TV & Film
Healing Through Horror
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Oh, the Horror! It doesn’t often come up but when it does, people are often surprised when I tell them I never set out to be a horror writer. Sure, I’m a die-hard, lifelong fan of the genre, and it was reading Stephen King’s The Shining at thirteen that opened my mind and imagination to…
What To Read While You’re Waiting for the Next Season of Yellowjackets
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How do you know someone just finished binging both seasons of Yellowjackets? A. They roam around in a daze grabbing random people and asking, “Who is pit girl? Who is pit girl?” I know I’m not the only one obsessed with the Showtime series about a New Jersey high school soccer team, the unspeakable things…
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…
A Cultural History of the Erotic Thriller
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The strip mall video rental store was an emporium of illicit dreams. Its doorway in the small town where I came of age, located in between candy store and pharmacy, doubled as a portal into fantasy, dark explorations of human nature, and cheap thrills that looked mightily expensive. Beginning in my early teenage years, I…
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…
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…
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, Le Carré/Cornwell ended up participating in a documentary about his life. Surprisingly, the resulting film—also called The Pigeon Tunnel, and directed by Errol Morris, feels so…
Ruins in Rain City: Trouble in Mind and the Career of Alan Rudolph
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Filmmaker Alan Rudolph has been working in the movie business for most of his life. Coming from a Hollywood family where his dad Oscar was also a director, Rudolph began his career as an assistant director on various projects including the Jim Brown/Gene Hackman flick Riot (1969), eleven episodes of The Brady Bunch and a…