The Waits is Over: “Big Time” Finally (Kinda, Sorta) Brings Tom Waits Back to Minneapolis
The Breathless Loitering of Down By Law
The Lyrical Loneliness of Down By Law
The Waits is Over: “Big Time” Finally (Kinda, Sorta) Brings Tom Waits Back to Minneapolis
|Chris Ryba-Tures| Y’all. After, like, 25 years of waiting, hoping, dreaming, I finally get to see Tom Waits in concert! Some of you have probably been waiting even longer. Don’t worry, you can come too. Get your ticket to see the mysterious junkyard troubadour, the skid-row Cyrano,
The Breathless Loitering of Down By Law
|Ryan Sanderson| In the first few minutes of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic, Breathless, Parisian bad boy Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) shoots a cop. The moment-as-scripted is very familiar. It’s a classic Hollywood film noir trope—the edgy criminal crosses a boundary from...
The Lyrical Loneliness of Down By Law
|Jackson Stern| Some of the best songs you can listen to when you’re at your lowest are the loneliest ones. When I was near the end of high school, I got my heart broken in a few different ways, like a lot of people do at that age, and I’d go for these long drives. Almost every day after school
The Only 35mm Print of Tom Waits’s Big Time
|John Costello| When a character, on stage or on screen, breaks the fourth wall and another character notices and comments, something special happens. A skilled performer involves the audience as performers in the live performance. Unlike plays and fictional films, concert films...
Of Teens and Time Travel: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
|Dan McCabe| Time travel is a fantasy. While time travel stories often get lumped in with science fiction, there’s not much “science” behind it. While general relativity and time dilation theories support the possibility of moving forward in time, backwards time travel has about as...
A Juggler, an Apple Farmer, and a Psychotic Slumlord walk into a bar in a Bankrupt City…
|Lucas Hardwick| In the hierarchy of entertainment juggling is somewhere between miming and magic outranking puppet shows but only slightly less compelling than street buskers (depending on what the busker is playing, of course). In case you’re wondering how low the bar...
A Hit Before It Was Made, And A Fairy Tale Ahead Of Its Time: How Nobuhiko Obayashi Made “House”
|Lucile Hanson| “How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava?” That quote is what opens up the description on the...
The Mesmerizing Horror of Essentially a Single Room Set in The Exorcist
|Allison Vincent| Honeymooning in order to see as many haunted houses as possible is, admittedly, a bit eclectic. Because we were COVID brides, my wife and I had to make a LOT of changes to our wedding plans, including moving...
Fear in a Handful of Dust: Hell, Faith, and Will in The Exorcist
|Harry Mackin| The Exorcist knows you're afraid of it from the moment it begins. Well before its disturbing supernatural plot starts in earnest, you can feel the malice Friedkin imbues into every shot and frame, like "fear in a handful of dust"...
It’s Terror Time Again
|Devin Warner| The Horrorthon is back in just a few short weeks at the Trylon, and once again, my body is ready to experience watching film after film after film. Movie marathons are something that you just can’t really get anywhere else...
The Gift That Keeps on Giving: Black Christmas and the Creative Continuum of Holiday Horror
|Andrew Neill| My first experience of cinematic horrors shattering the porcelain white purity of the holidays had to be The Nightmare Before Christmas. Six-year-old Andrew was not prepared for Santa to be kidnapped by demonic trick ‘r treaters and tortured by the Oogie Boogie Man, a sentient bag...
The Wicker Man: The Sources for an Insular Folk Horror
|Sophie Durbin| The Wicker Man begins like a typical “everyone in this town is hiding something” crime story. Sergeant Neil Howie arrives by seaplane to the fictional Hebridean island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. He discovers that the locals, who seem ordinary at first, ...
Echoes of the Past: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and the Haunted Heroine Archetype
|Courtney Kowalke| Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Or did I? Do you believe everything I write in these reviews? Do you take me at my word when I mention details from my life, or is there a sliver of doubt? Do you know who I am offline? When I’m not the person behind the keyboard telling you...
Totally Folked Up: Sex, Song, and Sacrifice in The Wicker Man
|Jay Ditzer| Along a ruggedly beautiful coastline, a middle-aged man dressed in an incongruous white robe struggles as he is forced up a hill by villagers who sing cheerfully, as if celebrating—because they are. The man’s eyes...
Low-Down Horror :: Keep Screaming, Blacula
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| The following assertion is perhaps already an old saw by now, but still I think it bears repeating from time to time: The notion of “elevated horror” is pretentious AF. It’s a crass moniker meant to distinguish horror cinema’s more prestigious vendibles from...
“This is no dream! This is really happening!”: Rosemary’s Baby’s Horrific Reflections of Female Subjectivity in 1968 and Present-Day America
|Jillian Nelson| When Rosemary’s Baby released in 1968, conflicts over women’s rights raged on as second-wave feminists battled governmental restrictions that seeped into interpersonal relations. Birth control pills had only just been made legal. New York had recently...
Rosemary’s Baby: The Anatomy of a Satanic Impregnation Scene
|Sophie Durbin| take so much pleasure in every rewatch of Rosemary’s Baby that it often feels more like I’m visiting old friends, not watching one of the scariest films of the twentieth century. I love the pink font used in the title sequence, the New York Christmas scenes, the way...
Spirits of Light, or: Theatrical Lighting in Movies Makes Me Happy
|Zach Staads| I've used this quote at the top with almost no context for where it comes from or what it means. I'm not even checking to see if the person who quoted this is correct, and that this is something Kurt Vonnegut said or wrote. I quote it to illustrate how...
Ingmar’s Munsters: Hour of the Wolf
|Jackson Stern| For all of its philosophical wonderings, questions of morality, madness, and arthouse sensibilities, there’s something very different about Ingmar Bergman’s follow-up to the monolithic Persona. Sure, it contains all of the aforementioned heft of his previous films...
HOUR OF THE WOLF is Your Cathartic Nightmare
|Jake Rudegair| In your nightmare the dinner guests are ghouls (all but one of course, sweet Alma). They’re frocked up in tailcoats and ballgowns. They chat over each other, so you only catch shards here and there. “Bureaucratic vengefulness.” “Humiliation.” “The pus never...
Richard Nixon and the Ghosts of the American Dream
|Finn Odum| I must admit to you that I know very little about the 1970s. I know that Richard Nixon “pledged to end the Vietnam War”, sending the poorest of America’s sons to die aimless deaths while massacring innocents. Black activists fought in memory of assassinated...
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Hippie Road Trip Masterpiece (Film as a Self-Care Text About How It’s Totally Fine to Go No Contact With Your Family)
|Phil Kolas| Pulled pork tacos were a poor choice. That was my first thought when I started this movie. After the opening flash photography montage depicting half-decomposed human bodies, leading into the zoom-out reveal of...
Massacre for Sale: Houses on the Market Right Now That Look Like the House from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
|Ben Jarman| Last week I learned about the fate of the original house from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It appears the house was cut into several pieces in the ‘90s and transported to a town 60 miles away. The house is now a restaurant in Kingsland, TX. This revelation is...
Of Monsters, Machines, and Relationships: The Stepford Wives
|Dan McCabe| Obedient tool. That phrase from the intertitles of Metropolis describes what a group of men desire in another science fiction film made decades later, The Stepford Wives (1975). In Metropolis...