The big daddy of bug movies. "Them! is flab-less horror. Director Gordon Douglas treats the movie at first as if it were a mystery—an ecological whodunit, because we know that no madman could have been responsible for this level of  destruction. The sugar is a deft touch. If you can make an ordinary household item creep out your audience, you’re doing okay."

The former classroom staple as one of the high points of 1950s animation. "The narrator’s duress increases. He cannot stop fixating. Again and again, he states his case to us regarding his sanity. Consider how focused he is, he says. How patient. We are privy to his projected prejudices and disgusts, as when he looks at the old man’s visage and the dead eye gives way to this horrible skein of snakelike nerves. The nerves, in turn, morph into a throbbing ganglion. A cyst that must be punctured to release its befouled contents."

A worthy--and intentional--follow-up to the famous 1931 film that also starred Bela Lugosi. "The grays and the blacks are luxuriant. The grains evident in the charcoal hues could fill many an earth box like so much soil from a vampire’s native land. Anytime a door opens or a window is cracked, fog enters. Frieda Inescort plays Lady Jane Ainsley, the Van Helsing–type figure, whom we don’t expect to be female, making for another nice tweak of the old story, as with the dual wartime settings. Instead of lightning, there are explosions. It’s Dracula in the world of modern warfare—terror of a different stripe than that of the forest with its  creatures of the night and the music they make."

An examination of the artistic flourishes and cultural significance of a game-changing horror movie in Bloodvine. "Chaney, naturally, is the Wolf Man, and Bela Lugosi the Monster, by which is really meant, Frankenstein. A totemic shift in the popular culture had occurred. If you ever sat in an English class and the instructor asked why it was that people called the Monster in Mary  Shelley’s novel by Frankenstein’s name—because you know how English  teachers like that deep stuff—this would have been your chance to say, 'It’s mostly on account of this old horror film called Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,' which would have been amusing—because what’s a teacher going to say to that?—and essentially true."

Among the strangest Edgar Allan Poe adaptations you'll ever see. "Set in mid-1960s Texas—yee-haw, Edgar!—Hoffman’s adaptation is about a schizophrenic writer, played by Robert Frost—seriously, that’s the guy’s name, but he did definitely opt for the road usually not taken—who likes snuggling with his animals more so than he does his wife (Sadie  French). He talks to them, gets all cuddly-wuddly with them to an alarming 'Oh my God, is he boffing these animals?' degree, and dumps booze into his birds’ cages (while chuckling, toasting, and philosophizing like a stoned high-school sophomore who just heard The Doors’ “The End” for the first time) so that his avian pals (and possible conquests) can tie one on, too. Polly wants a cracker? Have a Heineken instead, girl."

Give it up for Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space. "And let’s be honest: You know that saying, 'Hell is other people?' Doesn’t that seem increasingly true in our world? Sure, we want to be tolerant and behave with kindness, but other humans, frankly, work our nerves, and that’s one reason why I relate to the would-be conquering alien leader of Plan 9."

An overlooked early work of introductory animated horror fun. "We’re quick to associate ghosts with pain as a reason for why they stick around—the old unfinished business theory—and as a source of fear. And yet, in an indirect fashion at least, the ghost can provide so much pleasure to the life of the horror fan. M.R. James advised his readers to treat them gently, because they are a wellspring, and not in a misery sense either. James himself fell in love with the idea of ghosts after watching a Punch and Judy show as a child. This Disney short functions in the same manner. The ghosts are witty and oh-so-human. Prey to boredom, requiring stimulation, and needing to overcome ennui of the spirit, pun very much intended; for are there not times in which each of us is a ghost in all but name?"

Why "Bitter" Bierce is better than Edgar Allan Poe and the reason no one thinks this. "The funny thing about Poe—and this sounds like Halloween sacrilege—is that he isn’t at what people assume he is as a writer. His prose is grandiloquent, with marathon sentences full of words that few people know and fewer still ever use. The association, though, remains in place. Poe got his title when he got it—like the Beatles got theirs, or Taylor Swift, or Caitlin Clark—and it’s as if our brains then get tossed out the farmhouse window to be devoured by zombies Night of the Living Dead-style, except those zombies are also us."

From Best Classic Bands. "The overall assemblage feels like an avant-garde novelette that might have been produced by the likes of Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms if  he’d been exposed to the Golden Age of Monsterdom and turned loose to do  some spoken word story-making over the backing of a crack band, which is what the Crypt-Kickers (who counted Leon Russell among their number) were."

A consideration in Bloodvine. "For a movie about the removal of the body—and the brain in  following—there are a lot of bodily details, which Griffin diaristically itemizes in a kind of TMI purge. For instance, he shares that a person can see the food moving through him when he’s invisible. That must have  been shocking at the time, as in…“Gross!” Movies didn’t talk about the  bathroom and such, and here we have a casual remark regarding bowels in the fashion of Montaigne detailing his morning constitutional in a  journal entry."

The case for the 1939 version with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce from Bloodvine. "Before performing 'Behind Blue Eyes' circa 1971, The Who’s Pete  Townshend would tell the audience that they lose drummer Keith Moon for a while in the song, but find him in the end. You could say the same about Holmes/Rathbone with The Hound of the Baskervilles. Watson does a goodly amount of the investigative legwork while Holmes is strategically offstage. Cherish the scene when they walk arm in arm from Holmes’s temporary digs in the stone hut back to the mullioned  windows, wainscoted walls, and drafty long corridors of Baskerville Hall. Holmes takes Watson’s arm—not once, but twice, and it’s that  second time—because they’d already broken away—that gets you."

In Bloodvine. "The air itself looks like a swamp throughout. Moisture, haze, murk.  There’s a sugar-cane mill staffed by zombies—cheap labor unlikely to  unionize—and a couple played by Joseph Cawthorn and Madge Bellamy, and the lust-besotted plantation owner (Robert Frazer) who wants the young lady for his own, and so turns to Legendre, ace matchmaker that he is, with his notably nonconsensual voodoo methods."

In Best Classic Bands. "Lennon sounds like he's singing about everything he has ever loved on this 1964 Beeb cut, and also singing as if he sees himself squarely in the middle of the dream he had, which he's now living. The cover is a masterpiece. Every source you read on the subject will tell you it's dreck, because that's what someone said first, and then what everyone went with. Not only must we think for ourselves in this life, we must listen for ourselves, too. Chuck Berry's lines course like poetry, and so does Lennon's voice. Listen to how he travels atop the stream."

The Socratic wisdom of baseball. "We have this need to act like we know, and as Socrates correctly stated, the moment you think you might not know, tends to be when you might begin to actually know. That’s Socratic wisdom, but playoff baseball should teach you that it’s baseball wisdom as well."

The sport's inspiring rhythms. "Good baseball is markedly rhythmic, to a greater degree than any sport. There’s a prevailing crispness. A succession of right moves is made. The ball gets to where it should be. Winning teams are decisive in their on-field choices. The route the outfielder takes to the slicing liner. The cutting down of the lead runner. The location of the backdoor change-up. The opposite field double off the pitch on the outer half of the plate. The crowd becomes part of the rhythm, knowing where the beats have thus far fallen, and where the next beats should be. It’s a beautiful thing to watch, hear, process, and be inspired by."

Don't become a football couch zombie. "In a nation where hardly anyone is able to concentrate on anything, we are fixated on football. If something is to intercede, it’s often because we have no choice. The kid is being baptized, for instance, and you can’t put it off until Monday morning."

From the pages of Best Classic Bands. “'I’m Down' made for a bracing sonic blast on mid-1960s television. We’re inching towards heavy metal, with this performance serving as a case of Hello, harbinger. 'Ticket to Ride'—which itself has the gait and lurching swing of a heavy metal song—sounds like a gas to play and sing on this occasion. Lennon leans hard into the refrain, and if he relished the sound of his own voice in doing so, he’s hardly to be faulted. Sometimes as you sing for others, you also sing for yourself."

The ephemeral horror viewing experience. "The warm months are themselves bleeding out in Dark August amidst the baked colors that are starting to show cracks in their textures like some dried-out canvas that will never be restored. Summer’s heart has begun its agonal rhythm. We stutter-step to change, to next phases as the days show their first signs of shortening; the old sunlight persists, but not for long."

The boundlessness of an all-time great second sacker. "He was the Keats of the two-hole who authored a Wrigley-based pastoral in just the right number of words."

In the Bunker Hill Monument, as in life, stairs don't run themselves. "I began running circuits in the Monument nine years ago, after I had put an end to twenty years of alcohol abuse, my heart gimpy, its beat irregular. On the streets of Boston, I am often hailed as 'the stair guy.' Usually ten times a day, and upwards of twenty, I am inside of that obelisk, because doing so helps me keep going."

Cinematic inspiration in how to keep going. "The wisest among us realize that what we normally think of as opposites are also associates. There’s life and death, joy and pain, fulfillment and absence. And, as Charle Chaplin understood, and helped millions to understand, comedy and tragedy."

The horrors of not being seen and heard. "Later, we may think about these past relationships with greater affection than many of the others we have in the years going forward that ended with a slow fizzle, someone becoming increasingly uncommunicative until we just never heard from them again. The end of camp is closure, and closure—as you know when you’ve been denied it—is a very important thing with which to be provided in this life. The camp  friendship didn’t get a chance to go 'wrong.' It was meant to exist for a  moment in time. The song that is two minutes in length has the greater likelihood of being mistake-free than the song that continues for a half  hour."

Brian Wilson's song of remarkabable perspicacity. "As the singer sings, we get a second lead voice, a Brian Wilson-led dialogic counterpoint—the sun-soaked pop variant of a Grecian choir, or a gentler—but equally firm—version of Lear’s Fool handling the high harmonies—that feels no less indomitable than the tick of time."

Overlooked core horror from 1944, with the talented Laird Cregar. "Brahm excelled at melodrama—costume pictures that didn’t look ostentatious but nailed the period details. Enter, then, The Lodger and its Victorian London of fog, soot, flagstones, ulsters, and labyrinthine mews with a gas lamp on one end and who knows what awaiting at the other. Anyone at the right time of night could have been Jack the Ripper to the susceptible imagination, and if that’s him upstairs? Not the easiest subject to broach."

How the guitar became the star with the band's 1965 single, "Heart Full of Soul." "The Yardbirds never felt particularly English—as the Kinks were extremely so—or like a band with Americanized predilections. We encounter Eastern modalities, but a Yardbirds blues—which itself became a form of Yardbirds proto-metal—had an aspect of the sidereal to it."