The Cutest in the World
Even among the wild personalities on offer in professional wrestling, Japan’s Maki Itoh is, in all ways, an aberration.
There’s Nowt So Queer As Folk
With a carnival accordion wheeze, woodcut interstitials, and titles in Wicker Man font, Ric Rawlins’ Rewilding announces itself as exactly what it is–a feast of folk horrors rooted deep in green modern pagan dreams of green pre-Christian pagan rites and the conflict when the modern world scuffs up […]
Bollywood Zom-Com: Go Goa Gone
When I first watched this zombie horror-comedy when it released in 2013, I felt like it didn’t have enough bite. I wanted it to do more with some of what it started to lay out, namely the smart and funny premise that the party scene in Goa (a […]
The Legend Of My House
“It watches,” he added suddenly. “The house. It watches every move you make.” “We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it […]
The Creation Suite
The art of creating characters in video games is neither objectively new, nor even new to me. I’ve been messing around with video game character creation suites for decades, though I certainly never thought of it as art. I think the most common use for these creation tools […]
A Summer Place
Burnt Offerings (1976) opens, as so many of my favorite scary movies do, with our relatable heroes driving winding roads deep–into the country, into the woods, into the mountains. Into deep space, for that matter, if you want to extend the metaphor to its outermost limit. It doesn’t […]
The Cultural Gutter 