As the sage Lil Wayne once said, there are two ways to make art: be good or be good at it. A film does not have to be innovative or even have anything new to say for audiences to respond. This film is neither good nor good at it. I didn’t want to sing along, so here I am to heckle.
Arts & Culture
Classics of Pagan Cinema: Hocus Pocus
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“As a nation, we love to cast our projections on the witches of Salem,” writes Meg Elison as she examines America’s favorite film about witches. “What we want from the real people who died by state violence, the places where they hanged, the hysteria that killed them, is fun. We want Salem to be a theme park, to amuse us and titillate us.”
Arts & Culture
Life Itself: George A. Romero’s Theology of the Living Dead
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The more of Romero’s films that I watched – and especially the more of his novel that I read – the more I also found a theology bubbling up through the blood that aligns with my own theology of Ásatrú, a modern religion that revives, reconstructs, and reimagines the ancient polytheism of Northern Europe.
Culture
Review: “Agatha” shows it’s been a Gay Craft all along
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Storm Faerywolf reviews Marvel’s new series Agatha All Along. “When we get to see fictional Witchy characters living their best lives, it gives us a renewed sense of hope that we might be able to do the same, even if they are not exactly the heroes of the story. And when Witches and queer folk collide? That’s where the rainbow magic really happens.”
Arts & Culture
Classics of Pagan Cinema: The Secret of Kells
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Meg Elison reviews 2009’s animated film The Secret of Kells, which draws inspiration from the recently-digitized Book of Kells, a fabulously illuminated edition of the gospels. But while the film is set at a Christian monastery, it is full of encounters with Paganism, and these encounters are what will draw viewers back to the film again and again.
Arts & Culture
Television from a Pagan World: Reviewing KAOS and Twilight of the Gods
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“When I was a teenage zealot, I used to imagine what television might be like in a world that was primarily Pagan,” writes Meg Elison. “I’ll never see that world, but this year a small window opened on it. Over the last week, I got acquainted with two Netflix shows about the Pagan world as it might have been: KAOS and Twilight of the Gods.”