Horror is for Grrrls

              Happy May Day! I hope you and yours celebrated with a solemn procession to the beach to set a cop on fire. Me, I celebrated by listening to The Wicker Man soundtrack and watching a different horror musical featuring nudity – The Lure !               Going into this one, I expected a spooky-singy confection light as seafoam, sparse on plot and heavy on style and nonsense. That’s not a complaint; I love those kinds of films, though I know many audiences see atmosphere and think emptiness, or are impatient with pretty-for-pretty’s sake. And while this movie does go off on plenty of musical tangents, especially in the frothier first half, there’s way more here than I expected.               As much a coming-of-age flick as a monster movie, the film follows two young siren/m...

            Almost two weeks ago now, some friends and I went to an exhibition at the Met Breuer called Like Life. The theme was sculpture of the human form, spanning an extraordinary time frame and organized thematically rather than chronologically. It’s taken me a while to write about the exhibit, in part because it made such an impression and left me with so much to think about. It was going to be difficult to describe it to you as a series of sentences, rather than a series of questions. Secondly, because the exhibition has recently closed, you will not be able to verify what I tell you about this work. Instead, you will just have to believe me. Believe first, that there are unbelievable things in this exhibit, things you would anticipate more in one of the many sculpture-themed horror films than in the actual halls of a museum. A bust of the artist’s face made of his own blood. The skeleton of a famous philosopher within an i...

Growing up, on nights of idle channel flipping, Batman was king. Not only was it on with stunning regularity, it had something for all the family viewers: nostalgia factor and good-looking actors for mom and dad, Tim Burton cool factor for their wannabe-goth daughter. Plus, my dad and his brother have been said to resemble Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson respectively, so we imagined family rivalry as our hero and villain fought over Gotham’s soul and the attentions of blonde, dull Vicki Vale. On my first round of VHS collecting, I happened upon a copy. Its combination of too-dark-to-see lighting fiascos, Prince soundtrack, and nostalgia made it a necessary purchase. So Lily and I settled down for my first ever from-beginning-to-end viewing (having only seen bits and pieces in the aforementioned channel flipping). As of writing this introduction, we’re about a third of the way through, and already I have a lot of thoughts. The set-up to the film is a lot duller than I remembered,...