Bear with me: at first glance, this piece may fall outside the Cultural Gutter’s mission to share thoughtful writing about disreputable art. Kshudhita Pashan (1960) is based on a short story by Nobel laureate, author, musician, and all-around revered thinker Rabindranath Tagore. But its ghostly ladies, creepy palaces, […]
The Stepfather (1987) begins as many a story begins, with a man (Terry O’Quinn) seeing himself in the bathroom mirror as he grooms for the next big chapter in his life. This man in the mirror just happens to be sheeted in the bloody ending of the most […]
What is it about self-destruction that is so compelling? It feels terrible on all the obvious levels, sure, but on some deep, barren, emotional plane where the wind howls endlessly through the stunted trees, it’s also terribly satisfying. Somehow it feels right, even when it clearly looks wrong. […]
It takes a special sort of person to be haunted. It also takes a special sort of person to be a haunting. This is the unquiet thing looking up at me from the bottom of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, although I’ll admit that reading is influenced […]
For those of us who did not grow up watching Bollywood films (and maybe even for those of you who did, depending on how closely an adult monitored what you were watching when or after this film came out), there is a particular threshold that each of us […]
“I don’t know what I should have done. I never had to save the world before.” ~ Rita Farr Somewhere in west central Ohio, Black drag diva Maura Lee Karupt (Alan Mingo, Jr.) confronts a man, maybe the Man. He is there to enforce normalcy. He considers anyone […]
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