The Terrors of Death are Fallen Upon Me (Séance on a Wet Afternoon)
Future Imperfect: Jacques Tati’s Playtime vs. Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend
One Day, I Am Going to Grow Wings: Metamorphosis of the Self in Satoshi Kon’s Paprika
The Terrors of Death are Fallen Upon Me (Séance on a Wet Afternoon)
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| I’ve only ever seen British rain in the movies, a particular kind of rain that seems intent on keeping people indoors. Damp quietude where a slow-motion tempest may come forth, a private fantasy. What happens if it just sits in the parlor? What happens when...
Future Imperfect: Jacques Tati’s Playtime vs. Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend
|Hannah Baxter| 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left is a memoir by the surrealist English folk rocker Robyn Hitchcock. The book focuses on a defining year of Hitchcock’s adolescence, one in which he discovered the musicians—Bob Dylan chief among them—who...
One Day, I Am Going to Grow Wings: Metamorphosis of the Self in Satoshi Kon’s Paprika
|Riccardo Williams| From the moment we're brought into this world, we're molded by other's expectations of what we should be. For many, the bygone hopes of our parents are pinned to us before we have a chance to breathe air from outside of our mother's womb. Others are discarded, abused...
On Dreams: Paprika and Inception
|Dan McCabe| Dreams have long fascinated humanity, and we’ve always had this inclination that they contain deeper meanings than a series of random, often nonsensical images and scenarios first appear to contain. The concept of prophetic dreams, a staple of...
Seance on a Wet Afternoon, According to the Kim Stanley’s Needs
|Sophie Durbin| I jumped at the opportunity to write about Seance on a Wet Afternoon, one of only six films starring the legendary Kim Stanley. Ms. Stanley is something of a holy grail for midcentury acting nerds, with Seance being her Superbowl (though some might prefer her turn in The Goddess...
Videodrome Grabs Us by Our Eyes and Won’t Let Go
|Casey Jarrin| “What are you waiting for, lover? Let’s open these neural floodgates.” – Debbie Harry as Nicki Brand in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). Most people don’t just end up seeing Videodrome; it’s a choice and a rite of passage. I knew about Videodrome...
You Must Remember This and Identifying with the Artists Behind Hollywood’s History
|Andrew Neill| The 20th century ended over a quarter of a century ago, but it’s ever present on the movie podcast You Must Remember This. Since 2014, the show’s creator, writer, and host, Karina Longworth, has told true stories about the secret and/or forgotten history of...
Not Every Actress Should Look Like a Model: Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun
|Ed Dykhuizen| Since the earliest days of movies, they have been at least partially about showcasing attractive young women. The first film studios did so enthusiastically, even if they tried to keep the young women anonymous. Fans and newspapers still latched on to a...
Kanał and The Odyssey: The Power of Time and Sound
|Zach Staads| When I watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey for the first time, I was left empty. I enjoyed many aspects of it, certainly had my issues with it as someone who has studied Greek myth in some small way, but really I just felt like there was some strange missing piece.
Ingestion: Andrzej Wajda’s Kanał and the Dissolution of the Warsaw Insurgency
|Victoria Breshears| War films usually batter the senses with concussive noise from above, but Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal smothers them from below. The true horror begins only after conventional battlefield noises disappear, replaced by the wet, suctioning drag of submerged boots, frantic...
WarGames as Wonderland
|John Costello| When I began working on this piece, I wanted to dig into what I see as the dichotomy of rational computers versus irrational humans struggling over nuclear war in WarGames (1983). I wanted to contrast a previous era's acknowledgement that computers are programmed...
Wolverines! Red Dawn and the Fear We Grew Up With
|Eric Sorenson| As a teenager in the early 1980s I drew bullseyes on a Rand McNally road map of Minnesota, centered on the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and the Arsenal in Arden Hills, the two most likely targets of Soviet warheads, with each ring representing a different level of...
Futile Games
|Caitlyn Speier| Growing up as a child of two soldiers, conversations about politics were sparse. My father graduated from West Point and maintained the rather officerly position that soldiers shouldn’t really speak about politics openly, because they were expected to serve under...
Restoration as Worship: The Everlasting Terror of Ken Russell’s The Devils
|Chris Polley| When I was transfixed watching Michaela Coel restore an ancient, priceless painting in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers earlier this year, I found myself strangely moved. It was cold and calculating but also incredibly caring and artful. I thought of this scene again when I heard that BBC critic Mark Kermode and...
Ken Russell’s The Devils: Cinema at the Mercy of the Censors
|Dan Howard| Over the last few decades, The Devils is a film that, ironically, is considered the ultimate holy grails for film buffs. One that audiences will snag any opportunity they can to watch even the most butchered version of, bootleg or otherwise. The first time I saw The Devils was in...
All Consuming: Hausu
|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...
It’s a Scream, Baby! Hausu and Why Comedy Enhances Horror
|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...
I Just Wanna be a Woman: Music of The Craft
|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...
Loving and Cruel: The Craft and the Mean Streak in 90s Teen Movies
|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...
VIY (1967)
|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...
The Frequency of Heresy: Sound, Confinement, and Collapse in Alucarda
|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...
Drag Me to Hell vs. Up
|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...
Four “Oh Fuck!” Moments in Horror Movie Music
|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 ...
Our Invisible Roommates: What The Conjuring Gets Right and Wrong About Living in A Haunted House
|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...
How to Horrorthon
|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 ...
Will the Real Goblin Please Stand Up
|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 ...
Suspiria’s Score is One of Horror’s Scariest Characters
|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...
Coming of Age with Dead Kids: The Cathartic Dread of A24 Horror
|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...
The Fierce and Downcast Eyes of Day of Wrath
|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...
American History 101 with Robert Eggers
|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 ...
Satan’s Ghastly Abacus: Thoughts on Two Burnings by Carl Theodor Dreyer
|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...
Before Dawn: George A. Romero’s Years at Sea
|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...
Impulsive Desires and Getting Personal
|Lucille Hanson| The following piece contains spoilers for Je, Tu, Il, Elle and also contains descriptions of sexual content. "It snowed. I figured that, in any case, life had come to a halt, that nothing more would happen, and that I should wait for the snow to stop and then melt. It snowed for a...
Down, Out, & Paradise: Chantal Akerman’s Tricky Triptych Je Tu Il Elle
|Chris Polley| “Making films is very much about frontality, about facing off,” legendary director Chantal Akerman told Mousse Magazine in 2011, less than four years before her death by suicide. Decades removed from her stunning black-and-white debut Je Tu Il Elle in 1974...
Must Be the Season of the Witch, Yeah!
|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...
Your Number One Fan: Misery and the Progenitor of Parasocial Relationships
|Courtney Kowalke| On September 24, 2018, a post on the celebrity gossip website Oh No They Didn’t changed my life. As reported by LiveJournal user tevhenna, daytime talk show host Kelly Ripa commented on her husband actor Mark Consuelos’s Instagram (a post which has since been deleted). Not a...
Lost Loves in Green Lights: Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas
|Penny Folger| A man wanders a Texan desert landscape in a red cap, mute, and in a daze. Rather than walking along the roadside, he seems to be walking down an invisible path that cuts across the landscape and that only he can see. We don’t know it yet, but this man is a...
Distant Voices, Still Lives
|Ben Desbois| My mom still lives in the house I grew up in. Visitors often refer to it as a museum because of how well it preserves the past. In the dining room, there is still a mural of a dragon burning down a mountain village which I painted when I was eight. It’s hard in today’s...
It Happened: The Story Behind Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night
|Dan McCabe| Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, had a problem. Director Frank Capra, arguably the person keeping the lights on at Columbia, had a great script based on a popular short story. The issue? Directors and scripts didn’t sell movies during the Golden Age...
A Love Triumphant: It Happened One Night
|Jackson Stern| As a young man, I loved a good romance. Two people walking alone until, usually without warning, they’re cosmically entwined forever under a setting sun. It’s a pretty picture to see, especially when it features two unmistakably beautiful people whose smiles melt your...
Omnes Eodem Cogimur: Christ Stopped at Eboli and Life Under Fascism
|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...
Wandering Strangers: Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop
|Penny Folger| “You can never go fast enough,” declares James Taylor’s character in Two-Lane Blacktop, known here simply as The Driver. He occupies a world where he and his righthand man, The Mechanic, played by original Beach Boys’ drummer Dennis Wilson, make their living...