyday of sophisticated horror, led by the likes of The Babadook, The Witch, Midsommar and Get Out, brings back a cinematic conception which not only predated the horror […]
Consider this your Thanksgiving PSA! If your family is anything like ours, you probably spend hours cooking up a scrumptious meal for the family only to watch it be consumed in less than twenty minutes. So should you be looking for an excuse not to cook, I thought I would share 8 food moments in […]
Now more than ever, we’ve been living in a horror film, as the isolation of seven plus months of lockdown has forced us into a reality mediated almost entirely by screens. For those of us working remotely, days are spent on computers and in video meetings. We socialize through phones and laptops too: Zoom birthday […]
As folk horror has steadily become more popular over the course of the last ten years, a canon has emerged –the “must watch” folk horror films. These canonical films are all eminently worth watching—and they begin with what Adam Scovell called the “unholy trinity”: Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers […]