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… Continue reading

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… Continue reading

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… Continue reading

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… Continue reading

Making Romania on Film: The Case of The Keep

|Sophie Durbin| The Keep was a tough sell for me, a Michael Mann fan who fell in love with him through Heat and Thief—on my first watch, I was almost offended by the supernatural plot (I’m fine with the paranormal on film, but keep it out of my Michael Mann features). Of course… Continue reading

Cinema as Resistance: Black Revolution in Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door

|Chris Polley| The early 70s were, in many ways, rife with watershed moments in Black history: Charles Gordone became the first Black playwright to win a Pulitzer prize, Rep. Shirley Chisolm helped form the Congressional Black Caucus, and Thomas Bradley became the first Black mayor… Continue reading

An Experiment in Disrespecting the Troops: Dead of Night

|Doug Carmoody| The patriotic imperative to “support the troops” grew, like many other national neuroses, from America’s inability to reckon with the moral failures of the Vietnam War. To counter anti-war sentiment, the U.S. political establishment boosted effusive parades to “Support… Continue reading

2008: The year Tom Cruise played a Nazi and Hollywood changed forever

|Andrew Neill| 17 years ago, on a frigid night in January 2008, I was in a car packed with friends, speeding up I-29 from Fargo to Grand Forks to see a new release. We would have gone to see it locally, but the theater chain (Marcus) and the distributor (Paramount) were fighting. The film… Continue reading

Not From Around Here: How Roger Corman Captured The Intruder

|J.R. Jones| If you’re sensitive to microaggressions, brace yourself for the macroaggression of The Intruder. This low-budget 1962 drama, about a small Southern town struggling to integrate its public high school, plunges viewers into the sort of casual white supremacism… Continue reading

Constructing an Auxiliary Language of Horror: Esperanto

|Sophie Durbin| I have a strict “don’t talk about people from your past in your writing, they didn’t sign up for that” policy, but I am going to break it to share that I had an ex tell me (I was an admittedly overzealous linguistics minor in college at the time) that the concept of preserving… Continue reading