Ever finished a movie and have no idea what you just watched? That’s Kiyoshi Kurasawa’s Japanese 1997 film “Cure” in a nutshell. Here’s the shape of the plot. A police detective is assigned to investigate a series of murders. The catch is, the killers have been caught, but they have no good explanation for their…

This is a tasty little novella about coming of age, family secrets, and learning that the people you grew up with are not what you thought. It reminded me of the great Jack Finney novel “The Body Snatchers.” The setup is straightforward. Twenty something Jake returns to the town he grew up in for the…

Despite being a great director, Alfred Hitchcock has never gotten the biographical film he deserves. I was about 20 minutes into 2012’s “Hitchcock” when I realized I’d already seen it. But so little of the film had imprinted itself on my neurons that it felt like I was watching something new. The film is centered…

I’m a bit hit or miss with the films Clint Eastwood has directed. I liked “Unforgiven,” his 1992 Oscar winner. But he’s made a string of movies that I find too obvious in their themes and messages. And I found the final ending to ”Million Dollar Baby” rather unbelievable. For the most part, I would…

I recently learned about a concept in the world of philosophy, called the regression of interpretation. Essentially, it’s the idea that to define a word, you need to use other words, which themselves need to be defined. I could say a tree is a “cylindrical plant with limbs and leaves,” but then I need to…

I’ve been looking forward to reading Jay Bower’s “The Terror of Willow Falls“ and finished it last night. The set up is as follows: Young Joey and his family move from Chicago to a small town. Joey soon discovers that the town has secrets, and a hideous monster may lurk in its surroundings. The “kids…

I’ve mentioned that a fertile ground for the kind of tension and conflict that permeates horror and thrillers is a setting where several women are forced to interact with each other. Hence, the various “women in prison” movies that were thing at one point. It’s not the confines of prison, but rather an all girls…

At some point in the recent past, I caught wind that the science fiction author Robert Heinlein had written a short story called “All You Zombies.” The story, I was told, featured one of the greatest plot twists ever devised. Intrigued, I read it, and generally agree with that assessment. More recently, I sat down…

A few interesting thoughts related to storytelling hit me this morning. I did some research on it, and I’m far from the first to come up with this stuff, but it seems worth considering. Part of human evolution involved developing the ability to track the social status of members of small groups/tribes, etc. So, knowing…

Certain films just don’t quite know what to do with themselves. 1970’s “Joe,” starring Peter Boyle (the monster in “Young Frankenstein” and dad character in the sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond”) as a hippy hating working stiff, is one example. The plot in brief: white collar father Bill discovers his daughter (played by Susan Sarandon in…

Dario Argento is a well-known Italian filmmaker who did a string of terrific slasher films from the 70s into the 2000s. (He’s also known as the father of the actress/director, Asia Argento.) I went through a phase of watching his movies about 15 years ago, but somehow I missed “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage,”…

So I’m currently reading a rather dense introduction to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Or maybe I’m the dense one. I’m not sure.) I’ve known about him for years, and have always been interested in his phrase “the meaning is the use,” which I took to mean that a word’s meaning does not come from…

Horror sequels can be tough to pull off. Often the original lays out a series of perplexing events (teenagers dying in their dreams, for example) and then provides an explanation (Freddy Krueger was killed by those teenager’s parents and seeks revenge.) When you get to the sequel, the mystery is gone.  Sometimes screenwriters handle this…