A woman tearfully leaves her newborn in the lap of a giant statue of Shiva during a thunderstorm and keels over dead. Hindu brothers are separated when one one falls into a raging river, presumed dead, but actually rescued and raised by a thief. Boys from good homes […]
Have you ever had terrifying dreams of a snakes flying at you and eyes watching you through a knothole? Have you ever felt the hands of the Silver-Haired Witch around your throat? Have you ever feared that your sister might, in fact, be a malicious snake girl? Last […]
I would pretty much always prefer to watch shows where nothing bad happens to the folks who are minding their own business. I get enough reality in the world without having random terrible things happen in my entertainment to bring home to me how easy it is for […]
That darkness is a part of me. Living in a world without streetlights allows you to understand the true meaning of utter darkness. White indicates a lack of matter, while black shows an abundance. It makes you think that something is lurking just beyond, hidden in the blackness. […]
Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation (2015) is the kind of film that almost resists genre as its genre; that is to say, its mutability makes for part of its substance. As an impressively sustained exercise in ambiguous dread, it tries on the skins of awards-season drama, psychological thriller, a […]
Like George Costanza, I’ve often wanted to pretend to be an architect, and an offshoot of this dream is to do some kind of major study of the architecture of evil spaces in Hindi movies. The most distinctive visual marker—physical manifestation, even—of evil in Bollywood is the villain […]