Culture
Anatomy of a Fall Is a Stunning Experiment in Unknowability
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In 1990, Jens Soering and Elizabeth Haysom were found guilty of the murders of Haysom’s parents. Haysom, who testified against Soering, claimed that he had committed the crime alone, but at her urging. Soering initially confessed to this, but then quickly recanted his confession: he has maintained his innocence to this day. In prison, both…
James Kennedy: “Storytellers are manipulative cult leaders.”
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I missed my chance to be in a cult. In my twenties, a guy on the street handed me a pamphlet to join a “communal farm”—an obvious cult. Nevertheless, I was intrigued: maybe I could enjoy this farm’s bucolic vibes and free love, while shrewdly avoiding any mass suicide, or baby-eating, or barnyard chores. I…
Sudden Death and the Startlement of Absence
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Sudden Death is a dirty business. It touches you, and there’s no rubbing it off. Scrub until you bleed. No dice—it remains. Maybe that’s why I keep writing about it. A Southern California summer in ‘93. I remember blades of grass on the bottoms of my feet. Morning dew between my toes, and sunshine on…
Confessions of a Serial Anthology Editor
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My parents moved to Paris in France for work when I was only three years old. As a result, not only did I become bilingual (and was once capable of writing in both languages) but I spent much of my first two decades navigating between France and England as a result. In my early teens,…
On the Uncanny Delights of the The Invisible Man
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I wish so badly that I could have seen The Invisible Man in 1933 when it premiered in theaters. The film is a carnival of early special effects, a parade of parlor tricks and stage magic and photographic tricks. To see it for the first time, unburdened by the knowledge of a century’s worth of…
Spooky Shenanigans for Halloween
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I’m such a sucker for holidays. I love to completely immerse myself in a theme: holiday decorations, holiday meals, holiday baking. As soon as the leaves start to turn amber and scarlet; the air goes crisp; and when the windows have that little bit of frost in the mornings, it’s time to think of pumpkins…
David Fincher’s The Killer is a Winking Investigation into the Limits of Control
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In his foreword to Adam Nayman’s “David Fincher: Mind Games,” director Bong Joon-ho explains his personal dichotomy for classifying films, dividing them into “curvilinear” (like those of Federico Fellini and Emir Kusturica) and “linear” (like those of Stanley Kubrick and David Fincher). Bong makes a point to say that Fincher goes beyond the linear, “[cutting]…
Goosebumps Remixes Its Source Material to Satisfying Results
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Adapting a property like Goosebumps, R.L. Stine’s beloved series of children’s horror novels, for the big (or small) screen in 2023 is a tricky proposition. Each of the sixty-two books in the original run, apart from a handful of sequels, stands alone, so an anthology format, like the one adopted by the popular Canadian-produced television…