Onibaba
Onibaba (鬼婆, 1964) is a Japanese horror film directed by Kaneto Shindo. Set during the aftermath of a fourteenth century civil war near...
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1 min read
Rosemary's Baby
This is another film I'd heard of countless times but watched only recently. Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski, is a 1968...
1 min read
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
I’ve heard about this 1956 sci-fi horror film a thousand times since I was a kid but didn’t watch it till just the other day. Directed by...
1 min read
The Human Chair
"The Human Chair" (人間椅子, 1925) by Edogawa Rampo isn't so much a scary tale as it is a deviant's disturbing fantasy come to life. An ugly...
1 min read
An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street
A very good "haunted house" story, and my first time reading Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). Years before the...
2 min read
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Roger Ebert wrote that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) is arguably “the first true horror film.” And whether...
2 min read
The Old Nurse's Story
“Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age!" Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse's Story” (1852) is a classic that...
1 min read
Mad Monkton
This is the first story I’ve read by English writer Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), and it’s a very good ghostly Victorian tale, with eerie...
1 min read
The Signal-Man
Written by Charles Dickens four years before he died of a stroke in 1870, and a year after the train to London he was on derailed, “The...
1 min read
Bartleby, the Scrivener
Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853) is a rather odd short story about an unnamed lawyer who tries...
1 min read
Scandal
This 1986 novel by Shusaku Endo is a departure from a lot of his previous work, mainly historical fiction. Protagonist Suguro, a...
2 min read
Notorious
The beauty of this film (besides Bergman) is its ending. The good guy does not stumble across a gun and shoot down the baddie. The bad...
1 min read
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Short epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1774, is a tale of unrequited love that's...
1 min read
Persona
Liv Ullmann plays Elisabet Vogler, a famous stage actress who has a breakdown and after refuses to speak. At a psychiatric facility she’s...
1 min read
Kafka on the Shore
After reading and enjoying Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase and Norwegian Wood, I was disappointed in his 2002 novel, Kafka on the...
2 min read
The Burmese Harp
The Burmese Harp (1956) (ビルマの竪琴) is a Japanese anti-war film directed by Kon Ichikawa and based on a novel for children (same name) by...
1 min read
Pachinko
This multigenerational family saga by Min Jin Lee is very good and quite a feat considering the breadth and complexities of the...
1 min read
Waiting for the Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) by J.M. Coetzee is the first-person narrative of a magistrate in a fictional settlement at the frontier...
2 min read
The Book
At about 160 pages, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966) by Alan Watts is a fairly short read but leaves you with...
2 min read
Pusher Trilogy
Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher films are brilliant, bleak tales of wheeler-dealers each having a run of bad luck in...
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