Features
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…
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…
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…
Why Horror Fiction Matters for Telling Indigenous Stories
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I’ve been consuming horror films and books from perhaps a too young age, though it’s worked out fine for me. It’s been a formative genre for me as a…
16 Spooky Novellas by Women and Nonbinary Authors
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What makes a spooky novella so satisfying? You might as well ask why a raven is like a writing desk. (The answer, of course, is that all three things remind…
Dann McDorman on Exploring Literary Hijinks and Meta Mystery
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While mysteries can usually be trusted to compel the reader within the first chapter or even the first few pages, it’s rare for them to hook us from the…
The Pigeon Tunnel, the New Film About John le Carré, is Intimate and Illuminating
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John le Carré (born David Cornwell) hated giving interviews. “First you invent yourself, then you believe the invention”, he wrote in his autobiography The Pigeon Tunnel. Despite these reservations,…
How Scarface Became a “Foundational Influence for Hip Hop”
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It’s hard to think of a $21 million dollar motion picture as a “cult movie” but that’s what Brian DePalma’s 1983 Scarface almost became until it was saved by…
The New Season of “Lupin” Is Extravagant, Spectacular, and Occasionally Hard to Believe
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Two things jumped out at me back when I started watching the first season of Lupin, Netflix’s wildly successful show about a ‘gentleman thief’ in Paris who spends his…