Writing for Bloodvine on the highpoint of Roger Corman's filmmaking career. "The Masque of the Red Death is also painfully relevant in a culture of (handheld) screen addiction, weaponized classism, rampant and countenanced sexual criminality, despotism become increasingly tyrannical through narcissism, dismissed mental illness, and sociopathic  demands of and needs for attention."

Regarding 1961's The Pit and the Pendulum, the second film in Corman-Poe cycle. "Poe’s fiction oeuvre (don’t sleep on his inimical criticism) makes for prime pickings for filmmakers because there’s a central thrust—which can take the form of an oppressive mood or an implement of the macabre or a pain-maxed death—but plenty of room to insert what you please. You must. His fictions were prose-based trips to sensory overload. The movie theater itself is a geographical manifestation of this conceit."

The Dead and the dance of life. "The prime gospel period for the Grateful Dead was in 1970, which is also when the Dead performed the greatest about-face in American musical history."

Leave the cave. "The over-reliance on phrases like 'protecting my peace' and 'committed to my healing journey' in truth betray what’s tantamount to a language of isolationism. We simply call our isolation by other names. We dress up our aloneness, our aversion to trying to connect, with everything that entails—the courage, the vulnerability—in rhetorical raiment."

1986's April Fool's Day, of course. "The result is that we’re able to term April Fool’s Day something we’re rarely able to with 1980s horror movies, and that’s winsome. The humor can induce eye rolls, but cast your mind back through your presumed greatest hits of wit from those days of your own life, and you probably aren’t feeling a sudden surge of confidence as a result in the here and now, like you’re Ralph 'I still got it!' Malph."

Friendship and love. "If you aren’t open and vulnerable with yourself, you won’t be with anyone else either. Say it again: To have a true friend, one must be capable of being a true friend."

The musical romance of Billie Holiday and Lester Young. "There’s no partnership in jazz—or anywhere in the arts—like that of Baltimore’s Billie Holiday and Mississippi’s Lester Young. She sang as if playing a horn and he played the tenor sax as if he might have been singing. She had a hard life, and sometimes he had a hard time being taken seriously."

An intro to horror movies with 1932's The Most Dangerous Game. "No one can say that The Most Dangerous Game  doesn’t hold up well. Co-directors Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel imbue it with a sweaty urgency in following from what at first appears to be a drawing-room BS session, not unlike those we encounter at the start of Victorian ghost stories when men at their club are on their third glass of whiskey."

For Bloodvine. "The idea of toys becoming alive is fraught with metaphor. As Charlie Brown noted, consumption itself consumes us during the Christmas season, such that we can lose sight of what it’s supposed to be about. Goodwill to man—which means everyone—and all that Vince Guaraldi jazz. Toys shouldn’t be the life of the Christmas party in the holiday’s grand scheme."

An end-of-the-year nod to the Mother's Day piece from back in May. 

The horrors of The Wizard of Oz as Christmas treat. "At Christmastime, we tell ghost stories. Or we once did. Some still do. The curtain between worlds isn’t as thick as normal. It has some give. You can push a hand into a different time, place, or plane, while the veil remains against your skin. The same as we feel like we’re leaving a world behind—as part of an elongated crossing over—the further Dorothy gets from the house that killed a witch."

A consideration of 1964's Santa Claus Conquers the Martians for Bloodvine. "Had you told someone who didn’t know about this film that you accidentally encountered it on Christmas Eve at two in the morning and watched the whole thing, wondering if this was really happening, they’d think you were putting them on. And you might begin to wonder if that’s what you were doing to yourself as well. The cold light of winter morning won’t help. Back-checking the TV listings may give you peace of  mind in this season of peace. But mostly, you are on your own."

Being single at Chrismas. "Watching the characters in The Apartment, you want to tell them to knock it off. Get out of their own way. But maybe we’d be best off saying that to ourselves."

'Tis the season for heartwarming fare. "The aim of slashers—at least in their early days—was to shock. They  weaponized their newness and how they broke with films of the past, in which the gory details of riven bodies happened offstage after a fashion, even when those injuries were sustained in front of our very eyes. Strands of tissue weren’t shoved into our faces until the  advent—and yes, in this instance we’ll consider that a Christmas pun—of the slasher."

Another op-ed. "Linus never fully gets there, and neither do we. But each morning he stood at that brick wall with his friend Charlie Brown and shared what he learned and what he was trying to, often by asking the right questions."

Regarding a short Christmas film about how we're all in this together. "We can act like we’re separate, but the truth remains the truth. What affects your neighbor, or someone you encounter at the coffee shop, or that person in their car next to yours on the highway, also affects you."

For Bloodvine. "Helen wants to make Christmas as painless as possible. She has her tree as well as her commitment to keeping up appearances. There’s a void in  this woman’s life, and our sense is that this portion of the year is  something she tries to endure and put behind her. She’s generous to her  niece and the neighborhood children—a person trying to share small, but notable, parcels of joy, but whose sorrow is constant."

Discussing a debut like no other in Best Classic Bands. "'The Ox,' meanwhile, is an instrumental as chimera: part strafing missile fire, part hulking behemoth fit to accompany Paul Bunyan. A few years later in 1967 the Who would play a version of this song at the Village Theatre in NYC, a tape of which has surfaced. You may not regard it as music as you’ve come to know music, but rather an avant-garde lashing to make strips out of your back as your ears bleed out. It’s awesome."

In Best Classic Bands. "Perusers of Beatles-based digital forums will be overly familiar with the attempted “hot take,” in which someone makes what’s posited as a convention-detonating declaration, but is in truth meant to be a source of attention for that person."

A movie course for all your holiday needs. "Films from the 1980s are often bad, but it’s rare that you watch one and can’t see its appeal. Chopping Mall is about some randy popular high-school kids and a couple of sweet nerds—have a guess who survives—planning to throw a party and bang after the mall has closed, in a store that sells beds. The mall is policed by three security robots that aren’t programmed quite right, which means that instead of gently correcting behavior trending in the wrong direction, they are switched to kill and then remark, 'Have a nice day'  afterward, because that was a surefire laugh producer in the 1980s."

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."