A man-sized mosquito descended on 43rd Street and 7th Avenue amid a warm afternoon. The horrific creature’s presence made me scream. However, my legs, quite inexplicably, could not flee the fearsome scene. Amazing still, I was the only person who noticed the otherworldly invader. So, as a result, I concluded the scenario was a hallucination.
Géza Csáth (1887-1919) by Rhys Hughes For those who speak not a word of Hungarian, which is the majority of the talking world, it may be helpful to point out that the author Géza Csáth is actually pronounced something like: GAYSO CHATTER! It may be helpful, or it may be pompous. He was a genius.
Good morning and welcome to the end. You wake up to a trail of garlic cloves running down your staircase and no one will cop to putting it there. You’re filled with an ineffable sense of dread. You don’t know if the garlic was put in place to keep the vampires out or to ensure
In his landmark Surrealist novel Nadja, Andre Breton said, “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.” This sentence perfectly conveys our involuntary attraction to both the Romantic and the macabre. It speaks to the love that exists in all things, whether it’s our treatment of life or the subject of death. It
Nicole Cushing: Vampire Circus (1972) Why? Well, for me, a successful horror film plucks the same nerves as a nightmare. It doesn’t necessarily have to make sense. It just has to make enough sense that it doesn’t lose you. In this movie Hammer gives us nineteenth century vampires who: (A.) form a traveling circus, in which
BIONIC EXOTICA While exotica is fondly remembered as a borderline-novelty post-WW2 pop genre where white people made asses of themselves exploiting indigenous music, it was also an inevitable dialogue between traditions that genuinely inspired sincere converts and cut them free of western assumptions about how music should sound. For every Martin Denny or Les Baxter
It’s a damp, dreary morning in the bloated intestine of post-Gatsby Long Island and I’m motoring down Wellwood Avenue, past boarded-up storefronts, bound for The Botanist, New York’s finest medical marijuana dispensary. CSNY’s “Teach Your Children” is spewing from my tired car radio and I’m smelling things I haven’t smelled in years. The air is
Video games might be a surprising reference point when we’re discussing art, especially since many people struggle to perceive video games as anything other than a silly game for kids, much less a sport in which people can be paid handsomely to compete against opponents around the world. One of the craziest and most original
If you’re a weird film fan I imagine you’ve seen, or at least heard of, German Expressionist horrors Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the nightmarish documentary Haxan, early science fiction Metropolis and Un Chien Andalou, the most well-known silent Surrealist film. Instead I wanted to share films you might not know. I had
Richard Thomas: Under the Skin (2013) What some are calling an arthouse flick, Under the Skin is probably Scarlett Johannson’s best film to date. Without spoiling it, this eerie, creepy surreal movie starts with an opening that rivals 2001: A Space Odyssey. The music and soundtrack go a long way toward creating an atmosphere that
