The movie musical is in danger. It, much like the Western, was one of the quintessential American art forms, but over the years, their popularity has declined much to every theatre kid’s dismay. It doesn’t help that many consider the genre to be old-fashioned and cliched. “No one just BURSTS into song,” or “It’s so SAPPY.” But all these absurd arguments aside about the genre’s relevance or power, it doesn’t help that we haven’t had an out-and-out great movie musical in years.
Hey folks! This is a classic from the archives. I wrote this back when I was in 2014 and remains one of my early favorite essays. In honor of reaching a year of releasing articles, I decided t dust off this old chestnut.
Quilting has been around as long as humanity has needed to keep warm, but it wasn’t until it moved to the New World that it became its own art form as well as a comfort item. Over the course of the birth of a new nation that would be the United States, quilting would become a wholly American combination of practicality and artistic expression wrapped into one comfortable patchwork package. The Quilt is the type of thing passed down from one generation to the next, added on to, a piece of living history in the making.
Christmas season is upon us and with it comes the endless posts about people gathering around the Netflix fireplace to indulge in their favorite Christmas cinematic traditions. The sounds of “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!” and the screams of Kevin McAllister will emanate from houses across America. This of course also results in the inevitable and endless debates of what is and isn’t a Christmas movie.
When one thinks of the most reviled villains in all of pop culture, many will turn to the watchful and tyrannical eye of Nurse Mildred Ratched from Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, Dale Wasserman’s 1963 play, and Milos Forman’s 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. She has become synonymous with the horrors of institutional corruption and the subject of ire amongst audiences everywhere. Her shadow as a villain looms so large that she recently got her own dark and gritty Netflix origin story.
The world of horror is a vast and diverse playground of chills, thrills, and (blood) spills. As one of the most enduring and popular genres in cinema, it has many branches that make it so effective. While slashers, ghost stories, and vampire pictures have their place, one subgenre in particular seems to leave a lasting psychological effect that most of its sister subgenres don’t. It goes by many names, from folk horror to pagan horror to fanatical horror, but it is most easily surmised as the cult horror film.
