|Riccardo Williams| n October 2025, I saw Hausu for the first time ever at The Trylon. I was so moved that I immediately went home and could not find a way to get the movie out of my head. After sitting and thinking about it for about an hour, I asked one of my friends who I thought would like the movie to watch it with me over video call. And so I had seen… Continue reading
|Matthew Christensen| In 2006 I moved from Minneapolis to Japan to teach English in one of the large adult language schools they have there. It was a good job, and my students were an enjoyable eclectic assortment of businessmen and women, housewives, retired folks, and high school students. One of the textbooks contained a simplified retelling… Continue reading
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| “Now is the time, now is the hour, ours is the magic, ours is the power.” The first lines of The Craft (1996, directed by Andrew Fleming) focus us on the goal of the film’s creators, empowerment. Instead of a cute coming-of-age drama, we get sexism, racism, classism, depression, addiction, sexual assault, and… Continue reading
|Andrew Neill| True magic is neither black nor white. It’s both because nature is both. Loving and cruel all at the same time. This line, spoken by Assumpta Serna as the enigmatic shopkeeper Lirio, may be explicitly about magic and nature, but it extends to the central focus of the movie around it… Continue reading
|Victoria Breshears| When the White House deactivated entry badges for reporters from CNN, Politico, and MS NOW this September, the administration defended the lockout through the familiar vocabulary of institutional decorum. The move cleared the room of inconvenient questions. Deactivating a press badge does what political… Continue reading
|Benjamin Desbois| He was nine feet tall and his name was Darryl. Made mostly of paper mache and chicken wire, he weighed about 40 pounds. Wood planks ran down his spine and were attached to a backpack-like harness of bike tires and wood built… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| May 28, 2009, 11:45 PM. The summer so far has been a veritable shitshow. X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian, Terminator: Salvation, Angels and Demons. I’m a bit more positive… Continue reading
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| In the fall of 2023, I suffered my first ever bike accident as an adult (though I’d experienced plenty as a kid, largely due to a general lack of self-regard for my body flying off dirt ramps, across alleyways, and through dark wooded terrain). In fact, I suffered three accidents in a matter of … Continue reading
|Wil McMillen| I’m going to tell you something, and you can either choose to believe it or not. (Deep breath, exhale) I lived in a real-life haunted house for six months. From January to June 2013, my family and I were having our house renovated. During that time, we had to live in a rental house that had more than enough weird things happen to bring us to the conclusion that… Continue reading
|Jay Ditzer| In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, indie filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has been hired to reboot Camp Miasma, an in-universe cult slasher franchise. Early in the film, she stops at a remote gas station, buys a DVD of Camp Miasma Part VI: A New Beginning, and fills a shopping cart with a mountain, or at least a hill, of candy. She later … Continue reading
|Devin Warner| For those who are unfamiliar with the band Goblin (or as my Mom said upon hearing the Suspiria soundtrack she bought me for my birthday, “what is that noise?”), they are one of the most preeminent composers in cinema. They created … Continue reading
|Lucille Hanson| “WITCH!” screams the Suspiria soundtrack every now and again, startling the viewers like it’s an accusation. With its frantic drums that feel like someone is chasing you down, the low bellows that feel like they’re coming deep from inside… Continue reading
|Abraham Teuber| Have horror movies always been so romantic? As predictable as the changing leaves, the dating app normies whip out the ol’ “Let’s cuddle and watch a horror movie” line every October. The hulking recliners in chain multiplexes have enabled the canoodling. Raisable armrests and blankets… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| I’ve loved (or at least enjoyed) most of the films I’ve written about in the six years I’ve been aware of Perisphere, but every now and again, we show one of my personal favorite films. You know the ones. The select group—some film nerds have them… Continue reading
|Ben Tuthill| For a country obsessed with our colonial heritage, we’re astonishingly bad at making movies about it. Once upon a time, we put out a French and Indian War movie every other year. The practice fell out around the time of the Bicentennial, and since then … Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| Humans have burned each other at the stake for a long time. Records dating back to the Code of Hammurabi prescribe death by burning for criminals convicted of incest or heresy. The Celts may have roasted their human sacrifices… Continue reading
|Doug Carmody| Season of the Witch plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema on Wednesday, September 30, one night only. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. The 1970s found George Romero in a peculiar place—Pittsburgh, not Hollywood. Despite his debut’s eventually colossal impact on horror cinema and eventually massive box office… Continue reading
|Benjamin Jarman| was watching the TV show Agatha All Along, about a group of witches in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. By this point, my mind had been trained to expect Donovan’s 1966 hit single, “Season of the Witch,” to start whenever I watch… Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| For the past year, I’ve had Umberto Eco’s essay “Ur-Fascism” open in a tab in Firefox on my phone. Going about my daily life the way I did prior to 2025 has me feeling wrong-footed. I feel like a foreigner on earth, like the world… Continue reading
| Wil McMillen | It’s astonishing to realize now, but Anthony Perkins wasn’t even nominated for Best Actor for his role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s cultural earthquake Psycho. Horror films rarely get the attention they deserve, but one would expect… Continue reading
| Matthew Tchepikova-Treon | Her hands were on my shoulders, perhaps even clasped lightly behind my neck. I can’t remember for sure, all those middle school dances, so uneventful yet monumental at the same time. The sense memories slowly slip out of focus over the years… Continue reading
| Matthew Tchepikova-Treon | Have you ever been hungover in church? That particular feeling is what Kris Kristofferson’s album The Silver Tongued Devil and I sounds like. Or it’s how I’d describe it anyway. Sweat, salvation, and self-loathing, but in a fun sorta way. Because by Sunday night you again remember… Continue reading
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| For the inaugural 1980s Action Extravaganza, three years ago now, I wrote an ode to a few particular moments from action movie soundtracks that, by sheer musical force, can compel moviegoers to exclaim aloud, “Fuckin A!” This year, inspired by… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| Bleak Week, which began at the American Cinematheque in 2022, partially as an ironic response to the pandemic, has now spread globally and is making its triumphant return to Trylon Cinema. This time with Testament, the story of a family in a small town on the outskirts of San Francisco in the aftermath of… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| Eager to celebrate Bleak Week, my favorite national holiday, I asked humbly to write about Sátántangó. My intentions were noble. I wanted to do a “Slow Looking” analysis in which I muse about the benefits of immersing oneself in the world of a film over many… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| To call a film totally immersive is to imply that there isn’t almost always some sort of invisible barrier between the viewer and the images projected on the screen. Something happens in the space between the light’s reflection and the eyes of its observer that dilutes perception to the point where even the most painfully… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| Just two years before her death, Kinuyo Tanaka gave an interview for the 1975 documentary Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director. It was during this interview that Kaneto Shindō, the director, inquired about the rumor that Mizoguchi was secretly in love with her and never confessed his feelings. Tanaka, while flattered… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| It’s 10:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. The lights in your apartment are dimmed. There’s a migraine kicking in, and your insomnia is fighting the sedative in your medication just long enough to keep you conscious. You’re aching for the sweet release of death sleep—but you know that if you try to lay down… Continue reading
|Olga Tchepikova-Treon| As far as I’m concerned, every week at the cinema should be Bleak Week. Well, not every week, but let’s say maybe 40 out of 52 weeks of the year could easily be Bleak Week, and it would be wonderful, cathartic, exhilarating, moving, and maybe even sublime. I like Bleak Week, and bleak movies in general, for mostly… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| I love both David Fincher movies and movies about tracking and apprehending serial killers. I also love a good true crime doc. My Netflix recently watched is filled to the brim with multi-episode rundowns of both the most well-known offenders as well as the bizarre… Continue reading
|Chelli Riddiough| The Terminator isn’t a very horny film, unless you’re into feathered mullets and homicidal Austrians. But inside this ‘80s action thriller lives a love story, and not one, but two, very weird sex scenes. That’s enough to catapult it into a genre I call “cyberspunk.” When The Terminator begins, our protagonist… Continue reading
|Ben Jarman| Memories of Deep Blue Sea’s initial release still stick with me even though I never went to see it. I remember the smart shark gimmick and Samuel L. Jackson yelling, “Just what the hell did you do to those sharks!” in the trailer. I also remember… Continue reading
|Wil McMillen| Network plays in at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, March 27th, through Sunday, March 29th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. My first day as a national news photographer was December 19, 1998, one of the most important and crazy days that nobody ever talks about…. Continue reading
|Natalie Marlin| Noise was roiling in Olivier Assayas’s blood as the 20th century neared a close. At the end of his 1996 film Irma Vep, the director of the film-within-a-film has disavowed his initial attempt at a conventional filmmaking style. The star has left the picture. The narrative is… Continue reading
|Lucas Vonasek| John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) begins bleakly. Train horns moan as they clatter along the rails, surveillance helicopters chop through the air above in staccato, and smog drapes a city dominated by monolithic buildings clad with corporate logos. These structures… Continue reading
|Nate Logsdon| On January 5, 1970, Jock Yablonski was found dead in his home alongside the bodies of his wife and adult daughter. They had been shot six days earlier, on New Year’s Eve. Yablonski was a Pennsylvania coal miner who became… Continue reading
|Brogan Earney| If you’re like me and you grew up in Minnesota in the 90s or early 2000s, then we can all agree that Gordon Bombay was the shit. I first saw the Mighty Ducks films when I was 6 years old, and I quickly latched onto the character and looked up to his methodology, and I wasn’t even a hockey player. Over time, I realized that… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| Before anything was “Lynchian,” “Altmanesque,” or “Kafkaesque,” it was “Shakespearean.” For the last four centuries, William Shakespeare’s deep-seated insight into the emotion and moral complexity of the human experience continues to enthrall audiences to this very day. Every actor… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| When I initially pitched this idea for Alien to Perisphere, I intended to write a snarky, humor-laden essay about the trope of smart women who are ignored in horror/sci-fi films until the very loud, usually mustachioed men who did the ignoring succumb to their dumb, … Continue reading
|Zach Staads| If you really want to make a statement, affect some real change and be an upstanding, ambitious member of the bureaucratic body that keeps the lights on*—you should know the importance of bureau fashion and the importance it plays in… Continue reading
