If horror films have taught us anything, it’s that you should always be suspicious of a really good real estate deal. is that house a gorgeous vision of Victorian craftsmanship on the market for peanuts? Don’t buy it, unless you plan to use it as a place to which you invite a group of apparent strangers with the promise that if they can survive spending one night in it, you’ll give them a million dollars.
Although lord knows the world doesn’t need another origin story — modern films are positively obsessed with explaining every single detail of every single character in film history, leaving nothing to assumption or mystery and never accepting that sometimes we simply don’t need to know — The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is an origin story.
On The Cultural Gutter, I’m taking a look at diversity in science fiction. Specifically, Syfy Gets Diverse looks at the Syfy Channel television shows Killjoys, Dark Matter, Defiance, and The Expanse, all of which feature gender and racially diverse ensemble casts.
Over on The Cultural Gutter, In This Green and Pleasant Land examines Children of the Stones, regarded to this day as one of the smartest, weirdest, scariest slices of children’s television programming ever produced.
Before there was Emmanuelle, there was Emmanuelle. Emmanuelle Arsan, to be slightly more precise. Marayat Rollet-Andriane to be even more precise still. Born Marayat Bibidh in January 1932, in the city of Bangkok, she was the real-life Emmanuelle, the one on whose life the novel Emmanuelle was based.
Ghost stories wend their way from Noh, Kabuki and the Bunraku puppet theater all the way through “J Horror” and the vengeful ghost ladies with invasive hair of today. There are many tales of love, bitterness and vengeful ghosts, but like a certain Scottish play, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is unique in having a curse associated with it.
Despite the evidence so far presented, Dublin was more than just a non-stop tour of whiskey and bars. The city was in the midst of its annual Bram Stoker Festival, which included storytelling, art, and roving packs of vampires handing out penny dreadfuls.
